In the 3 months from 1st July to 30th September we had 53,400 visits (45,300 unique visits) with 144,500 page views. There were 5432 adsense clicks.

Given we have achieved what we set out to achieve  income wise, I now intend to close down this element of the blog. We are extremely pleased and proud of what has been achieved with almost no starting knowledge of internet marketing or search engine optimisation. Given this I’m sure that anyone with a website could fairly readily build up their visitor numbers and income by following the path trodden by us over the last 9 months. Our income has gone from an average per day of £1.36 in January 2011 to a current average (over the last 3 months) of £10.42 per day purely on Google adsense income. Not bad!

So what are you waiting for – you can do it too – go for it!

The post Final Income Report – We are there! appeared first on Human Resource Solutions.

May had been a good month where the average daily income rose to £6.51 (from £4.86 the month before). Total earnings from Jan to May inclusive of Amazon affiliate income was £616.01.

The main changes made in June involved placing additional Google text ad units across the centre of each web page and continuing Twitter activity (if a bit intermittently!). Here are the statistics for June:

The number of visitors to the website in June 2011 was 14,084 (13211 in May 2011) of which 12307 (11508 in May 2011) were unique visitors (i.e. they had not previously visited in June 2011) This represents a 6.6% increase in visitors over May 2011.

Incoming Links

Yahoo is showing 82 inlinks – up from 68 last month. Google is reporting 83 links – down slightly from 93 last month – at least both seem to be a bit more consistent this month.  Google pagerank however has now increased to 3.

Affiliate income

Details in June from Amazon were:

This is another very lowly performance this month – down from £1.61 last month.

Key Points

• June has been far and away the best month so far for Google income.
• Earnings are up to a daily average of £9.39
• Visitor numbers continue to rise – 6.6% increase this month
• The number of Adsense clicks has increased dramatically this month to 1579 from 690 in May 2011
• Amazon affiliate income is now hardly worth the effort making only 28p this month – I have no idea why this has tailed off so badly
• For reference the earnings so far for the first 6 months of the project are: Jan: £42.31, Feb: £81.15, March: £135.75, April: £145.76, May: £201.96, June: £281.76
• Total website earning from 1st Jan to 30th June 2011 stand at: £888.69 from Google ads and £9.36 from Amazon commission = £898.05
• The website now needs to maintain an average daily earnings (Google ads and affiliate income) of £0.55p per day to achieve the target £1000 by 31st December 2011.

The highlights of this month are the big increases in Adsense click thros and consequent increase in revenue – this is partly due to the additional centre text ad units which are performing quite well. We will continue our present strategy re Google Adsense ads, and perhaps look at adding some to the blog. We also welcome a new affiliate RedTapeDoc.co.uk and we will see whether that generates any revenue in July. I also need to try to re-invigorate Amazon somehow as it is not performing well at all.

The post Sixth Month Income Report – June 2011 appeared first on Human Resource Solutions.

The number of visitors to the website in May 2011 was: 13211 (10,675 in April 2011), of which 11508 (9117 in April 2011) were unique visitors (i.e. they had not previously visited in May 2011). This represents a 26.2% increase in visitor numbers over April 2011.

Incoming Links

Yahoo is showing 68 inlinks – up from 50 last month. Google is reporting 93 links – up from 39 last month. The domains don’t necessarily look particularly high quality but this is certainly a big increase in inlinks. Google pagerank remains at 2/10.

Affiliate income

Details in April from Amazon were:

This is another fairly lowly performance this month – down by 20p from last month.

Key Points

1. All in all May has been an excellent month!
2. Earnings have increased again to a daily average in April of £6.51 from £4.86 last month
3. Total visitor numbers have increased fairly dramatically by over 26%
4. Amazon was again disappointing this month. Total income from sales so far from Amazon from January 2011 is: £9.08
5. For reference the earnings so far for the first 5 months of the project are: Jan: £42.31, Feb: £81.15, March: £135.75, April: £145.76, May: £201.96
6. Total website earning from 1st Jan to 31st May2011 stand at: £606.93 from Google ads and £9.08 from Amazon commission = £616.01
7. The website now needs to maintain an average daily earnings (Google ads and Amazon) of £1.79 per day to achieve the target £1000 by 31st December 2011.

Part of the success this month seems to have been around increased visitor numbers and more inlinks. We also added another set of Google ads – text ad units to the bottom of each page. For June we will extend this to include a text ad unit across the centre of each page; we will also continue the push with social media and perhaps progress further article marketing to try to further improve inlinks.

The post Fifth Month Income Report – May 2011 appeared first on Human Resource Solutions.

This month we again continued to improve the website content, continued with this blog, and also started a twitter account (http://twitter.com/Alex_Brogan) to generate interest and hopefully drive traffic to the website and blog. I also added an affiliate advert to the sidebar of the website. This has not proven to be successful at all, and so I will be removing this asap. But it still means I need to look at how I can maximise any other affiliate income apart from Amazon (we have not managed to generate any non-google / amazon income so far).

For May I intend to add some Google ad units at the bottom of every page, and perhaps some additional google ads on certain pages. Here are the stats for the month:

The number of visitors to the website in April 2011 was: 10,675 (10,101 in March 2011), of which 9117 (8699 in March 2011) were unique visitors (i.e. they had not previously visited in April 2011). This represents a 5.7% increase in visitor numbers over March 2011.

Incoming Links

Yahoo is showing 50 inlinks – up from 41 last month. For some reason Google is only reporting 39 links – down from 41 last month. I really don’t understand the discrepancy between the results, but this will not help the website page rank on Google which remains stuck at 2. Need to continue trying to drive up the number of inlinks next month probably through doing articles for sites such as ezinearticles.com which will link back to the website.

Affiliate income

Details in April from Amazon were:

This shows a reduction in orders from 7 last month, and a commensurate reduction in income from £4.19 in March 2011. Disappointing.

Key Points

1. All in all April has been another good month
2. Earnings have increased again to a daily average in April of £4.86 from £4.38 last month
3. Total visitor numbers have increased but only marginally however April was only a 30 day month
4. Amazon was a little disappointing this month. Total income from sales so far from Amazon from January 2011 is: £7.47
5. For reference the earnings so far for the first 4 months of the project are: Jan: £42.31, Feb: £81.15, March: £135.75, April: £145.76
6. Total website earning from 1st Jan to 30th April 2011 stand at: £404.97 from Google ads and £7.47 from Amazon commission = £412.44
7. The website now needs to maintain an average daily earnings (Google ads and Amazon) of £2.14 per day to achieve the target £1000 by 31st December 2011.

Things are largely on plan, and we will continue to focus on content, inlinks, social media and better utilisation of google ads on the site to improve income for next month.

The post Fourth Month Income Report – April 2011 appeared first on Human Resource Solutions.

During the search for alternatives I came across the concept of “Words in Tables” (WiT) as described by Jon Moon in his book: “How to Make an Impact” (2008). In this book Moon looks at how to present business documents such as graphs, tables, powerpoint slides, numbers and organisation charts in a new and much clearer way.

His contention is that if we fail to present information clearly and concisely, then we will fail to get the message contained in that information across to our target audience. In my experience that is true –  I have too often seen reports containing conclusions based on leaps of faith not supported by the data; or even the same data presented in several different ways just to include a nice colourful graph! This only serves to confuse and bemuse the reader.

Moon presents a wealth of ideas, tips and examples to help develop better more meaningful documents, and while at times he gets a little too mired in details such as font size, type etc, nevertheless there are some powerful ideas here which are well worth exploring.

Anyway – so what is the alternative to a bulleted list?

Well if we take a simple example such as this:

• January – first month – January is named after Janus (Ianuarius), the god of the doorway
• February – second month – February was named after the Latin term februum, which means purification
• March – third month – March comes from ancient Rome, when March was the first month of the year and named Martius after Mars, the Roman god of war

Moon suggests a better way to represent such a list is in a table like this:

Example WiT (I have put this in a PDF because it is easier to see / print)

This looks a lot better, is much more accessible in terms of understanding and is a welcome relief from yet more bullet points!

The post ..at last – the end of the bullet point! appeared first on Human Resource Solutions.

Well in March we continued to focus on creating good content both on the website and this blog as a way of trying to improve traffic. I had also intended to look at introducing more affiliate marketing (apart from Amazon) but couldn’t find anything appropriate (I did in April though but more on that next month). So what are the earnings and activity stats for March? Here they are in summary form:

The number of visitors to the website in February 2011 was 10,101 (6763 in Feb 2011), of which 8699 (5693 in Jan 2011) were unique visitors (i.e. they had not visited previously in March). This represents a 53% increase in visitor numbers over February 2011.

Incoming Links

The number of links has not increased, and both Google and Yahoo site explorer are reporting 41 in-links. This is in fact a small decrease from last month and we need to focus on improving this metric going forward.

Affiliate income

Details in March from Amazon were:

This shows a slight reduction in clicks, but a big increase in orders to 7 (3 last month) and income – £4.19 this month (£1.47 in February).

Key Points

1. This has been another excellent month!
2. Earnings have increased to a daily average of £4.38 from an average of £2.90 in February 2011.
3. Visitor numbers are up by over 50% from February
4. Adsense clicks have risen by over 300% since March 2010
5. The website has first quarter earnings of £259.21 from 1st Jan to 31st March 2011.
6. Total Amazon Earnings from 1st January to 31st March 2011 are £5.66
7. Total first quarter earnings are: £264.87
8. The website needs to maintain a daily earnings average of £2.69 to earn £1000 by 31st December 2011.

This improvement in earnings rate means we are on target to meet our projected earnings by the year end. However we need to undertake some specific tasks for April 2011 to maintain this trajectory:

• Continue to develop and improve the website and blog content
• Explore utilising social media – specifically Twitter and LinkedIn – to drive traffic to the site
• Introduce at least one other affiliate link
• try to improve inward links

6USTSUMVJFSB

The post Third Month Income Report – March 2011 appeared first on Human Resource Solutions.

…you know they have to be done – that report, starting that project, replying to those emails etc. However you can’t quite get around to them. At least not until they have become an imminent and perhaps even a potentially career threatening crisis! That is procrastination, and this book sets out to describe why we are all prone to this weakness and ultimately how to understand and deal with it.

Piers Steel is an academic with a 10 years track record in researching procrastination and its impact. In this book he describes why procrastination is built into our genetic make-up. In evolutionary terms we are programmed to live in the now and undertaking things which don’t give instant gratification are more difficult for us. So starting a project which will not be complete for some time cannot compete with the immediate gratification of chatting to a colleague or checking Facebook!

Steel’s “equation” which he has produced after much research and meta-analysis describes the factors which tend to determine our tendency to procrastinate. He has determined that our motivation to act is dependent on the extent we can expect a return on our actions and how much we value this return. However this is tendency to act is affected by our personal levels of impulsiveness and how far in the future our outputs are required.

The body of the book concentrates on how our modern lives are full of procrastination-inducing distractions, the personal price we pay for this, and the overall economic cost of putting things off.  However ultimately he considers the irrationallity of putting things off is a tendency not necessarily an inevitability. If we can understand and accept our internal state of affairs we can reconcile our evolutionary humanity with the need to plan and act now for future reward.

If you do have a problem with procrastination, this is probably about the best of the current crop of books on the subject and is recommended as a good read anyway.

You’ll find it on Amazon here:

The Procrastination Equation: How to Stop Putting Things Off and Start Getting Stuff Done

..eh just don’t put off reading it!

The post The Procrastination Equation – Dr Piers Steel appeared first on Human Resource Solutions.

Burkeman writes the the excellent “This Column will Change Your Life..” articles for the Guardian. This book is an extension of that column, presenting his take on self-help, happiness studies, lifehacking and other such ideas presented in so-called self-development books by a succession of gurus. You name them and their ideas are here: Dale Carnegie, Anthony Robbins, Steven Covey, Napoleon Hill, Lawrence Peter (Peter Principle) etc. He also picks up on modern self-development bloggers such as Steve Pavlina and Tim Ferriss.

Burkeman’s take is a pseudo-scientific approach to: “what does the research tell us about this..”; laced with a healthy dose of cynicism and dry wit about most of the claims made. He covers the whole gamut of  opinions expressed on self-development areas from the biggest cliches like “finding your passion” through how to be happier, how to win friends and influence people, ruling the office, how to use your brain, how to keep functioning, follow me (Gurus, God-men and other questionable characters), and roads less traveled . In most cases he examines the claims of the authors and grounds these in common sense and the findings of relevant scientific research. This generally serves to question most of the claims made.

For example he is critical of many ideas proposed such as:  the culture of meetings in organisations and why so much time is spent in what is self-indulgent and worthless activity: ” ..meetings move at the pace of the slowest mind in the room…”.  He also examines organisations attempts to induce happiness and good feelings. He concludes that top-down efforts to induce this are self-defeating. Happiness can’t be enforced when: “..you are required to do something that will be acceptable only if you do it voluntarily”. He also answers questions such as: “why do your friends always have more friends than you? and how smiling can help prevent bank robberies!

There are some nuggets to be had here when Burkeman takes the distillation of what he has discovered and presents his own view on topics such as how to deal with procrastination, how to keep your email inbox clear, and how to deal with to-do lists (he is a real fan of lists and timetables!)

All in all if you are tired of self-serving self-development gurus and their theories, have a read at this book. It will help you to put all of this into perspective and provide you with an informative and witty read. It is highly recommended.

You can get further details of the book on Amazon here:

Help!: How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done

It costs £7.19 in paperback and £6.83 in e-book form.

The post Book review: Help! By Oliver Burkeman appeared first on Human Resource Solutions.

From Google Analytics that the number of visitors to the website in February 2011 was 6763 (5197 in Jan 2011), of which 5693 (4354 in Jan 2011) were unique visitors (i.e. they had not visited previously in Feb). This represents a 30% increase in visitor numbers in February 2011 over January 2011. It would appear the search engine optimisation has started to have a significant impact.

Incoming Links

In terms of incoming links to the site, Yahoo Site Expolrer is reporting 48 links (up from 41 last month), and Google reporting 60 links (up from 45 last month)

Affiliate income

Details in February from Amazon were:

Key Points

1. This has been a good month! Average income in February 2011 has increased over last years average by 234%. The average daily income in February was £2.90
2. Visitor numbers have increased by around 30% from January 2011
3. Links have increased slightly, but there is still a fair bit of work to do to try to improve this
4. The Amazon affiliate link has at last produced some income – albeit a small amount of £1.47!
5. Taking everything together, total income in February 2011 was £81.15 + £1.47 = £82.62
6. To achieve £1000 by the end of 2011, we need to now average a daily income of : £2.86

Clearly then this has been a much improved month over both the 2010 averages, and January 2011. The tasks for March are to try to increase the affiliate income both through Amazon, and by adding other affiliates to the site, and to also increase the number of incoming links mainly by continuing to improve the website content.

The post Second Month Income Report – February 2011 appeared first on Human Resource Solutions.

The Problem

I have my main office at home, but also work all over the country and with a number of different associates. One of the main problems I have is ensuring we always have full access to all the information we need. This information is variously held on the office computers, laptops, an Ipad and numerous paper based files. It has been becoming increasingly difficult to keep all this information properly up-to-date and synchronised and this had led to important information being missed or out of date information used on occasions.

Our challenge then was to create a system which allows immediate access to our information and data including electronic files and documents, emails and all our paper files.

Sorting Out the Paper Files

The first stage in the process is to make our paper files available electronically. However if you don’t have a paper filing system that works don’t even try to digitise what you have it just wont work – sort it out first. So what did we do?

1. We created a file for each of our clients, this was then sub-divided into separate projects, and further subdivided into sub-projects and if appropriate key subjects or categories. Each client file also had a general correspondence sub-file.
2. We also created separate administration files for invoices and receipts, expenses, payroll, VAT returns, Company tax& accounts, general bills and business development.
3. I also took the opportunity to create a personal filing system for items such as personal bank statements, tax forms etc. which I would store seperately from the company information.
4. All the documents were then sorted, per file, into date order in preparation for digitising them using a scanner
5. We then created electronic folders on the office network drive corresponding to each of the paper files
6. Each document was scanned and saved onto the office network drive, into the appropriate folder as described above e.g.: <main subject>/<sub-subject>/<title or category>.
7. So for example: “JBloggs/TUPE-Transfer/Pension-issues”. The actual document would simply be identified by date and subject e.g.: “25-01-2011: pension transfer situation”.
8. The scanning software also allows the allocation of categories / keywords to the document, so it would be possible to allocate e.g.: “legal-advice” to the document so it could be retrieved using that category / keyword.
9. The use of categories or keywords also allowed us to identify documents which might be applicable to several clients but only saved in one place e.g.: legal-advice; pensions

The process of scanning the paper files is fairly slow and time consuming, and is made more difficult if you use a flat-bed scanner, one sheet at a time. We used a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 Document Scanner which has a 10 page document feeder and can scan both sides of a document at once pretty quickly; the software that comes with it is also very good indeed. If you are interested there is more info on Amazon where we bought ours:
Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 Document Scanner

What about the E-mails and Electronic Documents?

We wanted to ensure that every email related to a file topic was also saved with that file. Doing things electronically has allowed us to do this by simply saving e-mails into the appropriate file folder. We use Microsoft Outlook, and this allows an e-mail to be saved as a .msg file. Just go to the e-mail in question and choose the File>save as option. We use the same naming convention for e-mails as for other documents.

Similarly where we had created electronic Word or Excel (or any other type of electronic document), we would similarly save this in the appropriate folder / sub-folder with the same naming convention, and utilising the category / keyword convention. Where we received electronic documents from others – almost always as e-mail attachments, we would save these with the original e-mails in the appropriate folder as described above.

How Can We Get Access to the Information?

Now we have all the information nicely organised, we need to be able to gain access to this as effectively as possible. There is no problem when we have access to the office network, as all the files are stored on folders on the main network hard drive. However the problem is accessing this information when not in the office. The solution we use is the Cloud – that is storing information centrally and securely on the internet where we can reach it using a web browser from any computer. We use Dropbox,  but there are also other places to use such as Google Documents. Storage in the Cloud is not expensive, but it all adds up if you use a lot of space. Therefore we only load our live client files, and any which are likely to be required in the short-term. However it is very easy for a full folder to be uploaded (by someone in the office) in a matter of minutes should remote access be necessary.

Thats it – we now have a very efficient and up-to-date filing and retrieval system based on: effectively dividing information into folders and sub-folders, scanning paper documents, saving e-mails and electronic documents together in the appropriate folders, and ensuring remote access to all our important files through the Cloud.

The post Get Your Information Organised – Use a Scanner and Head for The Cloud! appeared first on Human Resource Solutions.