I am so glad that I had accomplished so much with my web site in the previous week, because this past week, I haven’t really been able to. With it being the end of the school year and having four children, it’s been really, really crazy. All the last-minute projects, functions during the school day and helping them study for all of their finals, and placing on top of all that - baseball championship playoffs and volleyball tournaments have also consumed my time (and I have to mention – I’ve got an All-Star player and an MVP player in the house!)
It was definitely challenging to balance all of that in addition to learning affiliate marketing and working on my site. Many people think it’s going to be so much easier as their children get older because they will be more independent, etc., but I’m finding that the pre-teen and teenage years are so much crazier because of all the things going on and everyone heading in all different directions every day (not to mention all the “chauffeuring” that is involved!). Though the days and nights can be so hectic, I wouldn’t trade it for all the world – all of which are such wonderful blessings for sure.
Taking Laura’s Skip The Scams Affiliate Marketing Course for Beginners is another blessing because I’m learning a new career which will eventually enable me to continue to be a stay-at-home single mom and to have flexibility during the day and be able to financially support my kids.
Anyway, on to what I’ve learned this past week! The implementation of Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) - Lesson 36, on my site was pretty cool. Wow, there sure is so much great stuff to learn with it and all the different things it allows you to do! Inside GWT there is a keyword report that will show you how many clicks and impressions your web site gets as well as the position your web site is in from results of Google searches. You can use Google Analytics in conjunction with this report too (one of the things I learned about and touched upon in week five of my study). For that matter, with GWT you learn how to make your web site search engine friendly not only to Google but to others as well.
Your web site performance is another aspect you can hone in on and tweak regarding how fast your site or pages on your site load. From what I've read, this is important because it's a new ranking factor that Google utilizes, and if I'm not mistaken was implemented at the beginning of the year.
Something I also did this past week was take from my drafts and publish one of my posts. (I'm getting braver hahaha - I don't know why I'm so nervous about the publishing part - must be that darn perfectionism hindering me that I have to get over somewhat). Additionally I learned about making a privacy policy in Lesson 37. Laura says "it is required by many if not most merchants you affiliate with, as well as search engines" and that it's "an important step." She provides a sample one in the course as well as gives a link to a private policy generator which I thought was cool too.
Until next time.....
- Kelli
Laura's comments:
Yes, life gets in the way sometimes, but there's nothing wrong with that. The point of doing affiliate marketing at home for me and many others is that it can allow more time for us to enjoy and care for our families. If you're having a busy week with family, as long as you try to do even a little on a regular basis with your online business, you will stay in the groove and keep making progress. And Kelli is doing just that.
It can be very nerve-wracking to hit "Publish" on your first post! (And many thereafter!) For me, it seems like I never know what's wrong with my posts until I hit "Publish," even though I always "Preview" it first. That's one of the reasons the MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer plugin is so important—if you go in to make edits on your post after it's been published, you won't be constantly pinging blog directories and services like a spammer would, which can cause a problem. If you don't have that plugin installed, WordPress will ping every time you hit "Update Post." Not good.
One thing I forgot to mention last week that I am impressed with is that Kelli has already begun building her e-mail list. It's not something I cover in detail in the course, but it's a great idea to start a list as soon as possible. This way you have a built-in audience for any special promotions you may have as well as possibly for when you create an ebook to promote your site.
It sounds like next week Kelli will be getting into the lessons dealing with off-site SEO—that is, things you do not on your site to get it noticed and ranking well in the search engines. Visit us again next week!
Previous posts in this case study:
Week 1 - Brainstorming ideas and keyword research
Week 2 - Evaluating competition and determining demand
Week 3 - Choosing and buying a domain and setting nameservers
Week 4 - Learning WordPress, HTML, and planning posts
Week 5 - Plugins, contact and about pages, meta tags
Week 6 - CSS, H1 tags, content ideas, publishing photos and videos
I LOVE my “job.” Affiliate marketing takes work, but it doesn’t feel like work.
Comments on this entry are closed.