What does a typical day look like for you?

(Updated from nearly 6 months ago)

Here is another great question that I have been asked multiple times in the recent past. I figured today would be the perfect day to answer this question as it has been a typical Monday!

I typically start my day at around 7:00am or 7:30am. When I get up in the morning, I am usually ready to get my day started and I don’t need much time to come to my senses. I like to head straight to the office which requires that I open our back slidiing glass door, walk outside, close the door, then take about 12 steps. I am then standing at the front door of our newly constructed office that was completed the first part of May. I am normally at the office no later than 8:00am on a typical work day.

When I get to my office I like to start of with bible reading, prayer, and some good quiet time to think about all that is going on in my life and business. Once, I am finished in my preparation for the day, I dive right in to my emails. Now that I have someone checking my emails, my private email address (which gets very little spam) receives 50-100 emails daily. I like to check my email to get my day started and usually takes anywhere from 15-30 minutes.

The rest of my days is spent on my forums, in multiple IM chat windows, responding to emails, talking on the phone, and reading through some of the forums I frequent. I will normally go home and get a bite to eat with my wife and kids for lunch at about noon, although we do get an invite next door (our grandparents house) for lunch a couple of times each week. One of my goals is to make at least 3 posts per day on all of the forums I run, and this can take up to an hour a day depending on what issues arise on any given forum.

The end of my work day usually hits between 4:30pm and 5:30pm when lock up the office and head home. In less than 26 seconds, I am in my house visiting with my wife and/or playing with the kids. We like to eat an early dinner, so we are usually through eating by 6:00pm. Our kids go to bed at around 8:30pm, so after dinner we focus on playing or reading with the kids until they get ready for bed at about 8:00pm. Once the kids are in bed, my wife and I spend time talking and hanging out. We may watch a movie some nights (thanks to NetFlix) or play a board game. We are usually in bed by 10:30pm or 11:00pm. This is a typical work day…

What does a typical day look like for you?

Here is another great question that I have been asked multiple times in the recent past. I figured today would be the perfect day to answer this question as it has been a typical Monday!

I typically start my day at around 6:00am or 6:30am. When I get up in the morning, I am usually ready to get my day started and I don’t need much time to come to my senses. I like to head straight to the office which requires that I open our back slidiing glass door, walk outside, close the door, then take about 12 steps. I am then standing at the front door of our newly constructed office that was completed the first part of May. I am normally at the office no later than 6:30am on a typical work day.

When I get to my office I like to start of with bible reading, prayer, and some good quiet time to think about all that is going on in my life and business. Once, I am finished in my preparation for the day, I dive right in to my emails. With spam, I receive between 300-500 emails daily to give you an idea of what I must deal with on a daily basis. My morning email duties can take anywhere from 15 minutes to 1 hour usually. I like to then get my daily reports updated which tracks income spread across all my sites. This usually takes about 20 minutes or so. These are things I do nearly every morning unless I am faced with some type of emergency.

The rest of my days is spent on my forums, in multiple IM chat windows, responding to emails, talking on the phone, and reading through some of the forums I frequent like SitePoint or DNForum. I will normally go home and get a bite to eat with my wife and kids for lunch at about noon, although we do get an invite next door (our grandparents house) for lunch a couple of times each week. One of my goals is to make at least 3 posts per day on all of the forums I run, and this can take up to 1-2 hours a day depending on what issues arise on any given forum.

The end of my work day usually hits between 4:30pm and 5:30pm and lock up the office and head home. In less than 26 seconds, I am in my house visiting with my wife and/or playing with the kids. We like to eat an early dinner, so we are usually through eating by 6:00pm. Our kids go to bed at around 8:30pm, so after dinner we focus on playing or reading with the kids until they get ready for bed at about 8:00pm. Once the kids are in bed, my wife and I spend time talking and hanging out. We may watch a movie some nights (thanks to NetFlix) or play a board game. We are usually in bed by 10:30pm or 11:00pm. This is a typical work day in the life of Lee Dodd.

Hi, I was wondering how much do you know about the topics you start forums on?
You have forums of many different topics, are you an expert at all of them?
If not how do you compensate for the lack of knowledge?

I wanted to try catching up on some of the recent mailbag questions I have received, and will start with this set of fantastic questions. Any time I start or purchase a community, I want to have at least a basic knowledge and a good level of interest in the genre. I don’t have to be an expert nor do I claim to be one. With SprintUsers.com, it was a perfect fit as I have been a Sprint PCS customer since 2000 and enjoy their service and phones. With CruiseLineForums.com, it was great because my wife and I have been on a couple of cruises with plans to take more in the future. With Guitars101, it was great because I had just begun taking periodic lessons within the pas 6-8 months learning to play the guitar. As you can see, I have been able to do well with knowing something about my topics, and having enough interest in them to stay involved and build something special.

Due to the fact that I don’t claim to be an expert on any given subject my forums cover, I have always tried to build a team of volunteer staff that do know a lot about the topic of discussion. Not only are these types of staff members going to be solid contributors, but there dedication to the forum and the topic is very solid. This is much of what I look for when bringing on new moderatros.

> Hi there, you don’t know me, but I found your writings while searching for information about Intellitxt. That big thread on the SitePoint forums. I think it’s awesome how open you are about helping people. Thanks to you, I’m going to look into YPN. You see, last year an established website just fell into our laps, and now that hubby has fixed it so that Google can actually see all that content, it’s approaching the 500,000 impressions a month level, which is why I was searching for Intellitxt information. It’s not exactly a forum, but similar… It’s an advice site.

My husband and I are trying to figure out the best ways to get the most out of the site without looking too “spammy”, I guess. Anyway, thanks again for your help. Take care!

Thanks for the kind words and the email! After taking a close look at your site, I see a number of areas where you have room for improvement. I would start with you adsense placement initially. You basically have a poorly blended ad on the right sidebar that likely isn’t getting you many clicks. I would integrate the ads within your fantastic content and work on blending the ads to match the background, coloring the links blue (#0000FF). That alone will increase your adsense income by at least 2-3 times.

Once you have that down (remember to test, test, test!), I would then look at an option like IntelliTXT. I am not sure what your traffic levels are, but they like to work with established sites getting 500,000 or more pageviews monthly. I think this will provide good supplemental income for you as you grow.

The key for your site is going to be new and fresh content for the search engines to gobble up. Continue working to generate both new topics (questions) and good answers. This will keep the people coming and promote growth in a great way!

Best wishes!

What has been your greatest failure?

This is another one of the many interesting questions I receive in the Forum Trends mailbag! I would have to say that my very first forum was my worst failure. It wasn’t a large monetary investment at all, but this was where I got my feet wet and began learning all the ins and outs of vBulletin as well as how to build a forum from scratch. I customized the design, did the promotion, began with basic hacking, and so on. I would spend hours a day posting and recruiting. It basically came back to the fact that I didn’t do enough planning prior to the start date.

As you likely have heard me say before, you need to pick a niche that can be marketed and experience growth. The niche of my choice had to do with a nonprofit organization I was involved with, having to do with child abduction prevention education. I quickly found out (over a period of 3 months), that this wasn’t a niche that was going to be easily developed as a forum.

Looking back, I am VERY glad I got my start here. While I wasted plenty of days, made less than $10 over a 3 month period of time, and ended up shutting the forum down, I still count this as a project with positive results. I began to meet some interesting folks in the forum industry and definitely got my feet wet. This is also where my forum addiction was birthed…