Here's some money maths for you...
if you post legit posts on forums, with a sig link, starting from your first post...
(a) about 10% of the forums will remove your sig but leave your post
(b) from
50 posts you will generate up to about 10 to 30 inbound hits per month, ongoing
I ran tests a number of times - once in July 2008 and again at end November - december's result showed that if I did finish posting at the first 1000 forums on my list (although I'm still confident that if I embrace slave labour again I can take that list up to 10,000) I would probably get few hundred inbound hits a month, converting to a handful of quids per month, at the beginning.
It's not a complete waste of time, if all else fails for me I WILL go back to that and finish the 100+ hours of painful labour needed to bootstrap my business without money.
But this way I can get away without adding any surplus labour to the minimal labour that makes me earn so much more per hour if you only include the hours of work and divide my income by that.
Posts I made on forums in July are still producing the same regular inbound hits per month... therefore I am sure that the forum posting method of promotion is quite strong - another advantage is that it takes the traffic quite far away from the search arena. Although since a lot of forum traffic passes through to the forums via searches, I suppose there's still a huge presence of seach-driven traffic. People don't realise that on the bulk of forums there's 200 readers for just a few writers, and most people read and click, even if that handful of writers are a bit too egocentric to imagine your links, in their presence, are making any hits (let alone money!)
SO finally, what's it like, being in unexpected retirement (other than much more like the life of clegg i yearn for)? Assuming the final few days of my mission are successful... how does it work? Well, on my machine I now only have two windows open for work and I don't go near them that much - one of them is my browser, often open at adwords, and my purpose with that is to both add keywords to the pile, slowly, a handful at a time, scouring carefully through 1000s of them suggested by google and picking the tiny minority that work for me both in price and semantics. The second window is the "terminal" application - it's been running a shell script since yesterday...
This is it...
Quote:
#!/usr/bin/sh
for (( i = 0 ; i <= 10000; i++ ))
do
tail /var/log/httpd/access_log --lines=5000 | grep fashion_main | grep -v 86.138 | grep -v Googlebot | grep -v Slurp | grep -v msnbot | grep 10/Jan
echo
sleep 60
done
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Once a minute it just prints the last few lines in the list of hits which are possibly/probably going to be the ones which show up as coming from google - i can see pretty clearly when a hit DOES come from google, but occasionally, since i'm monitoring for a particular page more than anything else, I do see hits from other sources or no source.
That just runs all day and tells me whether or not clicks are coming in (why wait for google's dinosaur-slow data updating system?) - i can usually even see how and where they entered my site - the logs show it all.
For a few more days I have to fill the google adwords account with keywords. I've bravely raised my bid to 4p - i can JUST make a profit with that, which is enough. I doubt I can build up to any big amount of hits unless I keep the bid at 4p. I've switched it in the last few mins and will be adding keywords ALL day and enjoying it - NO slavery - no girls aloud fans, no sega-worshipping nutters, no footballers, none of these peculiar people who DON'T seem to realise life is about escaping FROM the crap rather than embracing it.
So I retire properly and completely the moment that my hits are coming in at 4p. Which hopefully ought to be in the next few hours. And of course my work will run over, just a little, since I'll spend the rest of the day adding loads of keywords anyway. Then I don't even need to have the computer running, the terminal app measuring or anything. My mobile phone can access my own inhouse moneycounter any time - and it costs me just 1p to connect, by wap, to that page and see what money i have. thus, once this work is done, I won't need to use my computer at all, except of course to create payments to adwords, every time I want to give em more money, but spending money has never felt like work to me!
There's no more news to share. If i get my hits at 4p, i'm rich! I'll come back here and tell you if/when I get my hits at 4p.
And life isn't so depressing. If I wronged a lass I should have cared for long ago, and learned my errors, and changed my ways, and figured out how to be the right guy for her and to be everything she wanted me to be, and she STILL won't let me back in... who can blame me for taking solace in the fact that for some reason I've found a handful of phone numbers some pretty nice lasses have given me in the last 12 months - one number I thought I'd lost because I just thought I'd thrown it away as she was too fit for (a geek like) me and that she was just being nice by giving me her number! Well. Perhaps my subconscious was just saving it all for a more affluent day. Then again, what I did most wrong in the past when the one I love DID care about me was to go after all those others... maybe this time I want to reconsider my relationship with temptation!
Still, I know whom I love and I think the work I've done (above all the slave labour which eventually cracked open the nutshell inside which was hidden the kernel of power) is evidence of who or what motivates me in life. Sure, the lust for fit girls and lots of fun and pleasure and sex, rock and roll and everything in between can teach you to go get a job as a stockbroker and exploit people, or use some pyramid scheme to con 1000s of people into helping you get 10k a month or some rubbish, but if you love someone, and you mean it, and you'd give yourself up for them, that's about the only way you can trust yourself to work with abandon AND honesty at the same time and make money both large AND morally acceptable.
So what if I pretended to be nelly and know who the hell lucy on celeb big brother is? So what if I claimed I have a pet chihuahua called "Social Worker" in order to raise my traffic? The actual traffic is no worse than stuff canvassed by some poor git having to take leaflets around a city. That's all it is the equivalent of, signature-link-sowing.
So retirement will involve, mostly, staying the hell away from my computer, getting exercise, etc - it'll involve sticking to my signature in my emails (in my emails, which i only write to people I like, never for commercial reasons to anyone, my signature is as follows...)
Quote:
Privacy Statement
The sender of this email has very few qualms about privacy and generally cannot be trusted to make coherent or sensible statements. You are advised to pay no attention to this or any other irrelevant bureaucratic diversion from the main meat of your existence, which should not be spent indoors or in front of a computer screen. Remember: this paragraph makes no sense and it wouldn't have mattered if you didn't read it. Vote lib dem, they oppose governments and taxes and bad weather.
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And I'm going to take my own advice. Winter is almost over - I have been saving my cash and now my business looks set to 100% boom - I may as well enjoy London - I do love London a lot. As much as I love my girl - whether or not she sees herself as that (because she is, believe me, or I just wouldn't be doing the things I do in life...) And I figure - she's running around half the world and has been for years, running from people and things that hurt her, but one day she has to come home - so where I'll wait for her is right here, with the money and the power, at home, where she HAS to come back, in the end.
As usual I WAS happier when I was merely poor and naively optimistic in love! Now as I edge toward the enclosure of the tigers, to take my place among my peers, i can see that we are just caged predators, held in babylon like animals in a zoo. One day I'll roam free in the deserts where my roots are from (Palestine, Syria, Iran, Lebanon?), in a better world, ideally, to be quite honest, one without Islam (or Christianity, or oil wars, or judaism or zionism... etc)
Right. I just heard the toaster announce that my breakfast's ready, so it's time for me to leave you, hopefully for the last time as a poor person, and go do my keywords and spend the day waiting for my first 4p hits.
Rumble in the jungle is my tune for the day. Well the lord has definitely sent the world an angel in this morning, but what kind? Angel of life or angel of death? Bring it on, babylon... looks like I got you on MY leash now.
I WON'T waste my luck by working as a slave. I'll spend my time canvassing for palestine and other issues, I'll use my money to stay in good health and all business expansion will be carried out through hiring labour and rebuilding britain and its ability to work competently - far too few people in this society have been educated in what they SHOULD do in their work lives. I'll gladly teach a few 10,000 over time. Corporations can be big - you can educate/free a lot of people with them, both inside and out - just consider... NGOs are just one approach. Batman is another.
auf wiedersehen, people.
wow
