Josh Buckley Internet Entrepreneur

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Introduction: staying motivated
We’ve all had that problem in the past! We’ve had the perfect idea. We spend a long time working on it and once it’s released, the lack of motivation drags you down. You may get bored of the lack of activity and growth, patience is vital for new websites! You cannot just expect your website to be an overnight success.

There will always be times when you lack motivation in your website, it’s about getting over those times. Selling out can take you on to something new, as i’ve done in the past. However, that’s just a short-term solution. Letting a lack of motivation beat you is a sign of weakness, menewsha is now the project that i’ve kept for the longest amount of time. Before that, i built up a site and ended up selling after a month or two. That’s all down to motivation, I saw the size of the competition and buckled under it.

My favourite way of staying motivated with my websites is keeping track of success, and looking back at it. I keep an excel file of how much menewsha makes each month, i post about features on my blog. If i look back at older posts, I would see that my network has come a long way. Selling all this success would take me straight back the start. Why would I want to do that?

If you’re running a community, your users would also be a great source of motivation. They are what keep me running. I get many compliments on my forums, which is great. Just a two days ago, menewsha reached it’s first 1,000 page forum thread. That’s quite an achievement, right? It’s not spam, either.

Friends can also help. Just talking about their projects, talking about yours. Somebody close to you can see your projects and success in a diferent way. They may have seen it happen so much quicker than you did. Don’t go fishing around for compliments from friends, they will come with success

Topics:

• Exams over
• Menewsha: 6k members, 600k forum posts.
• Blog update

Exams over
It feels like i haven’t done a proper blog entry in a long time! Exams have been on all week, pretty stressful. I needed to force myself to put exams above everything else. I’m confident that i did well, just a waiting game now.

Anyway, now I’ll give you guys a better update than last time

Menewsha: 6k members, 600k forum posts.
Menewsha is getting ever closer to 10,000 users and a million forum posts! Compared to gaiaonline (my main competitior) that’s nothing. But, menewsha will carry on it’s growth, steadily but surely. I’m still waiting to get accepted to big-boards, i’m very confident that I will. They accept most forums that fit the criteria, and there are forums with lower stats than menewsha there. They say that it can take a few weeks, i don’t see why….

I actually did a cool little viral marketing trick to boost the site up, getting some more members in. For two nights I put on the referral system, giving the users a unique url to refer their friends with. When they referred their friends, it grants them 50 gold (in-game currency) That worked perfectly, and no spammers this time.

Speaking of spammers, menewsha was getting bombared with spambots recently. The forum is based off of phpbb, so what do you expect? Luckily, i managed to get rid of nearly all the spammers with a few code changes here and there… i’ve still got it

There is one day left of selling items, i’m pretty sure that last month woun’t be beaten. I’ll show you the graph again, however the last few days of selling is when people seem to buy a lot. But, not enough to beat the whopping amount that was sold last month. I’ll make sure that next month is better, with better items that all of the users will want

I need to figure out how to change the 1,2,3 to march, april, may in excel. Things may get confusing, but after all the posts with that graph you should understand.

I’ve also been looking around for a new server provider. I’m currently paying $200 a month to hostgator for my dedicated server, but Oli showed me the company he uses. They look great. I’m temped in paying $350 or so a month for a great server. If you want to see the company, it’s LiquidWeb

Blog update
I’ve been playing around with photoshop to try out my new blog design. I’ve wanted to go for a simpler, yet still unique design.

Click on it for a bigger version:

It’s still unfinished, and i’m not sure if it’s the way that i want to take this blog. If you guys would give me your oppinion on the new design, it would be great. I’ll definately need to install that reply to comments mod sometime.

In other news: Feedburner is being sold to google, the best cursor ever has been found, 20 wordpress themes that don’t dissapoint and NetbusinessBlog is for sale.