My 4 Hour Workweek

November is almost here (my birthday month!), so it’s time for another reading list.  This month, I’m going to go with a couple suggestions that were in the comments of last month’s post.  Also, I’ve decided to add a short summary (taken from Amazon) for each book, in case you don’t feel like heading over to Amazon’s product page.

Here they are:

1) The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

• “The best-selling author of The Big Switch returns with an explosive look at technology’s effect on the mind. “Is Google making us stupid?” When Nicholas Carr posed that question, in a celebrated Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the Net’s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply?

2) What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

• “In a book that’s one part prophecy, one part thought experiment, one part manifesto, and one part survival manual, internet impresario and blogging pioneer Jeff Jarvis reverse-engineers Google—the fastest-growing company in history—to discover forty clear and straightforward rules to manage and live by. At the same time, he illuminates the new worldview of the internet generation: how it challenges and destroys, but also opens up vast new opportunities. His findings are counterintuitive, imaginative, practical, and above all visionary, giving readers a glimpse of how everyone and everything—from corporations to governments, nations to individuals—must evolve in the Google era.”

If you’ve read or are currently reading any of the books listed here, please share your comments.  I’d love to see what everyone else thinks about these books, especially before I read them.  If you have suggestions for next month’s reading list, please share those too!  As always, you can check out my past reading lists by clicking the Reading link on the top menu.

For my niche site, the past week has been a wild roller coaster.  After my recent discovery that I picked the wrong target keyword and domain (by only one letter), I explained how the tiny change will make a huge difference.  Following this, the site underwent a period of a few days where there was virtually no traffic, and it had seemingly fallen off Google’s radar (although it was still indexed).

As with everything else in the passive income “game,” patience is key.  Despite this roller coaster of events, a lot of good things have come out of the past week or two for this niche site.  Let’s explore it, shall we?

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When it comes to learning SEO (search engine optimization) on the internet, there’s a lot of fluff out there.  There are experts who claim to know everything and know very little, and there are people with hidden agendas – one of which is to make money off of you by promoting a product or getting you to opt into their e-mail list.  We accept this reality, and many of us embrace it.

That’s why it’s a breath of fresh air when the masters of SEO – the search engines themselves – provide guidance.  They have no hidden agendas, or at least, none that really bother us.  They want to create useful search engines and meaningful results, so it’s in their best interest to come up with a ranking algorithm that accomplishes these objectives.

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In an effort to enhance the SEO of my blog, I decided to change the permalink structure of my posts.  You may have noticed that my post URLs used to contain the month and year the post was published, along with the name of the post.   Instead, I wanted my permalink structure to just include the name of the post.

In other words, it used to look something like this:

/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html

And now, I’ve changed it to this:

/%postname%/

Much cleaner and it’s more SEO friendly (or so I’ve read).  My biggest concern was creating broken links on other sites (where my blog posts may be linked) and losing any pagerank assigned to each specific page through Google.  To mitigate this issue, I used the plugin Dean’s Permalinks Migration 1.0. Very simply, you can input your old permalink structure and then change your permalink structure to what you want it to be (in the same permalink settings you would normally use), and the plugin takes care of the permanent redirection.  This is similar to the 301 redirection I discussed in another post.

The Big Problem

Unfortunately, I didn’t account for the affect this would have on my social networking/bookmarking plugins – in particular, the Retweet button and StumbleUpon button.  Because my link structure changed, the counts on these plugins reset to zero (they were tied to the old links that I just changed).

Now, I have nothing! I’ve heard about this happening before, but completely forgot about it.  Now, I’m faced with two options:

1) Leave it as is and maintain a better search engine optimized blog, or

2) Restore the old link structure, and thus restore my tweet and StumbleUpon counts.

I’m really incline to stick with #1, because I know it’s the best long-term answer.  What would you do?

If you’re interested in helping me out, feel free to go back and retweet some of my older posts – I’d owe you forever. I know it seems silly, but it’s been well-documented how important “social proof” is, and I’ve basically just lost a big part of mine!

I’ll start off this post by saying, this update wasn’t planned – it was inspired by a flaw I uncovered in the foundation of my niche website.  As you know, I’ve already made one mistake, but I feel like this one was more critical.  How critical was it?  Let’s just say, had I not uncovered this mistake, I would potentially be missing out on a 500% increase in traffic.

The source of the mistake: My original keyword research (and domain purchase).  Allow me to explain…

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It’s kind of sad that most of the blog posts you read today (that cover WordPress plugins) only seem to highlight premium plugins (generally, because the blogger gets an affiliate commission).  Don’t get me wrong – there are a lot of great premium plugins, and I use many of them myself.  However, I wanted to come up with a detailed list of free WordPress plugins that I think are helpful for niche websites and blogs.

You certainly don’t need every one of these plugins for every single niche site you create, but I thought it would be helpful to compile a list that you can reference whenever you’re creating a site, or for a site you already have and want to improve.  These plugins are not listed in any particular order.

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You know the cliche:  Content is king.

When it comes to these niche websites (this probably applies more to micro-niche sites), however, I don’t believe content is king.  Traffic is king.  Monetization strategy is queen.  Content may actually only be the prince or princess.  If you’re trying to build a real authority site (with a broad base of content, with subscribers and a community), you can ignore what I’m saying here.  In that case, content is probably king.

But if you’re merely providing content in order to make a commission one way or another, content merely needs to be sufficient in quantity and quality.  I’m sure people are going to disagree with me, but I believe this to be generally true for smaller niche sites.  Okay, enough with the royal family analogy.  Allow me to explain.

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If you’re at all like me, you are constantly observing people around you (especially those who you admire), and you’re always wondering what makes them tick.  Success is everywhere, and it’s made up of so many different factors that it’s nearly impossible to create a sure-fire path to success.  Luck, determination, intelligence, and subject matter all play an important role, and the importance of each individual factor varies from person to person and situation to situation.

One thing I noticed that seems to be present in many examples of success (in particular, with internet entrepreneurs), is that their success was born out of some kind of chaotic situation: they were laid off from work (or fired), they were faced with unexpected, life-changing events (new child, death in the family, etc.), or were otherwise up against extreme conditions or several instances of failure.  In these examples of success, the individual in the “chaotic situation” emerged from it stronger and better equipped for success.

An examination of this seemingly common trait brings me to this question – Can “forced chaos” lead to success?

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