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10 Hours A Day Experiment

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jan 14, 2011

Some of you know I write many of my blog posts in advance. This one is real time for a reason. I’ve been doing an experiment this week, one that either has changed my life or made me realize I need to figure out another way or one that reminds me why I’ve been doing things the way I’ve been doing them and I’m going back to it.

Following up on that work/life discussion from a couple of weeks ago, I made a decision that for this week I was going to limit myself to 10 hours a day on the computer, which obviously also means 10 hours a day online, or way less. See, other than brief moments away from the computer, I tend to spend upwards of 16 to 20 hours sitting here at my desk doing something; at least I thought I did. I acknowledge it’s not always productive, although I also do accomplish a lot of things. And some people have been shocked that I could spend that kind of time at the computer.

Most people don’t work that many hours on their job or in their work. Eight hours is the norm, sometimes a couple of hours here and there. Then they go home and have the evenings to do whatever they want, which might mean they sign onto the computer and do stuff. For me, there is no separation between my regular life and business life except when I go to the casino. After all, my business life is my computer, and by extension most of my social and fun life is on the computer as well. That’s kind of a shame, but many times I feel I need all that time. So, this was an experiment to see what I’d do with that time, and whether I really did need it or not.

I decided to start on a Sunday, which for me is either a day I rest a lot or a day where I work almost nonstop. This past Sunday I actually rested, and since it’s now the playoffs I had a rooting interest in a couple of games. So I napped and watched some football unencumbered by being at the computer. And I never made it to 10 hours of computer time; as a matter of fact, I didn’t even make 8 hours. The first day made me think that maybe this was going to be an experiment that was going to have a totally different outcome than I expected.

Monday came and, knowing I was on this timed program, I worked some, took it easy some, and basically had a pretty good day, which is rare for me on a Monday. I also had some business calls, which I didn’t count since I didn’t take them at the computer. Once again, I didn’t reach even 10 hours on the computer. I took a long nap, I watched some TV programs, and went to the gym for almost 90 minutes with my wife in the evening. But I did reach 9 hours; things were getting interesting.

Tuesday was an interesting one. I planned the day but I felt horrible all day physically. Seems I might have worked out too long Monday night. So I was sore and lethargic. But I had a full day of work planned on the computer, as well as a meeting in the afternoon which was going to take me away. I also took another nap before the meeting; I was starting to enjoy this experiment. However, Tuesday night at around 2AM I finally hit that 10 hours, when my alarm went off. I was feeling like I was in a great work rhythm, so I was irked, but I had my rules and thus I went to bed.

Wednesday was the day things started to change some. I woke early, like 7:15, which was disappointing because I didn’t turn the TV off until 3AM. I came straight to the computer for about 30 minutes, then went outside to shovel show; we’re in our “snowbelt” daily snow routine now, so while everyone else gets hit with storms coming up the coast, we’re getting 2 to 6 inches daily. Wednesday we got a little over six inches for the day officially. That meant I had to shovel in the morning and in the early evening. It also meant I didn’t go anywhere except a brief outing for lunch. I was on the computer for the rest of my time, including being on the computer during the Syracuse University basketball game (they won again; 17 straight wins). I looked at my time; at 9PM I only had 33 minutes left to go for my computer time. What the hey? What was I going to do for the rest of the evening?

I got off the computer at 9:30 with 3 minutes remaining. Now I was stuck. I usually don’t go to bed until between 2 and 3 in the morning; I had 4 to 5 hours to kill. I took a book into the other room, but ended up turning on the TV for awhile. Eventually I gravitated towards a DVD or two. And I stayed up until just past 2AM. So I wasted time instead of used the extra time for something else; then again, I had no idea what else I wanted to use it for, but my body, after shoveling twice, said “let’s do nothing”, and that’s what I did.

Thursday morning I was again up at 7:15 and this time decided to go to the health club for a short bit. I came back an hour later, got onto the computer, and went to work. I took time out to cook something for lunch, which took about 30 minutes, but I came back to the desk to eat at the computer and work some more. I was also very active on Twitter and the blog during the day; lost a lot of time doing that stuff. I had a networking meeting at 5:30, which means I pulled away to shower, get dressed, and head into the city. I barely stayed an hour; wasn’t feeling it and I didn’t know anyone. Came home, and got right on the computer again.

This time, the alarm went off right at 10:30; ugh! I knew it was coming, so I quickly tried to finish up a few things in that last half hour. I almost thought about getting off and saving some of that time for later on, but that didn’t seem to make much sense. I got off, and decided to watch a couple of DVDs before finally shutting everything down just past 12:15, since I had an early morning meeting anyway.

So the experiment is over, and it becomes evaluation time. And to me, what I learned is pretty simple.

One, if I decide I don’t want to deal with 16 hour days, I just won’t do it. That was proved by Sunday, though that type of thing will be rare.

Two, right now anyway, if I have more time all I want to do is, well, nothing. Watching TV and DVDs is classified as nothing to me. That and sleep; true, maybe I need more rest, but if it’s all I have to look forward to with my down time then I’d rather not. That is, unless I can get a lot of massages to help me rest; that might not be so depressing long term, eh?

Three, it’s easy now to see how I can slip into being on the computer for so many hours. I mean, look at Wednesday; I could have easily been on the computer 5 more hours, because I remembered that on Wednesday I took myself out to lunch, which was about an hour away. Add to that a trip to the bank and the store, and there you go.

Four, I probably need more DVDs, because I watched DVDs that by now are probably starting to wonder if I like anything else. Hey, I only buy things I could watch over and over; nothing wrong with that.

And five; there’s absolutely nothing wrong if I decide to take time away to relax or do something else if I think about it. I got all my projects done by Thursday, and with a little concentration I could have finished them by Tuesday and had all the other time for other stuff. This might bode well as far as planning for future projects.

Of course it might all mean nothing in the long run as well; I’m not really sure. I’ll admit that it’s hard to evaluate myself on this one. I haven’t really decided if I’m going to try to change or even if I really need to. If I went on the “happiness” scale, I’d have to say that I ended the experiment no happier or sadder than when I went into it. I wasn’t happy with how Wednesday and Thursday night ended so early mentally, but physically my body was probably happier.

Another experiment is over; whew! And it’s Friday, which means all bets are off since I finished my paid work. Hmmm, what other trouble can I get into?

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My 2010 Goals – A Review

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Dec 17, 2010

Let’s just get this out of the way; my 2010 goal process stunk. Well, that’s not quite accurate; I didn’t have a full process to reach my goals, so I stunk. As a matter of fact, I stunk so much that in August I even tried to change a couple of things. I think I trapped myself into a corner; what would Admiral Ackbar say? Well, no matter; let’s take a look back to see what I was hoping to accomplish this year.

Here were the goals:

1. Earn at least $15,000 online.

5. Get my Alexa rank for two of my blogs into the top 100,000.

How’d I do?

1. Hah! Next!

2. I hit 175 one day.

3. Wait a minute; I hit this one. Google Analytics says I’m averaging 4,400 visitors a month, while Count Per Day says I’m averaging 17,000+. Hmmm… either way, I actually attained one of my goals.

4. I started the year strong with some guest posts, got a couple more in the middle of the year and that’s it. I think I wrote 6 guest posts this year, but wait… that was actually higher than last year. So I guess I hit this one as well.

5. Hmmm… I guess I broke this one as well, sitting in the 90,000′s as I write this.

That means I actually hit 3 of my 5 goals; I guess I didn’t fail so much after all, did I? And now that I think about it, I really can’t gripe all that much about #1 either. Sure, $15,000 was definitely audacious, but in the end I’m averaging nearly $200 a month with all the things I do, way higher than in 2009. So maybe I’m on the way up in some fashion.

So, I actually only failed on #2; I’m still wondering about that one, but you know, it increased for the year, actually doubling.

This is why one sets goals. Yeah, a couple of those were crazy, and yet in a way it pushed me to be better, and I was better even if I couldn’t hit the actual goal for 2 of them. Guess I should be proud of myself instead, right?

So, how did you do with your goals for the year? A few of you commented on this post about the last 3rd of the year, so it would be interesting to hear if you at least finished strong.

Maximum Achievement Goal Planner

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Post #900; Blogging Baby!

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Dec 10, 2010

Wow, I’ve made it this far! This is post #900, and at least this time I didn’t miss it by two days as I did #800. I usually wait until the post after the monumental day, but decided to change it up this time in preparation for #1,000 at some point in the spring.

This post is two days before the anniversary of the first post on this blog, which was December 12, 2007. At that time I didn’t know what I was really going to write about in this space. Now I have no idea every time I write what I’m going to write about, but I at least have a format that works for me.

For those of you who are new, let me explain the process I go through. For every 100 posts, I like to go back and take a look at the topics I wrote on and the posts that seemed to be the most popular for one of two reasons, which I’ll mention as I go along. I do it to help me chronicle what types of posts work better than others, but I also think it highlights for people just what kind of writing I tend to do on this blog, if anyone is predisposed to visit and then take a look back at things. And of course it’s another way for me to have backlinks to previous posts, in case you want to check them out.

Time to get to the numbers. I always start with an accounting of my top 5 categories for the month. This month they were:

That’s the first time that the majority of topics weren’t in double figures; freaky! The products was a fluke, since 6 of those posts were me highlighting the products I have for sale that I created, something I’d never done before.

Next, I like to show the posts that supposedly were the most popular per Google Analytics. This one is always weird because these are almost never any of the posts that were written during the 100 post period, but older posts that, for whatever reason, continue to always dominate the numbers time and time again. There is a new contender on this list this time; first, let’s see the list:

The last post was a guest post by my friend Scott, and it was written on August 12th, which is outside the last 100 days, but is still a relatively new post. Regarding those others, I’m really surprised people are still having difficulties with Google Desktop, especially since I’m assuming more people are on a newer operating system and the product now comes in 64-bit. As for that cleavage post… well, no wonder Google Adsense went away on this blog.

Finally, let’s look at the blogs that got the most comments. As always, the disclaimer is that I commented on them as well:

I did write a lot of posts about blogging, but I think the responses were fairly eclectic so that means I really don’t have one style that grabs everyone, other than the one salacious post that I didn’t think was all that salacious. I thought about trying to find a way to only show posts within the 100 with the highest views for the second category, but that wouldn’t be quite fair to later posts, plus that would be way more work. But for your edification, the post with the most views that was within the 100 days was the one on modesty with 107 views.

And that’s that. Thanks for going down memory lane with me. I don’t have any platitudes on what I’m going to write about over the next 100 posts; let’s see where the mood takes me.

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Traffic From My Campaign

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 30, 2010

As you know, last week I decided to take a shot at writing two posts a day, with the second daily post highlighting a product of mine. I thought that waiting a couple of days and then looking back at how it all went as far as traffic and analytics went would be an interesting thing to see.

I have to say that “interesting” really is the correct word for it; “well” definitely is not. Whenever you try something new, you need to have at least a couple of things you want to track as far as seeing what happened. In my case I wanted to see three things: one, would anyone actually read the product posts; two, would my traffic go up because I had two posts a day for a week (okay, six days); three, would I send any traffic to my other sites, where all my products ultimately reside.

Let me start with this; I never expected to sell a single product. If I’d gotten lucky maybe one or two sales might happen, but I wasn’t expecting it. That’s because this blog really isn’t for that type of thing. What I expect I’ll do is run the same exact series on my business blog, almost word for word, and see if it generates anything there, though that blog isn’t nearly as popular at this one.

Now, a quick look at my three things. The first was whether anyone would actually read any of the posts. Well, I think I knew someone would read them, but how many folks. It turns out not all that many. None of those posts made the top 10 visited articles for the week, though 5 of them made the top 20. That’s not so bad until you see the numbers overall.

That’s because now we have to look at the second thing, overall traffic. And my overall traffic was down for the week, even with two posts a day. It dropped precipitously after Monday, and by Saturday, I was showing visit numbers lower than normal. Okay, it was a holiday week in the U.S., so I’ll try to take that into consideration to a small degree, since most people still have internet access during holidays, but even I wasn’t as active online as I normally might be. I will say this, however; those folks that did read the product posts spent more time reading them than my normal average except for one post, so that’s a bright spot.

That brings me to the third thing, which is if I drove any traffic to my other sites. On this one I’d have to say that the word “drive” is ambitious. A couple of people came over and looked at a product, but left almost immediately; average page view time was 16 seconds. That’s on the business blog. On my SEO website, only 3 people clicked on the product, and it averaged 0 seconds; how does an analytic show 3 visitors and no time on a site? Well, it did; freaky.

What can I take away from this? Actually, I’m not sure. Do I go with my entry premise that almost no one would really care about my particular type of products on this site? Actually, I think I can say “yes” to that one. Is this an indictment against 2 posts on one day as being too much? I’m not as sure on that one, but it’s possible that it could have felt like overwhelm. Some folks might have seen two posts, been unsure which one to click, and just avoided both of them. Maybe Chris Brogan’s thought on multiple posts a day doesn’t work, but I can’t be sure about it. Will this type of thing work better on my other blog, where that’s really the audience I want to reach for at least some of these things? I’m not sure about that one either.

Hmmm, maybe this one wasn’t as scientific as I had hoped it might be in the long run. Too many extenuating circumstances to get a clear thought on it all. Then again, it gave me something to write about, and once again proves that one can find inspiration anywhere. You have any thoughts on it?

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September Income Report – A Fluke!

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Oct 2, 2010

Back in January when I wrote my last income report, I said I wouldn’t be writing another one of these until I made $500 through online stuff in one month.

Piles of Money by Thomas Hawk

Well, September turns out to be my first month, although not quite how I ever thought it would pan out. It was my best month ever with Adsense, made a couple of sales I hadn’t expected, and I find that I like seeing the money coming in like this; I want more!

So, without further ado, how did I make my money in September online?

Flipped Website – $300.00
Adsense – $197.47
Infolinks – $24.70
Commission Junction – $20.00
Product Sales – $15.95
Google Affiliate Network (Barnes & Noble) – $3.24
Kontera – $0.47
Bidvertiser – $0.48

Total – $562.31!

Just to get it out of the way, for those of you who saw my post on Google picking on me, I made 14 cents on this blog from them in September; not a big loss.

The selling of one of my websites was interesting, I must say. It came out of the blue (not saying which one it was for now) and I almost just deleted the email. Then I thought about it and realized I just wasn’t going to ever have the time to do it justice, so I let it go. It took about 2 weeks to finally get the transaction done, mainly because he needed someone to help him with setting up the new site, and of course we didn’t know each other so the level of trust had to be overcome. But we got it done. Website flipping won’t be something I do on a regular basis, but I have one more site that I might try to build up some and eventually sell it; we’ll see.

Most of that Adsense money and all of the Infolinks money came from one site in particular, which has turned out to be a gold mine for me. It does prove in a way that you can make some pretty good money on niche sites. The GAN sale came from one of my newsletters. The other two… actually, one came from my finance blog that I forgot I even had one of their ads on, and I have no idea where the other one came from. And the CJ payment came from someone buying a year of hosting from 1&1 through me; neat!

And that’s that. Now to go back into the cave on this type of reporting until it happens again; I hope it’s not another 2 1/2 years before it happens.

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