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.
On the bottom of every comment is a “reply to this comment” button, so give it a go.
How much would you guys have to be paid to wear this to the beach, I’m seriously curious. I’d probably do it for a grand. If you want to start a fund, I’ll document it and post it here, just let me know 
