They say that patience is a virtue, but does that mean that impatience is neccessarily a vice?

I’m currently waiting on the sale of two of my sites and one domain. One was sold and the buyer backed out after three days of me waiting for payment and the other is only a little over a day of waiting. For the first one I’m now waiting on a new buyer and the second one, I trust the guy completely because I’ve seen him all over the web and I know that he has done tons of transactions, but I also expected him to have paid by now. To be honest my impatience stems from worry. These two sales are what I am counting on to launch other projects for the coming year. I have one website that I have sitting fully and completely ready to go and which I fully expect to make lots of money, but I can’t run it until I get on a VPS (virtual private server) which I can’t afford until I finish out these sales.

The domain I’m not really worried about, but I’d like to get it taken care of so that its not hanging over my head.

I was hoping to have all three completed by now, but I guess from this I have learned that selling a site is not as easy as it may look.

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I’ve got big plans for me this year. There are three things that I see that will make me much more successful.

SEO

To be honest I’ve never put much stock in search engine optimization. I’ve never really learned anything about it; only doing partial hack jobs from various articles that I’ve read from various places on the web. As a result I’ve never recieved much traffic from any of the search engines. This year I need to learn both the basics and some advanced techniques so that I too can be in the running for search engine traffic.

Graphics

I have very little creative talent so it won’t come as any surprise to you that I am very bad at graphics. I have learned from a desktop publishing class that I am taking that I can be creative and come up with good products if I take the time and I know how to use the right tools. So this year I resolve to become proficient at graphic design so that I don’t have to hire designers.

Web Programming

I must confess that I know no web programming languages. The only programming language that I have experience with is Java and Java is too ungainly to be used for web development. The only good thing about learning Java from a webmaster’s perspective is that it has taught me to read code so even without knowing how to generate custom code, I have learned to edit, copy, and mimic code to find ways for it to work. So this year I plan to learn and utilize 4 languages: PHP, MySQL, CSS, and XHTML.

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In order to monetize my sites I will initially use a combination of three ad networks.

Google Adsense
The first that I will use, and the one that I plan to use the most is Google Adsense. Adsense is recognized as a market leader. They pay very well depending on the topic and since they have so many advertisers they almost always completely fill your inventory. Plus, they are always rolling out new features. Adsense is definitely one you should check out.
Yahoo Publisher Network
YPN is currently in beta. They are accepting applications as part of the beta, but only from the US. YPN has highly customizable ads, but they don’t have as many and they aren’t as targeted as Google Adsense. Still, it is worth it to sign up and wait for them to be truely competitive.
Chitika eMiniMalls
I’ll use Chitika very limitedly. They have a unique approach and they pay very well per click, but they only pay for clicks originating from the US which makes them just a little bit less desireable than Google or Yahoo, however since they can be used with either if you turn off the contextual mode Chitika can work as a very good supplemental income source if you get a lot of US traffic. The greatest benefit I see coming from Chitika is that they will pay via paypal with only a $10 payout level.

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Welcome to MasterTheWeb. I have always, and for the time being will continue to, considered myself a novice when it comes to webmastering. Don’t get me wrong, I know enough to get by so that I don’t normally look completely stupid. But 2006 is going to be different. In 2006 I am going to make myself a successful webmaster. MasterTheWeb will serve as a chronicle of my journey; after all, it’s not where you end up that matters, it’s how you get there.

To serve as a measure of success I have a few goals.

Higher goals

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