July 2006 - Working Holiday

aeroplane.gifFor the past year I’d been running CG alongside a full-time job. This was great from a financial point of view as I could re-invest all earnings back into my sites and be saving for retirement quitting the 9-5 but from a free time point of view it was not so good. This meant my partner was able to twist my arm to take a 2 week holiday.

Before the holiday I was able to post date a post for each day I was away and also organised extra cover from my writers, this meant I should be able to spend 2 weeks relaxing in the sun and do an intensive 1 week PADI SCUBA diving course. Haha, yeah right.

Just before going away on holiday I encountered a bug in the blog software where the admin pages wouldn’t always display, meaning nobody could post. I re-installed everything and the problem “seemed” to go away. I’m now about as prepared as I could be to go away.

Holiday Day 1

Found Internet Cafe, checked sites and email - all ok.
Found SCUBA diving centre, organised course.

Holiday Day 2
Visited Internet Cafe, checked email, found messages from all my writers saying they couldn’t log in. Spent the day researching problem, to no avail. A re-install again did “seem” to fix the problem.

Holiday Day 3
See Day2

Holiday Day 4
See Day 3

Holiday Day 5
Found an Internet enabled PUB, things were looking up. It was at this point I chatted to my provider about the problem, they couldn’t help as it was software related but did ask if I’d tried restarting the server. As I’d only just moved to a dedicated I didn’t realise you could restart it as and when you wanted and flicking the virtual switch up and down did do the trick.

For the rest of the holiday I went to the same pub each day (great excuse for a pint) and did a server restart. I never did find out what was causing the problem but I did an upgrade in the future and it went away forever (or so I hope).

Last Day of Holiday
Found best eating establishment on the island, typical.

Other than that July was pretty uneventful, the coolest product we wrote about were the powerizers which I so need to get.

cg-analytics-july-2006.jpg

Traffic
Our traffic continued to grow, Google sent us over 110,000 visitors and we also received traffic from 1,818 other sources.

Visitors: 195,960 (176,041)
Page Views: 450,726 (359,159)

The figures in brackets are for the previous month, May 2006.

Revenue

July 2006
Google Adsense 3,730.10 (2,463.54)
Chitika 176.01 (168.82)
Commision Junction 296.97 (178.81)
Total 4,203.53 (2,811.17)

Despite all the problems revenue rose pretty nicely in July and was about 50% up on June. Adsense continued to be the best performer especially with search engine traffic. By this time I had added some other revenue sources, like Blog Ads and private sales but I can’t include those in the totals as my record keeping back then was not great (my book keeper would say it’s still not great).

Conclusion
Don’t go on holiday If all else fails go to the pub For me the conclusion to this would be to always have enough information on you to be able to log in and fix your sites if required. Two weeks downtime would of been disastrous for CG, so neglecting the sun for the first week of the holiday was a small price to pay. I’m away for 2 weeks next month, I wonder what the Net gremlins have in store for me this time.

About Al Carlton

Al quit the 9 to 5 rat race in January of 2007, before then he was a software engineer and systems architect of financial system. Nowadays Al spends the days running his various businesses and experimenting with different ideas and opportunities.
Al can be found on twitter at AlCarlton.

Comments

  1. I had the same problem, I wrote down all my log in info on a peice of paper and carried it with me abroad.

    Nothing disasterous happened but I knew if anything did happen I would be able to fix it.

  2. I would like to know how you’ve got good writers for your websites. A comment or another blogpost.

  3. Being a webmaster is pretty much the end of the relaxing holiday.:)

    • Yep. I have to agree with you there. There is always something to watch out for. Even if you have someone covering you still want to check that they are ok with everything. Oh well :)

    • Yeah, I am always worried something is going wrong when I take long breaks from the internet. I got lucky on my last vacation though, nothing went wrong and some things actually improved.

  4. You mean you can’t remember all your login details?

    My mind is full of cpanel logins, FTP access and admin details…

  5. Al, aren’t you the one who keeps telling us ‘you can’t do it all yourself’? Seems to me this might be a good time to high a webmaster/network admin to help with this kind of work.

    • Excellent point Wayne, I do to out source a lot of my work but with this I didn’t think there was a problem that needed out sourcing. I am currently looking for a good admin guy (or gal).

  6. I’ve been hearing how businesses use email to advertise their companies more than any other method online. But the problem is that spamming is a big issue and where do you draw the line between advertising and spam?

    Well heres the idea. I create a website that allows companies to sign up to have their e-mail ads sent out for them by my company. They pay for example $5 for 5 e-mail ads that are sent out. In exchange for paying a low price they agree to accept five e-mails from my company containing ads by 5 other companies. This allows the companies to get known e-mails from companies just like them and get their e-mails sent out cheaply without being penalized for spamming because the e-mails are sent to companies that agreed to accept them.

    As the list grows with more companies wanting emails sent out for them and accepting emails about other companies the advertising would become mroe affective.

    I was wondering if anybody would tell me what they thought of the idea and any suggestions they may have. Of course in order to make it better the e-mails could even be sent to companies that could benefit from the products or services offered by the other company.

    Id apreciate any input.
    Thanks
    Bizenez
    http://www.bizenez.com
    contactbizenez@bizenez.com

  7. The problem I have with this is that I like wilderness camping out in Canada. Absolutely no chance of any contact with anything there except moose, raccoons or maybe a bear.

    If I ever get to the level of earnings that you guys do then it’ll be a case of employing a trusted admin.

    • Don’t they have satellite uplinks for laptops? You might be able to get a signal in the wilderness by finding a high point. 😉

  8. Wow cool blog going to read throug it and hopefully i can do the same thing

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