I have a big problem with this. It’s something I THINK I’m working on, but then I realize I’m really not trying very hard. I start to put in place some time management, but then I usually get tired of it and start letting things fall again. You might know what I’m talking about.
So, today Pat Flynn from the SmartPassiveIncome posted this slideshow he came across on Facebook. It puts it simply and gets to the point. I love it, and I’m going to see about printing it out and hanging it on the wall somewhere!
Anyway, I just thought I’d post this for anyone else that might be having trouble with time management and needs a little encouragement and motivation, like me!
Well, I’m back…..finally. It’s been a crazy past month and a half or so. First of all, I was delayed in posting any new reports because I had a bad toothache that laid me up for a few days. Then we started renovating our kitchen which then ended up turning into a whole house thing. Fresh paint, new moulding, finishing up the extra bedroom, texturing, and so on. During that time we all got sick a couple of times, and then I’ve been working on a new website for our church. So.
I will say though, the past 2 months have been shaping up VERY nicely and I’ve seen some wonderful improvement in my Adsense earnings. One thing I’ve noticed is that my amount I earn per click has increased lately. Many times I’ll get $1 or more from just one click from my websites. I’ve even gotten over $2 for a click a couple times! Pretty neat, and it seems that the click through rate (ctr) for the Youtube video ads is much higher than for my websites, like 11-12% vs. maybe 1% for the websites, so either I need to try changing the ad placement on my sites, or the video ads just do better no matter what. I’m thinking it’s the latter.
Income Report for January 2013
Adsense Earnings:
$20.94 (+$13.46)
$7.68 of the total amount above was earned from my candle making Youtube video. Pretty cool, huh? Wait til you see next months report…
How much of that was from my candle making video on Youtube??? $17.38 I’m loving it! Now to just get it in gear and get some more videos up. I actually have 2 candle making videos, but nearly all of the adsense earnings come from the very first one I put up.
$0 (this number will change for the very first time in the March income report! It’s just too bad I won’t see this money until I hit $100, so I just need one more referral!)
Offline Earnings
No offline earnings to report for the last 2 months, but I should start making some for March and onward since my brother is having me finally start work on doing payroll and Quickbooks for his business and I am also handling his online marketing and website. Plus I may be helping some Saturdays at some of the events that he’s doing coffee concessions for this Spring/Summer. And in case you’re interested, here is the link to his website: Coffee In Motion . He has 3 locations in Salem, Oregon. And makes the BEST drinks around!
So that’s all caught up now. Hopefully the next report won’t be so late. I just have the hardest time focusing on too many projects. One of these days I’ll get some sort of system down so I don’t end up abandoning certain projects for months at a time.
Well, here we are again! Christmas is over, New Years is over, and now it’s time to settle back down and get back to a daily routine. I love the holidays, but it is kind of relieving once they’re over with. Now I feel like I can get back to focusing on my goals, not only for my business(s) but also just for my daily home life with my kids and husband, and especially for my spiritual life. I am also looking forward to tax time, since we always get a lot back and then use that to pay off some things so we can start fresh and debt free (except for the house) for the year, or at least almost debt free anyway. I am hoping and praying that this year will see a significant increase in income so we don’t have to wait til tax time to pay things off! And so we don’t have to use credit in order to pay for necessary expenses that come up.
So I haven’t felt much like writing lately and I was just at the library tonight and was feeling accomplished after an unproductive time there because I had got this income report and all the little updates I wanted to do done. Then it was gone…..
So I’m starting over, and I’m just going to jump right into the income report again because that seemed to help get the writing juices flowing earlier.
Website and Quickbooks work: $0 I didn’t do much with Quickbooks last month since my brother is just planning on having me start over from Jan. 1st for both locations. So hopefully I’ll have something here in the next income report Plus I am getting set up to where I can install Quickbooks here at home instead of having to drive to his place to enter receipts and all that. I have been doing graphics and online work for him though.
Adsense Earnings Down….
So Adsense earnings were down last month which was a little disappointing since I had high hopes that my traffic would start to see some increases to my candle making site. Sadly it hasn’t changed much. I see no reason why my site should not be showing up for it’s keyphrases and I am beginning to suspect my theme? I think I’m going to try changing it to Atahualpa, which I have used a lot in the past and I’ve found a way to speed up the load time for it, so I think that’s what I’m going to do. Also I need to reevaluate the navigation structure.
Part of the reason though that Adsense was down, and maybe even the main reason, I took the adsense ad block off of the home page that was up by the introduction. I had asked some advice on a forum about the seo on the page and someone commented “do you have enough ads on there?” Which really, they should have kept that comment to themselves because it had nothing to do with seo, but oh well.
So I decided to take one ad block off the home page. Well, this month I put it back up there, and I have seen a big jump already in earnings. I’ve already made over $5 from adsense just from my candle making site! I’ve gotten some clicks from my other sites too, some of which didn’t earn me anything last month, so that’s nice too. Also…Also….. My video! I monetized my first candle making video at the end of December and it earned me $0.98 last month. And this month it has earned me a little money every single day. Only 8-38 cents each day, but hey, it all ads up. And I’m hoping the traffic will continue to rise even more, and then it could possibly make me a decent amount!
Youtube Video Update
So speaking of my video. I have two candle making youtube videos up now, and the first one is already up to 1300 views in just under 2 months! It also has 16 likes and I have 16 17 subscribers to my channel now. Plus! I’ve had the pleasure of replying to several comments on my videos as well Things are looking good in that department.
Library Fiasco….
So as I mentioned above, I was at the library earlier, trying to get some work done on my laptop. That’s one thing my husband and I agreed on recently, is to allow for me to have 2 hours a night a few nights a week to work on my online projects. So I thought that going to the library would be a good idea so I’d be completely away from him and the kids so that I might be able to focus better.
Well, tonight did not go well at the library. I got there and had to go to the childrens section and find the one table that was vacant (I suppose I might have been able to try upstairs, but I’ve never been upstairs in our library before so I didn’t want to look silly walking around with all my stuff searching for a place to sit!) and then the wifi signal would only go up to one bar. So, internet access was reallllllly slllloooow. Well, I thought I’d work on my ebook which I started on a few months ago, but the words just wouldn’t come. I could not think of where to start….at all….. And then a couple kids came to the table and started playing checkers. So then this other guy left from a different table, so I packed up and went over there only to find that there were no outlets there (my laptop battery doesn’t hold a charge). So finally I was able to go to where the library computers are and there was space there at the table with an outlet. So by that time, it was 7pm and I only had 1 hour left.
So then it took awhile getting my internet going and I messed around with a few things, was cold, and so tired I thought I was going to pass out, when I decided to do this income report. I stared at the screen for a bit and then started typing. I got so much done, finally!
And then I hit the publish button…..
That’s when something went terribly wrong. An error, or something, that I’ve never seen before “Are you sure you want to do that?” is basically what it said. So I hit continue…. it takes me back to editing my post. So without looking at it, I hit publish again and go to view my newly published income report……
ONE paragraph stared back at me…..ONE.
I tried the back button but to no avail. It didn’t even autosave it.
I thought I was going to cry. Then I was angry. Then I shut the computer and left the library behind.
So here I am retyping it here in the comfort of my home because my hubby was so kind enough to get the kids to bed and let me sit in our bedroom and do the work I had tried to do earlier.
I think maybe it might be best to just work at home
Well, that’s all I have for now. Hopefully my writers block will go away and I can get another post up between now and the next income report
Well, I was planning on getting this post up last week, but on Monday night our middle child, who will be 6 this month, broke his leg when he and his older brother decided to jump off the couch at the same time….too close to each other….That went real well….I have a picture of them smiling in the air too. That smile didn’t last long.
So last week was kind of hectic. He has now been on the couch with his broken leg elevated, in a splint for a week now and will be going in to get a cast on Tuesday. I thank the Lord he hasn’t really been in any pain since Thursday, unless his leg gets moved, like when I have to sit him up in order to change his bedding or use the bathroom or something, or when he has a muscle spasm in his upper thigh, which isn’t happening very often now. And then our 3 year old has been a little stinker the last couple weeks, so that has made it even more fun trying to get anything done here.
So anyway, it’s been kind of chaotic here. Just when I had a new schedule for myself too! I am determined to try and stick to it this week though now that things have settled down.
November 2012 Income Report
So every month I am reporting my income for the month before that includes all my work at home businesses whether it be online or offline. I am trying to get to where I earn most of my income online, and my goal at the moment is to hit at least $100 a month online. Right now I’m not making much, but it did increase over the past year, in fact it doubled after I got back to working on SEO and started getting more traffic.
*Some of the links below are affiliate links, but only to services or products that I have personally used. If you do decide to go through the affiliate link and purchase the product or service I would like to say thank you, I really appreciate it.
So the month of November held some changes for me as far as really ramping up my link building to my candle making site that I’ve been focusing most of my time and energy on lately. I’ve also been trying to write and write and write more content. As far as the link building goes, I tried mass article submitting with Unique Article Wizard (UAW). Now, I cancelled my subscription after a month because I just can’t afford to pay that much each month. I did however decide to do the $5 a month storage for a little while in case I want to start using their service again if I start seeing some great results. I do love that they have a 30 day money back guarantee, but I decided not to claim it since I do feel the service is excellent and it did save a lot of time submitting articles. They did charge me for the next month sooner than I thought they would, so I had to contact them to get that money back since I had cancelled on the last day of the month, but they quickly responded and refunded the money,so as far as trustworthy goes, I have been very happy with the service.
I submitted 5 articles with UAW which were each submitted to 200-400 directories. Now, I have to say, it has been a month since I submitted those articles, and I know not all of them had been accepted by all of the directories and blogs they were submitted to yet, so I may need to just wait a little longer to see, but the verdict is still out on whether it’s really working or not. I am doing the Backlinking Strategy that Works and so far for the keyphrase I’m targeting for the home page of the site, I’ve had all my site pages ranking and some of them moving up in the rankings on Google, Except, Except, the home page which I’m targeting! It keeps bouncing around on the very last page of search results, which is like page 87-96, and much of the time it doesn’t show up at all. I have been wracking my brain for the problem. It shows up on the first page of Google for the keyphrase “homemade soy candles” so I’m not sure what the problem is. Especially when you’ve got other websites showing up on some of the middle pages that have nothing to do with making soy candles.
Anyway, it’s a mystery I’m working on solving, so I will share my results when I see what works.
Update:
Since I started typing this report on December 3rd,it is now Dec. 10th and I have seen some definite improvement in my site standings. I have been doing some other SEO and link building here and there too, plus I also changed the title of the home page, and found that there was a duplicate title with one of my other pages. Apparently I forgot to set the title in All In One SEO on that page so it was using my home page title. Well, since I changed that too, I have seen my site go up for the keyphrase “homemade soy candles” on the first page of Google, where it has been, but now it is in position 4, and it is now showing up on the second page of Bing and Yahoo for my target phrase “how to make soy candles” which is awesome because it was not showing up on those search engines at all before a couple days ago. It is still bouncing around on the last page of Google search results though for the target phrase, but it gives me hope that since it is showing up on Bing and Yahoo clear up on the second page, that maybe soon, Google will get a hold of it too!
I do have my WordPress.com anchor layer site showing up on the second page of Google for my target phrase “how to make soy candles” so that tells me that the backlinks that I did through Unique Article Wizard are apparently working. I have several of my other anchor layer sites moving up also for that keyphrase.
I am a little excited to see what happens in the coming month. I was hoping that things would shape up before Christmas and that I might get a bigger check from Google Adsense, but I guess it’s going to have to wait til after the new year.
So How Much Money Did I Make?
Here are the stats for each of my income avenues:
Google Adsense: $10.07 (+$1.25) I have hit $100 dollars total in my Adsense account, so I will be recieving a check from them by the end of December! Yay! That will be 3 checks total since June 2011. I’ve been playing with Adsense since 2007, but last year I finally learned how to use it (and I’m still learning) plus getting more traffic to my sites. So there were 11 months between my first and second check, and now only 7 months between my second and 3rd check. I’m hoping soon I’ll be able to get a check every month!
Amazon.com Associates: $1.03 (+$1.03)
Bluehost.com Affiliate: $0 (not expecting much from this for awhile)
Offline Income
Quickbooks, Website, and Misc. Jobs for my brother’s business: $125
So I am encouraged a little by the upward trend from last month. I know that has to do with the increase in traffic. Also, not all of my adsense earnings comes from my candle site. I have several sites, but most of the earnings are from the candle site and my mom blog at the moment. I’m hoping to start back to work on my horse classified site soon too.
So I hope this report was helpful to you! As always, if you have comments, suggestions, questions…. Please throw them out there! I would love to interact!
So, I finally got my first Youtube video up, well, not my first, but my first one with me in the video! And you know what? I really enjoyed it. Sure I was up til 3 or 4 am 2 nights in a row trying to get it done, but it was actually perfect doing it that way because with 3 boys in the house during the day, there’s no way I could have got it done without you being able to hear kids yelling or saying “Mommmmy!” in the background So I have to do my videos after hours!
I usually hate seeing myself on video and hearing my voice, but this one turned out really well I think. The first take I did, I had my hair up in a ponytail and my husband watched part of it and suggested I’d look better with my hair down and that I reminded him of that blond girl off of Big Bang Theory. I can’t remember her name since I don’t watch it very much, but she’s the one that’s married to the astronaut guy. Anyway, I think I was trying to be too chipper or something, so the next take I tried to relax and be more myself.
So if you’ve been thinking about getting a youtube video up and you’re a little scared to show your face or talk in front of the camera, my advice is, just do it! I did mine late at night while everyone was sleeping so I’d be alone and noone would hear me. I am much more comfortable that way.
It’s not as bad as you think. I am naturally a shy person and hate getting up in front of people, but over the years, I have conquered that fear many times by just making myself do it! You can do it if you really want to! And with a Youtube video, you are not in front of a crowd when you record it, so just have fun. You can to as many takes as you need to to get it right and get more comfortable.
Also, I did my video in a few sections so if you need to stop and take a break, you can always do it in sections and then just use a neat transition effect when you go to edit the video. I use iMovie on our Mac and I love it. There are some cool effects you can use and it makes it really easy to edit your videos and then you can upload it to Youtube right from iMovie.
For the video camera, we bought ours from Amazon last year and it has been a wonderful video camera! I really like the sound quality on my video, since I had heard that you may want to use a microphone to get the best sound for your video. But I think this little camcorder did just find. It has a wonderful picture quality too and does great for action also. The video camera I use is the Panasonic HDC SD-60 (SD-80 I think is the newer version)
So get going and get that Youtube video done! Just do it, and I know you’ll be happy you did! I know I was
Wow, today I totally felt like “what’s the use?”. It’s kind of odd because all week, I’ve been pumped up about my websites and moving forward with them. I’ve been listening to the Smartpassiveincome podcasts, which, by the way, are awesome! Pat has really got me motivated, well, until today. I was motivated while listening to him today though for a little bit.
I just started listening to his podcasts on Monday this week and am now on #15, so I’ve been soaking it all in! I don’t know though, today I think maybe I’m getting sick or something. I ended up with a headache and bit of a sore throat,so most likely my body is just drained. I realized earlier today that I can’t just go by feelings. I mean, you’re going to feel down in the dumps sometimes but you just have to keep pushing through. We can’t just quit things just because we’re sick or feeling down one day. I wouldn’t do that if I had an outside job would I?
Nope.
In fact I would have still gone to work today if I worked outside the home. So part of it too was that I’m not seeing the results that I think I should be by now and today, since I wasn’t feeling well anyway, that just kind of hit me and a lot of negative thoughts started running through my brain.
So, what did I do?
Well, first I took a nap with my 3 year old. A much longer nap than I intended and then woke up with a headache! So that didn’t really help, but then I started thinking about what more I need to do with my candle making site, which is my main project right now.
Now I was listening to podcast #14 or 15 I think, and Pat was talking about how he only focuses on one project at a time, even though he has many projects going on at the same time.
This is how he does it…
He has specific things to get done for each project and lists those things in order. So like for his example, if he is working on an Iphone app, he only focuses on that until he gets to the point where he sends the idea to the developer. Then once it’s in the hands of the developer to work on, he can now focus on one of his other projects.
With each project he has certain “stopping” points. So once he gets to a “stopping” point, he will take that time during the stopping point for one project and focus on another project. So he has multiple things going on, but he gives each one his full attention until he gets to a stopping point, like sending an app idea to the developer where it is now out of his hands and he doesn’t have to work on it until it’s done being developed and then he’ll go back to it for promoting it or whatever.
Making My Own Stopping Points
So I was thinking today about making myself some stopping points for each website I’m working on. Just places where I can stop working on it for a little bit and work on another website. I’ve been doing a lot of building backlinks for my candle making site this month and also writing content for it, so I’m thinking I am going to spend this next week writing more content, putting up more pictures and I’m also going to try and get a Youtube video up tomorrow actually and I’m hoping that will really give me a boost too.
But I think after next week, I am going to give myself a stopping point for that site and start back to work on my horse classifieds site. I’m excited to get back to work on that one since it has been awhile and of course horses are my absolute passion. But it’ll also give me a chance to step back from this site for a bit since I think I’m getting a bit burnt out with all the work I’ve been trying to do. I’ll just give it a chance for Google to pick up the back links and kind of take a break and see how it does in the rankings.
Obviously, if people start emailing me about making soy candles, then I will answer them back and try to help, but no working on the actual website for a bit.
So that’s my plan to help prevent burnout on each project. I was really happy today though for one reason, this morning I looked a my Adsense account and I had $2.52 just from 2 clicks today! I’m really hoping my Adsense earnings get back up to around $20 or more again. It’s been a real downer seeing it plunge so much, but some of my keyphrases are getting back up there. Frappuccino Recipe is back to the first page, though down toward the bottom so I’m not getting much traffic from it yet, but that’s definitely progress from when it fell to several pages deep.
So that was my downer day today! I think tomorrow will be better. I’m looking forward to doing my candle making video for Youtube! It’ll be fun. I’m also thinking about doing a podcast just talking about my life and the different home businesses I’ve pursued, and just about my journey so far to this point today, which I will post here.
So I’m trying to keep track of my income at the end of each month here. This way I can have documented for myself what’s been going on with my income and past income and kind of give me an idea of what strategy’s have been working. Plus I want anyone looking at starting an internet business to be able to see how I’ve been doing and hopefully, when my income starts to take off, they can see that it is possible to be successful online.
As I said at the beginning, I am not making much yet, but I am excited to be following Pat Flynn at Smartpassiveincome.com because he has shown me that this could work if I work at it! As I said before, my short term goal is to make $200 a month either with one site or with all my sites put together, but that’s my goal. Considering how much I’ve seen that quite a few people online are making per month and even not long after they started, I think $200 is a pretty easily attainable goal.
So, I’ve had somesetbacks, but I’m working as much as I can to overcome these and get my sites back on track.
I’m going to go ahead and get into the traffic report so here is a list of sites I have currently. The ones in bold are the ones I am working on at the moment, and the others are on the back burner for now. Most of these sites I’ve had for several years, but only this year really started learning the right way to monetize them and get more traffic, especially after the setbacks from the latest Google updates.
Before those updates, I didn’t usually have any problem ranking for low-medium competition keywords/phrases, but now? I feel like I’m swimming upstream! lol
Traffic Reports
So here’s the list, I will use Google Analytics for this since it doesn’t count search bots so it’s more accurate of the true amount of visitors than Awstats or another stats program that you might use through your web hosting company.
Learnhowtomakesoycandles.com visits: 350 unique visitors: 250 with 2.45 pages per visit.
Homemade-candle-creations.com (my original soy candle site when I was selling them) I’m not listing traffic for this one yet because I had been redirecting it to the learnhowtomakesoycandles.com site, but I’ve removed the redirect and am going to leave it as it’s own site connected to the making soy candles site. I’ll explain later!
Mom-venture.com visits: 819 unique visits: 742 with 1.29 pages per visit
Myworkathomeventures.com visits: 29 unique visitors: 12 with 5.17 pages per visit.
ClassAdsequine.com visits: 986 unique visitors: 492 (I am using Awstats for this site because I have some pages that I haven’t added the Google Analytics code into, so it isn’t tracking all my pages in Analytics yet.)
Higherfocusart.com Visits: 715 unique visitors: 257 (using Awstats for this one too for the same reasons stated above)
Homecoffeerecipes.com No stats yet, I just started this site at the very end of October.
Chris-Hall-Music.com (my husbands site for his music) Visits: 247 unique visitors: 119 (also using awstats. Need to fix the analytics code I think)
Higherfocuswebdesign.com Visits: 7 unique visitors: 6 with 2.29 pages per visit
I have 3 other sites I’m working on, one for a friends gunstock carving business, another for a group camping rental website and another for my brother’s drive thru espresso business, but I’m not going to post stats here since they aren’t my personal sites.
Quickbooks (and website work) for my brother’s business: $125
So that’s it. Income went down some more due to less traffic, but I am very optimistic that it will start increasing again once the backlinking strategy starts to kick in, plus I am really trying to hammer content out on my soy candle making, and coffee recipes sites, and of course this site as well.
Wow, it’s been a month of clawing and scratching to get my soy candle site back up to the top in Google! I’ve made quite a few changes. Some are mistakes that I had made that I didn’t know about and I’m hoping these are what has kept my home page from even being in the top 800, if you can call it that…… I had found it on page 88 at one point and then “Poof” gone! Nowhere to be found! And then I’ve been working on my backlinking strategy which I will go into detail about. So far I’ve seen a little movement from some pages in my site, but not much. It is a bit early to tell yet though so I’m optimistic about it.
Questioning Myself…..
So a few months ago I changed my soy candle business “Homemade Candle Creations” from a candle sales website to an informational website on making soy candles and starting a business. So I had found out about exact match domains and thought, maybe if I change the address of the site to something that was more specific to making soy candles, that that might help me to get to the top for my main keyphrase of “how to make soy candles”. My homepage had originally had a target keyphrase of “Soy Candles” and although it never did rank well for soy candles, it did rank well for Homemade Candles and Homemade Soy Candles, most likely due to the fact that the name of my business and the url is Homemade Candle Creations.
So , around March or April I had the brilliant idea to change the domain name to learnhowtomakesoycandles.com . I thought I was so smart, putting in place my 301 redirects for each page that I transferred over. And you know what? Traffic started picking up about July. I shot up to the top of the page for “homemade candles” , though still did not rank well for “how to make soy candles” and my traffic steadily increased and so did my Adsense earnings until that fateful day, September 27th 2012…… “homemade candles” dropped some that day, (see my first income report for a analytics chart)then more the next, then down to nothing the day after that. Since then, it has gone up a little, but is still buried around page 20. What would cause this drop? Well, the update Google rolled out that day was the EMD update (Exact Match Domains). Now I’m not sure why mine got penalized since the keyphrase that got dumped wasn’t even in my domain name. I am assuming that I just got penalized all around because I had an exact match domain name.
So I’m thinking that I made a mistake in changing my domain name. I could have kept “Homemade Candle Creations” and it still would have worked with the theme of my site. So now, do I try changing the domain back? Probably not since I just sent out a bunch of articles using the learnhowtomakesoycandles.com domain name. I’m thinking I’ll just have to keep adding content, keep creating quality backlinks and keep plugging away to see if I can climb back to the top for some sort of good keyphrase!
Attempting the Backlinking Strategy that Works
So I’m attempting to follow Pat Flynns Backlinking Strategy That Works. I realize that after these last few Google updates, that this may not work as well as it once did. I really wish I had found out about this like, last year….. Do you ever feel like you’re two steps behind? I do! I’ve been building websites and trying to start an online business, oh, since 2003 and I never heard of Pat Flynn till now. I know I shouldn’t think of it like this, but if I had known about this strategy even just last year, I could have been ahead of the game and maybe already making more money by the time Google rolled out all these updates.
I mean, think about it. Pat started his Security Guard Training website back in 2010 for a niche site duel to see who could get a niche site started from scratch and earn money from it. Well, he used this backlinking strategy and wrote great content and made it to the top in Google. So by the time all these Google updates rolled out, that site was already an authority site in that niche with an exact match domain I might add, and so Google most likely will not touch it, and rightly so. If I had been able to do that through lots of backlinks, I could have made it to the top most likely(making soy candles is not a particularly large niche) and maybe, with lots of good content, have started getting “authority” status too and then most likely I wouldn’t have had these problems with keyword ranking. I should say, I ranked well for several of my pages when I was selling my soy candles, and business was growing. It’s since I changed to an informational site that I’ve started running into road blocks although traffic was growing and growing until the google update in July and September. That’s when my site was dropped out of the first page (around position 1-3) for “homemade candles” which was where much of my traffic was coming from. I ranked great for it when my site was www.homemade-candle-creations.com (wouldn’t that be considered exact match, or close to it?) but when the EMD (exact match domains) update happened, I was dropped out even though my domain wasn’t exact match anymore www.learnhowtomakesoycandles.com. Keep in mind, I changed the url of of my site before the google updates and traffic continued to climb, even more than it had before.
Doesn’t make sense to me.
So anyway, that’s my little pity party. I promise I won’t do that again any time soon!
Sorry this illustration isn’t the easiest to see, but you can click on it to enlarge it. As you can see, I started with my main site in the middle “Learn how to make soy candles” and then the Anchor layer that links back to the main site are the Ezine Article, Squidoo, Web 2.0 properties, WordPress.com site, Blogspot site and so on. Then I use anchor text directed to the anchor layer sites to submit mass articles and also submit the anchor layer sites to social bookmarks. You can check out Pat Flynn’s post on the Backlinking Strategy that Works for a more in depth explanation on all this.
So to recap what I’ve been doing the past couple weeks, I’ve submitted a spun article to each of the top article directories. Then created some web 2.0 properties and blogs with an anchor text linking back to the main site. Then I’ve submitted my own original article, spun, to Unique Article Wizard with anchor text linking back to 2 of my anchor layer sites like Ezinearticles and Squidoo. They send out hundreds of different unique versions of your original article to different article directories and blogs. This is supposed to increase the link juice to your anchor layer (squidoo, ezinearticles, wordpress.com, etc.) and pass it on to your main site through the links from your anchor layer.
Then you do mass social bookmarking to your anchor layer articles too which is also supposed to create link authority.
So will this all still work after Panda, Penguin and EMD? Pat seems to think it still works, though probably not as well as it used to. So I’ve decided to try it anyway and just make sure to vary my anchor text and try to make things look as natural as possible. And the cool thing is, that Unique Article Wizard has a 30 day money back guarantee, no questions asked. So if I don’t start seeing results after I’ve been working my rear off with this article marketing campaign, I’m going to request my money back.
I’ll post updates on how the site is doing. It’ll probably take another week or so to really see some improvement.
So that’s it for now! Next up should be my income report for last month…..
So I’ve been so disappointed, if you hadn’t noticed, with how 2 of my websites have fared during the recent Google algorithm updates the last couple months. I keep wondering if my sites will recover, yet I can’t see how they wouldn’t? They’ve done so well for several years now only to be completely knocked down overnight??? So, yes, I’ve got some work to do to keep that from happening again….
But!!
Tonight I was checking my search ranking for my Mom Venture site, for that certain recipe page that got knocked down after enjoying a huge traffic boost from it for the last year. Wellllll One of my main keyphrases that used to be at the top of page 1 of Google before the update on July 24th, that knocked it down to page 35-40 is now on page…..drum roll please!…… 5!
Still not a good page to get traffic from, but that is a huge leap in one day! So I am optimistic that it could make it back up to page one.
Site Speed Changes
One change that I did recently though is that I changed the theme back to Greenpark 2 which has proven to have a much faster load time than Atahualpa theme, which I had been in love with for awhile until I realized how slow it loads! I love how easy it is to customize, but I know enough now that I can almost fully customize different WordPress themes without too much problem.
I remembered that that is the main reason I had switched to the Greenpark 2 theme, so I’m wondering if switching back to Atahualpa theme was what delayed my bouncing back after that update in July. Google does take into consideration site loading speed, and when I checked my load time on Pingdom.com it was 15 seconds!! That is snail speed! After switching back to Greenpark 2 it is down to about 3-4 seconds, which is still a bit slower than I’d like, but way better than 15.
Upcoming Projects
Anyway, I am just really excited and hopeful now to see what this coming week brings. I’m just going to keep plugging away at submitting articles to top article directories and building quality backlinks for both my main sites this week.
I’m also going to start back to work on my horse classifieds site too because I’ve had some major brainstorming going on, and I think if I could focus on that site at least 2 days a week, I could really get it moving. There are tons of possibilities for content on that site, and I am very experienced with horses, training and riding lessons, and it is my passion, so we’ll see where this goes!
Plus I have an idea and have already bought a domain name for a new niche site, but I’m probably going to only work on it one day a week for now until I get my other sites going well.
Well, I just found an article that says that Google also released a new Panda update about the same time as their new EMD update. September 27th. Here’s the article:
So I had been wondering why both my Mom Venture site had gone down even more in traffic, although the main recipe that was bringing in so much traffic before July 25th has gone up a little in results for one of it’s main keyphrases, and my How to make soy candles site had took a dump in the search results and traffic after several months of significant traffic growth.
Now it is really frustrating to me, because I look at some of the sites that are at the top of the list in search results for homemade candles (which was not my main keyphrase for that sites homepage, but it was one I was ranking almost at the top for), and I really don’t see the quality that should be there. In fact I don’t see why my page took such a nose dive at all! The only thing I could think of is that I didn’t exactly have “homemade candles” in my title although for some reason when I’d see my homepage in search results for homemade candles before the update, it didn’t show my site title, but showed the name of my site “homemade candle creations” which I always thought was kind of weird!
So, I changed the title a couple days ago to include “homemade candles” in it. I guess we’ll see if that works. Google has indexed my site since then to reflect the change, but there hasn’t been much difference. Though I know it can take some time to bounce back from this so I just need to be patient.
As far as my magic traffic recipe on my Mom Venture site……I just don’t know what to do about that. That drop happened back in July and I still haven’t been able to recover from it and since the new Panda and EMD update, I’ve seen even more of a drop in traffic. This is a blog I’ve had since 2009 with quite a lot of content.
It’s just so frustrating now because I used to not have much problem ranking for certain keyphrases and now??? I just don’t know what Google wants, because great content still is just not enough. I imagine that if you have lots of people sharing then, sure, you’ll rank well, but what about the great content that is new. How are people supposed to see that content if you can’t be found in search results because the already established content is all set at the top? I don’t know….
So before I came back to finish this post, I found out that there was in fact a Panda update on July 24th, which coincides with my high ranked recipe dumping down in the serps on July 25th!
Well, I just plan on continuing on with the new backlinking strategy I’ve been working on, and see how things are in another couple weeks, and keep adding content to those sites. Pretty much all that can be done right now.
Plus I am getting set up to where I can install Quickbooks here at home instead of having to drive to his place to enter receipts and all that. I have been doing graphics and online work for him though.
