I’m always excited when a month comes to a close because it presents me with the opportunity to look back at what happened last month. This is especially important because I have the opportunity to see how I’m doing in attaining my goals for my sites. In particular, I’m most interested in traffic and financial trends.

Traffic Analysis
In looking at site traffic every month, I go immediately to my AWStats server software to learn how succcessful I’ve been. . .

• Did each of my sites see growth?
• What kind of growth was it?
• Did unique users increase or decrease?
• Did page views go up?
• Were there any major strains on my bandwidth (i.e. was anyone hotlinking to images on my sites)?
• What keywords were most successful in drawing traffic?
• Were there any keywords that fell in the rankings?
• How did the sites fare on the different search engines?
• Did I start to make progress on any one of them?
• Did I begin to lose ground on another?

I haven’t been especially active in tracking the number of sites linking in, the PR of my pages, or my Alexa rankings, because I don’t find them to be anything I can really control. Since I focus mainly on organic growth for my sites, I let the links come instead of undertaking a true link building program. With quality content, the links come in naturally. PR is really meaningless IMO, and Alexa rankings are extremely inaccurate. I have two different sites . . . one typically will rank on a daily basis similarly to another one, yet one of the sites gets between 10 and 20 times the traffic of the other. The one with less traffic that ranks well on Alexa is popular with webmasters and others online - people who likely have the Alexa toolbar or other tools installed on their browsers. It amazes me that this has become one of the standards for monitoring traffic because it is simply so innaccurate.

In terms of blogs, I’ll also look at numbers from places like Feedburner (# of subscribers to my feeds), Technorati (# of sites linking in), and MyBlogLog (number of people who have joined my community) in addition to the basic numbers.

May was a good month! I saw growth in all areas and by all metrics. I can’t really ask for anything else, especially considering I no longer run any keyword advertising programs. I’ll just say that I’m serving many millions of page views a month across the board!

Financial Analysis
The first of each month is also important because it allows me to reflect upon the financial status of my company over the past month. Between direct advertisers, ad networks, and affiliate programs, I draw income from various sources. In any typical month I spend a good amount of my time focused on how I can increase revenues from one or all of these sources. Because of this, I’ve been able to create a company that has seen steady growth financially since inception (with a few minor flat spots).

May was a good month and I’m looking forward to see what we can pull off in June! I guess we’ll find out next month!

This might seem like a completely obvious post, but sadly, it is not obvious enough. I get emails every day from people who want to do business with me, but have no clue that I’m instantly judging them by their signature (or lack, thereof). A signature is hugely important, especially online. You can’t just hand people your business card through email, so the email signature takes the place of a card.

In order to present yourself as being professional, you must include a signature with your emails, and these signatures must have the following elements:

The Proper Elements of a Business Email Signature

1. Your Name - Pretty obvious, no?
2. Your Professional Title / Position - People need to know where you fall in the scheme of things. Your title or position in a company immediately tells others this.
3. Your Company’s Name - Should be as obvious as including your name.
4. Your Phone Number - If you’re not willing to include a phone number with an email, then who on earth can take you seriously?
5. Your Company’s Website URL - This is a must, especially if you’re corresponding with people working on internet related businesses. The only reason not to have your site’s URL is if you’re hiding something.

Optional Elements

• Your Fax Number - While most professional emails contain a fax number, people can do without it.
• Your Email - The recipient of your emails will always have your email address, but by adding it to your sig, you just make it easier for people to find.
• Your Business Address - While it helps to know where someone’s physical presence is, in the current day and age people aren’t using snail mail as often as they used to. Mailing addresses are great to have, but not 100% necessary.
• Alternate Phone Numbers - Having additional ways to contact you is always a plus.

If you’re trying to do business or create business relationships online, you must post your signature in your emails!

How serious will a potential partner take you if you contact their company in hopes of forging a relationship when you don’t include a signature?

Example of An Unprofessional Email Request

A few days ago I got an email inquiry about advertising on BiggerPockets.com. The person who contacted me, asked me for information about the site’s traffic, wanted to know if I’d give them free time to test their ad, and even asked for a discount in my ad prices. I had never heard from this person before, and they hadn’t told me anything about who they were. Worst of all, their signature contained only 2 elements, their name and phone number. In addition, their email address was a generic one from one of the major internet providers. Clearly, this person did not look very professional to me.

Do you think I gave any information to them?

I had no way to identify her and wasn’t about to send priviledged information to just anyone. Had she simply included a proper signature, I might have looked at the email completely differently. As a result, I had to waste my time by sending her an email asking her to identify herself. I immediately judged her as being unprofessional; she now has to work much harder to build up my trust. (Somewhat unrelated sidebar: Asking for ad discounts and free ad time to test her potential spots clued me in to the fact that she is not very professional as well. Who does that? If I had worked with her in the past, I’d have had no issue with the request, but asking on first contact is just bad form. Why would someone assume that you would give them a discount if you don’t even know who they are?)

Are there any other email signature elements that you feel are necessary?

• I’d like to thanks CNN for sharing with me the incredible AvoidDelays, which is brought to all of us from our nation’s air controllers. This site is chock full of awesome data about flying in the US, including airports to avoid, worst time to fly to certain cities, and much more. If you travel at all, this site is a must for your bookmarks!
• Thanks to ComputerWorld, I learned that Google recently launched Google Trends, an improved version of their previous Zeitgeist. Googe Trends has an awesome feature that allows you to search the 100 fastest rising search terms in the US, which should come in very handy for those bloggers and others who target popular keywords. You can also look at cool trend & historical charts of different terms, something that is pretty fun to fool around with.
• On the other hand, in a more ominous story, apparently, Google doesn’t think it has invaded our personal lives enough, and wants to delve deeper. In a story I learned about from Drudge, the Financial Times interviewed the Google guys and they revealed their EXTREMELY FRIGHTENING plan to take over the world:
  Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said gathering more personal data was a key way for Google to expand and the company believes that is the logical extension of its stated mission to organise the world’s information.

  Asked how Google might look in five years’ time, Mr Schmidt said: “We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalisation.

  “The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ ”

  I’m not sure about the rest of you, but I’m absolutely more afraid of Google then I am the US government under the Bush/Cheney regime. If the government knew as much about everyone as Google did, we’d all be up in arms! I already discussed how they use private data to get better results from Google Blogsearch in the past, and this is just another step towards a complete invasion of all of our privacy. Sadly, people are embracing their efforts instead of fighting them.

  Do you really want any one company to know that much about you? It is indeed a Brave New World and we don’t even realize it!

After a TON of work learning about ecommerce, shopping carts, security, vendors, permits, and the law, I am excited to announce that I’m un-officially launching our BiggerPockets Real Estate Investing Store!

The store is now live with a whopping two (2) products available for sale! (hey, we all have to start somewhere)

I’m quite pleased with the current form of our template, and I know as things evolve, our design and navigation will no-doubt, improve! After testing and re-testing our secure cart provider, E-Junkie, I have concluded that we’ve made the right decision in choosing them. This is not to say that I haven’t already found some issues that I’m not completely happy with, however, in comparison to the other solutions that I tested, it does what I need it to. I plan on bringing these minor issues up with the company’s founder, someone that I’ve found to be quite amenable to suggestions.

That said, stop by and check the store out. I’d love some feedback! I’ll be adding new products as time goes on and plan on an official launch, perhaps as early as next month. While we could just go and add every real estate book or product, we will only carry products that either our website’s team or our users have endorsed. This is our commitment to providing quality goods to our users. I think it is what will certainly separate us from our competitors.

Meanwhile, you can also get a dose of free real estate education from our real estate forums (6,500+ extremely helpful members).

Thanks to everyone who has been helpful during this process. I couldn’t have done this without your help.

If You Do Something Wrong, Fix It!

It is really not that difficult a concept. If you do something wrong, first you must recognize that you have done so, then you should do something to rectify the situation.

For those of you who have been around for a while, you know about the situation that occurred with Ezine Articles. For those of you who don’t, have a look at Never Accuse Your Customer Without Having All the Facts! AND Don’t Steal People’s Content!. In brief, I submitted an article to this site that syndicates articles, but my article was rejected. I never heard why until a year later when the company essentially accused me of stealing the article from someone else. I was floored by these accusations, since I was the actual author of the article (someone else had stolen it from me), and it was plainly obvious. I then blogged about it.

Vindication & Courage

Yesterday, Chris Knight of Ezine Articles, made a public apology to me in the company’s blog: Josh Dorkin’s Blog Comment
The apology was sincere. While Chris did not need to go and make a public apology on his site, he stepped up and did what was right.

Customer Service Lessons Learned

For those of us who run a company, we are responsible for all of our employees and their behavior while representing our company. Clearly, Chris realizes this, and I’m sure he will work with his editors and other employees to ensure a situation like this does not occur in the future. That is the key here.

When you make a mistake, fix it, then put systems into place to be sure the same mistakes don’t happen again. Most importantly, when an apology is in order, step up to the plate and make sure it happens. We all have pride, but it takes a strong person to cop to the errors of their (or their company’s) ways and apologize for their actions.

Weakness & Cowardess

[NOTE: Political Commentary Ahead]
If only our government’s Executive branch could learn this lesson . . .

I believe a true coward is someone who is so caught up in their own ego that they are completely unable to even recognize their own mistakes, let alone apolgize for them. How about you?

One thing every blogger, web-designer, and entrepreneur has in common is that we all have some kind of office that we work out of. For some of us, it is a lounge chair on the beach, for others, a cluttered mess.

What Does Your Office Look Like?

Here’s a look at mine. I call it “Organized Chaos!” As you can tell, there are papers on the floor (they don’t last there long . . . my dogs get to them and shred them eventually), the all-important trail mix, scattered electronics (digital camera & camcorder), notes everywhere, and the centerpiece, my iMac (if you haven’t tried switching to Mac, I would highly consider it!).

Group Photo Contest

Now that I’ve shared my home office with all of you, let’s see what your workspace looks like!

While I don’t have any prizes to give out, I thought it might be fun to see how chaotic or immaculate the offices of the rest of you are.

Here’s what I propose:

1. Take a photo of your workspace (without cleaning it up first - we want to see how it looks in reality).

2. Post it on your blog in a post about your workspace.
3. OPTIONAL, But it would be great if you did: Link to this post somehow (I deserve credit for the idea, don’t I?).
   
4. Contact me via my contact form and point me to your post . . . I’ll add a link to your post from this one.

5. Visit all the other interesting workspaces of your fellow bloggers. Feel free to comment on the photos.
6. Feel free to tag your fellow bloggers if you’d like!

If anyone has some sort of prize they want to give away, we can always transform this into a fun contest. Anyone?

If no one decides to participate in any way, at least you all now know what kind of environment I work in.

So . . . Share Your Office / Worspace With The Rest of Us!

Disclaimer: This was partially inspired by all the group writing contests out there.

Here are The Offices / Workspaces of Our Friends Out There

• David Pitlyuk’s Cool Multi-Screen Office
• Blog-Op’s Workspace Exposed
• Francesco Mapelli’s Bedroom Office
• Alison’s Workspace Revealed
• Melt du Plooy’s Workspace
• Claire’s Workspace Exposed
• The World Around Us’s Workspace
• Minddriven’s Workspace
• Workspace of the author of the Banalita Blog (italian)
• Brandon Hopkins’ Workspace Video Tour
• Andrew Flusche’s Workspace
• Mark Shead’s Sparkling Workspace
• Nirmal’s Cubicle Workspace

I’m sitting at home watching Dreamgirls (great movie, BTW!) through Comcast OnDemand and I’m working at the same time. Yup! Its Saturday night and I’m at home working, as usual. While I do consider myself a complete workaholic, I didn’t really realize how many hours I put in ever week until I started to think about it just now. I decided to break down a typical day to see what on earth I do with all my time:

An Average Day In the Life of an Internet Entrepreneur

2+ hours: Writing & Responding to Email
2+ hours: Reading And Commenting on Blogs & News in my Feedreader
2+ hours: Reading, Moderating and Posting on Our and other Forum Communities
1+ hours: Researching & Writing posts in my various blogs
2+ hours: Marketing, Advertising, Outreach & Publicity
3+ hours: Web Development, Design & Programming
1+ hours: Meetings & Conferences

In case you think the 13+ hour days are rare, they are not. I usually put in that kind of time during the week and try to ease up on the weekend with a 5 to 10 hour day.

Does it sound like fun to you? This is the greatest job I’ve ever had with the world’s best boss! You’ve gotta love it!