SEEFAD #1 Results

This post is a followup to SEEFAD: Self Employed Experience For A Day.

I had a great time during the course of the day. I woke up earlier than I would on a normal day because I was excited to get started. I did some brainstorming over hot chocolate on my balcony and drew up a plan for the new site I've been scheming about. I uncovered a mindblowing realization that if I throw in a handful of 'user centric' pages on this site, then I could hope for a bunch more visitors that I hadn't initially anticipated. I did a good amount of keyword research and then I wrote ZERO articles to get the site started.

Unfortunately, the plan was to spend most of the 'working day' writing articles to not only jump start my progress on the site, but also to gauge how quickly I can produce these articles so I can use it as a planning benchmark. I got a lot accomplished, but article writing wasn't one of them.

Everything was well on track until about 10:30am when I received a call from a recruiter about a job I'm actually interested in (normally I get calls about embedded systems and other crap I don't like). I don't yet know if it will amount to anything, but I spent the next hour or so researching the area the job is located in. Of course this had to include checking cost of living prices, especially rent, and looking up some activities in such a small town.

At the end of these shenanigans, it was time for lunch. I took a break and watched an episode of 'That 70's Show' from one of my box sets and then attempted to get back to work. Basically from this point on I was all over the place, checking various websites, reading, and occasionally doing some work.

I reworked some of the SEO characteristics of my power inverter website to try to help it get a ranking. I found some strange problems with it and thought of another potential problem this morning. The most interesting problems were that none of the pages linked back to the index page and there were H2 tags on every page, but not H1 tags...

Clearly this was a different version of myself when I created this site two years ago ;) I wouldn't do things like this now. Anyway, I changed the H2's to H1's and setup the linking structure (which is still slightly faulty) to better accomodate the world. These could have been the major issues holding the site back from a good ranking (it was back at like 100 for 'power inverter', which is wildly absurd because there isn't too much competition and it's the site's sole focus).

I think the day was pretty positive but obviously I didn't accomplish the tasks I intended to.

Lessons Learned:

• Treat the day more like you're at a job
• Focus on task items, but allow for short timed breaks to pursue tangents
• Attempt a fixed schedule next time...

Speaking of next time, I've decided that it will be tomorrow! I do have a class from 10-11am, but I'll just pretend that is a business meeting or seminar. I'm going to create a fixed plan tonight with time slots and what should be accomplished/attempted in each of the time slots. I think that will be a more efficient method of tackling the goals.