A fond farewell to Tom at Nothing-Ventured.org

Posted by stuart as adsense

Goodbye from Nothing Ventured

After around 15 months of blogging at Nothing Ventured about building websites and trying to make some supplementary income on the internet, I’ve decided it’s time to call it a day.

There are several reasons.  Firstly, I wasn’t enjoying a huge amount of financial success (although that could have easily changed in the future - you never know eh?).  Secondly, I felt like the fun of building websites was waning, and what began as an enjoyable hobby started to feel like a chore, or second job.  Thirdly, there are some pretty major changes coming up in my life in the very near future (like a wedding in three weeks, and the strong possibility of a dream new job) and I knew I wouldn’t really be able to concentrate on my sites anymore.

Were my online experiments a success?  Financially: probably not.  As an enjoyable and rewarding hobby, through which I met some genuinely nice and inspirational people: most definitely.

Despite “giving up”, I’m actually feeling incredibly positive about the future.  The philosophy of “nothing ventured, nothing gained” is something I will certainly continue, and it has put me in a position where I am genuinely excited about potential developments over the next year.  I might not be building an AIS lifestyle, like I hope the rest of you succeed with, but I am definitely going to be taking on some new challenges.

Good luck to everyone continuing with their online journeys.

Tom

Post timing - a few questions with no apparent answers

Posted by stuart as blog traffic, blogging, blog

I’ve often wondered whether there was an optimum time to post to a blog to bring the most traffic and pageviews.Opinions are many and varied on this topic, with some saying that you need to post at lunchtime to get the people who are reading blogs in their lunch hour, others saying that 6pm to 9pm is the best time, as this is when people are free after their day at work or school.

Of course these times assume that everybody in the world who reads blogs is based in the US, and that readers actually come to your blog to read your content.

A couple of things I think need to be taken into consideration here are the type of blog (and readership) you have, and whether your content is time sensitive.
A lot of the stuff I post here is done using the WordPress timestamp feature. Some of the posts which you’ll read here were written more than a week ago. A good example of this is the blog reviews which will be posted here every Sunday. I’ve already got a few of them in the bag set to automatically post on Sundays over the next few weeks.

I’m a busy man with a couple young kids, so when I get a free couple of hours, I write like a madman, but don’t want to hit the readers with eight posts in a day, then nothing for a couple of days. So I set them to post over the next few days. It’s important to note here that most of what I write is not time sensitive. The short posts you see throughout the day here from time to time are just random thoughts that cross my mind during the day when I’m home with the kids, and don’t warrant a long post on their own.

So what about the type of blog you have, and your readership? The readers of this blog are fairly tech-savvy. They’re going to be reading my ramblings in a feedreader, at a time which suits them. So it doesn’t really matter what time I post, as long as there’s fresh content regularly in their feedreader. But if you have a blog about rose gardening for example, your readers are more likely to be less technologically minded, and will struggle to set up a feedreader to access your posts. The thing is, these readers will probably come to your blog at roughly the same time each day, so it still doesn’t matter what time you post, as long as you have something fresh to present to them each time they visit.

Unless you have a blog which regularly attracts attention from sites such as Digg and Reddit, I don’t really think it matters what time you post, as long as it’s regularly, and of a quality which people want to read.

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guest spots available

Posted by stuart as adsense

If any regular readers here would like to make a guest post here during the next couple of weeks of anticipated inactivity, drop me a line at mail (at) pimpmypagerank (dot) com.

I’d love to hear from you!

Beer buying

Posted by stuart as donations, advertising

John Chow want you to buy him a beer using the “buy me a beer” Wordpress plugin.

Once again, the raving sycophants are are congratulating John, and he is basking in self-congratulation.

Pfffft, been done before

Fan sites - pre-empting the market

Posted by stuart as rss, online marketing, make money online, seo

Empress got me thinking today about fan sites

She’s being studiously vague about the project she’s working on, but I think there’s something to be said for the idea of fan sites.

What about this for an idea:

When the next series of American Idol (or Australian, Armenian or whatever) starts up, set up a site for each of the contestants.

These programs are popular enough that there’s always going to be a fair bit about them in the news-media providing enough regularly updated content for an RSS feed to be crawled by the search engines for each contestant.

As each of the contestants are eliminated (up till the last four or so), delete the site corresponding to that contestant.

Chances are that the winner at least, and probably the top three or four contestants are going to become famous, and you’ll have a site which has been ageing nicely for three or four months, with regularly updating content, ready to monetise as you wish!

Just thinking out loud.