Last year I wrote a post outlining some of my Internet goals for 2009. I thought I should revisit that post again here in January 2010 and see how I did. Here were my Internet goals for 2009 and how I did.
Posting more regularly, hopefully on Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays. If possible increasing posting frequency to five days a week.
I was doing alright with this goal until summer came around, then my posting went downhill and has never really gone up again. While I still enjoy writing for this blog, other things seem to come up. In my defense I have been taking part more on Twitter and that is often where you will find me.
Increasing RSS subscribers in the LGR Internet Solutions blog to 500 or more.
Thanks to some stupidity by Feedburner it appears that I accomplished this goal having over 1000 subscribers. But if you take the Friendfeed numbers out of the Feedburner count my subscriber count has remained stable and grown slightly to 300. Not bad considering my posting dropped off.
Diversifying my online income so it is more dependable and less reliant on one or two sources.
This has seen some growth in 2009. While the majority of my online income is still from two main sources I have seen growth in other areas. The majority of the growth has come from diversifying my affiliate marketing into other areas. I have plans to expand this further in 2010.
Increase page views and reader participation on all my websites.
While I would say reader participation has not gone up, pageviews across the majority of my websites have seen significant increases. This has been good for income on several sites.
To learn new skills and apply them.
While I never did finish the Facebook application or the WordPress plugin I was working on, I did learn a great deal more about affiliate marketing in 2009. While I was not a total stranger to affiliate marketing before 2009 I did learn a great deal about how to improve conversions and increase my online revenue through affiliate marketing. Not something that I was planning, but it has been something that I have enjoyed learning.
Overall I would say that I failed on my 2009 Internet goals. I might have failed at my goals, but I had a great year! My business income doubled, despite a global recession, and my client base has remained stable with many of my client work increasing. 2010 is already looking great with work continuing to come in from clients and my affiliate marketing websites continuing to grow here already in January.
I have been wondering what people would like to know more about that read my blog so I thought I would open up the doors to you to ask me your webmaster and blogging questions.
The floor is all yours, what questions would you love to have answered about being a webmaster and / or blogging. Be as specific or general as you would like. Leave your questions below and I will answer them in either upcoming posts.
I have been doing some more house keeping and have decided to discontinue LGR Quote. I discontinued LGR Photo a little while ago and can’t see any reason to keep LGR Quote around either.
If people are interested in using the script I will offer it here still for download. You are welcome to use it, rewrite it, play with it etc, but I can no longer offer support for it.
If you want to know more about the script here is some information that I had up about the script.
Features
This script inserts a random quote from a text file. Includes the ability to define the quote, a quote author, a hyperlink, and hyperlink text.
Easy Installation. A basic install on LGR Quote should only take as long as it takes you to download it, unzip it, define your quotes, add an include to your web pages and upload it to your web server.
Inline Styles used for presentation. Can be easily edited to fit with your website.
Many years ago I wrote a quick PHP script to help me create a simple HTML photo gallery from JPG images. I released it as LGR Photo and gave it away for free. It was a great little gallery and did what I needed it to do. I made it mainly for my own purposes but many others downloaded it and found it useful. I have been wanting to rewrite the script for quite sometime now, but it never seemed to make it onto the list of things to do. That being said I think it is time to simply retire LGR Photo.
If people are interested in using the script I will offer it here still for download. You are welcome to use it, rewrite it, play with it etc, but I can no longer offer support for it.
If you want to know more about the script here is some information that I had up about the script.
Features
LGR Photo Gallery is a photo gallery script written in PHP. The current version has the following features:
Easy Installation. A basic install on LGR Photo using the defaults should only take as long as it takes you to download it, unzip it, and upload it and some photos to your web server.
Uses the GD Libraries to dynamically create thumbnails from your photos.
Reads EXIF comment information from photos and displays the comment under the photo.
Next and Previous thumbnail images when browsing photos.
Table columns and rows adjustable.
Cascading Style Sheet used for presentation.
Easy to insert your custom header and footer files for complete web site integration.
Easy to insert into an existing web site. Allows for many different layout configurations.
Can use Javascript to pop open photos in a new window.
Creates albums from folder structure. Number of sub albums only limited by the operating system.
Not bloatware! Only two files for a quick and easy install. Perfect for home networks and to share photos with friends and family over the internet.
Simple slideshow component included with a basic install.
Valid XHTML and CSS in default install.
FREE! What more can you ask for.
Requirements
The following are the requirements to run LGR Photo on your server/computer.
A web server that supports PHP.
Any operating system that can run a web server and PHP.
PHP Version 4.3.3 and up.
GD Libraries are required to create thumbnails.
EXIF support enabled if you want to display EXIF comment information.
Currently only supports jpg files.
To make LGR Photo blend in more with your web site you will need to have some knowledge of:
You might have noticed I have not written much here lately. So much for keeping up with my goals for 2009 and posting three times a week. The main reason for being so quiet here on the LGR Internet Solutions blog is the fact that I have been busy getting a new server online and moving some accounts to that new server.
The new server is actually a replacement server for one of our older dedicated servers that hosts clients websites that has been running for roughly 4 years. I decided to replace that server with a new one since it has been maxing out the ram on that machine and websites were often taking longer to load. I have been slowing migrating sites to the new server and hope to have them all moved in the next week. If you have received an email from me about moving your site then your site will be moved this week.
The move has been seamless so far for the sites that have been moved. I have been moving one website at a time by creating a cPanel complete backup and uploading it to the new server and restoring it. There are faster ways to move several sites from one cPanel server to another but this allows me the opportunity to review the website move, make sure things are working on the new server and in the event that something does go wrong I will only have one website to fix at a time instead of all of them being down or inaccessible.
I hope to be done this week moving all of the websites and hopefully I can get back to posting here more regularly again. I have been fairly active on Twitter if you want to follow my tweets to know more about what is going on with me day to day.
The web turned 20 years old yesterday and I finally took some time to watch the video of Tim Berners-Lee. Amazing how a pet project 20 years ago changed how we connect with each other, talk with each other, and literally changed the world.
How has the web changed your life? I know for me it has made it possible for me to work from home, spend more time with my kids and help numerous organizations and businesses share their information with others.
It was just over a year ago when Rhett and I launched Epiblogger. We had high hopes of changing blogging for the better by calling bloggers back to being better bloggers by being organic and personal. With the start of 2009 Rhett and I have decided to close Epiblogger and move our posts to our own respective blogs with redirects from Epiblogger to the new post URL’s. I have tagged all of my Epiblogger posts that I have imported from Epiblogger so a part of Epiblogger will live on here. If you are interested in reading the posts I wrote at Epiblogger here is a list of all the posts I wrote:
I hope that you enjoy these posts and find them useful. I enjoyed working with Rhett on Epiblogger as we explored organic blogging. I am sure Rhett and I will continue to read each other’s blog and partner at some point again in the future.
It is that time of the year again when people start to look back at the year and to look forward to setting new goals for the coming year. 2008 for LGR Internet Solutions has been a good one in many respects. Work has been rewarding, new clients continue to come in on a regular basis, I revamped the website and traffic and income from my web properties has increased. If things continue steady for 2009 I should be able to maintain traffic and income levels. One should never settle for maintaining the status quo so some goals I have for my websites for 2009 include:
Posting more regularly, hopefully on Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays. If possible increasing posting frequency to five days a week.
Increasing RSS subscribers in the LGR Internet Solutions blog to 500 or more.
Diversifying my online income so it is more dependable and less reliant on one or two sources.
Increase page views and reader participation on all my websites
To learn new skills and apply them.
Having goals are great but you need to have some kind of plan to accomplish them. Here are some of the ways I plan on accomplishing my goals in the next year.
In order to post more I need to find more time to post. To be honest this will be the hardest goal to accomplish since I am not sure where I will be able to find the time since client work and family does need to come first.
To increase RSS subscribers I have some plans to release an ebook at some point during the year. I have also been busy arranging for special offers that will only be made available to subscribers.
Diversifying my online income will require some work. I have already started to explore some additional income sources. I will eventually offer private ad sales here on the LGR Internet Solutions blog. Several of my other websites will also see private ad sales at some point during the year.
Increasing page views and reader participation will require some time to take part more in the social side of the web and creating more community here on the blog. Taking part in Twitter has helped already and I am looking forward to getting to know more people at Twitter and on other blogs around the web.
Constantly learning is what makes working on the Internet such fun. I find the best way to learn is often to have some personal projects to work on. With that in mind I plan on finishing off some Facebook applications this year, and I have some WordPress plugins that I have been working on that I hope to finish and release.
I have always set goals for my websites, but this might be the first time I have written a post about them. I thought this was a good time to start to take part more on the social web by taking part in the “What Are Your Internet Goals for 2009? Group Writing Project” over at Daily Blog Tips. What are your Internet goals for 2009?
Last week I noticed on Twitter that Jeffro was looking for some bloggers to interview for BloggerTalks. Jeff and I finally connected on Skype yesterday and had an interesting conversation about blogging, the difference between a website and a blog, and a few other tidbits. The interview was published today. If you have a few minutes head on over and check it out.
If you are coming from BloggerTalks welcome to LGR Internet Solutions! Feel free to browse some of the more popular posts from the blog archives.
I am also a regular author on Epiblogger, a metablog, that is a little different from your average blogging tips website. We regularly talk about the future of blogging and how to make blogging relational.
A few days ago I posted that LGR Internet Solutions had officially launched. Today my official press release was actually released on PRWeb. This is the first time I have done a press release through PRWeb and I have been happy with it so far. I have seen new visitors from PRWeb, I can find my press release listed in both Google and Yahoo News and I have noticed a few new links on the WordPress dashboard from places that are linking back to be that have published the news release. All in all that makes me happy. I was not expecting huge amounts of traffic from it, but I am pleasantly surprised already at the number of visitors I have gotten from it.
I have read about how doing a press release can help with publicity of a website or service and I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to take advantage of it with my new focus on web and blog consulting, search engine optimization and social media. If your business is interested in releasing a press release to announce a new website, a product or service I would recommend taking advantage of a professional writer to help you write one. While it can add to the cost of doing a press release it will be worth the money to make sure your press release is approved for release.
Now that my press release is out and my company name has been changed I am looking forward to working with my current and future clients and finding new and innovative ways to help them with their web and blog consulting needs. Of course if you are wanting help with your website or blog and are not sure how to take it to the next I will be pleased to discuss some options with you. Feel free to contact me and we can look at how best to reach your online goals.
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