A Day in My Life
To Do List for Year 2013-2014
This year I am not going to put any financial targets as I find them to be too distracting and moreover I haven’t been able to achieve them so far so don’t want to demoralize myself by not reaching where I want to reach despite making progress. So I am just gonna list some of my to-do list for year 2013-2014. I hope just sticking to most of these to-do lists will be enough to progress towards my goals.
Daily To-Do
1) 100 Bids spread across freelancer.com, odesk.com and elance.com.
2) One Startup Idea everyday.
3) 1000 Words of Content.
4)
Weekly To-Do
1) Review of One IM Course
2) Review of One IM Software
3) 1 Mini-software based on one of the daily ideas.
Monthly To-Do
1) 5 Cheap Sites
2) 5 Celebrity Sites
3) 15 Broken Arrow Sites
4) 5 Product Niche Sites
5) 10 Gaming Tips Sites
6)
Quarterly To-Do
1)
2)
A day in my life – 17 March 2013
05:54 – 10:40 – 4.8 & 15:13 – 16:23 – 1.2
I haven’t done much today except reading some blogs. One of the blog post really caught my eye was this. I have always believed in bootstrapping but now I think it was a wrong notion to carry. In particular I can understand behind the lines now which says “Raising money early reduces one of the many variables that an entrepreneur has to deal with. Building businesses from scratch is hard, so it is better to reduce one variable early on.” I haven’t actively pursued getting funded till now but now I am gonna change my game plan a little and will start focusing on raising some external funding. So I have already shoot a non-fluffy, to the point mail to growthstory team and am waiting for a reply. I am not sure how it will turn out but I am gonna start reaching out to more people now to increase my chances of raising fund. I am also planning some crazy stuff to get the word out and get myself noticed which could be a better way rather than chasing people which I am not very good at.
In evening I attended Kavi Samellan event which was good but the highlight of the evening was the food at novotel, vizag which was awesome. I am not a foodie and don’t generally care for food that much but nonetheless I wanted to eat much more than what I generally eat just because it was that good.
Here are some stats
Bids – 8 , Won – 0
Niche Sites – 3283
Celeb Sites – 699
Gaming Blogs – 79
Youtube Videos – 25
A day in my life – 16 March 2013
02:22 – 09:40 – 7.3 & 14:40 – 16:14 – 1.6
Most of the day was spent on going through projects rss feeds and bidding on them. I don’t like the 25 bids per week bid limit of odesk. Got some ideas on which I will start working on soon. One of them is building lists of stuff. I am sure something like this already exists but I just want to do it because I am not able to find something for which I am looking for in a proper manner. The other one is to build a domain availability tool. I haven’t researched more about it but I want to build a desktop software (including a CLI version) to help me with getting availability for domains. I will build this even if there are many out there just to get my coding skills brushed up. I haven’t coded anything big for a long time now but now I am bracing for getting more coding output as I am looking to drift towards building products and not just concentrate on services. I think it will be better if I build a to-do page where in I can list all the online stuff I want to do or get done.
Here are some stats
Bids – 15 , Won – 0
Niche Sites – 3265
Celeb Sites – 687
Gaming Blogs – 81
Youtube Videos – 20
A day in my life – 15 March 2013
04:14 – 11:30 – 7.3 & 16:10 – 17:37 – 1.5
I wasn’t able to do for much for the day as I was busy getting some personal stuff done. Also spent quite some time of the day reading stuff.
Here are some stats
Bids – 10 , Won – 0
Niche Sites – 3012
Celeb Sites – 757
Gaming Blogs – 70
Youtube Videos – 65
A day in my life – 14 March 2013
Here come the 2nd post for my A Day in My Life category.
02:11 – 06:25 – 4.2 & 09:00 – 11:51 – 2.8 – Total 7 hrs.
I started the day with finishing some project work and then bidding on freelancing sites. After the vworker.com was purchased by freelancer.com, we aren’t getting many projects currently and the only way I see the situation can be improved is by increasing the number of bids. So I have kept a target of bidding on atleast 50 projects daily and hopefully winning 1 or 2 in the process. I am thinking of mentioning my bid count also apart from the traffic details. In fact I will be disclosing more and more details about my life as one of my dream is to run a totally transparent company (kinda open sourced company) wherein everything about the company is in public domain. It is kind of my big idea in life which makes me think about lot of different things. Btw getting projects through outsourcing site is a big hassle but it seems to be the only effective way currently until I can figure out how to get projects directly from clients or market ourselves to our potential clients in a cheap and effective manner. I did have a conversation with the owner of opposite flat in my building who is already running a company in US and it looks like one of his friend who owns decent number of petrol pumps is looking to augment his business with support services helping him with numerous tasks like monitoring, tracking and suggestive remedial measures to increase the business. I also came to know that more and more people in US are now paying with cash for stuff like petrol because of higher credit card fees as there is a rate difference for both the mode of payment and people are looking to save money.
On another note I have been reading the 4 hour body book by tim ferriss and looking forward to start implementing things mentioned in the book. I tried searching for the stuff mentioned in the book like brazil nuts but couldn’t find any source which is selling it in India. And it was a big hassle searching for the stuff on google as many sites listed on the serps weren’t carrying that stuff at all. The more I search for stuff on google, the more I feel there is a need for a niche site which is a hybrid of justdial, junglee and google. I am definitely putting it on my to-do dream list.
I forgot to mention why it is so tough to find available freelancing jobs currently in a single place. Why I need to go through multiple rss feeds looking for wordpress jobs and I believe there is a need for a software which can find this jobs and make it available in a simple listing for me to go through. In fact I was wondering why I need to bid for common projects like transferring wordpress sites from one hosting provider to another. Why cannot the freelancing sites just like fiverr allows me to create my fixed priced offerings and allow buyers to purchase them instead of going through all the hassle for a straightforward task.
I stopped working on affiliate marketing using paid traffic sources due to some problems (including a problem with my credit card) but I am looking to start working on it again soon. I just got my trafficvance account reactivated and will be creating a campaign there soon. I am planning to post some of the campaign details here so stay tune for that. I am also building some sites which will help in many of the tasks associated with creating campaigns. It is just a building block towards making a full fledged digital marketing company.
Here are some stats
Bids – 12 , Won – 0
Niche Sites – 3390
Celeb Sites – 757
Gaming Blogs – 99
Youtube Videos – 16
A day in my life – 13 March 2013
As mentioned in earlier post I have decided to post daily. As it will become tough to find a new topic and a headline everyday, I will be writing this daily posts under A Day in My Life category. The primary purpose of the posts will be to get me into posting regularly and I hope it will be easier to just post what I did for most of the day. Most of it is going to be boring so you just need to bear with me until I am good enough to write something worthwhile. Anyway here goes the post for first day.
- Woke up at 10:40 (Don’t be too surprised as I slept at 04:06) – 6.6 Hrs
- Replied to few clients and finished a smallish project which was to build a simple text logo for Vancouver Roofing Services site and configured the mobile theme setup which is using the handheld plugin by the eleganthemes guys. One of the task was to display a click to call button on mobile phones but not on desktop browsers and after searching for few hours for an elegant solution, settled on <div class=”hide-desktop“> trick. While searching for this solution I was wondering why the theme authors don’t make the theme documentation publicly accessible. I am really fed up of the whole scenario of hiding everything behind a pay-wall. I feel sorry for some of my clients who despite having purchased themes weren’t able to configure it as per the theme demo site because the documentation is scarce. One of a long pending idea which has been bubbling in my head is to create a single resource / support site for wordpress theme/plugin documentations and charge very nominal fees for helping others with their wordpress issues incase it takes more than an hour to fix it. I haven’t decided on the name yet but will start working on it soon.
- Checked out Rage of Bahamut Game and saw that a new event has been announced which is Holy Wars Bloodbath. I need a better way to keep track of all this gaming events (not for playing but for updating the sites). We haven’t creating any new gaming sites but hopefully we will pick the steam again. Btw the gaming site thing reminds me of the new monthly targets I have kept for my blogging team. I am listing them here.
- 5 Cheap + Keyword Sites
- 20 Brokenlink Sites
- 1 City Portal
- 1 Beach Portal
- 5 Celeb Sites
- 5 Gaming Sites
- 5 Product Keyword Sites
- 5 Software Tool Reviews
- 5 Summaries of IM Courses
- 60 WordPress Themes using artisteer
Now the thing is I want to build lots of virtual real estate but due to lack of enough funding I am not able to build as much as I want to. I have been thinking of crowdsourcing the funds to build these sites and do a 50/50 revshare with the funders. A single niche site can be built for $500 so I just need to raise $5 from 100 persons. Don’t know how much such sites can really make in an year though.
- Finalised the cheap + keywords sites for the coming months. I had collected lots of cheap + keywords variations and then run it through Market Samurai and picked the keywords which passed the Majestic Golden rules. The sites are listed below
- cheaploafers.org
- cheapblouses.org
- cheapwedges.org
- cheapboatshoes.org
- cheapblankets.org
- cheapclutches.org
- cheaptanktops.org
- cheaptights.org
- cheapchinos.org
I know google is getting ready for another massive penguin/panda update but hopefully my sites won’t be affected much as I don’t do much off-site seo to my sites.
- The power cut is too severe in Andhra Pradesh as we are currently facing the power cuts from 10-12 in morning and 3-5 in evening because of which we aren’t able to work at all. So I have gone ahead and purchased a 2 KVA gas/petrol powered portable generator build by the perfect company (PEG-2500) for my project team. As per the dealer this set should be fine for running 5 computer systems. If this one runs fine then I will go ahead and get PEG-3200 model for my blogging team.
I think I have covered most of my work done today. Tomorrow there will be a new post telling what I did for the whole day. Till then goodbye and see you soon.
Update : As is customary on internet marketing blogs, people like to post traffic/income details. As the current income through blogs/niche sites is negligible I will just post the traffic stats.
Niche Sites – 3153
Celeb Sites – 810
Gaming Blogs – 91
Youtube Videos – 9