I’ve been over The Bridge to Wales today so I loaded up my MP3 player with some Traffic School lessons to keep me company on the trip. First up was an interview with Leo Babauta; if you’ve not come across Leo before he has an insanely popular blog called Zen Habits - that’s dotnet not dotcom! Ironically I used to be one of Leo’s subscribers a few years back but somewhere along the way I lost track of him, so I’m glad to be reunited!
In the interview Leo talks about how Zen Habits came about and it was because he wanted to share what he had learned about living a simplistic and frugal life with others online – not because he wanted to make money from the website. He only made a conscious decision to see if he could quit his job and earn enough to sustain his lifestyle from the blog when he saw how successful it was becoming.
This struck a chord with me because I set up Operation Pixie Dust for similar reasons;because I wanted to help people have more enjoyable Disney World vacations by sharing the tips and strategies I had learned. It was never to make money. The difference between me and Leo is that when I decided to monetise the site I didn’t make enough money to quit my day job!
Now onto the related homework for this task…
1. Have you ever measured the effectiveness of your efforts to grow your site?
The simple answer to that is no. Because I’m not sure I’d even know how to measure the effectiveness. I can measure traffic, but could I tie that back to specific tasks I had undertaken? I don’t think so. Although one thing I have seen is that if I stop posting to the site regularly my traffic dies off.
2. Do you spend a lot of time pursuing the same strategies or just jump from one thing to the next?
I’m guilt of jumping I’m afraid. I think that’s part of my problem. Instead of finding what works and then doing the old “rinse and repeat” I go off looking for other activities I could do instead. Lack of focus could be my middle name…
3. How focused is your site’s design? Do you think about how each visitor interacts with the various elements? Do you have priorities for what you would like visitors to do?
I’ve recently redesigned the site but I still have some work to do. I’ve tried to categorise the content into three distinct areas: thinking about a Disney vacation, booking a vacation and then planning what to do when you get there. I’m not sure it’s really 100% clear to the visitor how that works though.
I’d like visitors to either book a vacation through my affiliated travel agent or buy my Kindle book to learn more about planning a vacation. But right now I don’t think I’m achieving either of those goals effectively.
4. Make a list of the five lowest-level things you’re doing on the site each week – things you spend time on but don’t get a return from. Then stop doing them and see what happens…
I can’t really do this task because to be honest I haven’t been working on this website for a while now. At least I haven’t developed any bad habits I need to stop!