So, I’ve just signed up to basecamp and freshbooks for better management of my projects and income, It’s better to track all payments using freshbooks if you are thinking of selling or site that offers services and ads, i know people would rather prefer to see paypal stats but something is better then nothing isn’t it?
I used to have a subscription at conceptshare but i think base camp has alot more things that i could use, the tools and flexibility is simply awesome.
Some benefits of this from my perspective :
Freshbooks
Proof of income
Better view of my overall online income
Managing Clients, contact info..etc
Professional Invoices for my clients
Future reference info.
Project Management
Base camp
Great for designing
Handling clients and collaborating is easier
Managing my own sites with it is easier as well
Great project features to help speed up the process
I’ve had a few questions that were lengthy enough to be answered in this post, brazilman commented on my blog income report for jan (pretty late) and asked a few questions:
According to whois blueverse.com has been registered since 2006? Did you buy this domain in Jan08 with backlinks and PR already? Or the site has been online for longer then jan 08 but you just started earning in jan08 is that it? Can you tell us how long you were working on the site before jan08?
This blog was infact registered in late 2006, and then was used as a twitter for my daily activities no matter how lame they were, later on i moved this blog on to Gurilla.net for a while then i realized what i really wanted to do with gurilla so i moved it back here near june of 2007, i didn’t start serious blogging till september 2007, with absolutely no monetization and zero income from it, i had to build it up to the point where i can risk spending a grand on the theme that you see so that it’s more attractive and would finally start earning some money. Late december i paid UBD for a blog design and early Jan i had the theme that you are looking at right now.
Right after the theme was placed i had alot of ad sales (some of which are still advertisers here ).
Hi, would you be kind enough to tell me how many unique visitors you were getting back in january and how you were getting them?
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Reader Optimization is another term i use for User Friendly but reader optimization deals with more features that deal with features that benefit the readers rather then the search engines.
Nowadays everyone is trying to please search engines, there’s only a certain limit till you can seo your site but after that its all content and user friendliness that will keep the real visitors coming back again and again for more content and more of your blog.
Design
A good design/user interface is the the first step towards Reader Optimization, real visitors want more then content they want flashy content and eyecandy images that make reading the articles so much more pleasing and interesting, many sites with a great design and less content do 4 times better then a blog with tons of great content but a poor design.
From what I’ve seen only 12% of the blogs get away with an ugly design but since their content is so addictive people keep coming back, Smashing magazine published a post on the 45 most attractive blog designs on the net, take a look and check out the competition.
Navigation
Usually people say that navigation and link placement is a part of UI as well but i think it deserves its own discussion here, navigation and accessibility of content (inner pages) is important for both SEO and RO, read up on 30 usability issues once again by smashing magazine they explain most issues that i was going to discuss here.
SEOMoz has included navigation and in-content mentions to inner pages alot in their premium content and various seo articles, and it is a crucial aspect of web design and development.
Friendly Scripting
Using a good platform on which you can make your site has its own long line of rewards, one thing was painfully obvious to me, never use flash to make websites if you really want users to come and stay never go with flash its laggy and slow for most people and there are several incompability issues in my opinion i know alot of people may argue with me on this but i feel that flash is not the right way to make a profitable and user friendly website, CSS is where i like to stay there are so many awesome sites in css and you can see them showcased here.
Be the man
From a blogger’s view, I’d say the best thing in a blog that keeps users there is the personal touch unique bloggers have in their posts, so be yourself doesn’t matter if you curse alot or you have bad grammar, as long as you make a valid and stern point you’ll be just fine.
These 3 days were hell for me, to start off i had a really bad fever going on since wednesday which got worst on thursday night then the dsl bill came in and it got cut off the next day the dsl office was closed and during all this there was a server migration going on after which there was supposed to be a restore of all sites (which by the way did not go all the way) there are still 10-20 of my sites that are still down or not restored at all, this blog however was one of the lucky ones, not a single post missing, i guess thats an up side to all of this.
I guess today will be one heck of a day to deal with, only after i get all of my sites back up then i can carry on with further development, and this is kinda depressing..look at it go down..eh.. ah well i won’t let it get outta the 100k mark!
I believe a good design takes you 50% of the way to success for any niche, so I’m getting a whole new design for Blueverse from Unique Blog Designs, they have designed sites like Shoemoney and John Chow and I think they’ll do a kickass job for this blog as well.
Now apart from the design there will be atleast 2 more ebooks one is a sequel to my free seo book and the second will be all about monetization and factors, tips, tricks and articles on how to earn more then you already do using SEO and general Marketing techniques, apart from the more features/articles..etc there will be some free scripts and tools here as well that i know will be helpful to ALOT of people.
And some development news on how i take a site from $0/day to $20/day , personally thats what I’m looking forward to do the most!
Funno is my latest project, its basically just to prove a point that no matter what methods (hosted/non-hosted) you use as long as you have 1-10% user approval you can make it work and maintain the traffic and probably have the whole site running on and funded by Adsense.
The media on Funno is perfectly divided into hosted media and non-hosted media, i am getting nearly a 10% bounce rate, mostly from the traffic that i am receiving from stumbleupon. The site launched just today and got 2 unique stumbles on inner pages (fresh content).
The good thing is that during the launch i got users posting deep links on other sites (craiglist forums/general forums)
I am gonna go ahead and make sure this project is updated and perfectly documented on this blog properly so that anyone can go through the blogposts to see the development.
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In order to maximize the success of your website, there is a lot that needs to be done to your website design. The best way is to hire a website designer to put in all of the leg work for you so that you don’t have to. Having someone that is skilled in the website design field is very important for any website to have no matter what type of niche you are in. If you have looked into hiring a web designer, you may have ran into some of the astronomical prices that certain website designers charge. 
