If you have been a regular visitor of my website during the past 8-10 months, you will know I have been updating my blog daily for most of this time. There were several reasons why I decided to do this, mainly because I wanted to increase my ability to write creative content and because I wanted to create a loyal based of readers who would always find new articles everyday. I think I have achieved both of these goals in the sense that it is now much easier for me to come up with new posts for the blog and my website is registering a very good 30-40% of returning visitors, some of which I think read my blog on a regular basis (thank you for stopping by ! :o)). Now I feel it is time to take this "daily writing" and all the generated content to the "next level", so to speak. On today's post I will talk to you about a new project I will be starting dealing with all this content that and a new, free ebook that will come out as a result :o).
I have noticed during the past 6 months that most of the articles I write are not read a lot and most of them end up as part of my archives, being accessed only sporadically once or twice every month. Most of the people who find my blog through google end up in articles dealing with backtesting, renko charts, tick charts, Watukushay experts, Ayotl and mainly, in articles dealing with Commercial EA reviews. I feel that this is a waste of content since I believe some of my best contributions are actually the articles that are less-found through search engines.
How to fix this issue ? Some of you have suggested that my navigation system is pretty bad and that I should change it to a more "category sorted", "user friendly" way of finding my different posts and articles. You are absolutely right in this sense but the truth is that I am bound by the limitations of the blogger platform which does not allow me to input posts categories and generate menus with as much freedom as I would like. Of course, changing websites might be a solution for this (changing to a more powerful platform like wordpress) but the fact is that I would lose search engine placement and important links which make this move probably not so good for the blog right now.
After reading some websites dealing with content organization and how to make old, unvisited, yet extremely relevant content surface, I decided that the most productive and so the best way to get my content out there would be to organize it in a free ebook. So what I will be doing right now is pretty simple, I will be taking many of my blog posts and I will edit them so that they can be "stitched together" in an ebook. This ebook will become available totally for free and it will become - hopefully - a vital piece of information for new traders who are looking into becoming long term profitable traders using automated trading systems. The ebook will deal with many issues I have discussed within posts like doing backtests, simulation reliability, backtesting pitfalls, scalping systems, martingale systems, surviving draw down periods, EA design, etc.
Does this make the current ebook irrelevant ? Of course not ! The current ebook contains a lot of content which has never been published on the blog and it is bound to stay as the guide it has always been for people new to automated trading. What I seek with the new free ebook is to organize the blog's content and make it easily accessible for people who will not easily get to all those archived articles. It will be more of a "blog summary" which I think will prove absolutely useful for many people out there. Right now I am aiming for a 30-50 page ebook but the final length will depend on how much content I take from the blog and how much space it takes after editing it to fit a more "ebook feel".
Certainly the current ebook will have some changes (sorry, I know it hasn't been updated for a while !) which I will discuss on tomorrow's post. I will be working on a very important remake and content addition in July and other similar changes and I am definitely thinking about offering it only within Asirikuy as for me everything is kind of bundled now and I fear that people buying only the ebook are not getting "the whole picture". Again, I will explain all of this in much more detail on tomorrow's post :o).
If you have any suggestions or opinion about this new free ebook project dealing with the blog's contents please leave a comment. Is there any post you would like to see on the ebook ? Do you think the idea is good/bad ? Which posts do you think would be very useful if you were a new trader ? Which posts did you find particularly interesting ? Please leave a comment :o).
If you would like to learn more about automated trading and how you too can learn to design your own trading systems based on sound trading tactics please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or joining Asirikuy to receive all ebook purchase benefits, weekly updates, check the live accounts I am running with several expert advisors and get in the road towards long term success in the forex market using automated trading systems. I hope you enjoyed the article !
I have noticed during the past 6 months that most of the articles I write are not read a lot and most of them end up as part of my archives, being accessed only sporadically once or twice every month. Most of the people who find my blog through google end up in articles dealing with backtesting, renko charts, tick charts, Watukushay experts, Ayotl and mainly, in articles dealing with Commercial EA reviews. I feel that this is a waste of content since I believe some of my best contributions are actually the articles that are less-found through search engines.
How to fix this issue ? Some of you have suggested that my navigation system is pretty bad and that I should change it to a more "category sorted", "user friendly" way of finding my different posts and articles. You are absolutely right in this sense but the truth is that I am bound by the limitations of the blogger platform which does not allow me to input posts categories and generate menus with as much freedom as I would like. Of course, changing websites might be a solution for this (changing to a more powerful platform like wordpress) but the fact is that I would lose search engine placement and important links which make this move probably not so good for the blog right now.
After reading some websites dealing with content organization and how to make old, unvisited, yet extremely relevant content surface, I decided that the most productive and so the best way to get my content out there would be to organize it in a free ebook. So what I will be doing right now is pretty simple, I will be taking many of my blog posts and I will edit them so that they can be "stitched together" in an ebook. This ebook will become available totally for free and it will become - hopefully - a vital piece of information for new traders who are looking into becoming long term profitable traders using automated trading systems. The ebook will deal with many issues I have discussed within posts like doing backtests, simulation reliability, backtesting pitfalls, scalping systems, martingale systems, surviving draw down periods, EA design, etc.
Does this make the current ebook irrelevant ? Of course not ! The current ebook contains a lot of content which has never been published on the blog and it is bound to stay as the guide it has always been for people new to automated trading. What I seek with the new free ebook is to organize the blog's content and make it easily accessible for people who will not easily get to all those archived articles. It will be more of a "blog summary" which I think will prove absolutely useful for many people out there. Right now I am aiming for a 30-50 page ebook but the final length will depend on how much content I take from the blog and how much space it takes after editing it to fit a more "ebook feel".
Certainly the current ebook will have some changes (sorry, I know it hasn't been updated for a while !) which I will discuss on tomorrow's post. I will be working on a very important remake and content addition in July and other similar changes and I am definitely thinking about offering it only within Asirikuy as for me everything is kind of bundled now and I fear that people buying only the ebook are not getting "the whole picture". Again, I will explain all of this in much more detail on tomorrow's post :o).
If you have any suggestions or opinion about this new free ebook project dealing with the blog's contents please leave a comment. Is there any post you would like to see on the ebook ? Do you think the idea is good/bad ? Which posts do you think would be very useful if you were a new trader ? Which posts did you find particularly interesting ? Please leave a comment :o).
If you would like to learn more about automated trading and how you too can learn to design your own trading systems based on sound trading tactics please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or joining Asirikuy to receive all ebook purchase benefits, weekly updates, check the live accounts I am running with several expert advisors and get in the road towards long term success in the forex market using automated trading systems. I hope you enjoyed the article !
Posts
9 comments:
Hi Daniel,
For me as a rookie trader there were two very important things that I learned here in this blog and I think it basically changed my views on trading and hopefully helps me to be a successful trader:
- First and foremost: REALISTIC profit expectation. This is a thing that is very hard to accept for a newbie, 'cause as we know the net is full of the promises of unrealistic profit dreams ('systems' that make few hundred %s per 2-3 months). For me it took about a year to get rid of these irrational expectations. Finally, it was an aha moment when I discovered the simple rule, that a very good trader cannot make more annually in average than 2-3 times of his/her worst drawdown in the long term.
- The other fundamental discovery is that long term profitable systems have extended periods of drawdown that can be even a year or more. You have to be prepared for that and you have to know what to expect in terms of drawdown period length and depth.
Of course there are a ton of very interesting and important posts here - like adapting to market volatilty, or the flowchart of how to make a long term profitable mechanical system, the indi series, portfolio trading, just to mention a few - that a trader has to know, but I think that in your e-book you should put a big emphasis on the two things above if you target the begginers.
Gabor
Daniel-
Good idea making your material more accessible to regular blog visitors who do not yet subscribe to Asirikuy.
I think the e-book format is too dense for most readers to absorb. I found from reading your e-book that after the first few sections, I had to take a break and assimiate the information because it challenged so many preconceived notions of trading. As a result, I was tired and had to come back later to read more.
Maybe its different with printed books, but I seem to have a shorter attention span for stuff read online. As it stands now, I still haven't finished the original e-book because there is took much information in there.
I think you are better served to make a "free" and a "paid" level of access to Asirikuy. Take everything on the site and divide it into these 2 categories.
The basics (profit expectations, evaluating EA's, etc and 2 or 3 EA's) should be free to any registered user. The advanced stuff (mathematical expectancy, live account access and all EA's) should be at the paid level.
You can still write the e-book, but instead make registered users come back to your site for each chapter. This increases your page views, user loyalty, ad views, etc, etc.
Under this format, I probably would have joined Asirikuy many months ago. Same information, but a different delivery method.
Cheers and keep the good work,
Chris
Hello Gabor and Chris,
Thank you very much for your comments :o).
@Gabor : I am glad that you like the ebook idea, definitely you are right about your suggestions and I will make sure those two points take up a very large portion of the material. It is definitely very important to have realistic profit and draw down expectations and - as you say - this is one of the most difficult things to achieve in automated trading. I am sure this will help beginners tremendously !
@Chris : You are definitely right about reading online material. I believe that probably my ebooks are too dense in the sense that I try to explain too many concepts in small amounts of space (bad habit from writing scientific papers) and I will definitely take into account your suggestion in this regard.
Your idea about the free section of Asirikuy is also intriguing but it would definitely complicate site management for me to a good extent. As you say it probably makes a lot of sense from a marketing perspective but well, Asirikuy is a one man operation when it comes to site management :o). However I will give it some thought, as always you have some good ideas !
Thank you very much again for your comments guys and for being such faithful readers :o)
Best Regards,
Daniel Fernandez
Daniel:
I am reader of your posts not in your web site but using RSS. Does your meassures of page hits include RSS? May be you have more readers that you think.
About the ebook it is simply a great idea to have all your excelent articles in one place.
Thanks again for sharing your knowledge.
CAVA.
Hello CAVA,
Thank you very much for your comment :o) Now that you mention it, I do offer the links to add my RSS feed but blogger doesn't offer me any way to actually track how many people are accessing my content through this service.
Hopefully you are right and I have many more readers than what I think :o). I am glad you like the ebook idea ! Thanks again for your comment,
Best Regards,
Daniel
Hi Daniel,
I hope you're doing well. I've been very busy lately reading all of the very cool and useful materials available in Asirikuy (awesome work, BTW), so I'm just now catching up with your latest blog posts.
I run a couple of blogs as a hobby in my free time, and I thought perhaps I could give you my opinion about the blogging issue. I my experience, Blogger is far inferior to Wordpress when you're looking for flexibility, adaptability, customization power, etc., particularly if you have sufficient html and php knowledge. If you are afraid of losing traffic by moving your blog, you could just redirect all the traffic to your new WP blog, at least for the first couple of months until your users take note of the "move" and update their links, etc. Exporting/importing between blogger and WP works very well: I have actually done it in the past and didn't lose any of my posts, comments, or categories/tags. If you are interested in WP, let me know and I'll provide you with more specific information and all sorts of links and resources that you can use.
As for your RSS feeds, have you tried Feedburner? It is a very powerful feed manager packed with cool tools (including keeping track of the amount of followers, of course), which can even help you improve your online presence and ranking.
I hope this was useful. Take care!
Francisco
Hello Francisco,
Thank you very much for your comment and kind words about Asirikuy :o) I am glad you are currently enjoying it and going through all the content available on the website.
I do agree with your wordpress vs blogger issue and obviously wordpress is a much more powerful platform. I also have a wordpress blog so I already have a hang of all the basics and I could definitely port this blog but - as I said before - I am concerned about my google ranking and the links currently outside my website. There are also some hidden advantages to using blogger like - for example - that new posts are indexed in a few minutes on google (probably because these are google servers).
Regarding the RSS feed, I do know feedburner but it wouldn't help me to know my current amount of RSS readers since only new readers that signup to the feed through feedburner would get counted. I would like to know the amount of readers I am currently getting, but I believe this is just not possible.
However thank you very much for offering a helping hand and for your suggestions. I will give the move to wordpress a little bit more thought and perhaps next year I'll have more confidence to take this decision. :o) Thanks again for your comment and for joining Asirikuy !
Best Regards,
Daniel
Daniel:
Isn't there an option in blogger to configure rss feed to publish only a part of the posts? Then rss users have to come to the site for the whole post that way you can get a more accurate picture about your visitors. I personally don't like that solution very much, because I like to read the content in my favorite rss reader, but maybe you should give it a try, at least for a shorter period.
As for wordpress and search engine indexing speed, there's a solution for that:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/
Hello Gabor,
Thank you very much again for your comment :o) I have just looked and there doesn't seem to be such an RSS limiting option in blogger.
But well, I don't mind if I don't know the exact number of RSS subscribers I have, I just hope they keep growing :o). Also thank you very much for the link, I will check that up and - as I said before - I may make the blogger to wordpress change in 2011.
Thanks again for the comments :o)
Best Regards,
Daniel
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