The Aspiring Crackpot

This is the logical continuation of my previous post $1200/yr with No Effort Whatsoever. I have been following my own advice and saving every 1NT coin that I can. After my first 2.5 months, I saved NT8,000 ($258). I am at the end of my 4th month, and I now have NT28,000 ($875) of genuine savings! Did I knock over a video arcade? No! Then where did this money come from?

I must admit, not all of this was change. In fact, I really think that 90% of it was attitude, and the other 10% was actually getting my ass to the bank.

I was walking to the bank with Nick, our Operations Manager here at ili Design. Nick is an extremely pragmatic guy who has been pinching every penny since birth. When he saw my tray of carefully separated change, he said (not unsarcastically), “Stupid. Why don’t you just make a savings plan?”

That would have been wonderful advice for someone who’s been budgeting since the womb, but this is me we’re talking about. “Guess how many deposits I’ve made since I opened this account.” Of course, he couldn’t answer. I could, right off the top of my head.

“Two,” I said. “Last month and this.” In fact, I’d even go so far as to say that it is the least stupid thing I’ve done in a long time. If playing the game of saving a handful of change every day just to see how much you can get by the end of the month will get you to the bank, it’s an awesome start. People don’t get rich (and stay rich) from windfalls like inheritance or winning the lottery, they get rich from having a saving and accruing interest over the long term. Check out “The Millionaire Next Door,” you’ll see. Anyone can do it. That means you. And me.

As an added bonus, once I got my mind into the mode of saving, I have found it easier to scrape together a few more thousand here and there to add to the pot. Now it has become a personal challenge to me, and if you have read any of my previous posts, you know that I’m a beast (actually a 40ft mechanized locomoto-beast) in the self discipline department.

It’s a good thing too, because my salary just dropped 60%. It’s a good thing I’ve been practicing. Now I can ONLY save change!

This site isn’t a private affair. I’m doing this in hopes that my crazy schemes of becoming a better person will help someone, and that this can in turn provide a little support for my time. In any case, one of the aspects of the creation of the Aspiring Crackpot is that it’s a wonderful opportunity for me to teach myself SEO, or, if you’ve been living under a rock, Search Engine Optimization. Now, I’m going to focus on “white-hat”, or benign optimizations (although I know there’s contention as to what this actually means.) In case you’re thinking of setting up something similar, here is a list of exactly what I’ve done. Let me say first that none of these are my original ideas, I’ve only done what I’ve been able to glean from reading online.

The first thing was to optimize Wordpress. Wordpress is awesome in that it works similar to many CMSs, or Content Management Systems. When you write a post, it’s saved as a database entry, and when someone navigates to your page, the php script calls that entry, using the CSS as a filter to display the content, just as if you’d programmed the page by hand. It’s simple for the user, and provides the freedom of simple writing and publishing to many people who aren’t tech-savvy enough to program a site on their own. Unfortunately there are a few drawbacks to this system, the most important being that by default, it’s not very search engine friendly.

The first step is to fix up your links. Because CMS systems use backend server-speak to interface with the database, records (ie. your posts) are called from the database by their unique identifier number, like this: http://www.duanemathes.com/?p=123

Obviously the p=123 is your 123rd post, but what does that mean to a search engine robot crawling and indexing by keyword? In this example, think of a robot as the village idiot. The village idiot wants to know where he can eat, drink, and be merry, and will be happy to bring all his friends, but would he remember the street address of “The Salty Seaman” after a night on the slosh? Doubtful. He’d remember the wench with the biggest — well, keywords.

Similarly, the robot won’t even read your site if you don’t have friendly links (ie. big jugs.) Fortunately for us, Wordpress has an easy fix.

1. Navigate to Options / Permalinks.

2. Choose custom, and enter: /%category%/%postname%/

(If your .htaccess file isn’t writeable, Wordpress will give you a snippet of code to paste into it.)

3. Save, and mouse over one of your links. You’ll see that they are much more readable, not only to you, but to any village idiot that happens to wander by.

Another thing I’ve done to build links is set up BlogRush, a link sharing system for bloggers. Tomorrow I’ll get into why this is great for increasing your visibility, but for now, click here to learn more.