Website Spring Cleaning

Well, I’ve had my site up for two and a half months now, and I think this is a good time to stop, take a look back, and reflect.

What I’ve Learned

1.  It takes a lot of effort and a ton of time to create and maintain your own site. Getting a layout to be just right can be a huge bitch if you have no experience (I didn’t.)  Coming up with the time and motivation to post regularly feels like a full time job sometimes, because even when you aren’t sitting down to write a post, your mind is constantly jumping around to new post ideas.  Also, marketing your site takes just as much time and effort as producing the content!  This aspect of being a webmaster really blew me away in the beginning.  I had no idea you needed to put so much time and effort into just getting your name out there.  Lesson learned :P

2.  Want to make money?  Don’t hold your breath. The monetary return for all my efforts has so far been pure dogshit.  I’ve learned that for making money online, there are three main ways.  Sell your own product or service, sell someone else’s product or service, and the easiest to set up yet lowest earning way of them all, put ads up and pray your readers click on them.  For a personal blog, you don’t really have anything to sell, and you can put links up to Amazon.com items or something similar, but what are the chances someones going to click the link and buy the item?  Pretty tiny.  So this leaves us with number 3, put ads up and pray people click them.  My “click through ratio” so far has been 0.32%.  That means, for every 300 visitors, 1 clicks an ad.  Mmm  mmm, eat up that dogshit, oops you misses some, here ya go, enjoy!  For my hundred or so hours I’ve put into making this blog a reality, I have made exactly $7.78.  Looking back, maybe I should have just walked down to McDonalds, worked for 1 hour, and spend the other 99 hours learning how to knit or something.

3.  Once you know what you are doing, it becomes much easier to set up second or third site. I already have about 3 more sites I’m considering putting up, and it will take me about 1/3 the time for the new ones.  When you set up a self hosted web page the first time, it takes forever to figure every little detail out, but once you know how, it’s a breeze in comparison.

4.  Content is King. Just because you have a blog does not mean readers will come flocking to it.  Even close friends and family, let alone strangers out on the net, need a reason to come back day after day, and that reason is quality content.  Be interesting.  Be funny.  Be inventive.  Whatever it is, make sure it’s of a high quality.

Spring Cleaning

So, my To-Do list is as follows…

• Tweak layout
• Delete a few elements to make load times faster
• Change add positions, and remove them from the main page
• Rewrite most posts and optimize them for search engines
• Less stress, more fun.  Post what I want to post and not worry about anything else

Remember, if you guys have any questions about Hawaii, or want me to blog about anything at all, just tell me in the comments and I’ll most likely do it.  See you all next time.

Wow, this blog is worth…

Lol, I would sell if for this in a heartbeat. By answering 19 questions, MyBlogValue.com takes a guess at how much your site is worth if sold right this second.

14,501.5
How much money is your blog worth?

If I was to guess, I think this blog might go for $100-$200 bucks if I tried to sell it. It’s a confidence booster to see that someone thinks my blog is worth some good money though and I guess they are better judges of website value than me… So maybe it is worth more than I thought. Pretty cool little website

A Friends Advice

Recent Letter from a Friend

“Hey man, I was just checking out Johnstonefitness.com for some reason… probabily because I have nothing to do here in L.A. But anyways, I just thought that it’s a really neat website that I’d keep checking out just because it’s really unique and in it’s core it’s really about the transformation of this guy. I think that’s probabily why people who like the website would keep coming back to check it out. Because this guy made a website about the changes that he’s made and is making and therefore as long as he keeps up dating his life, people will always come back!

I think with all the reality television shows out there it’s pretty clear that most people are interested in living vicuriously through other’s lives. You got a cool website going, and I honestly believe that we as your friends of course will want to know what you’re up to, but if you want to connect with strangers all over the world, you’ll need to entice them with somthing that everyone will want to see. I think Hawaii is a great gateway to capture attention, but you’ll need somthing to make yourself more specific, more original, more special. If you make your website about traveling all over Hawaii to find the most exotic or strange food you can find, that’s going to be interesting and keep people coming back. If you make it about yourself going into the toughest, ghettoest, shadiest neighborhoods and fighting the local gangsters people will want to keep coming back until you die. Now, the above two are only senarios that I came up with… and obviously you’re only man enough to even attempt one of them… but you are probabily too poor to afford all the food. But here’s a pretty cool one that I think you can be challenged and probabily going to enjoy.

What if…

you went after tons of girls all over Hawaii and documented your successes and failures? (hopefully more successes) I’m just throwing that out there, cuz I’m not even sure if that’s the coolest thing you could do. I mean, what if you started to build somthing cool? Like a motorcycle with a jet turbine engine? Well, someone did that in their garage and I saw it on youtube. I’ll think of more ideas and letyou know! By the way, Johnstonefitness is probabily making him some money cuz there are a couple weightloss and weightgainer buttons that people could click and make him money on that website.”

So what do you guys think of his ideas?