So that I do not bore everyone with mindless statistics on a too regular basis, here is the bi-monthly round up of my traffic since this website started in the middle of February. This article covers website traffic for May and June.

I intended to post information at the end of May, but as I did not change my strategy in May from what I was doing in March and April, i.e. write content, talk one-on-one about this website with people, and share the occasional link through a social bookmarking website, I did not feel that any great insight would be gleaned from just a few updated numbers.

I now have traffic data for four complete months, ignoring the two weeks in February when the website was live but had very little audience. With four months of data I have the ability to sketch out a real graph and begin to draw some inferences from it.

I wrote back at the end of April that each month’s traffic had grown by 300%, well it is very easy to grow by 300%, month on month, when you only have a few dozen visitors to your page per sample period. Now that the website is becoming a little more established, I expect the growth rate to actually slow down if the growth rules of this website work like every other commercial website my company has ever created for clients.

There has been a steady month on month increase in traffic, both due to some small marketing efforts through social media such as Twitter, Facebook and the major social bookmarking websites.

There has also been the steady flow of traffic from search engines, many of the search terms are the standard affair.

In the web server logs there are the usual personal development searches, along with an increase of searches for "treadmill desks," "sensecam" and "World of Warcraft."

The number of people searching specifically for “Microsoft word draft mode” or "Microsoft word get rid of green and red squiggles" surprises me too. Perhaps Microsoft need to make that a knowledgebase topic because there appear to be a lot of people looking for the solution.

Looking at the traffic statistics of both StatPress and Webalizer, the growth is around 30% for the past two months. By the 21st or 22nd of each month I have surpassed the previous month’s visitors and page views.

I have had a few anomalous spikes in my traffic, which after analysis I was able to account for and remove from the traffic log. Sometime around the 15th of June a number of Made-for-AdSense (MFA) websites started using a modified WordPress plug-in called "Related Websites" which can perform a keyword search of your blog articles and link to related WordPress blogs within the network.

I had heard “good things” about Related Websites and thought I would give the plug-in a shot, using it to show related pages within my own blog that were pertinent to the article being read. Prior to switching to Related Websites, I was using Yet-Another-Related-Posts-Plug-in (YARPP) and wanted to experiment with different options whilst my traffic numbers are still reasonably low. Low traffic, lots of experimentation, not too much disruption to my readers.

I had started to see pollution of inbound and outbound spam links for close to two months, and they were just a minor annoyance at first, but as the month of June proceeded I began receiving more and more spam links, both coming to and linking out from this blog.

Unfortunately there is always a few complete assholes in any group who completely screw it up for everybody else. The owners and operators of MFA blogs, which are on the rise within the Related Websites network, are those assholes this time.

Unfortunately, just disabling the "related websites" part of the Related Websites plug-in, and making use of the "related pages" to show relevant pages within my own blog, keeps the website within the Related Websites network and hence, sending and receiving traffic from the spam blogs.

I would not mind the inbound traffic so much, but if your posts contain images, the Related Websites plug-in displays that image on the spam blog. This hit counts in your tracking statistics, consumes your bandwidth (no different to image leeching), pollutes your referrer log, and a bunch of other administrative nonsense I do not have the personal bandwidth for, taking time away from more important things.

I would like for legitimate blogs to get the image attached to the article in the excerpt being displayed, so I cannot really turn on the leech protect functionality in the web server control panel, but prevent the spam and MFA blogs from receiving the images. Right now, I don’t see any viable way of achieving this.

Once I cleaned out my statistics-tracking database and blocked the spam blogs using the web server software, the traffic began to settle down again to normal levels. Yes, it was great seeing all those “unique visitors” coming to my blog, but they were not. The hits were just false web traffic skewing my results. So out goes the Related Websites plug-in and I return to YARPP (for now).

When I wrote out the traffic statistics for the month of April, I made a mistake due to a bug in StatsPressCN that misreports data at the end of the day due to some issues with time zones. I fixed the numbers in that blog entry shortly after posting it but it is also a “feature” I need to be aware of in the future.

A friend asked me, shortly after I posted my website traffic update at the end of April, whether this website is going to be monetized heavily? And also, do I feel the usage of Google AdSense is somehow devaluing what I have to say?

The reality and intention is that I do intend to make money from this website, but mostly in indirect ways; selling services for my company, for my coaching and consulting, for products my company creates, and so on. So yes, there will be monetization in that regard. But, I also do not feel that Google AdSense, or any other advertising programme, that I run on this website will devalue it. It comes down to carefully monitoring what advertisements appear on this website.

Out of all of the websites I have been involved with creating and promoting, and there have been many, I have not run and marketed a purely personal website that is advertising supported before, so for me this is a good learning experience. I cannot very well attempt to educate clients with regard to how they can create revenue through advertising, sponsorship or affiliate sales, if I myself have not done it too.

I have never liked to bullshit clients on what they should or should not do, based purely on something I have read about or watched others do. If I have no direct experience with the subject matter myself, I have no business telling you your business. I laugh loudly, maniacally and most definitely disparagingly at much of the "self-help/self-improvement" industry, marketing and PR firms, and internet "gurus" telling you how to make money.

Much of what gets published by “people in the know” is regurgitated garbage they have read about, but never actually done. There are very few authentic people out there doing this stuff for real, and you can generally count the best on one hand.

You cannot be a criminal mastermind, or any kind of mastermind, if you take the well intentioned advice of people who have not been there and done that themselves. I am constantly asking of would-be advisors and well-intentioned people "from what authority do you speak?"

Face it, would you take advice on how to run a marathon from a 300lb couch potato who had never moved very far from their games console in their entire life?

Here are my traffic statistics for the period March 1^st to July 1^st.

Even though the month column shows the date as the beginning of the month, the statistics for each month are actually from the end of the month. I have yet to figure out how to make Google Docs spreadsheet just show the month and year in the formatting.

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There are few endeavours in life that require you to immediately stop what you are doing, go off and read a couple of pages in a book, browse through Google Groups or search Stackoverflow for a close enough answer and then return to work.

And yet, this is what people do all the time.

Stuck for an idea? Research!

Do not feel like writing? Research!

Cannot seem to figure out the solution to a problem? Research!

Most office workers are constantly shifting gears, going from work to research, and back to work, and then back to research, throughout their work day. Talk about inefficient.

Welcome to this week’s Tuesday Time-Wasting Tip-Off, where you might just find that conducting research is actually counter-productive to the creation process.

Perform Your Research During Research Time

Let us be up front about this, never, ever let facts, or the lack of them, get in the way of anything you do. For most of the tasks you perform and projects you undertake, the gather of factual information, or further information, whilst in the middle of the creative process is just a hindrance to progress.

Many projects and sizable tasks need and should be broken up in to discrete phases, first research and due diligence, followed by whatever the task entails to “make something happen.” Mixing different types of work just slows the whole enterprise.

As an example, writing has, and should have, very discrete phases, if you want to be very, very productive. Idea generation, research, writing, editing, further research, fact checking, are all examples of these individual phases and a good, and above all, disciplined writer knows when to do each phase and when not to try and shift gears and combine two phases in to one.

Yeah, but what happens when you are writing like a madman and hit a wall and need to know some information to continue?

Ask yourself this, is the information vital to the narrative or plot point right now that you cannot write another word without filling in the missing blanks on the information?

Research when it is time to research. Write when it is time to write. Once you are writing, should you need more research, just put in a quick note indicating a lack of information and further research to be done, then get right back to writing.

I know of many writers who, when they are not sure of a fact, or need to perform research on something, whilst in the middle of their flow, will just insert the two letters, TK, [insert link to a writer who uses TK] and just keep on writing as though they had the information.

The letters T and K are not in any English words [verify this fact] very few English Words, so it becomes exceedingly easy to perform a find and replace on them once the actual writing work is done and the writer returns to doing further research. By doing it this way, the writer can remain in their flow state and become super productive without being bogged down in details.

Personally, I do not use the TK method, instead preferring the use of [square brackets] with a comment inside them to remind me what I needed to do. I find that the usage of square brackets allows me to search quickly and they stand out like a sore thumb when I format just those characters in Microsoft Word to display as bright neon pink.

When programming I will insert JRL (my initials), followed by the six digit date, which I can easily search for in all of my source code files. This little tag in the source reminds me to write more error checking, clean up a particular section of code, or just figure out why in the durn hell it does not work the way I expected it to.

This same principle applies to many other tasks and activities too. A placeholder graphic in a website design, a discordant audio effect in place of the real one during development of a video game, a neon green or hot pink image as the texture on a 3D model can all substitute for the real item when what you need to do is the work and not worry about the details.

So many people fall in to the trap of “perfect research.” They avoid putting off the actual task, such as writing, until the perfect amount of research is completed. Sometimes it pays to have only partial research, with incomplete information, and just begin the required task, filling in the missing details later.

A good enough solution that takes advantage of the opportunity available to you now is far, far better than a perfect solution delivered after the opportunity has passed you by.

What other areas of your life can you put TK on and return to later, after you have become super productive?

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