It all depends on how we value our time, effort, and results.

I’ve been attempting to build an online business, and part of a business is producing something, while the other part is its ability to provide income.

While I started out writing and creating websites just for the excitement of it (and watching the site statistics!), the reward of feedback in reader commentary became an important part of the reason to write. At that time it was reward enough for me.

As the internet became bigger it became important to put some of my writing into its own hosted domain. That cost money. Thus was born my initial attempts at monetization with much trepidation. In fact, I was so timid about adding Google ads and Amazon associate links that I made almost zero every month. And only a penny or two usually on other months. That went on a long time, long enough that I wondered whether online earnings might be an Urban Legend.

I finally earned something

After I did start getting some small results, it just seemed that the boat had passed me by, and I did miss out on the early days when some savvy entrepreneurs were turning their websites into businesses. Today, though, I see that with lots of hard work, it is possible to build your income with writing online.

I’m not successful enough to parlay expertise into training and tutorials, but I can share how some endeavors are working for me.

Squidoo

Squidoo is presently having its share of hiccups, but it has worked out very well for me. I went overboard the first year that I figured out what Squidoo was about, helped along by their friendly monsters, but it helped me learn tremendous amounts about online business and marketing in a community setting. I am earning regularly from the lenses I’ve written. I’ve written about two hundred in total, but only about 58-59 earn anything. There is a tiered structure in Squidoo which means that the top earning lenses might earn dollars while the majority earn pennies, plus the shared associate earnings from Amazon and eBay. Potentially you can earn from Cafepress, but I don’t personally find that this is a stream of income.

I have found Squidoo to be affirming personally, overall. And that fits in with my view that work we do is more than about the money earned.

The primary reason I began writing on Squidoo was for the purpose of providing my own backlinks to my garden website, as I found garden bloggers less than supportive of my work. Squidoo has been better for helping me write on a wider range of topics, more than any benefit from the backlinks. And it is responsible for helping me see an increase in Amazon orders.

My latest lens is “Making Fairy Houses” which is in the Gardening niche of my writing.

HubPages

Although lumped together with Squidoo, HubPages is very different. I am too new at it to assess ityet, or even tell much about the nuts and bolts. I began there as a way to intersect links across the web, and to see if ther income that is promised is possible for me. There are a number of people who write both for Squidoo and Hubspot.

I think the community here is a little more rough and ready with prominent forum arguments and less willingness to embrace someone new (at least that is my perception so far). The truth is that every online community has its learning curve, so I will need to report on that later. With money earned, however I have already seen $.20 after posting 4 hubs in about five days. By comparison, Squidoo did not earn me that much until I had been writing for about three months.

It was that sort of earnings comparison that lured me over to Hubspot.

I began with a garden topic, “Front Yard Curb Appeal” and moved onto Local community events with the “Ohio Renaissance Festival“.

I am not comfortable making pages on controversial opinions or even much personal storytelling… although I might branch out into the storytelling. I need to improve and exercise more in that type of writing.

My goal

This year I set my goal high. I would like to earn $1000.00 a month from my the revenues of affiliations. As of now, that seems too high to reach, but I want to stretch and see if it is possible. It will take concerted work, I know that much!

For those who want to try for themselves:
You could join Squidoo, or HubPages, or both.

That is one lesson I learned, in action. Always include your affiliate referral, because you never know!

A Word about Zazzle

Here is another program I was slow to learn and didn’t see any results form for many years. I finally have a fairly regular check that arrives from Zazzle. I rarely get referral income, but there has been some purchases of m products. This is probably the most underutilized of my efforts, and I think it could be significant if I learn a bit more, and produce more often.

For all the little updates I make about Squidoo, visit my blog ilona1 Squidoo.

Well, more empty hours to spend trying to sort things out. Right now, here is one of the articles I’m reading to try and learn how to use the new analytics:
Google Opens Analytics Platform

renewing my sites

My sites have been continually in need of watchfulness, care, and replacing files ever since EIG took over Netfirms. I am very tired of it. I have been hardening my wordpress installaions, and now, I’ve been comparing numbers of files, then uploading fresh files if there is a discrepancy. Everything is much harder with joomla, which I do not understand half as well.

The reason for this post is because I recently found a php file in my plugins folders. It is named weather-de and has that evil “eval” right at the top. I deleted all copies that I could find- it had contaminated almost all the WordPress blogs I had.

I don’t know what it does. I found this note on it: WordPress forum discussion on hack problems

Method
I am doing things awkwardly, until I find something that works better. I download the fresh copy of wordpress. Then I compare, or maybe manually update the installation, first deleting the old files. Sometimes I am now doing this with plugins I use.

Changed the passwords and made them stronger on most of my sites.

Keep everything updated as best as I can.

Still looking for better hosting possibilities.
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Do you know Lorelle? If you are working with a WordPress blog, you ought to. She has been around seemingly forever and I know that I gained alot of information and perspective on blogging from her posts in the past. Well, she has written an in depth article on how to make a proper link, and though for some of us that is basic html know-how, there are lots of newbies who find this sort of thing mysterious. Lorelle strips away the curtain of mystery and makes it all clear for you.

I found her directions for framing a proper link on one of her lesser known (to me) blogs, Lorelle Teaches. If you are new to blogging I believe you should bookmark Lorelle’s blog. It will come in handy.

Of course the drawback was that I lost a few features, like the asides posts. For some reason WordPress developers didn’t feel it was important, although I could still add them in with an extra plugin. Another drawback to going with the latest and greatest default theme is the lack of child themes. Twenty Ten had lots, …T.Eleven, not so many, and T.Twelve had almost nil free child themes made for it. Its font sizes were way too small, too.

What did I most like about it? The newest themes, including Twenty twelve are “responsive” themes to show up well on mobile phones,etc. And that is where the internet is going…. mobile. It doesn’t make sense to have themes that look wonky on a phone, anymore.

I suppose those are things that will be ironed out in the future. For now, I am happy using the Twenty Twelve theme for my Advent Devotionals, which now have monthly devotionals throughout the year. I wish I could settle on just a few ideal themes for my wordpress blogs, but I seem to have a problem being truly satisfied, even with premium themes that I pay for each year.

I’ve seen it on other blogs and always liked the look. If it works out well here, I think I will replace other plugins I am using on some of my other blogs.

One of the criticisms of social sharing plugins has been the way they slow down a site, which is a real problem for some of my sites (although not necessarily for this one). This site is not image heavy and the theme seems fairly fast. If there are problems it likely come from the unfortunate fate of Netfirms, which was bought by EIG. I have had lots of hosting woes since ownership of Netfirms changed. And they seem to buy out every hosting company I look into, so far.

Back to the plugin… Shareaholic for WordPress is HTML5-compliant, its JavaScript is hosted on Amazon’s CDN, and it is customizable in ways that are easy to implement. It includes sharing sites that others don’t always include – like Squidoo.

I like it.

Add it to the list of important WordPress plugins to include in your list.

Plugin Good For Ads

For Adsense I used to use Easy Adsense until it changed into something second rate, not to go into a rant or badmouth it. It served well for many years, but now I use Post Layout which gives much more control and doesn’t seem to try and siphon off earnings (of which there was never very much and is quite low at this point). Post Layout allows for other ad programs to be added, as well. So far, I like it.
Post Layout Plugin

Plugins Every Site Should Have

Some of my sites have been WordPress based for many years, and during that time went through changes including problems with permalinks, etc. I had lots of redirects and broken links to other sites, etc. So I am super excited about the plugin I tried, called “Broken Link Checker”.

It is very easy to use and I have gone through just about all the broken links to either unlink, or -more often- find the new links on site that dropped their pages or changed the location. I am looking forward to this plugin changing the speed and (possibly help) google rank. At least my site is updated and far better experience for readers!!!

(1.) I recommend every WordPress site to have the Broken Link Checker plugin.

For many years I used “All In One SEO”, and I have no complaint about it, but when I read about all that Yoast’s WP SEO plugin could do, I started using it. It is complex and I don’t have the learning curve completely mastered, but it is working well, and I think it will be a huge improvement for my site. It imports all of the settings and info from ‘All In One’.

(2.) Yoast SEO for WordPress

“Yet Another Related Posts Plugin” is one that I have used from very early on. It has been reliable and helps people find more posts, which is more important than ever on sites that have lots of content. I tweaked it to provide graphics, much like “LinkWithin” but without the nuisance keywords of the LinkWithin site coming up repeatedly. The new version of YARPP now has those thumbnails builtin.

I wouldn’t do without this plugin.

(3.) Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Other New Additions

I started using the Jetpack because it was so highly recommended. Mostly the stats part of it interests me, I’m not sure about the rest of it (and it is extensive). The verdict will be in later in the year. But it is well worth trying, especially if your blog uses more of the features than mine would.
Jetpack.

Jetpack Plugin

Google XML Sitemaps isn’t perfect, but it helps provide a sitemap which is necessary and which I don’t understand well enough to provide for myself. I liked it much better when you could add pages, a feature which they have not restored as of this writing. Still, the plugin is a useful one.

Google XML Sitemap

WP-PageNavi is built-in to some templates, but if you don’t have it, this navigation tool is very worthwhile. It gives a logical and good looking way to navigate through the sites pages. Plus you can style it.

WP-PageNavi

I have used many plugins over the years, some of which I regret, some that I get more excited over the more I use them. If I wanted the essentials this list is one I would start with. It is not a definitive list by any means, but a great way to start your WordPress site.

So pinterest buttons, yeah. They are a big thing for lots of people online, so most of the social plugins now include them. No need to separately install them, and anyway, there are load time issues with lots of little widgets fidgeting around on your blog.

One thing I am trying to work on is the information that those social sharing plugins of all types are a major source of drain on increasing page-load times. Plugins themselves bloat your site, so I have deleted the more redundant ones when possible. When I have more time I hope to compile a list of helpful things and the sources for the info in a separate post. If you can’t wait just do your own research on WordPress plugins and site load times.

Also. I used WordPress Twenty Twelve theme for my Advent blog this past season (Advent 2012). So the post on the Twenty Eleven theme is a little stale, too. Yet, in many ways I liked that theme… it was so easy to make aside posts, etc.

These are just some notes to give you a little heads up on things you may want to change about your WordPress site, in case like me, sometimes you follow old practices. I love the changes that WordPress and Joomla have made to their software! The old days of difficult updating and trying to manually delete hundreds of spam comments are a thing of the past.

OK, this is just a bite …don’t’ want to post all at once, but wanted to let you know this blog is ALLLIIIIIVVVVE. It is not a zombie blog…which reminds me that I will have to post on all the Zombie movies and stuff I’ve been watching…”Like Walking Dead” on Netflix. I watched them all.

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This post was written by Ilona's Reflecting Pool @ myreflectingpool.com.

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