It was the 18th of March 2007 Al made the first post!

Crikey, a year old.

• 254 posts
• 160,266 words
• 4501 comments

If you want to read through old posts they can be found via the sitemap, I would say there is a lot of good info to be found there, some light posts, some long posts and some gold dust. Lot’s of lessons learnt and a few mistakes to boot.

One of my favourite posts would be Al’s at the start if the year in which he breaks down his December income, we are all learning but everyone loves those big numbers. Talking of big numbers Al did an excellent link bait post on the top blogs by subscriber numbers which brought truck loads of visitors, subscribers, links and over 200 comments/trackbacks.

The posts I enjoyed writing the most were the property developing online one’s because that really can be done on a budget by anyone and took up a fair bit of my time or the minisites post which I picked up on a few times. UK domains don’t get the type in traffic that .com’s do and therefore developing a domain even into a small minisite can generate enough traffic and income to pay for it’s own renewal fees which makes it an attractive option and one I would think the parking companies have been trying to develop if they are to remain in business in the future.

I plan on doing a good case study soon once a domain purchase goes through which will be transparent and updated as it will be a big focus of mine for this year. In the meantime if you have questions or topics that you would like our view or opinion on then please get in touch, if either of us are to make a post it’s better done on something people find interesting so send in questions and we will try and make sure all get answered as long as they are not the blatant self promotional type of spam.

Just wanted to wish everyone a Happy, peaceful and prosperous New Year from Al and myself.

Let’s ensure that we leave behind all negatives and reasons why not to and make 2008 a doing year that builds on what we have already done and sets us up for the future.

Quick thought on 2007
In 2007 I have personally gone through a fair dip in Adsense, like many others, but that has been no bad thing for me, it gave me the jolt to open my eyes and realise I needed to make moves right now to ensure a more stable and an overall greater income in the future which has prompted me to invest in some good generic domains to build, earn from and lease. (more…)

Al mentioned last week after working together on a few sites for over a year we had arranged to meet up for the first time this weekend in Edinburgh with our families. It’s a funny thing working online with someone and then meeting in person for the first time, you half meet up as strangers but don’t do small talk as you already know where they live, what they do etc, quite surreal. Then again not quite as surreal as going out for a meal and seeing Al’s daughter order a 50/50 pizza with baked beans and cheese on one side and marshmallows and chocolate on the other, it was a pleasure to meet up and enjoy good company staying in an Apex hotel with a view of Edinburgh Castle from our rooms, a great excuse to get out of the house for a few days on a ‘business trip’. (more…)

Scott and I have been in business together for just over a year but we’ve never actually met or even spoke on the phone, all communication has been via PM’s, email and MSN messenger. That’s all about to change this weekend as we are meeting up for the first time, which means we can talk shop whilst the other halves actually shop.

One of the things that will be up for discussion is the direction that we’ll be taking Self Made Minds AKA “this site” so this post is to get a bit of input about what you think we should talk about (over a beer or three). Ideas from me are:

• SMM Idea - Case Studies - Creating new sites from scratch and documenting their progress but what sort of case studies would our readers like to see?
• Discuss sharing statistics from other sites that we own (jointly or individually)
• Re-investing profits
• SMM Marketing - How to increase our readership
• Does beer taste better in Scotland or England

So if there is anything you’d like to know or stuff you think we should talk about now is a great time to ask. I’m really looking forward to the weekend and just hope I can understand Scott’s Scottish accent.

Instead of writing a (hopefully) informative post I’ve spent this morning coding, installing third party plugins and generally tweaking the Self Made Minds site. So this post is more about the changes that you can (and cannot) see.

Comments and Commentators Links
After fair bit of feedback on this post, on whether using keywords in names looks spammy I’ve modified the comment system and added a Title field. This will be used as the anchor text on both the comment title and list on the sidebar.

If the title field is set the comment will appear for example as

Martin of Community Building Blog

I’m sure none of our regular readers will abuse this but please use a bit of common sense with what anchor text you want to be associated with.
(more…)

We’ve not done all that much by way of promotion with Self Made Minds and are instead using a long term strategy of quality content will bring traffic over time. That being said we’ve still tried a few traffic generating ideas when the opportunity presented it self, so in this post I want to share them.

The first two promotion methods we tried cost a bit of cash, the others cost our time.

Press Release
We paid a pro to write us a press release about the site and distribute it via PR web. The total cost of this was around $200 and a bit of time was spent by Scott sending it manually to various related sites. Traffic on the day was up slightly and we picked up a couple of decent links including one from entrepreneur.com But I don’t think it created anything like the traffic we were hoping for. It’s a difficult one to get exact figures for but the link on entrepreneur.com did bring us 476 visitors.

(more…)

I always find it a bit tricky doing the first post on a blog, so here goes. First off welcome to Self Made Minds, the site is run by 2 online entrepreneurs, Scott and myself Al. We’ve both quit the 9-5 rat race and make all of our earnings off our own projects, we’re not millionaires yet but well on the way :).

The purpose of this site is share some of the things we’ve done right and also mistakes we’ve made along the way, if you don’t make mistakes you’re either doing nothing or doing something wrong.

Comments and suggestions are always more than welcome.