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.

Dear Boss, Please pay me like this:

Letter to my manager

Dear Boss, Please pay me like this:

Base: $7.50 per hour

Then add to that:

.25c every time I have to answer any question of any kind.

$1 every time I have to answer the phone.

$1 every time I have to recommend a restaurant that doesn’t suck.

$2 every time I check a guest in or out.

$3 ever time someone asks me a retarded question, such as ” ‘So where are the elevators?’ ‘Uh, 10 feet behind you sir.’ ”

$3 every time I have to haul bags up to the room that are so heavy the plane on the way over was flying tilted to the side.

$5 every time someone complains about how long their flight was. IT’S HAWAII, EVERYONES flight is long, don’t you realize I hear this same drivel a thousand times every single day? Stop whining!

$10 every time any woman over 50 years old flirts with me.

$10 every time any woman over 200 pounds flirts with me.

$15 every time someone who speaks HORRIBLE english insists on trying to get their point across even thought they know damn well I don’t speak German / Japanese / Norwegian / or Slovenian. And yes, I have seen every one of these.

$25 every time a customer yells at me for absolutely nothing.

$50 every time a coworker yells at me for absolutely nothing.

$75 every time a man of any age or weight flirts with me.

$99 every time my manager even asks me to plunge a toilet.

$300 every time a child barfs in the lobby.

$10,000 every time someone takes a shit in the elevator.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Jeremy G.

STOP. Read this.

Today marks an important day in my blogging life. I started a blog for two reasons. In order, I want to: 1.) Make money, 2.) Talk about my life and have people listen. Note, these are in order, and that is important. So today is the day that I realized, I want to go BIG or quit.

If I can’t make money with this blog, fuck it. I’d rather watch some shitty, forgettable tv show. Making money with a blog is pretty damn tough, I’ve been reading quite a few “real life, how I made money with my blog” blogs and that is the consensus. But it is possible, and I can attain it if I so choose, but how I’ve been going about it has been wrong to this point.

I’ve had a blog for 5 days short of one month, and I’ve learned so much in that time. I can honestly say I know 50 times as much about running a web page as I did not even a month ago. In this way it’s been a huge success, and I’m glad I did it. But the problem is I’m nowhere even remotely fucking close to attaining point #1, making money. From day one until today, I’ve made a grand total of 54 cents. Yeah. Exactly. So what are you guessing I’m saying by telling you all this? Here it is.

I declare this blog that you are reading right now, this newly antiquated one, “Life of Jeremy v1.0″ I’m going to update it as often as I damn well want (never sooner), and I’m not going to give a FUCK about how much I make with it. I’m doing this blog from this day forward as a way for my friends to keep up with me and for me to talk about whatever I want, nothing else. This will fulfill Reason #2 above. But I’m working on a bigger better version…

I will deem this (inside joke style) Life of Jeremy v2.0. Completely new layout, SEO optimized, money making motherfucker of a Life of Jeremy blog! I’m switching over to a new platform (Wordpress for those who know about this kind of shit) which is both way better and way more complicated to learn, but hey, I do my best work when challenged.

I’d fill in more details, but I’m tired as hell right now, and am feeling the irresistible pull of my bed, but I’ll fill you few buy mighty followers in sometime soon. If I feel like it…