2007 July Results - Nothing to write home about
July 31, 2007 | Posted by InvestorBlogger | Comments Off
Well, July’s results are in and they aren’t impressive at all, except in one important respect. Details first.
By comparison even with June’s results, July’s results are an apparent disappointment, but that is for one reason more than any other.
Payperpost: $34.00
Google : $8.40
SR/ReviewME/Other : $0.00
Adlinks : $67.56
Stocks: $106.96
Hosting : $0.00
Bank A/C Interest : $19.54
Business: $61.54
Total: $298.00
I’ve pretty much reduced my reliance on Payperpost for Blog Income, partly because I’m just not finding opportunities that are worth the effort. Indeed, there are almost 40,000 bloggers in the network now; so it’s getting harder to find suitable opportunities, more so as I’m about 12 hours different.
After reinstating Google Adsense, I played about with the placement for a while, but once it settled down, income is slowly increasing. Text link Ads are also increasing month-on-month. Stock dividends were quite high, too! Hah! The last variation in my account was a small bonus from our business for the success of our promotions in July, which resulted in additional enrollments.
Traffic this month jumped with being stumbled earlier this month. However, for about 5 days, the Google Stats code was broken, so no results were recorded. Despite this, we recorded just over 1041 visits, with 1681 page views. I would have like to have reached 1000 unique visitors this month, but the outage prevented that!
Naturally, this would have much higher if things had been working. Interestingly, the average time spent by visitors on this site was 8 minutes and 12 seconds. Also reducing the number of pages in Google’s Supplementals Hell initially affected traffic from Google, but it has recovered, mostly in July.
Whither now? Well, as you noted, PPP income really is down, and I have no idea what’s going on with Sponsored Reviews. Other sources of income, with no direct effort (Passive Income?), are now showing signs of life: Adsense, Text Links, etc. So in fact this month, over 2/3rds of the income was passive. That’s a good standard.
Driving Me Batty: How do you store their data? Or do you?
July 31, 2007 | Posted by InvestorBlogger | Read these 2 comments
At work, I’m the IT manager as well as everything else. I’m in charge of five systems: 3 Windows 98 (One English, two Chinese) systems, XP is on two systems (one English, one Chinese).
You can figure that the interrelationships and commutations are quite difficult to manage: but it gets worse. One system has a DVD burner that won’t burn DVDs, every system has a CD burner. Some systems have only one Hard Drive, but some have two.
Then there are incompatibility problems between Windows 98 English and Chinese, as well as idiosyncracies that would make the hair fall out! One notable one is that file names in Chinese can be copied, deleted, opened or anything-ed in Windows 98 English version.
Additionally, some data has been copied to some other pcs; while some has been backed up to other pcs. There are numerous copies of the same files, but occasionally just one copy of important files. Some files even exist on our webserver.
On top of this, one of the systems has doubled as my personal workhorse for the past few years as well, while the home system (number 6!) also served as a print server while our photocopier was broken.
There are also legacy CDRoms with tons of data that was backed up for quite a while. Then I moved onto portable disks which could hold much more data. I have two such disks each stuffed with 80GB.
It’s difficult to make sense of all of this, but this has been my project for the past week. It’s quite clear to me that I need to find ways to manage the increasing amounts of data.
So, first I’m updating the systems so that we can reduce and eliminate the Windows 98 nonsense. That should put most of the systems on a level playing field. Then both primary systems will have DVD burners that can burn upto 8GB at a time.
Second, I will have to adopt an archiving policy by burning old data to DVD burner and removing it from the systems on which it was found.
Thirdly, categorizing and organizing data is going to be necessary. Unfortunately, the colleagues I work with are far from organized when it comes to managing their own data. I won’t be able to do so much on that score.
How do you guys deal with the ever increasing amounts of data and files that you work with? Do you archive and delete regularly? This really is a plea for help!
Buzz: The proof is in the Thoof.com
July 30, 2007 | Posted by InvestorBlogger | Comments Off
There are now quite a few social (or Web 2.0) websites that are out there. I was excited to find one that was very easy to use, much easier than Digg or Reddit.
Thoof.com offers readers personalized news that allows readers to find, read and comment on stories. Additionally, clicking on the story link takes readers straight to the blog’s website, unlike Digg or many other Web 2.0 which seek to ensnare readers by endless clicking on pages that link to other pages in their trap.
Instead, Thoof.com aims to help readers find traffic, and send that traffic to the website, itself. Now that should be a boon to website creators as extra streams of traffic will be available for your blog.
There are three aspects that new users need to know:
1. You can submit a story without an account. In fact, it’s really easy to do this. Fill in the link, the title, the comments, and choose appropriate tags for your post and you’re done.
2. You can also create an account that is remarkably quick and efficient. Look at the top, create an account name, then add your email address. An email is despatched to your account, and you click on that link to activate your account, AND create your password. Once that is done, you’re already logged in.
3. Once you add your own story, you can add the HTML code to display a kind of ranking in your blog post. It looks like the image below:
This image is taken from one of my own posts that you can check out by clicking the image.
Overall, the website is well-designed, and well thought out. Adding a story, and creating an account were the simplest of almost all the membership sites I’ve joined in the past six months. Since this website is just out of beta, it will be exciting to see it develop its ranking system, as well as add and improve its usability even more.
Suzuki Swift VVT: 1.6L of small car comfort
July 29, 2007 | Posted by InvestorBlogger | Comments Off
Suzuki, for me, was always associated with the manufacture of motorcycles and small trucks. But in the last few years, Suzuki has manufactured an interesting range of small engined vehicles appropriate for crowded roads in Taiwan and Japan. First there was the Jimny, then the Swift, and now a car that I really like: The Swift VVT. It ain’t no Zonda, John either!
This is the righthand drive model for roads in the UK. There is even a diesel version, too. It’s nippy, easy to park in crowded Taipei, with good fuel economy (about 25% better than my Mazda 323), and the four door is big enough for a small family. It’s no Benz, for sure! But there are quite a lot of thoughtful touches that are usually only included on much more expensive cars: electric wing mirrors, CD players that can play MP3s, to mention two that I noticed. With smaller needs for fuel consumption, you might find it a little lighter on your wallet, too!
Turns out from reading Wikipedia, the car has had quite a long history (and confusing one)… but the model featured here is known as the Suzuki MK4 Swift Sport. Suzuki’s website has a great 3D model that you can play with by rotating the car by 360 degrees.
Do you want to be counseled by Robert Kiyosaki?
July 28, 2007 | Posted by InvestorBlogger | Comments Off
Here’s an interesting article called ‘Who Wants to Be an Entrepreneur?’ that investigates Robert Kiyosaki: from ABC News.
How easy is it to make money? If someone handed you $1,000 and gave you 20 days to turn a profit, would you have any idea where to start? “20/20″ challenged three would-be entrepreneurs to find out. To give them guidance we brought in famous get-rich guru Robert Kiyosaki to offer them his secrets for money-making success.
It throws down a challenge to three contestants who are counseled by the Guru and examines what happens to them over 20 days.
For more about what happens, it’s worth reading the full story. And yes, I know it’s an old story, but still! I hadn’t seen it before!
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