Crucial Business

Beware of Avantlink's Inactive account policy

2012-05-10T16:27:00.000-05:00

For several years along with my teaching, I did affiliate marketing. With backlinks being king at the search engines and economic downturn, I decided to take a break and go back to full time teaching however several affiliate marketing accounts are below the minimum payment so they are still there and well when demand for classes goes down I plan to try again.

Yesterday, I got a check in the mail from Avantlink for my remaining balance. Unfortunately I can't use it. It is very complicated to cash an international check written to a business name. I quickly sent a message to them asking why they sent me a check since from the beginning I had my account set to pay me by PayPal and they can see by my address that I don't live in the USA.

I got a friendly message telling me that it is their policy to send a check if an account is inactive. Isn't that an interesting policy? Lets ignore payment settings if an account is inactive!

I replied asking them to cancel the check and to correctly reissue payment as configured.

I was then told that they could charge me the stop-check fee and get the PayPal payment for the remainder. The fee is more than half of the value of the check.

I later replied that if they don't want to fix the problem to go ahead and close my account. I got a reply about an hour later that they'd do exactly that so I am no longer recommending Avantlink. I don't appreciate that treatment at all. I thought they'd care, but they obviously didn't in my case.

Beautiful Business Card with Vintage Pattern

2011-08-26T09:29:00.000-05:00

Your Photograph with a Beautiful Border Browse more Fancy Business Cards

In addition with my busy work teaching English classes, I've been keeping busy at my Zazzle stores. I've spent most of the month on graphic design especially with vintage patterns and monograms. This business card uses one of my favorite backgrounds with a matching separator this berry or maroon tinted card is great for a woman, an antique shop, a jewelry store, or other formal situation. Just change the text to your information and replace my photo with your photo or logo. It is available in different colors and I have several other vintage backgrounds and font combinations in my store if you browse business cards.

Seven Reasons Why Many Writers and Visual Artists Make No Money

2011-03-13T18:09:00.001-06:00

Writers and artists have several things in common. We like to create, we're sensitive, and we are mostly independent. We normally think in concepts instead of numbers so it isn't surprising that we often make the same mistakes that hold us back from success. Here are a few reasons why you might not be successful selling your writing or artwork online.

You are not publishing in the right place for your type of work
You are not doing enough promotion of your work
You are not very patient
You are not very productive
Your prices are too high or too low
Your finished works could use more finishing
Your work's descriptions and keywords (tags) are not very good

You are not publishing in the right place for your type of work.

There are several different ways to publish both books and artwork online. There is print-on-demand like Lulu or Blurb for books and Imagekind, FineArtAmerica, Zazzle, CafePress, Redbubble, and many more sites for artwork. For ebook sales there is the option to publish them for Kindle (at Amazon) and other sites using Smashwords. Just because you don't get any sales on one site it doesn't mean you won't have better luck at another. It normally doesn't hurt to upload the same works to multiple sites so people have options when searching on those sites for your keywords

You are not doing enough promotion of your work

With so much competition, you have to work to get seen. Blog, create a website, use social bookmarking, Facebook, Twitter, and anything else that comes to mind to get your artwork in front of others without spamming. Do your best to establish friendly relationships with people who like your artwork or writing. If you are a writer offer a sample perhaps the first chapter of your book. Artists should include thumbnail images of their artwork.

You are not very patient

Sales take time and effort. Whoever told you that selling online was an easy road to riches was probably trying to sell you an expensive get-rich-quick e-book. There is no honest get rich quick. If it were so easy to make money online, everyone would do it.

You are not very productive

Did I mention the w-word? Yes, it takes work too. You must always be working on new books or artwork, post them for sale and promote them. The moment you stop working you will start to lose future income. Also consider the more work you have available to the public, the more likely people will remember you and your personal brand.

Your prices are too high or too low

If you price too high you lose impulse purchases and bargain hunters. If you price too low, people will think your work isn't quality. Better yet offer different price points like e-books and hardcover books and postcards as well as canvas prints.

Your finished works could use more finishing

Always proofread and edit any book you plan to publish. Always post process your photos and other artwork even minimal editing and post processing makes a big difference. The image your work has will make a huge difference in sales. Would you buy a book without cover art or a photo where the subject is out of focus or with poor composition? As a general rule, only post for sale works that you are proud of.

Your works' descriptions and keywords (tags) are not very good

Often people will find your work online because of keywords in your work's description and tags. If you don't write a complete description with good tags, your work might not appear in the results and you lose the sale.

Working from Home: Set Daily and Weekly Goals for Productivity

2011-03-13T09:28:00.001-06:00

Working at home can be changing in terms of productivity due to distractions that exist however working at home has one challenge that is worse for many. You are not supervised. If you require supervision to get work done, you won't be successful working at home because you have to be a self-starter. If you don't regularly add content (sales and informative) to your website, blog, or print on demand (POD) site(s), you won't make any money and will have to get a job where you will have a set schedule and someone looking over your shoulder.

One way to deal with this problem is of course to set regular days and hours for work so you get into a routine. I wrote about this in earlier articles. Today, I want to emphasize the importance of setting (and writing down) your daily and/or weekly goals for your online business.

The importance of setting goals

Since you don't have a boss while working at your home or online business, you need more than just the need to eat to keep yourself working and keep your online business growing. Your list of goals (or as I like to call it my to-do list) replaces the boss. Instead of going to the boss to find out what to do today or this week, you check your list. You know that you have to do whatever is on the list or do what it takes to reach a certain statistic.

You could set a goal of writing 7 quality blog posts or articles each week. You could also say that you want to have the goal of an average of 10 more readers per day in your blog statistics (compared to the previous week or previous month. It is easy to compare by installing an Analytics like Google Analytics and then just comparing the statistics from one week or month to the next such as the number of visitors or repeat visitors.

Another good statistic to compare would be RSS or Newsletter subscribers. Perhaps set a goal of 5 new subscribers for the week.
What do you have to do to earn the new subscribers? You will of course be judged by the quality of your content. If they see value they'll eventually start to comment and subscribe.
By setting goals and checking your list, you'll never have the excuse of having nothing to do nor will you be playing video games during work hours until you have reached your goal.

Why you should write down your goals

It is important to write down your goals for working in your home office because we often forget what is important especially in the long term. Seeing that sale for a book you wrote about at Amazon might make you forget your plan.

Don't just write sales content! People are not going to come back to a website that just has advertisements. People want to learn and be entertained. You have to add value to the products and services that you promote (even if they are your own products).

What kind of goals you should set

Any goals you set for your online business should be productivity related. Your focus should be on creating new content, new products, new services, improving existing products, improving existing services and promoting all of those.

Checking your blog statistics is not a goal and as a task, it is only beneficial at most once a day. E-mail is not productive either. Checking e-mail is only important for replying to clients. Otherwise twice a day is more than adequate. Don't put statistics or e-mail on your to-do or goal list.

A goal of 5 new subscribers, 10 new articles, 20 new enriching blog comments, improved ranking for your most important keywords, 2 new finished artworks, etc are all great. Your goals should be to move you forward!

Weekly or daily goals

If you have trouble getting going, daily goals are probably the best. At or near the end of one day, make a short list of 3-5 things to do to meet your objectives and put it in your work area where you will see it right away.

Weekly goals are more objectives than tasks although they go together. If you don't add new content and you don't promote your website or blog, or POD profile, how do you expect growth? Weekly goals are best for self-starters who just need a push to do what is productive instead of what is unproductive.

After a few months of this routine, you might discover that you automatically start on productive tasks and checking your goals for continual improvement! Once you start seeing success the success will also start to motivate you to work smarter.

Do you Spin your Articles for Article Marketing?

2011-03-12T09:43:00.002-06:00

Due to the recent Panda/Content Farm update at Google, the Article Marketing methods of recent years of writing a short article and submitting it to various article directories for backlinks and new exposure seems to be challenged. While there are many websites accepting articles, most seem to be requesting articles that are ONLY for that site.

Web 2.0 Sites are getting strict

I noticed this message this morning in Hubpages:

Hubs with text that is substantially duplicated from other sites are now completely prohibited
Hubs must contain at least 50 words of original text for each Amazon or eBay product that is configured to be displayed
Hubs can no longer use an Amazon, eBay, Link, News, or RSS capsule as the first full width capsule in a hub

I really like the idea of requiring at least 50 words of original text per product displayed since I don't think social sites really should be use for in-your-face product promotion so if they can't say more than just a list of products the article should get rejected. I always thought that product lists that are just product lists should be on your own website or blog.

Notice how they are not allowing the same article to be used or an article only partially rewritten since the duplicated content will be substantial. Although they don't mention percents, I'm sure this is to go against copied content and people who rewrite the title and first paragraph only before adding an article from another site (like their blog).

Squidoo also recently started reminding users about the need for original content. When I checked the blog for the article that was linked to the user dashboard, I found a link to this FAQ.

While the FAQ reminds people not to use content by others with out permission (you know not to steal photos and text right) and to not be excessive with quotes from Wikipedia and other creative commons websites question #7 addresses the article marketing issue.

Q: I write a lot of articles elsewhere, and I want to post them on Squidoo too. May I?

A: Careful here. Squidoo is a place for original content. That means it's not recycled in several places, verbatim, around the web. Surely since it's your content you can link it all together, but please remember to excerpt yourself. Don't post an entire article of yours here AND somewhere else. Rather, use your lens to excerpt your favorite parts of your own article, maybe share a little more background behind it, add something that is truly unique to the lens only, and have fun.

Again we have the push for minimal content duplication just like Hubpages and I wouldn't be surprised if article directories start to follow this and require original articles too. Ezinearticles which greatly affected by the search engine changes now requires 400 words or more and twice as many quality checks as before with an emphasis on good language use. Which probably means that many articles that they have been getting have been "spun".

What is article spinning?

From what I understand, Spinning articles is the process of using software to rewrite article content quickly mostly through replacing words and phrases with similar words and phrases. I assume people started to use article spinning software because they saw the writing on the wall with similar updates at Google last year which dropped website rankings for sites that include affiliate datafeeds using content from the datafeed instead of rewritten content and similar cases with unchanged product descriptions and little original text. I know and I agree. How much can you really say about a product that really is helpful and useful to a visitor to your website? Unless it is your own product there really is very little you can add that can help the decision to click a product or not, but the search engine doesn't see it that way. That's also probably why there are so many review and fake review websites today since the BS about products got better ranking even before those changes in the last couple years.

Those very problems made article marketing more popular since people needed more backlinks to get their sites back up in search results and since by nature we are lazy and because we need to compete with the real content farms where there are hundreds of writers writing nonsense (yet original) articles every day, people started using Article Spinning software.

I have been tempted to try to use them but so far I've only rewritten my articles starting by thinking of the topic and what I wrote before. I make a point of changing the title and while I'll occasionally keep the main points, the text is different. Often by the second writing of a topic the content is better than the original on my blog or website since I had more time to think about it and I can add any new ideas that come to mind.

Pros and Cons of article re-writting by hand vs. using an article spinner

The Pros for rewriting by hand and mind is that it is truly your work and it will be just as understandable as your normal writing. It will be original work even if you keep the same main points.

The cons are the time it takes and the boredom that occurs by having to write the same topic over and over just to get your work seen and to have a backlink on another site. Article spinning software can let you rewrite an article in a few minutes even if it is still confusing. I'm sure if you just pasted an article directly from software, it would be almost impossible to understand since we know that most synonyms are not 100% the same and therefore multiple work changes will cause confusion as someone tries to read it.

What is the future of Article marketing?

I almost wonder if article marketing is dying, since it is no longer as easy as reposing your content to other sites as links and the same work will be needed as posting to your own websites. Perhaps people will finally just focus on writing great content for their own web properties and social bookmarking? I'm sure web 2.0 websites will still be around for people who don't want to have their own website or blog, but I wonder how much value there will be in using them for traffic generation and backlinks after the next few search engine updates.

What do you think? Do you spin or have you spun your articles? Do you do article marketing today?

14 Things to Do When You're Having a Bad Day (in your home office)

2011-03-11T15:20:00.001-06:00

Sometimes you have the best of intentions, but no matter what you try you just can't seem to concentrate and that great post that should have taken you thirty minutes to write has already taken an hour and it still isn't complete. Admit it, you're having a bad day.

Here are some things to do when you are having a bad day when working at home. A few are just temporary things to do and then you try to go back to your productive tasks while others will take the entire day. In any case don't feel frustrated. We all need some time off and away from the computer.

Have a coffee
Take a nap (set your alarm for 1-2 hours)
Go for an inspiration walk with your camera
Lift weights
Cook your favorite meal
Daydream or meditate
Read a book (especially one about one of your blog/website topics)
Clean your office
Paint or decorate your home office
Do laundry
Take the day off
Do yoga
Take care of your garden
Call Mom or your best friend

Take care of your body and spirit

When you are having trouble concentrating your body is probably not in its best condition. How have you been taking care of your body recently? Have you been averaging less than 6.5 hours of sleep per night? Perhaps you need to take a nap. Maybe the neighbor's party just kept you up so try a strong coffee now and a nap after lunch.

Perhaps you haven't been getting enough exercise. Lift some weights and take a walk or go jogging. Do some yoga or gardening. Your body was designed to move. It was not designed to sit in a chair in front of a computer every day and all day long! Work up a good sweat, take a shower and try to spend the next hour working on something productive. Yoga and gardening are great because they are not only exercise but also spiritual and relaxing.

Feeling isolated from the world? When was the last time you took the day off or went out. We all need some social time too. Call Mom and say hello. Send your best friend or your significant other a quick text message to see if they have a moment for a quick call. Take no more than 5 minutes for the call and get back to work! :-)

Finally consider your diet. If you are eating mostly junk food you will be lethargic and have trouble concentrating. If so, make a fresh vegetable salad or cook a vegetable soup (no I don't mean anything that comes in a can!). You need vegetables to be healthy. A hamburger and fries may taste great, but if that's all you eat you'll just get fat and you'll be missing what you also need: vitamins, calcium, fiber, etc. that fresh vegetables can give you.

Take care of your home office and home in general

We are often distracted or depressed by our home office and home in general. Perhaps your mind is reminding you that you have nothing to wear tomorrow. If so go take care of that quickly and try to get back to work.

Is your home office a mess or dirty? Take an hour (set an alarm) and pick it up and organize it a little. Empty the waste basket and wipe off all the desk surfaces with a damp soapy wash cloth and mop the floor by the desk. Don't forget the dust and stuff under and behind the computer desk. Yes, you can do it in one hour if you work quickly. This is important because you'll also be getting anything that might be causing you allergies in your immediate work area and an organized clean office makes you feel good.

If you are in a cleaning mood spend thirty minutes on any other close by room like the bathroom or kitchen and then try to work on something productive in your home office for the next hour.

If you office is already clean, consider painting it. While walls turn depressing gray and light blue walls are depressing too. Beige is a little boring. Consider painting it white (for a dark room), yellow (always cheerful), or a bold green (if you have good light a bold color can be great). Do you have any plants? Get one or two. Put them where they get light and water them at least once a week. They'll make you feel good for that little effort it takes to take care of them. There are some plants that will tolerate low light, but don't expect them to survive or grow if you stick them in the dark corner of your room. Put the file cabinet and storage boxes over there instead!

Even if today you weren't able to be as productive as you'd like, by taking care of your body, spirit, and home, you'll be more prepared for a more productive day tomorrow!

Six Tips for any Business Person Who Wants to Hire a Freelancer (Outsource)

2011-03-10T20:47:00.004-06:00

In, my previous entry I described for freelancers some common problems now this post includes some tips for businesses who want to hire a freelancer or in other words want to outsource common tasks like accounting, graphic design, website development, or coding.

If you follow these tips you will have a better experience working with freelancers for any project. Good planning and communication will avoid most problems.

Be realistic
Know exactly what you want before you contact a freelancer or before posting an advertisement.
Be willing to listen to the expert's point of view. If they give you advice, it is probably for a reason.
Plan a timeline for different tasks and verify that the timeline is realistic with the freelancer you hire.
Take responsibility for you part of the project.
Pay a good price for good work or expect less.

Be realistic

You wanted it yesterday and you want all the bells and whistles, but don't expect everything unless you are willing to pay $$$ and wait a long time. A complicated dynamic website or computer software program is best done in functional parts starting with the most essential features and adding on to it as you go keeping in mind what you later want it to do.

Know exactly what you want before you contact a freelancer or before posting an advertisement.

Planning is essential. If you don't clearly know what you want, how will you be able to explain to a freelancer your needs? Brainstorm and mindmap your project. Meet with whoever in your company will be working with you on the project and get their feedback before you contact someone.

No freelancer will want the extra work of doing something over because you forced them to guess at what you wanted. Likewise you won't want delays in completing your project.

Be willing to listen to the expert's point of view. If they give you advice, it is probably for a reason.

Most likely you want to hire a freelancer because he is an expert in his area whereas you probably have a limited knowledge in that area. After discussing the project and goals, be able to accept feedback from your freelancer. You are in control, but those suggestions might make the project even better or run more smoothly. There might be technical reasons why something might need to be done a little differently.

Plan a timeline for different tasks and verify that the timeline is realistic with the freelancer you hire.

You might have wanted this yesterday, but the freelancer might be finishing up another projects while starting yours. The freelancer might have a part time job or a family to take care of (just like you!). Make a realistic deadline and set a done by date for each separate step that you both agree on. By agreeing on completion of steps on certain days, you'll feel better seeing each step done and you'll know to be more concerned if your freelancer doesn't report it complete on time.

Take responsibility for you part of the project.

Don't forget that if the freelancer needs your feedback or information, you need to give it in a timely manner or the project will lose momentum. Don't sabotage your own progress. If your subordinate has to send information or give feedback, make sure he or she does as well. It isn't the freelancer's fault if he or she has been waiting for you.

Pay a good price for good work or expect less.

You really do get what you pay for. Don't expect encyclopedia quality articles for five dollars each and don't expect a short article with poor grammar for twenty dollars. You should expect a quality that corresponds to the price. If you want quality work offer a quality price and most freelancers who want repeat business will try to match the fair offer with good quality work. Also consider if someone only makes 5 dollars each per unit, he'll have to spend less time on it to include other projects. Everyone has to eat!

Conclusion

Working with a freelancer can be a great experience. By showing basic respect, clearly stating your goals, and agreeing on a plan and timeline from the start, you will avoid conflict and hopefully lead to working together on many projects.

5 Problems you should consider before you start freelancing

2011-03-09T18:12:00.002-06:00

Freelancing is a kind of consulting work where you charge by project. Essentially you work on different tasks which you agree upon with a client and once the work is complete you get the final or full payment. It sounds almost like the perfect situation for someone who doesn't have time for full time work or for someone who has a home business and needs a little extra income. It isn't as perfect as you might hope because freelancing means you have to negotiate and agree on each aspect of the project with a client. In this way it is much more complicated than selling advertisements for a website or adding affiliate links and this is also why things can often go wrong.

Here are the problems I've experienced personally. If you have done any freelancing, you probably could add to the list. :-)

A client doesn't know what he or she really wants.
A client wants to change the direction of a project half way through (without paying more for the new work or the work that will be re-done)
A current client will want extra services for free that were not included in the agreement.
A client's negotiation for the best price will compare you with the cheapest and lowest quality service.
You get stuck waiting for information you were promised by the project manager and the Manager's boss gets upset that the work isn't yet complete.

While many of these problems might be avoided by making formal contracts, you'll often discover clients that won't want to sign a legal contract. If possible at least write down the agreed points on paper and have a verbal agreement. Just don't be surprised if it doesn't help. Most companies will work to get what is best for them not what is best for both of you. It normally isn't personal.

A client doesn't know what he or she really wants

While I suppose it can happen in any industry, this happens to me most when people ask me for information on setting up and designing their website. I offer design, HTML and PHP coding, and WordPress Theme and plugin help for websites. Unfortunately most people have no clue what they want for a website. Many people just say they want a webpage (even though they want a complete site!). I typically have to go through asking multiple questions just to get a general idea of what they really want. Once I finish going asking questions they normally have a headache. The only idea I have to fix this is just show them a "sample" website and ask if that is what they want or not.

People and businesses with existing websites who want a redesign are not much more helpful. When they want a dynamic website, they can't tell me if their web host is a windows server or linux server and normally they can't even tell me WHERE their current website is hosted or if they could give me their control panel login info for me to just log in and see. I can't honestly offer them a dynamic website if they are on a webhost that doesn't allow a database!

One option is to charge a higher price and include hosting for their website, but here in Mexico most companies don't want to pay more than $3000 pesos (around $290 USD) so I haven't been very motivated to take that option since I'd have to then bill them every year to keep their sites up. I do offer the service of helping a client get set up with a decent shared host, but they signup for hosting not me.

At that point they typically tell me that they need to get back to me and they don't. It is frustrating because sometimes you feel like you are talking to preschoolers when it comes to technology and since they don't know what a blog is or what comments are or if someone will be updating the site or not. (they want it to be dynamic, but they don't want to add new content!)

A client wants to change the direction of a project half way through (without paying more for the new work or the work that will be re-done)

This has happened several times on projects. We'll meet come to a conclusion on what is needed and on the price all great. Then after starting the work, they'll mention that they were talking about the project and decided that they'd rather do it differently.

In this case they probably hadn't fully thought out what they wanted before meeting with me. Once they had a chance to sleep on it and discuss the plan they realized that they didn't want it exactly like that.

This happened to me when I was asked to design a website for a client's second business. I was going to install WordPress on a new Bluehost hosting account and totally customize a WordPress theme for them. That was all great. A week into the project I had finished editing the design and was adding the text they had sent me dividing it up into WordPress pages and they told me that they wanted to divide their business into four websites one per business division so half of my work was for nothing. I had to help them register the domains which was quick, but it meant installing WordPress, configuring it, and adding content to four sites instead of one site. I was not very happy when they didn't offer to pay more for all the extra work and I admit I really dragged my feet in getting the extra sites set up.

You can either renegotiate a price for the extra work or risk dropping the project entirely depending on the amount of extra work is included and your time. If it is an important client sometimes it is ok to take the extra work at no cost and then negotiate a higher price for the next project you do for them assuming that something will change.

A current client will want extra services for free that were not included in the agreement

In addition to the previous issue, I've had clients asking me for extra services for free. This is typically due to miscommunication between departments on what I promised or agreed to do so they try to send me their work since it is related. Once one of my clients who I did a website for wanted to have some Spanish-English translation work done. The project manager for the website sent me a business proposal that he wanted urgently translated for Monday. It was Friday afternoon when he sent me the document by e-mail. I replied that business proposal translations were not included in the agreement and asked if wanted to hire me for that service. I got an upset reply on Monday saying not to worry about it that they found someone else to do it! I can only guess that they just ran the document through Google Translate very quickly or they decided to pay someone else to spite me, but all he had to do was reply and he did have my cell phone number.

A client's negotiation for the best price will compare you with the cheapest and lowest quality service.

This problem normally happens to me when I negotiate English language services including English courses and English-Spanish or Spanish-English translations. I charge much less than a typical translation service that you find with an office in a fancy neighborhood, yet I'll typically be compared to the woman down the street who lived in the USA for a year and thinks that makes her an expert teacher or the translator who can barely speak English and charges $5 per page for a translation that isn't much better than one done by a computer. Don't people know they get what they pay for?

You get stuck waiting for information you were promised by the project manager and the manager's boss gets upset that the work isn't yet complete.

To avoid this problem for translations I normally ask for the document to be sent to me at the very beginning before I give a price quote. I'll also normally tell them that it will be X days after confirming that I got the document and I'll e-mail both the person who sent it and the boss so they know.

For websites I'll normally ask for the company's introduction letter and any PowerPoint presentations or other sales literature they use for selling to a new client and use that information for the website's text. They normally have a few days while I customize the website template, but sometimes the person in charge of the information gets busy and forgets to send it. I've discovered that it is important to e-mail both people to remind them that I'm waiting on them otherwise it is my fault.

Conclusion

I wrote this post for those who are considering freelancing to help new freelancers know some situations they should come to expect and in doing so plan ways to minimize them and deal with them as they occur.
Some strategies would be to expect problems to occur and ask for 15% more to include the "by the way I also need..." and to include extra e-mail updates so no one is left out of the loop. Extra communication and a clearly defined agreement are key to freelancing success.

The experiences I mentioned are not suggesting in any way that those were bad clients. Those are really quite typical clients and you just have to deal with less than ideal projects with a positive attitude. Expect the unexpected and good luck!

Would you work for free in exchange for a credit and a link?

2011-03-09T06:51:00.000-06:00

I wrote about this topic late last night on my main art blog, but I thought I'd write about this disturbing topic here to get thoughts from this blog's readers.

Last night someone posted in one of the groups I am in for Facebook that she was having a contest for the cover of her to-be-released book (the first in a new series) and she posted a link to a completely new website and blog which only had a few short pages on it. I read the information on the contest only to be very disturbed and a little offended.

The "prize" was to get a credit in the book and a backlink or perhaps a few on that site.
No financial award at all even though the work of creating the specific artwork would take at least several hours and perhaps several days depending on the level of detail or type of art.
If the writer doesn't like any of the work submitted for the "contest", no one would get any credit or backlinks.
By submitting for the "contest" you agree to give a license to the writer to use the artwork in anyway the writer wants to for the book.

In general, there has been a trend that creative work is treated as something without sufficient worth to be paid for not even a small amount. Instead of getting a few hundred dollars for very specific artwork licencing, someone is asking for it to be created for NOTHING!!! Perhaps I should have a contest for a professional blog design to for free in exchange for a link on a page on my site. Of course I'll want to meet very specific criteria not just a pro theme already out there! Oh yeah, if I don't like it you did all the work for nothing too! See what I mean?

If you ALREADY had created artwork and wanted to exchange it for a backlink and credit, I'd say it is up to you to give your work away, but at least you aren't working for free on someone else's project that could make them hundreds or thousands of dollars later on (and the publicity won't be worth much if they don't).

Now for the "crucial business" perspective. I know that one tactic for promoting an online business especially for bloggers is to offer a free information product as a sample to get more work, but this does not make sense for art nor in this case.

A visual artist can have an online portfolio with small (not print resolution) artworks for people to browse just as a writer can offer a free chapter excerpt of a book.
The free product of an artwork will probably have a small credit with perhaps the URL of the artist website somewhere by the copyright statement. It is not like how most books have an about the author page. How often do you look to see who created the cover art for a book? Normally they are paid to create specific artwork or stock photos or public domain images are used.
Free artwork for a book cover will just make the writer's product look good. It won't be a big source of traffic like it will be for the writer. The writer's name will be on the cover not the artist's name. How many sales do e-books without cover art get? I bet they get fewer sales! Isn't that worth paying your artist for his or her hard work?

What about guest posts isn't that the same you ask? Lets be honest. The typical guest post someone makes on a blog only takes a few minutes to write and the credit for the post with link and probably your small photo will be beside it. Special artwork for a book cover will take at least a few hours to make and the credit will be somewhere else.

If you are offering a free e-book it is normally in exchange for someone to sign up to your newsletter or to get more readers to your blog (they have to go there to download it). No one has to go to a website to the the art on a book cover. It is right there on the front of the book.

Now, it is your turn. Add your comments. Are you a little offended by the "contest" too or do you think it is no big deal and want to know where you can sign up?

Print on Demand also requires work and patience

2011-03-07T18:03:00.001-06:00

I started selling visual art on the internet, uploading my photos to Imagekind. They weren't that great, but not so bad either. We all start somewhere and we improve through practice any skill. After a better camera (still point and shoot but 10.1 megapixels instead of 3.x), in 2008, I thought that I'd start to get monthly sales. I did, but now where I thought I would.

I like Imagekind and I know they offer museum quality prints and they also offer cards and even prints on canvas however their image search doesn't work very well so having your artwork found at random isn't that likely. To succeed there and at Redbubble (which also offers T-shirts and Calendars), you need to promote your own artwork and refer people to make the purchase.

In this post, I'm including 3 artworks that just sold at my Imagekind gallery. You see that patience is important. Additionally, I want to mention that there is really no relationship between the number of comments and what sells. I have never sold any of my works that have many comments and the works that have sold have had no comments at all. What is cool, and what you want on your wall are very different concepts.

White Iris. by Christopher Johnson
This artwork is one of my first photos from 2007! You never know what will sell. You can see I wasn't that bad. Several years later someone bought a print. What if I had deleted it like so many people do?
There is no need to remove good artwork. If you are proud of your work that is good enough. You'll also notice that there is no signature on the work. I started adding a digital signature to my flower artwork much later. There is a lot of debate on whether or not you should sign your artwork. I'll later write an article about my thoughts and add it to my visual art blog or visual art site.

White Geraniums 4 by Christopher Johnson
This one is from a long mixed color series I created in 2010.

What about work? Yes, Print on Demand is hard work even if is something we enjoy. To be successful selling art online and actually live off of your earnings would probably require adding several new artworks every day for a couple years and then at least one a day after that. I still try to keep my artwork fun. If I'm not inspired, I'd rather write articles or blog posts.

Single White Oleander 1 by Christopher Johnson
This one is also from 2010 and also from a long series although most of them were pink.

Patience is a virtue. The truth is, it is hard to become an overnight success. Most people who seem like it actually have put consistent effort into their activities even when they were not making any money or even supported by their family!

Make a plan to work every day toward your goal focusing on productive activities like new artwork, graphic design, or adding your artwork to products.
Make some effort to promote your work online even if you are just sharing links on social websites or a blog. You'll be surprised how many people say they didn't know you did what you do even after all that! You may not have money for an advertising campaign, but at least you'll get some feedback from your friends online.
Keep it up! Don't stop with the first 10 or 100 work and say too bad it didn't work. Keep adding new works. It doesn't matter if you are a visual artist, graphic designer, or book writer. Don't give up!
Thank people for giving you feedback on your work even if you don't agree with them. Don't be a snob. If someone gives you a constructive comment, thank them. Don't argue about it. Ask questions for better understanding. See if you can improve. No one likes to give feedback just to be argued with! You'll most likely lose a friend that way or at the best they just won't give honest feedback anymore.

Why do you write or why do you have an online business?

2011-03-05T11:40:00.000-06:00

Why do you write or why do you have an online business?

I've slowly come to understand (no, I'm not a rocket scientist), that when you have an online business ( are a self publisher, a visual artist selling for royalties or via PayPal buttons and shipping originals or even just a blogger making money from advertising) it all comes down to what you write.

I suppose that might sound strange to many especially artists who sell directly, but it really comes down to the text you publish. Your words are what the search engine looks at when someone searches for artwork and until you have built your e-mail list and your client base, search engines and perhaps any social networking you do will be most of your sales traffic. Can you make many sales without doing much writing about your products and services? From what I can tell in selling art online that very few print on demand websites will get you any sales at all. Even with amazing tags and description on the print on demand website, there is too much competition to expect high sales from that alone.

Do you publish books online?
There are print on demand book services like Lulu or Blurb and you can also publish for the kindle or other e-book formats, but how many sales will you get at first? I suppose if you offer an e-book for a dollar, you'll get some people who are curious and buy your book online from the different services that have started appearing in the last couple years, but your main source of sales is you!
When you share a sample on your blog, announce your e-book when it is ready on Facebook or Twitter, when you share about what you do and how you do it, people get interested in who you are and will be more interested in buying that one dollar e-book. You have to get the ball rolling!

Do you love to blog or write articles?
Perhaps you are on Squidoo, Hubpages, Infobarrel, or one of the many other revenue sharing websites for advertising and some affililiate revenue. That's great too if you want to make money. We all have bills to pay and we need to eat. Very few of us have inherited fortunes to live off of.

Why do you write?

I started this post mentioning desired outcomes and needs for writing. You write in part because you need the search engine traffic, you need more eyes on your work to make sales for commission or royalty payments, and of course you write so you can eat, and have a roof over your head, but WHY do you write? You could have gotten a job at the supermarket, gas station, etc. There are plenty of entry level jobs anyone with a high school diploma can get.

Writing because you enjoy the process & sharing your work

Some people write because they really love the activity and the process of doing it. Even if they don't make any money they enjoy typing or pressing the pen on paper. If you are in this tiny group then you'll do well creating e-books, writing articles for money for Elance, and similar freelancing sites, revenue sharing sites or just a monetized blog if you do non-fiction. The internet was made for you!

Writing for publicity and exposure (don't forget networking)

If you are a musician, actor, visual artist, or business consultant you probably belong in this group. You write out of the need to get people to see what you are really passionate about. It does not have to be a dreary task. As long as you are writing about what you enjoy it isn't so bad. :-) You may even start to enjoy yourself. That's why you should always focus on what you like. It won't feel like work that way. Of course if you like work that feels like work, you could always study to become an accountant.
If you are in this group, focus on your passion and try to convert yourself into a member of the next one. Brainstorming and mind-mapping help find topics so you aren't just writing about your artwork or service.

Writing to help others by sharing your knowledge and experience (Educate)

Some of us are natural teachers. No, I don't mean teachers in the formal school sense. Instead we love to teach. We enjoy informing and educating others. We dislike ignorance and misinformation. You'll probably enjoy writing How-To articles and list articles full of data for others to absorb. You'll probably add quizzes and surveys to your posts and articles to verify understanding and you'd also enjoy giving training courses. If you know of a product that can fix a problem, you'll do well writing product reviews as an affiliate.

Writing to Entertain

Some people write because they love to tell jokes, write stories, and in general make people feel motivated and happy. You'd be a great blogger and you could sell your novels and short stories as e-books. Even when you write about your books for sale, try to keep some of that storytelling style to your blog posts and articles.

Conclusion
I mentioned several reasons for writing and I'm sure you can think of more. They are not exclusive. You can share, educate, entertain, and promote all at once and they can all be reasons that you have to write.
It is hard to separate the reasons for writing from the need to prosper in a world that runs on money, but if we remember why we do something it makes working online easier and it will help us select the most productive writing tasks.

If you have the indirect need to write, but have trouble keep practicing it gets easier over time. Also remember that you can hire freelance writers to write articles for your website or blog if you have more money than time.

Feedback from Mailchimp on Their Terms Regarding Affiliate Marketing in Newsletters

2011-03-03T09:36:00.002-06:00

As I mentioned in a post yesterday, I signed up for Mailchimp and set up three lists and RSS campaigns including sign up forms on Facebook pages.
Before adding more signup boxes or designing any special campaigns I had contacted their support asking for clarification on their terms not allowing affiliate marketing. If you read their Terms of Service, it includes Affiliate Marketing in a long list of topics that are quite distasteful as if Affiliate Marketing were some kind of scam even though many respected companies and independent artists use it.

Since I didn't get a reply in 24 hours from the first message, I sent a longer more detailed question last night explaining the site topics for my first lists English Language learning, Home and Online Business Experience, and Visual Art and that my posts usually will contain links to related products (like books at Amazon or affiliate links to the page that contains artwork).

I got the following reply this morning:

"I hope this message finds you well. In regards to your query, to clarify things for you, you are not permitted to include affiliate links in the newsletter content. Let us know if you have any further questions."

I wasn't actually planning on using "Newsletter Content" for including affiliate links, but instead using newsletters in bringing visitors back to the blogs (which of course DO contain links) therefore I replied again since this short reply didn't really clarify one point.
What about RSS to Mail?
I'm pretty sure I can change the RSS feed to summary or short (still need to check the name of the setting for Blogger), but what if I forget to do so or what if subscribers request full posts in their weekly email?
So I asked the following:
"ok, I can accept that, but what about the RSS to mail? Won't that pass on the links already in posts? Is there a way to filter that?
I'd like to be able to send my subscribers a weekly email with RSS updates. I have no problem with not including affiliate links in regular newsletter campaigns. I suppose I could change the feed to just show summaries instead of full posts, but I think most subscribers would prefer getting posts. What do you think?""

Perhaps that isn't the best wording, but I am a little busy on Thursday mornings. :-)
I'll update this post as soon as I get a reply.

Of course, if you have the money to pay from the start for a service that allows affiliate marketing links in newsletter content, check out Aweber. I've only seen good reviews of the service and it is used by many famous bloggers. They currently have a promotion for $1 for the first month. I just want to try this first since I'm new to sending newsletters and have doubts about its value to my small websites. Yes, if my list grows to 2000 subscribers I'd need to start paying Mailchimp (or switch to Aweber), but I'm still considering this an experiment.

Same day in the late afternoon ( sent the reply in the morning) I got the following reply:

We appreciate you reaching out to us and providing the information!

Its ok to include some affiliate links in the campaigns. Every campaign sent through us must reflect the domain that is collecting the data.

Feel free to email us back if you have specific questions or comments beyond this that we can assist you with.

I'm not sure what is meant by "must reflect the domain that is collecting the data". Do you? Perhaps I'm just stupid, but I wrote again with more information about my ideas asking if they count as reflecting the domain. I hope I'm not annoying them with my questions, but I really want this to be crystal clear and if I do later get suspended I want to have the email replies to forward to them as proof that I asked first! The funny thing is that I asked specifically about the RSS to Mail option since if they are not allowed I'd have to make sure every feed is set to a short summary to avoid accidental affiliate links being sent out and here I see that some are ok if they reflect the domain.... so mmm I'll see what reply I get tomorrow :-)

Today, (the next day) I got TWO replies. The first one finally answers my question about RSS to Mail.
"Thanks for following up with us. Yes, if you have affiliate links in an RSS-driven campaign, the easiest way to remove those would be to remove them from the feed. Also, depending on the length of the posts, you can use the *|RSS:POSTS|* merge tag to bring in just some of the post and automatically add a "read more" link."

and the other one was supposedly a clarification of the previous comment of "some affiliate links allowed"

"You can include affiliate/banner ads in a campaign being sent as long as the overall branding is clearly done as the branding of the organization the recipients that campaign is sent to opted in to receive emails from.

Feel free to email us back if you have specific questions or comments beyond this that we can assist you with."

I assume that last comment of "beyond this" was their way of saying to stop ask for clarification of the issue. :-(

If you dear reader understand what they exactly mean by this please let me know. It seems about as vague as before. An affiliate link is obviously for a different website than my own since if it were my own product from start to finish I wouldn't need an affiliate link would I? But the problem is for visual artists like myself who don't print and ship the final product and use a third party for that stuff and we earn a royalty for sales of our work. While an affiliate link isn't necessary, it is very important in case someone clicks through and buys something made by someone else since some websites will show related products by other artists and if the visitor searches on the other website they will most likely get results by other artists. I can't think of any Print on Demand art site that exclusively searches results by the artist whose product was in the link that brought the visitor to the site.

So I must ask how to I have the overall branding clearly done as the site the campaign is sent from????

In any case, it is clear to me that being an affiliate is not a problem nor is having a website about a specific issue. The concern seems to be the actual newsletter content and if an occasional affiliate link slips through it probably won't cause me to lose the account.
At least not until I have enough subscribers to make it worth switching to Aweber which doesn't seem to have a problem with affiliates.

Selecting a niche for your blog or website: How focused do you want it to be?

2011-03-02T14:02:00.001-06:00

Previously, I wrote about different questions that you should ask yourself for selecting the niche or topic for a new blog or website. I wanted to share some thoughts on how focused you will make your niche once you select a general topic or general niche.

What defines a website niche?
It seems everyone has a different definition of a website or blog niche. I remember a friend telling me that their niche is programming which is a very broad topic. It could be focused down to Javascript or PHP or perhaps programming for Unix servers or programming for blogs.

There are others who think that a niche is super tight like Android cell phones for American women. I just wonder how many USEFUL and interesting articles or posts could be written about that. Also focusing on a very specific technology means that in a few years your site will be irrelevant to the general public. Only those who haven't moved on to the next big thing would be visiting a site about that. I could imagine that topic as being a great post or article, but as a niche for an entire site or blog, I'm confused. That just seems very short term.

Advantages of a general niche (disadvantages of a focused niche)
A general niche like programming means that you can change and adapt over time to the new technologies as they arrive. Perhaps 10 years ago people were looking for Basic and C programming, but now they are looking for PHP, Ruby, programming for Facebook, and programming for cell phones. It is difficult to guess what will be popular in 5 or 10 years. If you want to start a website or blog that will be used as an asset and perhaps as leverage for other sites and services, a more general niche might be the best for you.

Interests change over time including yours. Perhaps you are all about Reggaeton music now, but next month you'll be listing to Pop and the following to Banda. Locking yourself into a tight niche means that you'll either get bored writing and updating content on your site when your tastes change, you'll be writing off-topic, or your drop or abandon that site for another one. A more general niche will cover your range of tastes and interests in a topic. It will be more timeless and you'll be less likely to repeat yourself from one article to the next.

Advantages of a focused or tight niche (disadvantages of a general niche)

A tight niche for your new blog or website means that you will get more targeted search engine results since your keyword list will be smaller and your articles or posts will be very related. A website about your favorite Chinese food recipes will have similar keywords, but a tight niche about cooking sweet and sour dishes will be very focused. It should be very likely to get on the first page in search engine results for the main keyword(s) of a tightly focused niche.

If there are advertisers or products that match your focused niche, you should also get a higher conversion rate and hopefully make more money. It should also be easier to attract direct advertisers.

A focused niche should get traffic much faster than a general site. The more focused your niche site is, the less competition you should have for your keyword phrase.

Make a choice

You will find people who will swear that you need to have a very focused niche site and others that will swear that you should have a more general niche. I only suggest that you weigh each option carefully after checking out the competition and then stay on topic. People who come to your site about imitation fur coats will be turned off to find articles about your favorite musician. If you can't relate the ideas then it is best to start another site.

I do find it fascinating how many people who advocate tight niche websites often have rather general niche sites not focused sites. It seems that you should do what they say not what they do even if most of their success came from that very website or blog!

How do you feel about niche topics? Are your websites and blogs on focused niches or general topics? Which get the most traffic or earn the most money?

Mailchimp Newsletter and E-mail List Experiment

2011-03-02T10:22:00.005-06:00

maiThis next step in my attempt to use free blogs and hosting along with custom domains is to set up a newsletter. When you have your own hosting account, you could set up PHPlist, your own email or newsletter script or a plugin for your content management system. You could also use a service like Aweber, ConstantContact, Mailchimp, etc.

Since I've recently canceled my hosting account and moved my sites, I'm still waiting for the pages to be reindexed and get regular traffic. I don't want to pay $19 per month for 500 subscribers at Aweber just yet. I'm not an experienced e-mail marketer and I don't have an autoresponder series planned out. If I did I'd probably go ahead with that from the start.

Instead, I decided to first experiment with Mailchimp. Mailchimp seems to offer everything I was looking for:
Autoresonder (for e-mail series, welcome message, etc), Facebook signup integration, simple signup forms to add to websites and blogs, Google Analytics integration, and premade forms. There are some other interesting features I'll test if the first month goes without any trouble.

The interesting thing is you don't have to pay at first for the service. You currently can send to up to 2000 subscribers (I assume in total not per list) and send up to 4000 messages per month without paying. That is a good motivation for trying the service first. I'm hesitant about newsletters and how well they work. What if I sign up with a paid service for $20/month and no one signs up for two or three months? Perhaps I get a list, but there is no increase in advertising clicks or sales not even a dollar? While I suppose it helps bring people back to your website or blog, I wonder if it is worth it.

There is one problem which I e-mailed them about. The Terms of Service seem to state that they don't allow Affiliate Marketing yet unless you are selling your own products directly from your home or site, almost everything goes through an affiliate or referral link including most artwork I promote even if it is my own although it isn't necessary to do so I'd rather take the chance that someone might click on one of my artwork links and buy something created by a friend.
The confusion in the terms is the wording. It makes me think that perhaps they are confusing affiliate marketing with MLM or perhaps they mean you can't be using your list for managing an affiliate program as a merchant.
I e-mailed their support last night and tried creating three e-mail lists and added signup forms to a few blogs and Facebook pages and RSS to email "campaigns" for those three lists. I won't try anything else until I get a clear reply.
I'll write a new post with the reply and if allowed the results of the experiment. If having affiliate links in a blog post is not allowed because they'd be passed on to the RSS to email summary, I'll only be able to test the autoresponder feature.

I had previously tried a WordPress script on my art site, but I know many times the e-mail didn't get sent out or the confirmation didn't go through so perhaps it is better to use an e-mail list provider since they'd have everything optimized and set up on the server for good delivery and confirmation whereas in your own script you have to deal with hosting limits and server configuration that isn't optimized for sending e-mail letters.

Article Writing on Squidoo and Hubpages Study Part 1

2011-03-01T21:54:00.002-06:00

I admit, I've almost been behind the curve on the internet trends and how people get ahead in link building. Whenever I get too stressed out, I dive into my artwork and ignore the outside world until I have a few more works uploaded. In fact I usually avoid watching the news on television and got out of reading internet news. I just don't have time to read depressing things I can't change.
As my faithful readers know, I recently moved my blogs and sites from self-hosted WordPress to Blogger and Google Sites with custom domains and I added a few experimental blogs without custom domains that are more focused niches.
As part of my strategy for 2011, I had decided that I'd try to write an average of one post or article a day for my site or other sites with revenue sharing. Yet as I was thinking about it a few weeks ago (before the big Google Content Farm and Scraper adjustments this Feb 2011), I thought it would be more interesting to write new articles for 3 sites at a time. One article for one of my custom domain websites. One article for Squidoo. One article for Hubpages. What about ezinearticles? Well, I never got much traffic from the 20 or so articles I added there and they don't share any adsense revenue or have any option for promo links to market there so it really seems like more trouble that it is worth to regularly add articles. Perhaps I'll add one once a month just to see that happens. It just seems silly to work daily to build their site when I could work on mine and revenue sharing sites.

So far I have 7 new articles this February which I rewrote manually and completely for Squidoo and Hubpages. I'm not generating duplicate content. I would write an article then just thinking about the topic would write without looking at the first one. Then without copying I'd write the third so really 3 unique articles about the same exact topic (but different titles and text).

Of the 7 new articles on Squidoo, their statistics show one view and it came from Google.ca.
At Hubpages I see two comments on the 7 articles and 93 views for the week although I wouldn't be surprised if all of those views were internal to Hubpages. Hubpages always seems to get many views from the start, but whenever I look up statistics for an individual page I just see Hubpages as the referrer.
I think that especially with the Google Content Farm update affecting social writing and article sites, these articles have probable not yet been added to the index.

Of course I also included a link in each article on both Hubpages and Squidoo back to my most relevant site. If I could get a fraction of Hubpage readers who see a new article to click through and enjoy my sites, that would help my traffic. There seems to be quite a community there.

I've made a huge list of article and blog post topics to write about. I've been spending about an hour and a half writing the 3 articles every day this last week for the experiment and also spending about 20 minutes brainstorming and writing down ideas as they come to me. I have enough ideas written down to last me the next month.

Of course the true test of the experiment is not in views or comments but in clicks and sales. Squidoo doesn't have any info on that, but I can see if a "lens" has made money and if there is a sale to Amazon through a lens it should appear, but I haven't yet. Hubpages on the other hand just uses percentages in determine whether or not to use my code or theirs so I can go to my custom URL tracking for Hubpages in Adsense and in Amazon Associates to see if there were clicks or sales coming from there when my codes were used.

Why the experiment when I could just put three times as many original articles on just my own sites? First I want to get some backlinks and traffic from those websites to my own. Many people still use them and I know if I don't get my sites out there, no one will see my content.

Second I like the interface on these kinds of sites. They both make it easy to add Amazon products and the other ads are automatic so I can focus on content. I especially like the Hubpages editor and how I don't have to manually type in the HTML code for links. They both offer some cool interactive modules for reader feedback like surveys. While I can do the same for blogger with Google docs forms, it isn't so quick to set up.

Finally I am curious to see if it is true that you can make enough money from these sites to make an income. I've seen testimonials from different people on both sites about how they are making hundreds of dollars a month from advertisements just from writing on one site or the other and just from writing a few hundred articles. I can do the same thing if I really organize my time, have topics ready to write about and get a good night's sleep. I was thinking if I could spend 3 hours a day writing and 3 hours editing artwork and uploading it on the three days during the week that I don't teach English, I'd have all my weeks writing done and have the weekend off to read blogs, go for long walks and enjoy life.

What am I not doing? I'm not sharing any of the new articles on Squidoo or Hubpages via Twitter or Facebook. I will only share new artwork and posts on my sites and blogs so my own blogs should get more traffic and clicks even though I doubt they will at first.

I'm really not sure if I can write for 3 hours without stopping. I'm still learning how to write and organize my ideas on informative articles. Writing doesn't come as easy for me as working in Adobe Photoshop, Corel Painter 11, or with a digital camera, but I'm sure I'll get better with practice.
How many articles or posts do you write every day? Have you found success with Squidoo or Hubpages?

Selecting a Niche or Topic for your Website or Blog

2011-02-28T13:52:00.003-06:00

If you are writing for websites like Squidoo or Hubpages you don't really need to worry about your niche since the focus is on writing pages and linking them as series. Although it would probably be best to write one series at a time so the topic will be fresh instead of skipping around different topics. However when starting a new website or blog there are a few questions that you should ask yourself before registering a new domain name or setting up the structure of your website.
If you have no idea where to start, make a quick list of things you are interested in reading about, your favorite activities, and things you enjoy talking about in conversations with friends, colleagues, and family. Then ask yourself the following questions.

Can you consistently write about that topic every day for a month or every other day for a year without repeating an article or post topic?
Is this a topic I enjoy? Can I share my passion for the topic with my readers?
Can this topic be monetized? Are there products or services related to this topic that I can link to?
Can I add to this topic something unique?
Do I have experience in this area that I can share?

Can you consistently write about that topic (niche) every day for a month or every other day for a year without repeating an article or post topic?

If you can't come up with a list of things to write about for the topic, then perhaps the niche is too focused for you or it is something that you are not very interested in. Try brainstorming or mind mapping the topic. You could find that your list of writing ideas is huge. Perhaps you could focus your niche even more. Your traffic would be even more focused, but you also might find yourself needing another site because you want to write about related areas. Remember each domain costs money to register and renew and each site requires some setup and maintenance.

Is this a topic (niche) I enjoy? Can I share my passion for the topic with my readers?

Perhaps you just love making money online so you don't care if you are writing about topics that you haven't heard of. For most of us though we love being able to share our knowledge, experience and hopefully passion for the topic.

If you only have one pair of shoes then you are probably not very passionate about them and most likely don't have much to say about shoes. Can you fake passion? Pretend that you love the shoes you are writing about? I'd guess that most site visitors won't be very motivated.

Can this topic be monetized? Are there products or services related to this topic (niche) that I can link to?

Some topics will be harder to monetize than others. Certain keywords will work for higher paying ads like for financial and banking services whereas other topics might only earn a few cents at most.

Perhaps a topic won't work well for contextual advertising but there are many products you could feature that are related for affiliate sales.

Can I add something unique to this topic (niche)?

This is probably the most difficult question to ask and answer. To be honest for every somewhat profitable topic you'll probably find dozens of great sites, hundreds of ok sites, and thousands of affiliate only websites. What can you add to the conversation? What will separate you from the crowd and bring you to the front page at Google or get people to sign up for your newsletter or subscribe to your RSS feed?

What unique perspective or information can you contribute?

Do I have experience in this area that I can share?

If you have experience in the topic you'll save quite a lot of time researching for a new article. If you have enough experience, you might be able to write from memory or tell stories! We always love a good story. It will help the visitor get to know you and see your personality. Perhaps the visitor will be able to relate to your idea and will trust you even more.

Working from Home: What's your focus selling or helping?

2011-02-27T15:48:00.005-06:00

When I started on my internet journey about four years ago, my goal was to help. I wanted to help people looking for my services find me online and contact me easily. I also wanted to provide my English students with quality content and resources for learning English . My goal wasn't to make money at all.

Of course my students found the site useful and they gave me feedback on it as well including topics they wanted to learn more about so I spent extra time (unpaid) to add that content. Although they were enjoying the site and using it for taking tests I was worried since it was a big expense for me. You may not think about $10-20 dollars a month for hosting is much, but it adds up fast when you don't have a formal job and what about when they cancel classes? How will I maintain the site then?

That's about the point I got sidetracked. I added Adsense, saw my traffic increase as I added original content, and saw about 5 or 6 dollars at the end of the first complete month. I was excited, but I wondered what I could do to actually earn enough to make it worth enhancing the site with more material. Just meeting the hosting and perhaps the domain renewal costs didn't seem like enough since I was spending a couple hours a day researching each topic before writing since they were mostly English grammar and vocabulary pages.

I started experimenting with different ad systems some of which don't even exist today. Then I learned about affiliate marketing and learned how to program in PHP with to set up datafeeds of related products. When Sales started to roll in on my product pages I was excited. No it wasn't a huge amount, but it was enough to get excited.

It wasn't much later that Google revised its ranking system to reduce in ranking affiliate sites that used product datafeeds so all that time spent on learning how to add feeds to my sites was wasted and sites with feeds (normally as a page link in the menu bar) dropped in ranking including all the original content. I admit I got depressed and frustrated and gave it a break for about a year and a half. The only thing I did was drop many of my experimental sites as their domain registration came up for renewal. I knew content should be my focus, but I've always been afraid of writing. I really am a little embarrassed by my writing quality so I was always hesitant.
When I had created those experimental niche sites I was planning on using my income from the sales to pay experts to write articles on those topics, but since everything dropped, I was almost ready to give up.

A few months ago I started re-evaluating my online activities and my goals. What do I want to do with my websites? What is their purpose? Do I want to be a sales person or do I want to help others? I realized that a big part of why I stopped working on my sites for a few months is that I wasn't helping with the changes and my original reason was to help my students.

What about you? Are you helping others with the content on your websites or are you just pushing and pre-selling products? Sure, selling is creative and great, but I'll now leave product catalogs to the merchants and the affiliates who are lucky enough to have "authority sites" or who want to rewrite all the product descriptions one by one.

The new changes in search engine rankings come at the right time for me. Now I have a chance to start ranking for keywords that were dominated by the content farms. Think about the change as an opportunity to express and share your passions.

What about me? I'm going back to my passion for teaching English (on and off-line), sharing my mistakes, and what I learn about online business. I also take breaks from that to work on my visual artwork which I sell online at Zazzle and other sites because I love creating art. it is my other passion.

What's your focus selling or helping others?

Working from Home: Stay Comfortable in your Home Office

2011-02-26T11:24:00.000-06:00

While you might not exactly have a home office as a separate room, it is very important to be comfortable while you work. Being uncomfortable while working is distracting. An uncomfortable work area can be distracting and it may also shorten your attention span.

In ideal circumstances, your home office should be a separate room with a door you can bolt from the inside with plenty of natural light and space for all your work equipment and storage.
If you don't have the room, but you own your own home, you might want to consider remodeling a room or adding a room, but not many of us have the money.
Check your budget to see what you can do to make your home office as comfortable as possible.

There are several basic things that are not very expensive (as office expense go) that will make a big difference.

A medium or large desk
A fan for the floor and a smaller one for your desk
A large computer display
A bookcase (or install shelves in a wall)
A comfortable executive chair
A file cabinet
A shelfing unit with large boxes or baskets (if you can afford them)
A CD or MP3 player with speakers.
A large bottle of water (several liters)
A desk or table lamp

I suppose many of these items seem silly to many of you, but they will make a big difference. While you might not think a file cabinet or a bookcase is related to comfort, but an unorganized office with papers and books all over is not a very comfortable place to work even for those of us who have the tendency to have disorder need a place for books and papers when a guest or potential client stops by. Even if books are not central to your work, you might have some that you use for reference like a good dictionary like the Merriam-Webster's Everyday Language Reference Set. If you live in a large city you might have a book with maps of the different neighborhoods, and of course you need a place to keep your telephone directory.

If you teach private classes, you'll need a place to keep your teacher books, grammar books, extra student textbooks and extra file cabinet space for worksheets you made yourself and student grade records.

A large piece of furniture with boxes or baskets to match is great for those who work with crafts, traditional art media (for paint, brushes, supports, frames, art paper, etc.), or photographers who do many still life displays (you need a place to store props). If you are a business consultant, your needs will probably be more in a large book case and a large file cabinet, you won't have that much stuff to organize.

If you do most of your work online you'll still need at least a 2 drawer file cabinet for official documents, receipts, tax documents, etc. You don't want them to get ruined, and you'll want them available on a minutes notice. Yes, there are cheap racks, but those are really a temporary solution.

The size of desk really depends on how you work. If you do everything at your desk, need to scan and print, a place for a drawing tablet, or other large items, then go for as large a desk that will fit. If you prefer to be on a laptop or mostly write, then a large desk really isn't necessary. You'll only need it for when the sofa is occupied or someone stops buy to see how you work.

It is important when working from how to give the look of professionalism when someone has an appointment for business purposes even if you normally work in your boxer shorts at the kitchen table. You should at least give the impression that you are a pro earning good money. Plus having a comfortable work area will give you a more professional attitude. When you walk to your comfortable office it will set your mood for the day.

The fans are of course for hot days. Once fan is often not enough to circulate the air. The desk fan is for keeping you cool. Fans are also good for covering some noisy-neighbor noise. Have the other fan push air toward an open window.

A CD or MP3 player is also great when playing background music to cover some outdoor distractions. I especially love to play Enya while I work. I find her music very relaxing.

A comfortable executive chair and large computer display are pricier items, but they will make the biggest difference while you work. Larger monitors will let you work longer without tired eyes and at higher resolutions you can fit more on screen so you'll have less switching back and forth between applications. The large executive chair will help you avoid backaches and you won't need to get up and walk around quite so often. These two will help you concentrate on your work.

A desk lamp is important for reading if you work early in the morning or in the evening. Try to position your desk so that you have sufficient natural light for working normal hours, but at the same time avoid glare on your computer display.

Working from Home: Automate Social Networking Updates

2011-02-25T14:01:00.003-06:00

While most of our creative tasks require our personal attention and can be made faster only through careful planning of our activities, however the boring task of sharing links to your most recent blog post or web site article can be automated quite easily if RSS feeds are created.

RSS is a common tool which allows anyone to read a site's articles or a summary of articles and click through the feed link back to the original page on the site or blog. You fortunately don't need to learn how to create an RSS feed since all the major blog applications create RSS feeds for you. You don't have to do anything to them.

Automating posts to social networking and social media sites vary. You will either need to add the blog URL, blog RSS feed URL, or some other option in the social site to set it up.
Twitterfeed

An alternative that I prefer for both Facebook and Twitter is http://twitterfeed.com/. It only posts text links, but for anything except artwork posts that works fine. Set up a Twitter account and your Facebook fan pages.

Join Twitterfeed. Add a new feed on their dashboard, select the options you want and it will automatically post a link to the most recent X entries for the period of time you select starting at thirty minutes. You also have the option of having it use your bit.ly account for the shortened links so you can see how many clicks a link actually got! I normally don't bother with that, but it is nice to know that I could look that information up.

For each feed you add to Twitterfeed, you can have it post to one or more twitter accounts and one or more Facebook pages (or your Facebook profile). Therefore if you have a Facebook Fan page about race cards and a blog about Nascar races and a twitter account, you could have both updated with your new blog post about Nascar without having to log in to each site and post links. It is great to be able to save time posting, and spend that time reading replies and commenting on friend's profiles and fan pages.

RSS Graffiti
For posting new artwork and graphic design to Facebook pages (or your Facebook profile) I recommend http://apps.facebook.com/rssgraffiti/ RSS Graffiti. It is an app you add to your Facebook profile or Facebook Fan Pages and configure directly. If your RSS feed includes an image, it should get included in the update! Since Twitterfeed doesn't include images I prefer RSS Graffili app for updates from my Zazzle feeds. Who wants to see a link to an artwork without a preview image?

There are other resources online for updating to Twitter and Facebook as well as other websites, but I couldn't get most of the others I tried to do anything!

Working from Home:Prioritize your home office activities

2011-02-24T09:00:00.005-06:00

I mentioned previously how important it is to consider the days of the week and hours your work at home schedule includes, but it is just as important to properly prioritize your home office activities and other daily tasks.

I'm not referring to meeting potential clients for freelance work or telecommuting since those situations depend on external forces. You have to determine a time that works both for you and the potential client whereas telecommuting depends on what your boss tells you.

For the rest of us, people who are paid by task, affiliates, web-publishers, bloggers, visual artists and designers (when not working on a commissioned project), etc., It is essential to prioritize your business's tasks in order of productivity.

Other than perhaps showering, eating so you aren't hungry, and preparing your coffee, those who are most productive in the morning or early morning should go right into their most productive task. If you are a blogger, start writing posts or brainstorm a new post. An artist might start by processing another photo for upload. The focus should be on adding new content and submitting it to where ever it should go for publishing or sale.
Make your goal having something of quality to show for your work before the distractions start and your energy level drops.

Put less productive activities lower on your list and spend less time on them. Checking e-mail message, viewing web statistics to see how many visitors you get, etc. can be fun, but it isn't very productive. You'll get those messages and those visits whether or not you check your Analytics account! Sure there are things to check for statistics like keywords and popular content on your site, but your efforts to create new content and keep everything up-to-date should be your priority.

If you aren't sure where to start, make a list of what you do as you do them for a couple days. Then review the list check the ones that are productive and think of them as a to do list to keep by your desk.

Prioritizing your home office activities also saves you time. You could easily accomplish in 4-6 hours what would take 8-10 hours just working as the mood moves you wasting time on unproductive activities.

Working from Home: Determine the Best Days of the Week

2011-02-22T09:42:00.001-06:00

I mentioned earlier that it is important to determine the hours of the day that you are the most productive in order to avoid distractions from indoors and outdoors, but what about days of the week?

Working from home normally means that you are self employed, are a freelancer, work for a company completing projects by different due dates, or you are a telecommuter. In the last case you are limited, but in the others it is best to determine when the best schedule will be for you to me the most productive.

I've discovered that my rude and noisy neighbors are even worse from Friday to Sunday so on the week end I will only work during brief breaks in the noise. Even now, at 9:30 am on Tuesday I hear a strong bass beat coming through the walls (probably 2 homes down) so you just have to imagine what it is like on the weekend.

Take into consideration your own situation. If you have children living with you, they might be a huge distraction on the weekend unless they go visit grandma or their aunt. Are there certain days when you have fewer conflicts with your time? Perhaps you can take turns baby sitting with a neighbor so you both can work the other days.
Determine which days of the week are best for you set a schedule of days and hours and let those you live and work with when you'll be available for work issues and for fun.

Working from Home: Find your most productive time of day

2011-02-21T09:19:00.001-06:00

Do you work from home? I started working from home about 3 years ago. While I will still teach one or two private English courses, I'm only away from home 2 days a week and the rest of the time I work from home, writing posts, doing site maintenance, taking photos, processing them, etc.

Today, I want to share my thoughts on WHEN to work when working at home. We know that a typical work day has very little real productive time for most of us.

When you work in an office you spend much of your time in meetings, checking e-mail, and writing reports. Working from home also has its many time wasters. Some of them, like checking e-mail are the same or worse. Working from home means putting up with noisy neighbor children screaming a few meters away and neighbors playing loud music. If you share a home with your family or with a roommate to save money, you'll find that they often don't understand the concept of working from home and feel that you are just playing and they'll express that as resentment or say that you need to do more chores since you work at home.

The point is that while working from home, it is often just as challenging to try to get any work done unless you live alone in the country! My first suggestion for working at home is to find the best time of day where you can be productive and with the fewest distractions so you can get the most work done in that time so if you are a writer, when can you get the most writing completed? If you are painter, when can you get the most progress on a painting without interruption?

I've discovered that as long as my roommate doesn't take the day off work, I get the most done in the morning as soon as I wake up and work until the neighbors start screaming and playing loud music and at that time my day is ruined, but if I can write a few good posts or process a few images in that time at least I was able to get something done. It makes the most sense to check my e-mail, Facebook, forums, and other websites after I do my productive tasks that require concentration.

How to use your Gmail or Google Apps e-mail with IMAP or POP

2011-02-14T19:50:00.001-06:00

When you set up your Google Apps account for a domain to include e-mail there are several steps involved. It is still a little flaky (sometimes it doesn't connect), but it is nice to be able to add various e-mail accounts to one program like Thunderbird or Outlook Express and see everything. If you have a regular Gmail account just skip the first part which is for using your own domain in the email address via Google Apps.

I assume that you've already added your domain to Google Apps. At this point I'll assume you'll want to set up e-mail for the domain administrator (which you selected on registration). You can add more users in Google Apps and you'll need to go through the gmail specific steps for each one.

To have email work for your Google Apps domain you'll need to set up the MX records with your domain name registrar's control panel. If you are with Godaddy and you were using the domain with a different host, be sure to "park" the domain and wait a few minutes the go back in to the domain manager for your domain to edit the zone file.
Here is the table from one of the Google help pages. However another says to set the priority to 10,20,30,40,50 instead of 1,5,5,10,10 so it really doesn't matter.
in the MX records add the first one and if your domain registrar lets you add the others. Set the time to update to around an hour, but again that really isn't crucial.

1	ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM
5	ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM
5	ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM
10	ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM
10	ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM

For e-mail for Google Apps you only need to change the MX records. However if you are wanting to use Google Sites or Blogger custom domain option you'll also change the CNAME record for www (or blog, etc) to ghs.google.com and make the corresponding changes in your Blogger blog or Google Sites settings. I already wrote a post about that on this blog.

Save the settings and go to the Google Apps email page to verify everything. The Google Apps set up also mentions the settings for mx records so no problem. The important thing is to get the servers added.
After everything is saved you'll have to wait a while for the DNS records to populate for the gmail account to actually work.

Now go into gmail. gmail.google.com or mail.google.com both seem to work. Log in with your Google Apps user name and password. If you are logged in with your regular account you'll need to log out first.

On your first gmail log in you'll have to accept the user agreement. Next go to settings. It is either at the top of the new e-mail message display or at the top right corner of the page.
After clicking on Settings go to "Forwarding and POP/IMAP". Enable either POP or IMAP and click on "save changes".

At this point, you'll need to configure your e-mail client software.
Your user name is your complete email address.
The password is the password for the user.

For outgoing e-mail use:
smtp.googlemail.com
port:465
use SSL/TTS

For incoming e-mail use:

IMAP:
imap.gmail.com

Use SSL: Yes
Port: 993

POP:
pop.gmail.com

Port: 995
Port for TLS/STARTTLS: 587
Port for SSL: 465

Google Sites limits you to 5 new sites per week.

2011-02-14T11:21:00.002-06:00

Today, I learned something new. You can only "create" 5 new Google Sites per week. No, I didn't create 5 new sites this week. In fact I have 5 sites in total (and one is just a template of another site set to private).

I created two new real sites and 3 if you count the private separate site. ( you can't make a site a template unless it is public so I just copied a site and set it as private).

You may ask what happened. Well, I created one site, but I didn't like the name so I deleted it and recreated it so it counted as two. The other site I had created I tried with another template first, but I didn't like the template so I had recreated it. Yes, that also counts as two sites created so when I tried to create another site to move another over from self hosting, I got the following error

"Sorry you can not create more sites at this time"

It appears to be a common error for many. On a Google Sites help page it says that you have reached the limit for site creation for the week and to wait a few days and it should work. It goes on to state that the current limit is 5 sites per week. Since I don't have more than 5 sites in total and two were created more than a week ago, it is obvious that the "new site" count is not reduced when a site is created and deleted right away.

It really doesn't bother me if this is the case since most people have no need to do five a week (nor do I), but it would have been nice if there were a warning on the add new site page or perhaps a message saying the exact problem like "you have reached the limit of new sites (5), you may create another on <date>" . If I had a message like that I would have thought ok, no biggie. Anyway if you decide to try Google Sites it is good to know that if you create and delete a few times, you may have to take a week off to work on other projects.

Adding a Contact Form to Blogger and Google Sites

2011-02-08T10:12:00.005-06:00

As I've made the switch from Self-hosted WordPress to Google's Blogger and Google Sites (still making the switch for several sites), I've had to learn a new way of doing things, workarounds, and accepting that somethings are not possible.

One issue that I discovered was the lack of a contact form (or any forms) for Blogger and Google Sites. With WordPress, I had installed one of several good third party plugins that would email whatever address was set with the form info. It was a bit of set up, but it all worked ok.

Since Blogger has few plugins and Google Sites only accepts Gadgets, it seemed difficult until I realized that I could embed a Google Docs form to either Blogger or Google Sites.

If you have a Google account, go to Google Docs and create a new form, add questions, make required the questions that are important like e-mail and name, save it and then embed the iframe code in a new page in Blogger or Google Sites.

To get notifications, view the form in Google Docs so you see the spreadsheet (results) view. To the right in the menu bar, click on SHARE and then SET NOTIFICATION RULES.

In the new pop-up, select the check box (or tick it if you prefer!) "A user submits a form"

You have the option below that for "right away" or "daily digest". If you get a lot of spam in your form, change it to daily digest.

The form at Google Docs could be more useful than a plugin if you have several related websites where people might contact you for the same information. You could use the same form on all of those related sites and have the contact information in the same spreadsheet.

Of course you could also make a form in Google Docs for other things like polls and surveys.

The only bad thing about the forms is the lack of an option to upload attachments so if you need to get a document either have them submit the url or tell them you'll send them a message so they can reply with the attachment. It is possible that you could accept an attachment though a Google Gadget attached to a form, but I haven't yet experimented with those options.
Click on my Contact Us page to see my Google Form.