Posts Tagged ‘improving what you’ve got’

This Blog’s Identity Crisis

Tuesday, March 25th, 2008

I’ve been quiet around here lately, I know. As I posted over at the Mom Masterminds blog, this blog is having a bit of an identity crisis as of late. Allow me to explain.

As part of my ongoing efforts this year to examine, improve, and focus, I’ve sold another website with the overall goal of moving away from the work at home Mom market.

My main target market is the one I speak to with my podcast (and several smaller content sites). I also have an active blog over there.

I’m not entirely out of the wahm market as I still have an information product for natural business owners (and want to be’s), private label rights article packs for natural business owners as well as several free ecourses for that market. But that’s ok with me because it still fits into the same larger market.

But this blog all of a sudden doesn’t quite fit neatly anywhere.

I certainly don’t want to get rid of it entirely. I enjoy talking about being a work at home Mom. I like sharing my wins (and trip-ups!) with internet marketing. I like helping people and guiding

them to good products and services that will help them make smart business decisions.

So I’ll put the question to you:

What do you like to see on this blog?

I got some fantastic feedback from the commenters on the MM blog which has given me some food for thought.

Nell and Angie said they wanted to see more personal “life as a wahm”" stuff here. (Nell also suggested I ask myself some pointed questions to figure out my goals with this blog.)
Erin said to mix it all up so my readers could see my unique perspective on marketing online.
Linda said I need to keep digging to find my target reader here.

What’s your take?

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Making Your Ebook Even Better

Tuesday, March 4th, 2008

Have you written an ebook?

In my continuing efforts to “examine and improve” my existing projects this year, one of the things on my list is my first information product, the Natural Mom Business Guide.

It hasn’t been updated since 2007 and I would like to tweak it a little each year to make it better for my existing customers and future ones.

Things change on the internet. Some of the tools I recommend today I may not be in love with in a year. Marketing methods and tactics also change somewhat. I want the NMBG to continue to be an awesome tool, so to editing I go.

To that end, I’m pretty stoked that I have Jimmy D. Brown’s coaching to help me along. I’ve probably mentioned before that I’ve been a member of his List and Traffic membership site for over two years now. I consider it one of the best values on the Internet in terms of internet marketing!

You can get a free ebook here by Mr. Jimmy all about improving your ebook. This info is great whether the ebook in question has yet to be released, or not!

Get a copy of it here: 30 Writing Tips for Ebook Authors.

I’ll be reading this this weekend, along with some other juicy reports I own of Jimmy’s while I’m stuck in bed.

I’m having some surgery on my foot and Doctor’s orders – I can only get up for bathroom privileges for 3 days. I haven’t had that much rest since I gave birth last. ;)

Enjoy!

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Somebody Really Needs to Slap Carrie Lauth

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

I really should be slapped. Seriously. Someone really should reach right through the blogosphere and slap me on the cheek for not writing up a proper review of AdSpy Tracker.

I’ve meant to, really I have.

It’s just that I’ve been really lazy busy lately.

I’m just ashamed happy that it took Kelly mentioning the topic on Moms Morning Show yesterday to refresh my memory.

So here’s a quickie review before I get to my DUH! moment.

AdSpy Tracker is a tool that you use to track your Google AdSense activity. You simply place the tracking code on your sites (and this wasn’t that difficult at all, the how to is VERY detailed and I only had to resort to ONE frantic instant message to Kelly McCausey who first told me about it to get it done, and then it was only a silly error on my part).

Then you log in to your AdSpy account and see what’s going on. AdSpy tells you all kinds of juicy and valuable information, such as:

  • Exactly which keywords people are using to enter your site
  • The actual Google ads people are clicking on
  • The pages those ads are located on
  • The ad formats that are getting the most clicks
  • The Click Through Rates of your pages

Yesterday Kelly mentioned the fact that it’s difficult to tell WHICH ADS are making money on a particular site that’s earning income through AdSense. After using AdSpy she learned that it was ONE page on one of her sites that was earning the bulk of the money – so what do you think she did with that information?

She built more pages like that one to get more results!

When I first got AdSpy I let it cook for a couple of days then started looking at the stats. What I found was that one of my sites that did pretty well with AdSense was making most of its money from two or three pages.

So, I immediately spent about an hour tweaking those ad blocks to make them more irresistible to clicking, as well as building a few more incoming links to those pages. Here’s what happened.

That site now earns more every day than my entire network of sites did two months ago.

I’m pretty pleased with that, to say the least. ;)

So. My advice to you, if you’re using Google AdSense, is to run not walk to this little website: AdSpy Tracker and pick up yourself a copy. This is a one time buy people. You don’t have to pay every month for it. It’s ONE. TIME. And you can use it on ALL your sites. Ok?

Ok. Here it is again: AdSpy Tracker.

Cause tracking is really important for us lazy busy internet marketers. :)

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Content Site Update

Monday, January 28th, 2008

I mentioned in this post about improving what I’ve got in 2008, and in this post I listed some specific changes I made to a content site one day.

By way of update, I’ve seen a couple of things already, namely I made two affiliate sales. This site hasn’t made an affiliate sale in many months so that is definitely not a coincidence. I’m happy about that because it means the trend will continue.

No big jump in traffic yet but I hired a ghostwriter to write an article for me, so now I’ll submit it around the web to get more incoming links and traffic. More updates to come!

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Making It Better: Content Site #1

Thursday, January 17th, 2008

When I said I was going to update you on my “Making It Better in 2008” progress, I wasn’t kidding!

Here is a site that has been gathering dust for FAR too long. I haven’t added content to it or made any changes in over a year (although I have sent out a couple of newsletters to the list.)

I thought of selling it, but decided to keep it since it fits into my overall target market. I also had some ideas on how to improve the site. One of the reasons I wanted to start with this one is because it makes NO money. It’s the only site I own that doesn’t generate sales or Adsense income.

So, similar to the thinking of a person who pays off their debt starting with the lowest balance for the psychological boost it will give them, I am starting with this one. Anything would be an improvement. LOL!

For starters, this is a content site all about limiting screen time. It has articles on why too much TV is a bad idea, and ideas on what to do instead. It makes affiliate recommendations, mostly books about research on TV’s effects and a couple of other products (some from Amazon.com and a few ebooks). It has a newsletter (actually just an autoresponder with a bunch of messages) with tips and ideas for family time that don’t involve screens. There are over 1,000 subscribers on the list. There is serious potential there, so I need to work on getting those folks to buy too.

I thought it had potential however, and was already getting some decent traffic and had incoming links from similar sites in this “un-TV” genre. It gets search engine traffic from a couple hundred unique keyword phrases.

Here is a screen shot of the Before:

And about half an hour Later:

You probably can’t tell a whole lot from the pictures, but I did the following:

  1. Removed Adsense ads from 90% of the pages. The ads were making NO money. When I emailed a friend about the site, she said she wasn’t surprised that this was the case, since the ads were showing up all about watching TV on the computer. DUH! People who are trying to watch less TV aren’t likely to click on ads about watching TV, are they? So that was an obvious thing to change.

  2. Changed the left nav menu so the links were smaller and shorter. I also added several affiliate recommendations to the left menu, and that font is a bit larger, making them stand out more.
  3. Wrote a bolder, more direct headline.
  4. Made the font larger and bolder on the right nav to draw attention to the newsletter sign up box.
  5. Added a picture of a product that I found on Amazon, it’s a perfect fit: a device that plugs into a Tv, computer or video game that enables a parent to set a timer that will turn the device off completely. This is a higher priced product than most I promote so I’m interested to see if it converts well.
  6. Made the page wider to give it a more modern look.

That’s it for now. Later on this month I’ll: add some more content, hire a ghostwriter to write an article I can send out, do some keyword research to guide me when I add new pages, and look for more appropriate affiliate products to recommend.

Stay tuned. No pun intended. ;)

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Give a Site Some Love, Will Ya?

Thursday, August 23rd, 2007

After Spring Cleaning coaching with Alice, and Flipping Websites with Kelly, and the Content Site Challenge going on at Mom Masterminds, I’ve been thinking lots lately about giving some of my neglected websites some love.

I already sold one site, am giving one away, and have a couple more to sell, but I have one or two that DO fit into my target market and that just need a little love.

One of these sites had a bad domain name so I bought a newer one that fits into my plan for the site as well as my target market. It didn’t have much traffic or ranking so it didn’t matter much, and it’s already getting some love from search engines despite the change.

What I love about improving an existing site is how FAST you can see results. It’s awesome to add a few new pages to a site that’s aged a bit in the search engines and immediately see some increased traffic and income from those pages.

I’ve already done a couple of things, like design a custom 404 error page. You can see an example here.

Then I linked to the site from one of my other sites, giving it another one way link. I also added a 5 day ecourse to one site, and added a second free report to subscribers. I sent a broadcast email to the existing list.

So here’s what else I plan to do to boost a couple of sites:

  • Write an article for each. Article marketing rocks and has been a consistent winner for me for marketing a website
  • Go through and edit some of the PLR articles on the site. I changed a bit here and there, but spending just a couple of minutes per page adding my own voice and a paragraph or two will improve my search engine rankings.
  • Add more affiliate offers to the autoresponder.
  • Find a way to link to the site’s internal pages from my blogs. As an example of this, I wrote about pet ownership on my blog today, and linked to a page of an existing site where relevant (using keyword rich link text of course).
  • See if I have any additional content (like my own articles, which I often forget to add to my own sites!) to add, including more PLR, transcripts of interviews from my podcast, free reports, etc.

There you go. Care to join me in my “Give a Site Some Love” challenge? I’ll link to you in this post. Leave a comment below with the website you plan on improving too, and it will get some immediate link love from me!

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