I’d like to apologize for disappearing for the past two weeks. Things have been kind of crazy here.
With school starting again in four weeks and my job ending in four days, life has been kind of hectic. It’s a scary thought going back to school after being out for so long — I’ve been doing as much as I can to prepare in advance.
By the way, are there any ASIC engineers out there? I’d love to hear from you…
Enough with the excuses, lets get back to blogging for profit!
The $50 draw will close at 10PM EDT or slightly thereafter. I would like to invite those who may not have entered yet to get check it out here and submit their entry.
Blogging for profit, as with any other for-profit venture, must be taken as serious as starting your own business. For example, I check traffic stats to my sites, profit for the day and analyze trends almost hourly. If things are moving up, I record what I have done lately for this change to take effect and act quickly to counteract any downwards trends just the same.
Keeping balance in your life between work and pleasure is something that we all combat daily. For us bloggers, we have one more activity to balance than most people do and it is important to keep everything in proportion. With that in mind, tonight I’ll be heading down to Mexico for a week , returning on July 15th. For the first time in nearly a year, I will be completely disconnected from the world — no cell phone, no computer, no PDA, nothing — and I can’t wait!
The plan is to return refreshed and ready to work on my blogs again. When I return, I will be putting my full efforts into developing the new site Stuck in the Sand as well as a few others which are still in the conceptual phases… and for those of you who still don’t think there is any money in blogging, my entire trip is being paid for through CyberWyre.
So keep at it, work hard, and don’t forget to take a vacation!
CyberWyre has allowed me to experiment and learn over the past six months, and it is now time to expand on my blogging for profit ventures. With the extra income from this site, I have had the opportunity to pick up golf — I’ve bought myself a nice set of clubs, two gloves, some balls, a bag, been to the range at least a dozen times and this past weekend played my first game of the year.
Oh yeah, did I mention that I totally suck!? But that doesn’t matter, as long as I’m learning from my mistakes and improving as time goes by. Similar to CyberWyre, I will report on my golf progress — documenting every mistake made along the way and every lesson learned. Hopefully it will help others in the same situation, and eventually turn a profit.
It’s Canada Day and I am writing this post from Ottawa right now where I’ll be for the rest of the weekend celebrating our nation’s birthday. For all of you south of the border, have a great July 4th weekend, and I hope you all took Monday off too
I’m a little curious to see how much of a traffic dip CyberWyre will take due to the long weekend and everyone (like myself) heading out of town for a few days.
Take it easy, BBQ plenty, and be sure to check out CyberWyre when you get back to the office next week for some updated blogging for profit content!
Looking back, I still clearly remember the cold day in January when I wrote the very first entry on this site. CyberWyre has been online for nearly six months now and has grown to something that I had never imagined it could.
Although I have always avoided, and actually never really felt a need to post anything about my personal life on this site, this blog entry is the exception. A lot has changed in my life in the past six months. In January, I had only started to apply for grad school, and the initial goal of this site was to find a way to support myself throughout school without a steady 9-to-5 job. In the past six months I have fought battles in my mind should I go back to school or not, back and forth constantly weighing my options. Whenever this would happen though, I would usually refer back to my very first post on this site where I clearly stated my goals and why I was doing what I was — this usually set me back on track.
Looking Forward…
Now nearly at the end of June, I have been accepted into a two-year Masters of Applied Science (Electrical and Computer Engineering) program here in Toronto where I will be studying precicely what I initially set out to — VLSI design & optimization, CMOS logic and hopefully will have time to better understand the design of current FPGA systems as well.
So how does school affect CyberWyre? A lot more than it ever has before. With only a little more than eight weeks of full time employment left for the next two years, I need to find that steady source of income more than I ever have before. CyberWyre started off slow in January and February receiving anywhere from 50-100 unique visitors a day, and generally making me enough money to cover my morning coffee, sometimes not even that.
Things changed completely near the end of February and through March with the introduction of the Highest Paying AdSense Keywords page which was an instant success, bringing in close to half a million visitors and drawing the attention of magazines such as Red Herring and Forbes. I still swear my heart stopped when I received voicemail from the senior editor at Forbes wanting to interview me about the site.
CyberWyre is now attracting anywhere from 2000-4500 unique visitors a day, and at times has hit peaks of 50,000/day. Monthly, this has translated into approximately $600-800/month in affiliate earnings, banner clicks, and private advertisement arrangements and is still increasing.
Lessons Learned…
CyberWyre has been a great learning tool for me, and I hope that it has been for you too. As I progressed, I always tried to document all of my experiments, my successes and also my failures so that others could benefit from them. The biggest lesson learnt is that nothing comes easy and nothing happens overnight. The #1 reason why blogs aren’t successful financially is because the author expected too much too fast. In the first few months you will receive only a handful of visitors and be working essentially for free. Be patient — it will take time to build your reader base but if you are persistent at it, you will succeed. This site started off with no visitors at all in January to now with hundreds of thousands and more coming every day…if I could do it, why can’t you?
What’s Next…
As I mentioned earlier, I only have about eight weeks of full time employment left before I’m leaving for school and I will be working harder on this site than ever before. By next January, my goal is to be completely supported financially through my online ventures.
I have started work on a second blog which I will provide more details on in the coming days. The site will be completely new with no reader base whatsoever and will be a true experiment in blogging for profit. I will be applying all of the lessons learned so far and will document the entire process.
Thank you to everyone who has visited this site, contributed an article or posted a comment. It wouldn’t be where it is today without your support.
Stay tuned for the latest in making a living 100% online!
With the popularity of the Data Mining on the Internet with Google page, I thought that there may be some people out there who might find it useful if the more advanced searches were pre-written for them. I have now created a tool to directly search Google for MP3s and also use the Translate feature as a web proxy to load pages. Anyone have eBay blocked at work?
Not really related to making money, but I’ve found it interesting watching the traffic stats for my site over the past few weeks. Summer is finally here and I, like most other people out there tend to get away for the weekend – Yesterday I spent the entire day up north at the beach actually.
Last last weekend (weekend of May 20-22) was a long weekend here in Canada for Victoria Day, and this past weekend was Memorial Day south of the border. For both of these long weekends, my traffic took a nose-dive Friday afternoon, dropping nearly 25% from the norm and did not recover until Tuesday morning (it has yet to recover from this past weekend).
After the Victoria Day long weekend, I had suspicions that it this was the reason, but after watching it happen again this weekend has lead me to believe that this is the cause. I guess when it’s blowing snow outside, people don’t mind tapping away at their keyboard all weekend long but whe the nice weather hits, they’d rather be on the golf course.
I would like to welcome Brett Morris as a new author on CyberWyre. Brett is a Webmaster specializing in website marketing and internet research. As a consultant he has used his skills in the SEO field to turn around failing e-commerce web sites. Brett has experience in customer relationship management and is actively involved with development of online communities. Avidly interested in learning, you may find him on a number of forums with subjects varying from psychology of cybercommunication to the Homestar runner fan forum.
Thanks Brett. I’m sure we will all learn a lot from your experience.
, returning on July 15th. For the first time in nearly a year, I will be completely disconnected from the world — no cell phone, no computer, no PDA, nothing — and I can’t wait!
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