Extra Cash From Home

I’ve spent the last several weeks reading and studying up on building minisites as well as sites geared towards the Halloween holiday. I read that this holiday is a multibillion dollar industry. And I believe it!

Some of my friends spend hundreds of dollars, if not more, on their costumes. Others create their own costumes. Needless to say, money is spent like crazy during this holiday.

I built 2 sites, one geared towards dogs, and the other is for stretch marks. I’m quite proud of the designs that I created for each. However, I don’t know if they’re going to do well with Adsense. Lately, I haven’t created any new content for them because I’ve been a bit discouraged. But I really need to start up with them again. I need the traffic and adsense proof to be able to sell them in a few months. That’s the ultimate goal with them.

The 3rd site I’m very excited about. It’s a vampire costume site. There are about 12 pages (not including the TOS, privacy etc), each talking briefly about a particular vampire costume. Yesterday I spent most of the day creating those pages.

Today I decided to spend several hours creating some backlinks and traffic generation. I’m quite excited about it. Yesterday Google didn’t know it existed. But today after I finished my traffic project, Google has not only indexed my site, but my site is also in the #1 and #5 positions for its main keyword! How friggin’ bad ass is that?! I’m tickled pink about it ;) I know I’m definitely doing something right.

At the rate I’m going with the vampire site, it should do really well come Halloween in terms of traffic and sales. It’ll probably sell really well if I choose to sell the site. But I don’t think I want to sell the site ;). I plan on building different websites, including more costume sites.

Related items

• Taking baby steps forward
• Plan of Action
• Themes, Templates, Minisites and More
• Article Marketing
• Pimp My Flip

Since I had no idea how to promote my own, tangible products that I created for Cafepress and Zazzle, I had put that project on the backburner while I focused in my internet marketing ventures. My stores and website were still live.

However, I checked my email last night before bed and got 2 little surprises. Both my cafepress and zazzle stores each had a sale! I was shocked. And pleasantly surprised. I went to bed a little bit happier last night.

The 2 small sales resparked my interest in my stores. Unfortunately, I won’t have very much time to focus on marketing the stores. I have yet to find my groove in internet marketing. But once I do, you can bet I’m going to give my stores a little bit of attention. :)

So far, I’ve taken itty bitty steps forwards utilizing my plan of action that I talked about previously.

I built my niche minisite targeting some keywords within the pregnancy niche. I chose those keywords because of my own personal experience. I figured it would be a lot easier to get my feet wet if I was actually knowledgeable and interested in the topic.

Because the targeted keywords are in the pregnancy niche, I designed a simple pink WordPress theme that would be clean and easy on the eye. There are no heavy graphics. I wanted the theme to load quickly. A grungy theme would not work well ;)

Since the domain I purchased from Godaddy was live within minutes of purchase, I was able to upload and install the WordPress script as well as upload and start up the minimal plugins needed.

For me, designing the theme, install the script (I upload the script to my hosting and add the database username and password myself. I don’t Use Fantastico), and getting the plugins started are the easy part. It’s thinking of keywords and writing several different articles about the keywords that I find hard, if not boring and tedious work.

I spent the 2nd day of this project writing up 3 different articles, each targeting one specific keyword. The title of each article included the keyword and I made sure to sprinkle the keyword throughout the article.

When I’m not focusing on specifically writing to grab traffic through articles, I can write seemingly forever. 600-1000 words would be a cinch. But when I have to focus on grabbing traffic, I get writer’s block. It’s a struggle to write an article worth 400 words.

I put my main article on the first page of the site. I did not use the posting feature. Instead I used the page feature and posted each article to its own page. This made my site look more like a regular site than a blog.

Once all articles were up, I added 3 different ways for monetizing the site: Adsense integrated into the articles, as well as Ebay ads and affiliate links in the sidebar.

I haven’t been heavily promoting the site as I’m very new to traffic generation. I’ve read up on the many different types of traffic generation and took notes. So far I’ve submitted articles to Ezine and a few other article directories (I now have a basic plus account with Ezine. Aiming for platinum status), I pinged the site at pingoat.net, I used Onlywire.com for social bookmarking the site, and I’ve used USFreeAds.com to post an ad regarding the site. I purchased a monthly subscription with the classifieds ad site so that I can post unlimited ads.

Traffic generation options that I haven’t utilized but am considering are forum posting (I’m iffy about this because I’m not big on setting up accounts at many different forums to discuss a topic I don’t know much if anything about), submitting to RSS feed directories, blog commenting, and submitting to press release sites.

Those methods above are all free methods. I don’t have money to pay for ppc or offline ads so that’s out of the question.

So far, the traffic to the site has been minimal. But what can I expect when I’ve only got 3 articles written and only 2 of them have been submitted?

Related items

• Plan of Action
• Pulled in different directions
• Article Marketing
• Keywords and Google Goodness
• Themes, Templates, Minisites and More

For many years I’ve dabbled a little here… a little there… read a lot, researched even more ’till I felt like my eyeballs would bleed. I’m a researcher. I can’t help it. Unfortunately, that’s led me to a place called information overload. This causes me to absolutely nothing.

Recently, I decided that my main focus was going to be building and flipping minisites. It allows me to use my abilities:  graphics, web design, and writing. My husband thinks it’s a good idea. He said it’s the first real plan I’ve come up with that has a good possibility of making me some money.

I’ve been waiting for the moderators of the War Room to accept my thread. It’s the one where I offer up a free pack of WordPress themes for the members. Unfortunately, they have yet to accept it. I sent for help in their support area and was told that it can actually take up to 4 weeks for my thread to be accepted. Holy cow! 4 weeks?!? I hate waiting.

I finally decided that waiting around for my thread to get accepted was a waste of time.

I spent most of yesterday gathering up all the ebooks I had on finding niches, building minisites, writing articles, and flipping sites and read them all. I took notes and condensed everything down to a few pages that I’m going to print out.

I finally finished my note-taking this morning. I’ve read and reread everything. I had to take action.

I started to get nervous as I purchased a domain that will collect emails from people interested in buying my websites, as well as a domain to create my first minisite. I’m on a very limited budget of $200. I was able to find a coupon online to use which knocked down the cost of my Godaddy domains from $20 to $15.

Since I’m on a limited budget, I’m using the free Bravenet mailing list. Once I start making steady money, I will switch over to Aweber.

I created a simple black theme for my main site and uploaded it. I had to go through the motions of adding the 2 new domains to my hostgator account, creating databases for both, as well as email addresses. I then uploaded and installed WordPress (an awesome free blogging platform that is widely used) onto both domains. I have to install the necessary plugins on the site I’m going to flip.

It’s been slow going not because I’m a novice at all this (I’ve been a webmaster since 1999), but because I’m nervous and don’t want to fail. I’m scared shitless.

Related items

• Themes, Templates, Minisites and More
• Taking baby steps forward
• Pulled in different directions
• Pimp My Flip
• Keywords and Google Goodness

Spent a lot of time reading threads in the War Room as well as the Warrior Forum as a whole. Learned a lot. I still am as I have so much more to learn.

I decided yesterday that I needed to give back to the members of the War Room. So I buckled down and designed 10 WordPress themes. They all have a clean design to them. Nothing fancy or ugly.

I’m seriously putting myself out there for fellow members to see and judge my work. It’s not going to be the best they’ve ever seen, I’m sure. But it took a lot just for me to press that post button to reach out to the community. We’ll see how it goes.  Moderators still have to approve my thread.

Related items

• Plan of Action
• Pimp My Flip
• Keywords and Google Goodness
• Taking baby steps forward