At the moment I’m not certain about the financial health of my business or whether I’ll actually have the same business in the near future. I’m a pessimist and I like to know what could be around the corner. So its possible that things will be OK, but I just don’t know.
Because of these worries, I’m finding it difficult to keep myself motivated about any of my projects. Even if I was motivated, I’m not sure what project would be the best to work on. I mean I’m not sure what projects would exist in a new business.
Something that creates profit might not be the best as I don’t know if it will bare fruit in the possible time I have left.
I guess training and investing in myself would be a good and I have an existing project, which would fit in with this. However, without my current business I’m unsure this training would be of any use.
I can hear blue saying, don’t worry, it might never happen.
But I’d feel happier working on something with a future.
by JM
I’ve created several blogs and only one, this blog, is still alive and healthy. However, this blog is more like a discussion area than a news / update information area.
Its easy to add content to this blog as were talking to other people and that gives us things to talk about.
The first couple of blogs I created failed as I was just writing anything I could think of which was relevant to the site. There wasn’t anything to keep me motivated.
It just occurred to me that, if I was to have a strategy, like if I were to envisage that I was writing to someone and the next post would be a kind of reply or alternative viewpoint, that may work. But thats just an idea off the top of my head. That wouldn’t really be news.
I don’t think a discussion-al blog would work for my other sites.
by JM
I used to have a blog for my K program, but I found it difficult to write new blog posts and in the end I deleted it. However, I do need to add more content and show that my K web site is alive and that things are happening.
I’ve made some early steps towards adding a summary of recent blog posts for our jewellery site to the front page. I’ve now began thinking that this could help a lot of my sites, but obviously only where the content is relevant.
So I’m thinking that if I could create a combined blog for my K site and my maths site, which has kids as the common theme, this might give me enough topics to keep a blog alive, parenting would also be relevant to both. As a bonus it would act as a cross selling mechanism too.
My problem is how would I integrate a blog into both sites, I don’t really want to setup a new domain, but having a blog on one site and shown on the other looks a bit odd.
Also, I did think I could have K specific stuff in one category and maths in another and only some stuff in those on the relevant site, but this would greatly reduce the content shown in the summary on the front pages.
Any ideas?
by JM
This week I’ve been spending a lot of time on one project, which isn’t going to instantly reap profit, although I guess I could say that about most of my projects. However, it has been something that I needed to work on, as overall its my best income earner.
However, I’ve still been able to work on my learning project although at much less time that previous weeks, but I’m just happy I’m still keeping the ball rolling, learning and not going backwards or having to re-read stuff.
Although I probably haven’t finished the main work I was doing this week, I’m starting to consider other work.
Then it occurred to me, that its been quite good working on a project which had been gathering dust, its made me think about the future of the project.
So what if I make up small tasks from all my projects, which have a priority and work on them in rotation, this breathes new life into a project I haven’t worked on in a while, but still gets me thinking and ultimately making progress.
by JM
I’m progressing through a teach yourself book, I was just thinking, it would be nice to know how much I’ve read today and this week in comparison to yesterday and last week. Then it would probably push me to beat yesterdays and last weeks progress.
A couple of years ago I wrote a little time keeping program which would sit in the systray, I had to enter what I’d been doing for the last 15 minutes. Even if I’d done nothing, I would still enter that. I also had a status, actual work, break, doing nothing work related. So I was able to total up how much time I’d actually worked. I was really shocked after the first week.
There is a downside I was mentally exhuasted after the second week.
by JM
I’ve been thinking about the multi-tasking post on this blog and how I handle (or not) working on multiple projects. Quite often I’ll find myself dreaming about some new project to work on and before you know it I’ve either started researching or implementing something. Then I sort of wake up and realise I’m wasting my time since I’m not working on my main money earning projects.
One of the biggest problems I find with beginning to research things is that curiosity gets the better of me so that I keep coming back to the same distractions again and again, ending up with more and more reasons to divert from my main projects.
One of the biggest time-wasters I indulge in is SEO. Trying to build links can often turn into a big pit of wasted time. Going onto forums to get a few more sig links can end up wasting hours if I’m not careful. I’ve never been good at managing the time I spend doing SEO.
Being human, I realise that I can’t concentrate on a single thing all the time. However, maybe I need to think about non-software related items when I’m bored so that at least I won’t end up with too many projects in progress.
So, my belated New Year’s resolutions:-
- Spend less time working, so I’m less likely to be bored/ jaded when trying to knuckle down
- Waste less time working on speculative projects
- When I do research, confine myself to things related to those projects that already earn me money
Yep, I’ve added a new category to this blog, Motivation + Multi Tasking.
At the moment I’ve got tonnes of work I want to do and not enough time to do it in, although my deadlines are fairly flexible, I still want to get stuff done as soon as possible due to profitability.
Last week I couldn’t do that much I was on child care duty with the school mid term break. At the weekend I was reading a marketing book, which I only got half read. During the week I’m reading a software development book on a new language, for me.
I’ve also got a couple of projects which are about 90% complete where I need to regroup and plan out how to finish them.
I had been reading the development book solidly for over a week before the break and I was worried I’d forget stuff after a week, but I didn’t. I’m thinking I might continue with the marketing book today. But I’d rather be doing the development book.
I do a little work in the evenings but I like to spend time with my family, I guess I could sit up late, but I’m always so tired. If only there were more hours in the day and I could use them
by JM
Not sure what’s going on in the last few weeks but the number of submissions on all of my sites has dropped. The drop isn’t drastic, but what’s more worrying is that the percentage of spam submissions has increased dramatically. I now end up rejecting 40 to 50% of submissions.
There seem to be a large number of sites/ blogs using free dvd converter packages for submission purposes. There are also an increasing number of other software download sites using similar programs to make submissions. Also, I’ve noticed a raft of new download sites being created with random names, like s666.info. This happened some years ago in the general web directory arena and resulted in the whole sector being devalued. I hope software download sites aren’t going the same way. Even if you aren’t worried too much about dubious submissions - content is content after all - since the majority of the submissions use very nearly the same text, it doesn’t take long to rack up a hundred or more pages with virtually identical content.
Since I’ve been looking at newsletters and customer engagement, its become apparent that I need to know more about my customers and potential customers.
I was just considering one of my projects however, it makes sense to consider other projects which might benefit.
About a year ago Blue convinced me that I should ask potential customers for their email addresses, I didn’t do this via my website, but I asked people at the start of my software.
Then as now, I don’t believe people would create an account on my website, just to download my software.
I was just about to say, I don’t see how to move forward and to build on and improve my website, without analysing customer trends etc. But of course thats what analytics is for, I can look at the features provided and make decisions from there.
This still leaves me with questions to answer, about what information will be useful. Unlike a lot of online businesses I have two marketing venues, my site and my software.
I guess I can leave my site to analytics, maybe get some help to understand whats actually going on from the stats.
For my software, I guess I need to collect the same information or at least try and figure out what will be useful and what I can engage the customer with to help conversion. But nonetheless the same type of information that analytics collects.
by JM
Program Design
If you’ve been following me on twitter you’ll know I’ve been researching newsletters. Obviously a lot of the information out there is very generalised and its taken me a little time to reflect and digest.
For a number of years I’ve been collecting uninstall information, basic data which hasn’t really helped me at all. When I first started collecting, I guess I must have heard mention of others collecting. But I’ve never joined the dot, yeah I’ve seen some patterns but not looked at the data from an individual perspective.
Anyways, during my research I’ve found that sending newsletters needs to fine tuned so that you maximize the relevance and get to know your customers or potential customers.
So if I link the newsletter subscription with the uninstall data I could contact the potential customer and turn it into a sale. I’ll have some information, maybe they couldn’t install the program, maybe they couldn’t print etc.
During my research I began to think that the setup of my setup was flawed as it was developed to send interval emails, not news. But I can do both depending on the circumstance.
I dont think it will be possible to produce glossy html emails with nice photos at this stage, but I should be able to produce relevant content which seems to be key. Also several different type of emails depending on data.
by JM
