Nathan Waters

Ouch. Saturday night, didn’t feel like going out. So I just spent at least the last 9 hours going through the 258 young entrepreneur blogs in the YE Blogger network, and manually searching for author and email details, adding those into the lazybase database and then adding the email to the newsletter system.

And being a poor uni student my snacks consisted of slices of bread and butter, 2 bottles of beer and water. Wow, that sounds worse than it actually was… I did listen to music through iTunes on shuffle the whole time

But anyways, it was a necessary thing to do as I had to get these emails into the system so we can actually notify most of these blogs that: a) they’re in the YE Blogger network, b) here’s the benefits it can bring, and, c) could you please add a backlink to the site using either the widget, logo or chickmarklet (coming soon).

A large motivation for me doing this long stretch of work (which I tend to do quite often for various things) was not only from Daniel’s friendly reminders to get onto things but also that the site actually went below the Alexa 100K ranking and hit a 67K rank a couple of days ago. So of course our traffic and pageviews are pretty juicy figures. This got me thinking… I am actually yet to see any blog with our widget and have only seen a few blogs with a logo backlink to YE Blogger. I was also aware that we only had 100 emails in the newsletter system and had sent out only one quick newsletter so far. We now have close to 200 emails in the system, so if we can manage to have those bloggers provide a backlink to the network then traffic should increase dramatically!

Hopefully with v2.0 features and feedback from bloggers and users we can create/update features such as the widget so that bloggers will find great value in using it/them.

You: “How much are you making?!”
Me: “Nothing atm lol”

Despite the high number of pageviews, we haven’t been receiving many clicks which I figure is because the majority of our visitors are young entrepreneurs (what a surprise!) and they tend to be very familiar with ads/adsense and so just don’t click them. We’re working on a few other revenue models which should alleviate this problem and make the long hours worth the work.

Nathan Waters
My wrist sounds like a concrete mixer