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MarkForster.jpgMark Forster is the author of three books about time management and personal organisation. The most recent, Do It Tomorrow, was published by Hodder in 2006.

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« Goal Monitoring Update | Main | Getting off to a bad start »
Saturday
27Jan

Goal Monitoring - Getting Worse!

DateSaturday, January 27, 2007 at 07:56

My daily average has declined again today - this time by only 1 cent to $3.17. So I have to add another 30 minutes, meaning that I have to work on nothing other than advertising income for a whole hour today.

I learned one valuable lesson though - like many of life’s lessons a pretty obvious one - if I am going to influence the measurement of the average for first thing the following day, I need to do the work early in the day so it has time to have an effect on the figures. Yesterday I did the work in the early evening, so it had much less effect on the average than if I had done it in the morning.

Unfortunately today I am out for most of the day, so it’s going to have to be the evening again.

AuthorMark Forster | Comment9 Comments |
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Reader Comments (9)

The "daily average" link didn't seem to link to something appropriate, perhaps it's me?

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Thanks, I have corrected it. Mark
January 28, 2007 | Unregistered Commenterbiscuit
I know this is at least partly an exercise, but the pain looks far too great compared with the reward to make this technique work here. 30 minutes of work for a few cents extra income? When you haven't the foggiest idea how that income is calculated? No thanks! There must be better uses of that time.

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You're right that I haven't got it in balance, and I will need to adjust it quite a bit to get it to work better. But do remember that the increase in income is cumulative and progressive. Where did you get the idea that I don't have the "foggiest idea how that income is calculated? Google Adwords provides very comprehensive statistics so that one can see exactly where the income is coming from. Their Terms of Service though prevent me from sharing anything other than the total income with you.
Mark
January 28, 2007 | Unregistered CommenterStephen
As someone who reads your blog completely through an RSS reader, it struck me that you are denying yourself a large number of potential 'clickers', who never get to see the ads on your blog. By only posting the first paragraph or so as an RSS feed and the line 'read the rest here...' on a cliff hanger, readers would be forced to visit the site.

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Thanks for the idea, Judy. I will be experimenting with various methods like that in due course.
Mark
January 29, 2007 | Unregistered CommenterJudy of the woods
You could also include advertising in the RSS feed

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Thanks for the idea, Oliver. I will be experimenting with various changes like that.
Mark
January 29, 2007 | Unregistered CommenterOliver
I think your Adwords are still not very visible. The positioning is fine, but on my computer, they show up in very pale blue so as to be almost invisible. I would darken the colour of the link.

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Thanks for the feedback, Silvia. They look fine on my computer, but I'll have a go at darkening them a bit. I assume you mean the ones in the side bar?

Mark
January 29, 2007 | Unregistered CommenterSilvia
I hope the new arrangement of the blog, i.e. only one blog article per page, is not part of the improved marketing drive. I do not find the new blog format user friendly. I enjoyed looking at comments relating to blogs and needing to click through each one is not ergonomic and is time consuming.

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I've changed to the one article format so that the ads are more closely targeted to the subject under discussion. However to read the comments you have always had to look at only one article at a time, so I'm not sure how the change has affected that for you.
Mark
January 29, 2007 | Unregistered CommenterDavid W
When I used to scroll down the page, I always noticed the giveaway of the day, the google search, your books bullets, etc.... The way it is now, I don't even they remember that they exit unless I hit a page like this with many comments to lure me down the page.

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Well, the Google search has only just moved down to the bottom of the page - basically because no one used it. The Giveaway of the Day is just there as a client service - I get nothing from it - and to attract people down to the bottom of the page!

Mark
February 3, 2007 | Unregistered Commenterclogged like a diaper in a toilet
Hi Mark,
cos I remembered how many comments existed on the each of the latest blog entries, so I had a good idea when to go to the detail of the entry. However I noticed you are being sneaky and adding your comments direct to your readers comments so the comment count does not increase, ahhh.
Congrats on the weight loss, most excellent.
Cheers
Dave
February 4, 2007 | Unregistered CommenterDavid W
Hi, Dave

Well, I wasn't trying to be sneaky. It was just that there were so many comments outstanding on the same page that answering them separately would have been confusing.

Mark
February 5, 2007 | Registered CommenterMark Forster

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