Medicine & Personal & Productivity & Writing 03 Aug 2006 09:49 am
Month 2: most goals exceeded; one not met
Time for another OTP zeitgeist. (June's can be found here.) It's been 2 full months of writing for fun and profit. This month went by particularly quickly — I've got more on my plate in terms of responsibilities, and the "newness" wore off. I don't check my AdSense earnings as religiously as I did in June. (Incidentally, if you are a Mac OS X Tiger user, this widget is quite nice if you just want an overall look at how you're doing.) I think think that was a particular factor in making the month seem to go by quicker.
Google also rolled out a toolbar PageRank update. I went from 0 to 4. Not as impressive as the 0 to 5 jump that polyscience.org did, but I don't mind. i get much more search engine traffic than polyscience ever did.
June-July comparisons:
Impressions:
June: 13,606
July: 12,042
Clicks:
June: 111
July: 90
Earnings:
June: $28
July: $25
RSS subscribers:
June: 28
July: 55
Goals exceeded:
- I said I wanted 3,000 page impressions for OnThePharm in the month of July. I got 3,629.
- I said I'd like 28 RSS subscribers. For the last 7 days, I've averaged 55.
Goal not met:
- I wanted to hit $35 in AdSense earnings. I didn't meet that for a variety of possible reasons. See below.
Contributing factors
Webhosting
Against my better judgement several months ago, I chose a crappy webhost. It was a tough month for them, and while they're a company that believes in full disclosure, their service has been spectacularly unreliable. If there's one more monumental screwup in the next six months, I'll be moving to MediaTemple who seem to have people that 1) know how to create a reliable network and 2) have servers that are fast. Even for WordPress sites. (OMG!) MediaTemple is in the same building as DreamHost — as is MySpace — but they didn't seem to have the issues that DreamHost has had thanks to their apparent lack of networking and failover expertise.
Mostly I just want a non-suck webhost that doesn't make me bleed money through my eyes. I sort of miss my dedicated server, but as I've posted above, I'm not making bank from my writing. Something tells me I'd be better off picking a datacenter that's NOT located in California. Even without Enron playing games with the power grid, it's still incredibly unreliable. I'd like to find someplace like DirectNIC which stayed up even during Hurricane Katrina with their entire first floor under water.
Misc. other factors
I wonder if my increased RSS readership has anything to do with lower revenues as well. My feeds are fulltext, which means you don't need to visit the site to get all the content. When I hit 100 readers, I'll switch to excerpt-only feeds as a one-month experiment. As I don't get paid for page impressions, I don't know if fulltext is a problem. Regular readers aren't likely to click ads, and since page impressions are up and revenues are down, I suspect some other phenomenon I've yet to discover is going on.
Looking ahead to August
I don't have a clear direction for the month of August. I'm going away for one week towards the end of the month. I'd like to hit $30 this month, which means I'll have to do a little more large-scale promotion than I did this month.
Mostly I'm going to focus on providing good content and seeing what happens with search engine traffic, RSS subscriptions, etc. I'd like to double the number of regular RSS subscribers by the end of the month. I wonder what the limits of my niche (healthcare) are? Is there huge demand for policy and finance (which I tend to focus on)? People seem to love good stories, but I honestly don't have many good stories.
I've got an idea for a controversial post that I'm going to write, but we'll see how long it takes for me to get around writing it. It's about a very real problem that faces patients — particularly terminal patients or those dealing with chronic pain.
