After spending some time on the fence without doing much online except the occasional tweet I went out and just started a new blog, which is called Silent Sound Waves. If the name didn’t reveal it for you, the blog is about music, and this is something I’ve been wanting to do for quite a while.

The domain was actually registered quite a few months back, but my original plans for it fell through the cracks and I decided to put it off for a while. As you can read more about in the first post, the initial plans for the site were much bigger, but this time around I decided to put the ambitions of world domination away and go for something as simple as a traditional blog.

Summer however is quite a busy time for me, as it is these months of no school I spend working and saving up money for the hard year as a student which is to come. As a result, the next month or so there will just be infrequent and unscheduled new posts at the blog in order to fill it up with content. This is because I believe it is preferable to give the potential readers some idea of what they can expect once I start to promote the blog in the middle of August.

If you are interested in music, mainly in the genres of rock / punk / pop and variations of these, feel free to check out my new blog and subscribe, as I would love some feedback on what I write about, even before I start to seriously promote it. Right now I am for instance working on a monster post of a report from a music festival I attended last weekend, and it will be a good example of what’s to come in the future from me over at Silent Sound Saves, along with news, reviews and a whole bunch of other opinionated posts.

See you there! Or here, if you’re not interested in a bigger dose of me than what you already get here at my personal blog

So why did I end up with the decision to sell the site that I’ve been working so hard with for the past few months? My reasoning was relatively simple actually. From a business-perspective it was probably a bad decision. The new owner seems like a dedicated and knowledgeable guy, and I am absolutely certain that if he puts the right amount of effort into the site, it will be worth at least twice of what he bought it for within three months.

I am sure you must be asking yourself why I didn’t just keep it for a couple of months then, and then sell it for twice as much. The answer to that is coincidentally also the reason why I ultimately decided to sell the site now. As most of you have probably noticed, since my exams race started, I have hardly had any time to work on the site. Even when my exams ended, I’ve still been too busy because of my “real” jobs (right now I have two of them). This is because I want to improve my financial situation, and by working hard in jobs that guarantee me the return, I can do just that this summer. Now couple that with the fact that when working this much, I won’t have much time to work on the site, which would ultimately have led to a decline in the activity there, which would only decrease the value of the site this summer. The final ingredient in the mix was that even though it might not seem like the world, the money I got from Bloggst goes a long way in stabilizing my finances. I’m just a poor student after all!

During my time working with Bloggst, I also had an epiphany of sorts, or a moment of self discovery if you will. I discovered that as much as I like to work with websites, the constant maintenance most websites demand is extremely tedious for me, and it drains a lot of motivation from me. What is it that I enjoy then? Writing. I love to write, and my writing was also the main reason why Bloggst attracted a decent amount of exposure in such a short timeframe. So I have decided that from now on, I will be focusing my online ventures towards the area that I take most pleasure from. Most likely I will start a new blog sometime soon. I will use the summer to brainstorm for ideas and make sure that I pick the right niche, and then I hope to have everything ready by the time school starts up again.

I’m really looking forward to having a place where my writing is the main focus, and not every cool feature that I’m able to implement. This also means that I’ll be putting more effort into this blog as well (how many times have I said that by now?). It’s a nice place for me to relax and be more personal about what I write. I think many will be pleased to hear that I’ll be covering some of the same subjects that I’ve covered so far over at Bloggst. I’ve been thinking hard to try and define a niche for this blog, and I’ve landed on two things that will get the bulk of my attention here. Promotion and branding (online and offline), as this is something I enjoy very much (I study it). The other topic is “Web 2.0″ – Yeah, I know, done to death. I will however be focusing mostly on the social aspect of it, and try to tie it in with promotion and branding.

That said, I’m not afraid to venture outside of these topics and touch in on other things here on my blog however. It is after all just that, my blog, and if something catches my immediate attention I won’t be afraid to write about it. Hopefully there are a few souls out there who’ll still be interested in reading and participating!

I will be writing at least three posts every week here, and if you don’t believe me, just subscribe to my feed, and I’ll prove you wrong The next post might come as soon as later tonight, where I will be telling you how I managed to create a site that was worth $3,000 in less than three months. Seeing how most of the people reading this blog are aspiring entrepreneurs and website enthusiasts myself, I think it should interest most of you!

I got a bit sidetracked there I suppose, seeing how this post is going to be another Bloggst update. Things are going pretty well over there actually, despite the fact that I’ve, like I mentioned, has been limited a bit lately with the amount of effort I’ve been able to put into it. The live blog directory has drawn quite a bit of attention, and I’ve already got a large backlog of at least 20 blogs I’ll need to review. I plan on going through all of these applications tomorrow afternoon to get rid of the backlog though, so if you’ve applied and haven’t heard back yet, don’t worry.

What amazes me though, is people’s inability to read. Seriously, it’s pointed out quite clearly on that page what should be included in the application, yet most people just include a link to either the feed or the blog, and that’s it. If these are people that I’ve never seen before, I don’t hesitate to just delete the applications. If I recognize the name from the community though, I’m inclined to be a bit more lenient and check out the blog and see if I can easily categorize it myself. There’s lesson to be learned here though, if you’re applying for something, read the guidelines and make sure you include the requested details. It’s bound to increase your chances of success!

Next, let’s take a look at the numbers to see how things have been growing. We just recently passed 3,000 posts, and I’m really happy about it. By all estimations, we are well on track for reaching the set goal of 5,000 posts by the start of June. I’m starting to realize though that reaching 500 registered members by the start of June might not happen. Even though growth is pretty good, at the current rate we’ll probably end up at around 400-something by that time. It’s never fun to not reach your goals, but that just means you have to evaluate what you’ve been doing, and see how you can improve.

What’s good is that I still have well over a month to turn the trend, and get us back on track. Recently I’ve experienced a bit with both StumbleUpon and Technorati’s WTF, and so far I’ve had great success with WTF. As a result of our efforts with it, the visitor numbers have steadily increased over the past few weeks from averaging between 300-400 visitors per day to about 500-600. I’m quite happy with this, and hopefully I’ll be able to keep the positive trend, and see the numbers increase further in the coming weeks.

I’m starting to realize that it will be some time before I get to see the results I want from search engines, especially Google though. I’ve read up the Sandbox and PageRank recently, and it seems I can’t expect much from the coming PR update at least. And with the site still being placed in the sandbox, I’ll still be seeing limited results from Google in the coming months. This month we’ve gotten around 500 visits from Google searches, and pretty much all of those are specific “long-tail” searches. By the time the site gets out of the sandbox, and gets a better reputation in Google, I firmly believe that we’ll experience steady growth from Google traffic.

What’s important in the meantime is to keep working patiently on keeping up the activity, and building quality content and trying to generate more incoming links. This is the most effective way to get the site out of the sandbox as quickly as possible, and hopefully as a result of it, we’ll get a decent result from the next PR update at least. The only reason I’m actually concerned about the PR is because I know it matters when I want to sell ads, and as I’ve already mentioned, I hope to generate most of the income through selling ads myself, as opposed to the placeholder AdSense ads I have up right now.

That’s almost it, but just incase anyone is wondering, I can mention that we’re well on track to reaching the set goal of 100 subscribers to our feed by the start of June. In fact, we’re already over half way there, so that should at least be able to reach. What’s important here, is that I’m able to keep it updated with new articles frequently, or else we’ll quickly lose subscribers. That’s it! And as you can all tell, it’s important for me when it comes to Bloggst to follow a very transparent “business model”, and such if you have any questions, feel free to ask.

I also remember having this feeling when working on a previous project, and I felt that the site I was working on had pretty much grown to its full potential. At that time, I felt that there was really nothing I could do that would make the site grow any further in terms of attracting new visitors, and increasing activity.

Of course this feeling is just a hoax, a deception of the mind if you will. When you come to this point, and get that helpless feeling, the easiest thing to do is to give out. Perhaps sell, sell, sell, and leave the responsibility to someone else. But that’s not nearly as rewarding as overcoming the obstacles put in front of you. So what I intend to do, is to more or less take a break from the project today (I already posted an article, so that’s covered), collect new strenght and motivation through rest and relaxation, and come back stronger than ever tomorrow. Hopefully a day’s rest will do me good, and maybe I can even come up with some new ideas that I can use for promotion. If not, that’s no crisis, because I know that what I’m already doing is working, and I just need to keep at it and be patient.

This was a somewhat random post from the inner workings of my complicated mind, but it would be nice to hear someone else’s take on these things as well, so feel free to comment if the situation seems familiar.