It’s that time of the year and everyone’s making their New Year’s Resolutions and setting goals for the next year. I never made a concerted effort to make goals in the past, so my New Year’s Resolution is to focus on hitting the goals I set out in this post ;). In fact, I didn’t make any goals in 2007 for this blog or the other websites in my company. I came to the realization a month ago that I must set goals and check up on them otherwise I’ll just go along without a plan or a focus on where I need to be. So I’m starting this year off with my specific and measurable goals for 2008 as a part time web publisher and blogger that I will revist on a quarterly basis:

Blog Specific Goals:

a. Get the custom blog design paid for and implemented Achieved March 18th
b. Make $1000 a month from my blog (All income from my blog will be disclosed)
c. Break the four digit RSS mark by getting to 1,000+ RSS subscribers
d. Hit the front page of Digg at least once
e Break the top 10,000 Technorati mark
f. Improve and maintain my posting frequency and by the last quarter of 2008 I want to look back at Q4 and see at least 92 posts.
g. Do a quick blogging tip every Sunday for the entire year of 2008.

For the other websites and forums I run:

a. Increase my online income to $2,000 a month (Blogging goal not included.)
b. Have at least one forum hit the 1,000,000+ page views a month mark
c. Be mentioned on a major video game related website (i.e. GameSpot.com)
d. Only launch two more forums (So that I will focus my time on growing the sites I have)

I know I took a while to post my goals for 2008, but I really wanted to spend some time thinking about what I can reasonably do while at the same time providing a significant challenge. I know that I can reach the goals I’ve set out for 2008 and am really excited to mark off goals and provide quarterly updates with recaps on all the goals.

If you haven’t set any goals for 2008 I urge you to try it. Make sure you write specific and measurable goals so that it’s easy to keep track of how you’re doing.

What do you think of my goals?

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I’ve been working with an account manager over at Vibrant Media, (the folks behind intellitxt ads) because I haven’t been amazed with my Kontera earnings. I believe that anytime you put more advertisements on a website it’s important to make sure that the money you make will compensate for some disgruntled members that may stop coming to the site because of the extra ads. Because in many circumstances you may be doing more harm than good if you put extra ads on a site to make a few extra bucks and end up not even making enough money to justify their use. Let’s be honest, in text advertising is fairly intrusive. Do I believe it’s so intrusive that it’s simply not worth using it on your website? Of course not. But if you’re going to run in text advertising it better payout well don’t you think?

So one of the things that I recently decided to change with my forum was to make the switch from Kontera’s content link to Vibrant Media’s intellitxt ads. At first I was denied access into their program because GV did not meet the minumum page views requirement of 500,000 monthly. The traffic for the site has been dropping off for a few months and I’ve been working on improving the things that members are complaining about. Anyway, after I got his email I immediately called him back because I don’t take no for an answer. Long time readers of my blog have probably noticed this trend by my earlier posts about being denied by Text Link Ads at first and jumping through hoops for Kontera months ago :D. So on the phone I told him about the qualities of GV, how it’s different than other websites, the time we’ve been on the net and after talking some business he agreed to offer me a trial period. I’ll report back my results after I’ve got the ad code installed for a month and compare it to what I’ve made with Kontera in the previous month. Obviously I want Vibrant Media’s intellitxt ads to do much better than Kontera’s and will provide detailed stats whether that proves to be the case or not.

I think it’s hilarious that I’m 3 for 3 when it comes to being denied entry into a publisher program at first and then following up with the person that denied me and trying to get in. I’ll let you know when I’m denied and can’t convince someone to let me in if it ever happens but so far I’m at a 100% average

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - if you’re at first denied entrance into a publisher program follow up and find out why you were denied. Sometimes it’s something obvious like not meeting a minimum page view requirement, but tell them to look at your site’s content and explain why your site is different and why not meeting the minimum shouldn’t stop them from letting you in. Just combat any objections they have and they might get burned out and let you in to get you to shut up. You can thank me later when you’re making an extra hundred bucks a month off one of your websites because of a program you were accepted into that you were at first denied.

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As a part time webmaster, you only have a certain amount of hours you can spend on the web building your business so it’s really important to focus the time you have to work on your websites that have the most potential to pay off. Why start a bunch of little websites that take up your time and can ultimately lead to spreading yourself too thin? I asked myself this question when I took some time to look at the websites still hosted on my old shared account. Why did I even bother creating these websites?

Nearly a year ago when I got into buying domains and websites on NamePros.com I bought a little flash arcade site (I was making such terrible money at my previous job the $10 arcade was about all I could afford at the time. My thought behind the purchase was that I’d simply put little affiliate buttons on the side of all my video game based sites and use that traffic to make a little extra money off the arcade. Unfortunately, what I didn’t count on was the time it would take for me to set up the website, get it transferred from the seller and place all of the buttons on my websites. And when I transfer this arcade to the new owner the total work will probably come out to about 4 hours or more. All this work for only $8.25 via Adsense for the website’s 9 months of operation. Looking back, was it really worth the time to take the time to deal with transferring the site from the seller, learn how to use the new arcade script, apply and put arcade banner exchange buttons onto the site and now to transfer it to the new owner? It really wasn’t worth the time and so this is why I recently decided to liquidate some of my really small sites that have not made me any money and just sit there reminding me of the time I wasted on low priority items.

As a part time webmaster it’s important to focus on continually driving more traffic to your primary sites that are already set up and optimized and other sites that show great growth potential. Don’t spend your time working on sites that already have a preset limited potential cap like a sub par arcade script site that can be found anywhere else on the web. If you find yourself working on new websites and the extra work load prevents you from providing the same amount of focus required to maintain your primary websites you have a problem. This is a mistake that I am focused on avoiding in the future; however, I hope some of you bloggers, forum admins and website owners will learn from my mistake.

Have you ever spent a lot of time on a website that showed little promise for growth and success? Or allowed the time you spent on a new website to take too much focus away from your key moneymakers?

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I just found out about the youtube partner program a little while ago and had to write about it. You can find program details at youtube.com/partners

The program basically allows you to make money off of your youtube videos much in the way you make money off of Adsense. If accepted the revenue from ads is split between you and YouTube (Google). The restrictions are listed below:

Who qualifies for partnership?
To become a partner, you need to meet these criteria:
You create original videos suitable for online streaming.
You own the copyrights and distribution rights for all audio and video content that you upload — no exceptions.
You regularly upload videos that are viewed by thousands of YouTube users.
You live in the United States or Canada.

I just applied under my youtube account that I use to share my halo videos thehalogodDotcom which currently sits at a little over 200 subscribers and about 17,000 video views. If only I had a youtube account before when I first created and posted my videos I’d have a lot more views and be much more likely to be accepted. Look at this URL for one of the earlier Halo videos I created http://youtube.com/watch?v=xwMUawpNJuY it has close to 300,000 views! And a couple other users posted the same video and those are in the 6 figure range as well. Either way, my subscribers and video views will go up a ton after I release my first Halo 3 montage and if I’m not accepted into the youtube partner program now I’ll definetely reapply after my next video is released.

I’ll provide an update wether I’m accepted or not, but I’m near certain I won’t be accepted because I didn’t have my videos posted on youtube when they were first made, instead someone else got all the views.

Have you applied yet?

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I’ve never understood why forum admins opt to lease vBulletin instead of paying $160 for an owned vBulletin license. Is the only reason to do so is simply because they want to save the $85 and get into the best forum software the net has to offer for as cheap as possible?

If that’s the case, lets look at why I highly recommend you go for the gusto and purchase a full vBulletin license instead of going the leasing route.

Obviously you are leasing this software so just like that car you may be leasing at $300 a month, at the end of the lease period you’re left with nothing. Leasing is pretty stupid in my opinion because you have to spend money on something and in the case of vBulletin after one year you have to pay for another year (bringing your total up to over $160 anyway) or then opt for an owned license and lose out on that first year you payed for the leased license.

I would also not recommend leasing vBulletin because of the fact that you can’t transfer the license to a new owner. So if you build up your forum and grow tired of the topic, don’t have enough time on your hands or just want to cash out you won’t be able to transfer the license to the new owner. This will of course affect the selling price of that forum you’re trying to sell on digital point.

I’m glad I purchased my vBulletin licenses instead of starting out by leasing because I’ve been running one of my forums for about two and a half years now. I’d hate to have spent $255 only to have 6 months left on my thid lease. Remember, it takes money to make money so if you aren’t willing to pony up the $160 for a vBulletin license what will you be able to do to promote and market your forum for it’s most crucial launch time period?

If you’re looking for steps on how to start a forum check out my series that covers it.

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Over at vBulletin they recently announced vBulletin 3.7 with tons of new features and benefits. Overall, I’m looking forward to the release and when it becomes stable I plan to move all of my forums up the the absoulte latest version then.

One of the things I like best about the latest version is their focus on improving spam control. With the latest version of vBulletin, it will give forum admins and mods the ability to deal with spam posts inline (i.e. from within the post or thread) and then delete it and/or ban the user that posted it. They’re also including an option to offer guests a random question from a bank of questions you create for them to answer before being able to finish creating their account. Awesome! It’s incredibly frustrating dealing with more and more spam these days so any time the developers over at vBulletin focus on improving ways to control spam I’m excited.

There are tons and tons of other great options they’re putting into vBulletin 3.7 that I’m interested in being able to use soon. You can see the official announcement thread here.

I think vBulletin 3.7 will mark the time in which I make the move to the latest and greatest vBulletin version for all of my forums. Currently not every forum I run is updated completely. It’s too much of a pain to do this every time .0X version comes out (i.e. 3.67 to 3.68). In the past I had paid my vBulletin designer to update the skins for me, but I think this time I plan to do it myself. Even though there are template changes, I really want to learn how to update vBulletin skins at the very least.

In my opinion, all of the new features of vBulletin 3.7 combined with the ability to use vBulletin blogs is enough for me to make the switch soon but I think I may wait until the stable version is released. What do you think of vBulletin 3.7 and will you make the switch now, wait for a stable release or stick with what you run currently?

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My birthday is coming up and so my wife decided to buy me a laptop because the current job that I’m working at is in Seattle so I commute via a train everyday to work. On the trains they offer free wifi so now I’ll be able to turn a boring 40 minute train ride into a super productive 80 minutes of working on my websites (Two train rides there and back). I’m really looking forward to it because lets be honest, I haven’t been incredibly consistent with my blogging or work on my websites. Halo 3 has been a huge factor in affecting the amount of work I get done on my websites because after I get home from work sometimes I just want to sit and play some video games to relax. I’ve also been doing a lot of lessons at $25 an hour over at thehalogod.com so I’m certainly not going to turn that down.

Either way, you can expect to read more from my blog soon.

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I’ve been waiting a long time for Google to finally update their Page Rank and I want to do a report on my sites:

Moved up:
ChrisGuthrie.net: PR 0 to 3
WorldofWarcraftBoard.com: PR 0 to PR 3
XboxLiveArcade.com: PR 1 to PR 4
thgwebmedia.com: PR 0 to PR 2

No changes:
GamingVidz.com PR 3
HaloBoards.com: PR 3
thehalogod.com: PR 3
GamingFonts.com: PR 3
AdobeChat.com: PR3
NESGaming: PR 2
WebHostButler.com: PR2

Dropped:
VideoGamesDirectory.org: PR 3 to PR2
BestArcade.info: PR 3 to PR2

Overall I’m pleased with the results, but I’m still really surprised that GamingVidz.com did not go up to PR 4 even after I worked on doing some link building for the site. One thing to note is that several of the sites I have listed here I haven’t even done anything with in several months like bestarcade, videogamesdirectory (although I plan to do some more work on this one soon) and webhostbutler.

How did your sites fair?

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