40-Hour Week Challenge II: Day 4
April 11, 2007 Posted by Tyler CruzI’m afraid today’s post won’t be too particularly interesting, so for that I apologize. However, there should be a great post tomorrow if things go according to plan, so hang tight.
I’m just about to finish the 4th day of my 40-Hour Week Challenge II. Unfortunately I didn’t get a whole lot done yesterday or today, and now I’m starting to doubt whether I’ll be able to beat this challenge! Here are my stats so far:
Timeline: April 7th 11am – April 14th 11am
April 7th: 4 Hours
April 8th: 8 Hours
April 9th: 4 Hours
April 10th: 5 Hours
Total: 21 Hours
I’m pretty dead even actually, with half my hours completed and half the week about done. I need to do another 8-hour day, then I’ll be back on track.
Here’s roughly what I did during those the past day and a half:
- I decided to finally read up on this whole AGLOCO thing, and so dedicated my time to reading every single page on AGLOCO’s website slowly and thoroughly. I also read through and commented back on my AGLOCO Contest entries, giving back detailed and long feedback as two guys are neck and neck right now. This took a very long time; it’s so hard to choose between the two guys.
Lastly, I went through most of John Chow’s past 20+ AGLOCO threads, reading up more information there. All this took 3-hours, but I now have a very good idea of what AGLOCO is and so I felt the time well worth it.
- I did the standard e-mails, site checking, blog posts, etc.
- I talked with my reviewer regarding PublisherSpot some more, assigned her a new ad network as she just finished one for Burst Media.
- Did some blog updates (see below)
Anyhow, we’ll see how many hours I get done tomorrow.
Blog Updates
Text Link Ads sent me an e-mail earlier today (as I’m sure all you TLA people received as well) mentioning that they had a new plugin available for WordPress which allowed you to add more ads which would be displayed at the bottom of your more popular blog posts. It’s only about 1-2 lines and pretty unobtrusive.
It’s definitely a good idea, and so I updated my plugin, but don’t see anywhere to set the option of enabling this. I’m not sure if it the ads will just come automatically once their advertiser section opens up to selling them (which they haven’t done yet), or if i installed it wrong or what.
I sent them an e-mail to inquire about it after their phone number came back with a “This number is not available in your area” message (WTF?).
I then decided to change the location of my TLA from the very bottom footer of the site to near the top left. It now gets a lot more visability, which I hope will encourage more people to purchase the ads.
However, TLA doesn’t let you set your own price for your ads, and since the price is determined automatically, mine are set at $50 a month. I think that’s incredibly expensive and is why I’ve been only selling 2 slots a month. If I could change it, I’d price them at around $20 a month. I e-mailed them about this as well.
Finally, I updated my Advertise page. I changed the 428×60 banner slot with a 728×90 Leaderboard since I now use that in my design, and priced it at $75, which I think is pretty reasonable for both the branding exposure and the click-throughs (I’ve seen a decent number of clicks on my PublisherSpot leaderboard).
I replaced my “Paid Plugs” with a link to ReviewMe, so you won’t be seeing any more Paid Plugs on my blog, although you haven’t for quite some time anyhow. I think people don’t utilize ReviewMe as much as they could be; I personally find it one of the best ways to drive awareness to your site, and will be buying another one on John Chow’s blog soon. At only $100 to purchase one on my blog, you’re getting an entire blog post on just your website, my personal critique on it, and the RSS, SEO, and comment perks as well.
Lastly, I removed my private text links I was selling myself and replaced it with a link to TLA. Once the Paris Hilton one expires in two weeks that I currently have up on the right side of my blog, that will be the last one of those kind. I’ve done this to help relieve time; having this automated makes things a lot easier. The only thing I don’t have automated right now is the leaderboard banner, and that could be done using AdBrite.
Anyhow, that’s all for now. I should have a great update for you tomorrow.
It doesn’t matter how many hours you do, it’s the productivity that matters and from what I see yours ain’t that great.
What have you accomplished in terms of new sites, new content? That’s what matters, all I see is you got another review for publisherspot in the past day and a half.
I guess it’s hard to quantify what’s work and what’s not when you work for yourself. I know that for myself, I work whenever. I don’t keep track of hours, but I make sure that I get things done.
The way I see it, he’s doing things that need to be done. That is productive. In my experience, site building takes a lot of creative thought and time that is not necessarily easy to quantify on the clock.
I would be interested to get an update on your earnings though. I understand the reason you removed the daily earning displayed at the top, but I think you should give an update. I think your earnings updates is what really brought people here. Now you’ve let that kind of fade away:(
I made around $12.5k last month. Shh.. 😉
That’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout! Now details. Yes I know I’m nosey;)
Any idea what the requirements are for Text Link Ads? I have been trying to get approved for a while now, but I don’t know what I am missing.
It’s hard to fill so many hours in a day with work when you are working from home – trust me, I know.
I just did a post about this on my own website – thanks for the inspiration!