Another short one this week as Scott and I are enjoying the summer holidays between fighting social fires on one of our forums.

Kieron over at here.org.uk has done an entertaining post on what cars Internet stars drive, both Scott and I are featured (though I don’t think either of us would call ourselves stars) and there is no Mondeo in sight .

Cool ProBloggr article on running a successful Dig campaign.

Todays game is just irritating 29.471 seconds to beat.

As it’s a short here’s a slightly less irritating and definitely more fun game, especially if you’re a fan of pool and angles, Big Diamond.

Over the last couple of months I’ve been experimenting with a few ideas to improve my social traffic and garner more email subscribers. In this post I’m going to share some of what I’ve been doing, which techniques have been successful and which not so. All these tests were done on CG.

I updated the theme recently and at the end of each post I added the following menu bar:

This included 2 new features, Email to a friend and a social Share.

Email to a friend

This option lets readers email specific posts and pages to their friends, hopefully enticing them to the site. I used the plugin Wp-Email for this, the ongoing results are pretty nice for the small amount of work and screen real estate involved.
We are now averaging around 30 emails a day not a vast amount but some will become regular readers and will certainly add up over time. Originally we only displayed the link on individual post pages, we now display the footer links on the index and category pages which accounts for the increase around the day 61 mark.

Social Share ()

We use the Add This service to give our readers an easy way to share posts on their favourite social network. Results from this have been disappointing with daily highs of 7 uses but again it doesn’t take up much space so will be staying until I think of a better use for the space

Increasing Email Subscribers

One of my ambitions for the year is to create an email list of 10K+ subscribers, a goal of which I am way way off target from at the moment. The following graph shows how many new subscribers we are gaining on a daily basis:

There are two points on the graph where you can see you can see an increase on average new subscribers, these are caused by the following:

• {1} - Added an email subscribe form near the top of the home page
• {2} - This is a something I hadn’t seen before but makes sense. Visitors that scroll down to the end of the home or category pages are interested in the site, therefore more chance of becoming a subscriber if they see an option, so we display the following at the end of the home page and all category pages, it also displayed at the top (and bottom) of all subsequent pages (i.e. page 2 and after).
  

Previous we were gaining under 5 new subscribers per day, now we average over 20. If we’d done this from day one we’d be nearer on target for 10K subscribers by the end of the year, as we didn’t we’ll need to think of other ways to improve it (ideas very very welcome).

The next experimental case study I want to share resulted in an extra 20K+ visitors in a couple of days, I’ll leave that for my next post, if interested please subscribe to Self Made Minds by Email or our RSS feed.

Some bits and bobs this week, been busy trying to juggle making an effort to get out and about during the kids summer hols and trying to be productive.

Looking to join Nominet and get my own tag next week, it costs £400+VAT  setup and £100+VAT per year but that means I can then try and catch names myself, very late to the party but it will improve the my chances of catching the odd decent quality name. A drop catching service may be after 30 names in one day and uses up it’s allowed requests where as I can concentrate on one or 2 names.

I also have a couple of names on my radar that should drop early before they are due and know the exact days they drop so I’d prefer to have something more efficient than hand regging them in place, I have to try anyway.

I also picked up a couple of .com’s this week - Inverness City and DundeeCity, always fancied doing a geo domain, Inverness is one of the smallest cities in the UK but it’s a huge tourist destination with Loch Ness/Nessie and the Highlands on it’s back door so I am looking forward to developing it.

Google launches it’s affiliate network.

If you can’t get enough of your Analytics data Google Tutor shows you how to receive it via email.

How do you see Adsense from Net Business Blog makes interesting reading.

The game this week is Cave Escaper, I am on level 42 out of 50 so far.

I was recently contacted me by my friend Wendy Piersall from the Spark Plugging Blog Network. She told me about her latest project (one of her life long dreams), Spark Plugging University.

I wanted to write and let you know about a new project we have going on with Sparkplugging - next week we are launching SparkplugU. The Sparkplugging team has started an affordable online learning ‘university’ to teach our fellow entrepreneurs, bloggers, and self-employed business owners what we know. The short pitch is that this is vastly different than other internet marketing trainings available. We aren’t promising anyone will get rich quick, we have a focused, quality curriculum that delivers what we promise, and we aren’t looking to exploit people who want to work at home - most of our courses will be under a reasonable $40.

I’ve followed Wendy for a long time and know the sort of passion and commitment she puts into her work so I’m expecting the courses to be of high quality. I did have a few questions before posting about it here:

SMM: You already provide a lot of great free information via the sparkplugging network, what benefit are people going to get by buying the courses?

Wendy: Great question - we will definitely be getting a little more in-depth with our classes as compared to our blog content. That being said, some people just prefer to learn information in the structured setting we’ll be providing. Other people prefer to wade through information and figure things out for themselves. Frankly, I’m more like the latter person. But I’ve found that a large percentage of our audience is asking for more guidance on how to implement the advice we’re giving, and these courses are the answer to that request.

SMM: As it’s a teleconference I’m assuming we are listening to the speakers in realtime and not a pre-recorded lesson, is that correct?

Wendy: Yes, for now our classes are live. But as we build up a history of courses, we will also be offering past courses as self-paced downloadable classes.

SMM: Is there a Q and A session at the end of the course, if so how do you think this work when coarses have upto 100 participants.

Wendy: Yes, there is Q&A - for our webinars, questions will be submitted via the cat room functionality in the web conference room. On the phone calls, we will have students submit questions via email, or we will have a question moderator on the calls.

Up and coming courses include:

• Organize Your Home Office for Maximum Productivity Workshop with Brandie Kajin
• Introduction to Starting a Blog Network with Wendy Piersall & Easton Ellsworth
• Podcasting Bootcamp - Strategy Through Implementation with Kelly McCausey

I will be trying some of these out so that I can give more of a review (and they sound interesting), if you enroll in any please let us know how you get on. Also if there are any courses that you would like to see let us know and I’ll pass the info on.

Hope everybody’s enjoying the summer holidays, so far I’ve done a bike ride, picnic and cinema trip. Great thing about this business is it makes money without me.

Foreclosure.com has purchased Property.com from Rick Schwartz, no official sale price has been given.

Matt Cutts posted that some penalties will be expiring and a toolbar update on the way

Hey folks, I wanted to let you know that new toolbar PageRank values should become visible over the next few days. I’m expecting that also in the next few days that we’ll be expiring some older penalties on websites.

Scour.com pays you to search. They combines results from Google, Yahoo and MSN and then lets you vote/review the results, when enough votes have been cast they will be reflected in future results. I like the idea and the fact they pay you to search (albeit I expect s minimal amount) is bonus, they also have a referral scheme which explains why I received at least a dozen emails about it . A side effect of the combining results from the 3 main engines means you can use Scour to quickly see where you rank on all 3.

Rag Doll 1.5 is out, another 25 levels of cannon shooting stickman fun (if anybody manages to complete the last level please let me know how).

I recieve a lot of link requests, 99.9% of them are simply ignored and deleted (the only ones I generally read are from people I already know). However this next one amused me for sheer amount of work they’d put in. Firstly they had scraped logos and text and created a page of images to all the sites they wanted to request links from, like the following but the page was a lot bigger (62 logos in total).

Next came the link request email (personal names and links removed):

Hello,

I would like to introduce myself to you, my name is D****, and i am the advertising director of a company here in Australia called EovZa Proprietary Limited.

The reason for me writing to you is because recently my team placed (on our website) a direct link to your website’s homepage.

The link incorporates your company/business logo, and a description of your website.

The page that is holding your link is on our server, but is not yet accessible by the public until August 1st (AEST). Giving you time to notify us to remove the link, if need be.

Please read on…

The link is held amongst other links at the following address:

http://****

If you are happy with the link, ..then we ask in return that you place a link to our homepage.

The link to our site is not for advertising purposes, but is intended to improve our ranking in search engines (by building a network of web-sites that link to us). Also known as cross-linking.

Please link to us at: http://www.****

Once we go live with this LINKS page (August 1st), we will regularly be checking each month to ensure you are still maintaining a link to us. We will do this to everyone who links to us (in whom we link to also). To do this I will need you to provide me with the URL-address to where you have placed the link to our website.

So in reference to all of the above, may i ask you to do the following:

IF TAKING PART…

Please reply to this email;
1. Letting me know that you are happy to link to our website,

2. Any changes you have in regards to the description under your link (you may change the description to whatever you like, as long as it does not exceed 50 characters),

3. Please also inform me of the URL-address where you will be placing the link to our home page, and at what date it will be up and running. You may give this to us at a later date if you like, but no later than AUGUST 16th. The link must also be up and running by this date.

IF NOT TAKING PART…

Please reply to this email letting me know you would prefer not to participate, you do not need to give me any reason at all.

Understanding of the dates mentioned in this email:

August 1st - Links page becomes accessible by the public.
August 16th - If I have not heard from you in regards to the URL address of where you have placed our link, both your company/business logo and description, will be removed from our website.

At the bottom of this email, is a cross-linking tip, i recommend reading over it.

I appreciate you taking the time to read this email, and i look forward to hearing from you soon.

My kind regards,

D****
Advertising and New Initiatives Director.

EovZa Proprietary Limited

CROSS-LINKING TIP…

Due to the nature of the products we sell, you may choose not to associate with us. But may I suggest the following:

Place a link to our home page at the very bottom of a particular page (on your website). Make the color of this link, the same color as the background of that page. No one will ever be able to see it and it still counts as a cross-link. The only way someone will know it is there, is if they scroll their mouse over that part of your page.

How’s that for a long winded link request. Love the cross linking tip at the end, duh .

Dosh Dosh speaks about how cracked.com successfully creates Diggable content.

Another opinion over on Jim Karter, when to put ads on your blog.

If you’re in the Midlands (UK) and fancy doing something a little bit different and meeting up in October you can join Al and do your bit for charity by fire walking, board breaking and glass walking.

Economics (dotcodotuk) is for sale if you have deep pockets

Audiobooks never really took off first time around, will they succeed now? New Hampshire Radio seems to think so and I believe it’s only a matter of time before it get’s done well so a good market with plenty of room to grow.

An enjoyable game is Totem Destroyer where you destroy blocks and try and save the golden idol from hitting the ground or dropping.

I was given a link to eDirectory.com and had a good look over it this week, thinking about developing a geo domain focused around a city and this script really looks polished but the price is massive at $1499, in reality another $500 is needed for modules and $199 for unbranded - I’m in a dilema whether it’s perhaps a good thing seeing as there will not be thousands of portals the same at that price but it would be a big bill to swallow.

It’s now 2 weeks into the summer holidays for us in Scotland and I’m off this afternoon to take my son to see Wall-E, last week was ‘Journey to the Center of the Earth’ - that was the first 3D film I have seen since Jaws and although the film was so-so, the 3D effects were awesome, I was very impressed and recommend it as an experience.

We are past the half way point of 2008, growth is slower than I’ve seen in the past, so how the hell am I on target for 7 figures of revenue.

When you work a day job you get paid for the hours you work but you also gain from experience and maybe training which means if you switch jobs you might be able to command a higher wage. However running your own business is a bit different to that and if you have a number of websites you are likely earning more than you think (hence the 7 figures in the title), this is how I break it down.

Training and experience
When you’re in our sort of business you learn by doing, reading, research etc. It’s difficult to put a figure on what this is worth, but say you went to college or university to do an MBA I’d expect this to cost you to the tune of $10,000 per year, not to mention the loss of earnings from the time spent studying. So I reckon I’m a conservative $10K better off due to knowledge and experience gained, probably more than that as learning by doing is way more valuable than anything you’ll learn in a class room.

Actual profit
I don’t run a business purely for fun I also like to make a bit of money, this year actual cash profit is on track to exceed $500,000. This is a pretty nice amount, a high percentage will be re-invested in business ventures but I’ll also draw enough to enjoy myself some what (I might even replace my old Mondeo).

Investment revenue
For the past few years I’ve been building up my emergency fund, this is made up of various interest bearing investments (ISAa, bonds, savings account etc.). The return from these isn’t great but the money is safe and the returns this year will be a bit over $20,000.

So this comes to a respectable $530,000 for the year, nice but not exactly 7 figures is it, here’s the beauty of working for your own business rather than somebody else’s.

Business Growth
As your revenue goes up so does the value of the business, in fact your revenue doesn’t need to go up provided it doesn’t drop your business is likely worth more this year than it was last (a domain that’s a year older with older links is easier to rank). Scott has written before about valuing websites but I’m going to keep this really simple and base business growth on how revenue has increased.

New websites are often valued at 10-12 x monthly income, however established quality websites can easily go for 5x annual revenue. I think my web portfolio is of pretty high quality, however I’m going to be very conservative again and go for a multiplier of 2. So on to the calculation.

This year annual profit is on target to increase by $200,000 over last year. So multiplying that by 2, means my business is worth $400,000 more than it was last year, pretty cool.

So my annual revenue projection comes in at $500,030 $530,000 + $400,000 = $900,030 $930,000 not quite 7 figures but I aren’t going to quibble over $70K (Edit: though if I could count I would quibble over $99,070, thanks Walt) (Edit: Thanks to Walt for correcting me incorrectly, Carl and Michael for correcting me correctly, phew).

Conclusion
It’s very easy to measure your sites success on how much it makes every month but the real value is from the business that you’re building, the monthly income you take out is something of a nice side effect and often by taking less your business will grow more (losing ads (hence monthly revenue) can result in more loyal visitors which will add more value to your business).

I hope this post has got your thinking and if you’re still in a day job maybe your business already makes more than your 9-5. I’d love to hear your thoughts about this post and how it applies to your business. Have fun.

Is it me or is this tool getting even better, to be fair this was possibly already there last week (I didn’t notice), following on from last week when I noticed the keyword tool gave numbers, it was mentioned that some people likes the advertiser competition, well now you can display all the data your going to need with average CPC & advertiser competition.

I just did it this morning for a domain that was caught for me for me by DropSystem.co.uk, recently I pickedup mobilematch.co.uk which is a real nice domain and this morning it was exhibitiondisplays.co.uk, both cost £20 which will change to £30 I think, plus Nom transfer fee of £11.75 per domain. ExhibitionDisplays is a nice keyword domain, so I wanted to check and see if there was a little bit of traffic for the term:

There is a drop down menu that you can change to show all columns, now I can see there is a little ‘exact’ search traffic but really high competition and really high average CPC for ‘exhibition displays’  at £6.56 making this a nice little gem, thanks Google!,.. oh and thanks Simon & Dale for catching it

A bit of a shorty this week as I’ve been out and about a lot and not reading many other sites.

A great analysis and heat map on how people read web pages Thanks to Jim Karter)

This is a cool post by Blog Bloke on the importance of Link Love, I do like some of the blokes posts but find he rants and complains way too much about other “A List” bloggers which really turns me off his blog, this is a shame as he does make some good posts.

The iPhone 3G is out, however it’s not all smooth sailing according to the BBC, Software glitch hits iPhone fans. Patrick also reports on some insane news for iPhone affiliates.

Not a game today but if you were a kid in the 80s you might want to reminisce on one of my friends blogs, Child of the 80s.