How To Get Stuff Done

So last week I had a lot on my plate – I wasn’ having the best week at work, I was falling behind in my posts and my projects, and the one project that I was focusing on fell flat on its face. Not great. It was about this time I decided I needed to sort myself out – that, or get very, very drunk. Seeing as I had no alcohol and an extreme lack of funds to even buy alcohol…I opted for the former…

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What Is Better? Content Or Design?

Everyone talks about having good content, that good content is the reason people read your blog, buy your product and why you ought to do well. However, content sometimes falls second to that femme fatale: design. It seems that nowadays, if a website has great content, but a horrible design, people are less likely to stick around - unless they are really involved in what you have to say. However, if that persons’ first impressions are that you can’t take proper care over your website, their attitude to your content may be less forgiving. Even the greatest content in the world may get downplayed to an awful website layout. You may have tables that run into each other; overlapping images; adverts pasted all over the place etc. One blog I visited had a sponsored advert covering his content, so that you couldn’t even see it! I think some rules need to be defined for creating a website design for your content:

• A website layout/design should be easy for the average user to follow and navigate.
• Links and important items should be made clear for the users to see, as opposed to having to hunt around for it.
• Adverts should be placed where they do not look ‘out-of-place’ and should complement your sites design, which will encourage people to visit.
• The more professional your site looks, the more likely the majority of people will stay
• Don’t overload your pages with pictures and ‘long to load’ items, the site should load quickly for the user to navigate.
• I know this one isn’t technically a design, but: NO SOUND ON YOUR SITE! This is a visitor killer. If they visit you site and all of a sudden start hearing your music, or hear you talking to them, you’ve lost a visitor there. If you do wish to put sound on the site, give your visitors a choice! This one really drives me nuts when I’m listening to music only to hear someone suddenly speaking over the top of it. The site is instantly closed down.

These are just a few pointers and pet peeves of mine that I see all over the place. Design does matter when bringing in visitors, as it provides them with a first opinion of you site. However, is it better than content? The simple answer? No…You could have the nicest looking page ever, but without some decent content, you will fail to bring visitors back. Content is what will keep your visitors coming back.

Think about it like this: design is the part of the site that the user first sees and is immediately attracted to; content is the ‘personality’ of the site, which develops the users love of the site. Essentially, the site could deteriorate is design, but the user will keep coming back because he is in love with its personality.

I am aware I have basically compared websites to romance and love, but if you think about it, the basics of it are true! However, there are always small exceptions where the design doesn’t matter, because as some people say; ‘love is blind’!

Dan

Should You Learn More…

I’ve noticed a trend with many ‘make money online blogs’ and their owners. The owners themselves manage to make money online with knowing very little about the stuff they are making. For an example, the owner of a blog I used to read a lot (not as much now as its full of guest posts) made a lot of his money from selling and developing various websites. However, most of the work he did, he outsourced to various different people at a very low rate. He might spend $50 getting this developed and then sell the website for double that, sometimes more! Now I’m not going to say this is a wrong way of making money online, but are we cheating ourselves out of an experience?

Now when it comes to spending money, I am always usually very tight with the money I want to spend out on a project. If I can do most of it myself, then I will, even if it takes longer to do it than hiring out someone more qualified to do so. Why? Well the obvious reason is to make more money than I would if I spent some on hiring people out. However a deeper, more underlying reason, is that I like to develop my skills to become better in what I do. Maybe I won’t make a fortune making money online, but maybe through experience it will help secure me a better job later on in life, or allow me to be hired by people just like you!

Now some of you may have just got into the ‘online business’ to make money, however I personally enjoy writing a web page, designing a logo or a piece of code and making it perfect, while at the same time learning more and being able to develop better things. By developing something yourself, you discover new things, and potentially new avenues of making money with what you’ve learnt!

Obviously I’m not saying that its easy, and I’m not saying that you should never hire freelancers, but think carefully about it before you do – could you do some of this yourself? Could you design that webpage using a free piece of software? Could you sit down and write 5 articles? Could you put a logo together? Thinking about these things can save you a lot of money when you are first starting out.

It may be you lack the skills or techniques needed to do a piece of work, so you need to hire a freelancer to get the job done. That’s fine, but just ask him/her to make sure they thoroughly comments through their work, so you can see exactly whats happening on the work they have provided (if its a script). If its a logo, just ask how they managed to make it that way, what software they used etc. If its an article, website, whatever! Most people are happy enough to give you information on how they developed what you want, and in all honesty, it sometimes makes their life easier to keep a track of what their doing. Using this information you can progress in your learning experience by studying what they have done, and understanding it, as oposed to simply accepting it as working ‘out-of-the-box’. You may even be able to improve on the item and sell it for much more than you first thought!

Some recomendations I would make for starting out with websites is W3Schools. They specialise in teaching you about various website building techniques in very simple steps that absolutely anyone can do, and its completly free! I always find myself coming back to this website as a reference. If its wordpress and other things you are looking for, you can always find tutorials on these subjects, and then maybe it will be someone paying YOU to make content for their site!

Its safe to say that you can find nearly any information you require on the internet, so instead of wasting it, lets use it!

Dan

Let’s Cut The Bullshit

Making money online is not easy. There I said it. Probably some of you reading this are nodding your heads in agreement while others are taken aback and say ‘Dan, what are you talking about? Making money online is terribly easy, even a child can do it.’ And its true. A child could make money online, but this doesn’t mean it’s easy. Why is it not easy? Because we expect it to be.

We read about how younger and younger people are becomming ‘tycoons’ in the field of making money by doing very little online, and we wish to emulate this, whatever age we are. However there are two aspects that is not taken into account. These people had to work to be where they are today. There is no such thing as ‘easy money’. The second thing? Making money online does not mean that you will be making LOTS of it. Unless you study and become good at it, the most you’ll achieve is a little extra pocket money. 

Lets look at an example – I have just created a website that I made for a total of $19 (including listing fees). That is now currently looking to sell at $70, so all together that’s around a $50 profit for me. Was it easy? For me, yeah it wasn’t that hard. I could market my ‘technique’ saying that its so easy a child can do it. Its true, and most likely, they can! However, lets look at the site (and me) in more detail. The website itself has a php script inside of it that took me a couple of hours to put together. I created the logo myself and also created the HTML coding for the page to a quality standard. Now I have done a degree in computer science, and learnt this stuff by myself, so yeah, it was easy for me, but for someone else without that knowledge, well…they may struggle.

Since I did this all myself, I can safely have a profit of $50. Now in my mind, that isn’t a lot of money, especially for something that took me a while to create from scratch, but if I think like that then I am guilty in falling into the second aspect; that I think I will make my money overnight. This simply isn’t true. Its true that when I started attempting to make some money online, thats exactly what I should be looking for because of marketers telling me it was ‘bound to happen’. For my first website sale I should be very proud that it has made that much money, and should look to learn from this in what to create next and how to spend my time properly so I can do it again. I should set this as a standard, and next month try to better myself, so that each time I will grow and learn with experience and slowly develop my skills to help my financial growth.

We all want to make money as quickly as possible, some so we can escape our jobs, some just for enough money for a holiday. Yet we must understand that the process is a long one, and something that rarely will ever happen overnight. Be happy with the little amount of money you may have earnt online, don’t discard it because it ‘doesn’t seem like enough’. If you had’nt of put the effort in, you wouldn’t even have that little bit extra, no matter how small.

I will be writing up some posts over the next few weeks with various techniques and suggestions to help you all get motivated into sticking with your goals – whatever they may be. If there is anything you would like to see me or Andy write about, a technique you would like us to investigate, or just maybe a little confidence booster, comment here and let us know. I’ll be posting up a visualisation exercise later this week, so you can look forward to that (trust me, you’ll feel better about yourself than ever before).

Thanks for reading, Dan