Personal Development Blog

At the moment I must admit I have only AdSense as my primary source of income from online projects. So what I earned in May is exhibited below:

 My plan for the end of 2007 is to have 300 USD in AdSense a month. And I must admit that those stats for my several projects show that I have a long way to go yet as many ups and down are sporadic, and I have not developed a stable search engine traffic. I published five new sites in May, in hopes of diversification, so there will be a lot more to come. I believe in my Russian Jokes project, and I think about buying a domain name for it. We will see.

Yesterday I took a panoramic picture from the 6th floor of Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kiev. This square was aimed for Communistic Center of Soviet Ukraine by Stalin, but Mykhailivsky Golden-Domed Cathedral survived. Actually it was partly destroyed, and then re-built.

It is still lame with not much targeted traffic, and some 30-40 visitors a day. My site is a little more than one month old, and I will take much more pain to promote it and make it more informative and helpful.

Today I visited Hyatt Regency Kiev 5-star hotel which is scheduled to open within one month, on June 22, 2007. They say that some guests already arrive. So following my article about 5 Myths Foreigners Have About Ukraine I would occasionally post my visits to different sights in Kiev, especially hospitality places, like hotels and private apartments.

As hotel does not allow to make pictures inside, I took this photo from their Kiev website. It says that they open in May but actually it is open in June.

Location

The location is great, the views are fantastic. It is near Sofiysky Cathedral and Golden-Domed Mykhaylivsky Cathedral, between Independence Square and Andriivsky Descent. So whatever you need in the center, everything is near.

Rooms

The rooms are not very large, just standard rectangular. You can request a special pillow according to your tastes. You can also actually buy special mattress from Hyatt. There are both bathtube and bathing cabin. The rate is between 300 and 400 EUR a night.

Restaurant

There is a restaurant called Grill Asia as everything is cooked on grill. Also the process of cooking occurs on open area so everybody can see it. The wine collection is very wide, and first you order a bottle of wine, then they suggest you dishes that comply with that sort of wine.

Today I read about new DoshDosh challenge. Basically what he intends to do is to start a new blog every day for the next 7 days to experiment with methods of making money online. It can really bring a lot of new experience and knowledge and open new opportunities as blogging about blogging and blogging about making money online is not the only method of success. If one can create something outstanding, some flagman niche site, it can develop into money machine with quite a pace.

One cannot appreciate the potential of a specific niche or monetization method, nor understand its flaws and compatibility with your goals unless one has personal experience with it. Just reading the thoughts of others will not suffice.

 That is an important thought. I am a quick starter, at least I believe I am, though some out-of-the-way tasks are sometimes postponed day after day. I want to experience quick progress, and to feel what is right and what is wrong on my own mistakes and endeavors.

My challenge is to have 20 blogs by the end of this year. I would like to find other people writing posts for majority of them, and some of them will be devoted to researching some specific niche.

The niches that I want to research include:

• health
• success
• investments
• sport
• travel
• medicine
• marketing

I do not want to involve into time-pressing obligations to post 10-20-50 posts a day. My approach will be either to delegate this task to other people or to make a thorough research and possible use a timestamp feature of WordPress to publish my articles over months ahead. I also intend to devote my time into making video and presentational content.

I plan to use 3rd level domain names for most of my blogs, unless registering a unique domain is a must for a niche. I tried with two names already:

http://bulgaria.alexradich.com

http://euro2012.alexradich.com . So this saves time and money and quite easy to create. I will keep track of my new projects on this site, as well as my monetization progress. I think 600 USD per month in Adsense is a decent figure for this year.

Today I read an article about motivation of bloggers: http://thereasoner.com/blog/thoughts-on-whether-bloggers-blog-simply-to-vent-emotions/ . That is an interesting theme, and goes into the deep motivations of people who blog.

One of visitors, Svend, put his categorisation of blogs in the following way: 

5 % of blogs are very informative having relative information to someone out there who is looking for it at that time
20% of blogs are somewhat informative; meaning it is not something that I would check back to regularly for information
50% of blogs are online journals where people have a group of readers or friends who write articles about their lives so others can get updated daily on their thoughts and events that occur.
25% of blogs are vent blogs where people write about something that bothers them all the time and these are the least visited of all. Unless you find one that you would agree with. I usually never go back to these.

I agree with Svend, with little alteration that majority of blogs are not read by any tangible number of people, and thus, when authors think that their work is not valued or read, they quit. Darren Rowse says that the average lifetime for a blog is 6 months, according to his experience. I think that blog is a challenge for me, some test for my internal integrity, and ability to express myself out loud. If I fail, I will persist, and find new and new ways to attract readership.

At the moment I do not produce extensive research as DoshDosh does, but am motivated to do so. I like in-depth articles, they bring a sense of education in reading a blog.

The famous Problogger’s Group Writing Project has just finished, and happy winner has been declared. And today another buzz project started. It is a Copywriting Contest that Brian Clark of Copyblogger announced.

The idea is to make a strong and short marketing campaign in a form of a landing page with an irresistible offer.

The campaign is sponsored and, as far as I can see, is initiated be SquidOffer. SquidOffers is the new advertising program from the high-traffic Squidoo website.

The prize is 10,000 USD which will be split in three parts. 5,000 goes to the first place, 3,000 for the second, and 2,000 for the third.

So it is time for creative state of mind, tuning to marketing… The skill that I endeavor to develop. Let us start, and I will notify when I am ready with my IRRESISTIBLE OFFER.

 I found a nice little feature in FeedBurner. You can easily put a teasing banner on your feeds with easy-to-fill form. You can try this if you want your readers to have a wider glimple of what news you have on your site.