WordVixen.com

Many of you haven’t seen me at your blogs lately. And of course, you haven’t seen me here either.

I have a tendency to bite off more than I can chew (excuse the cliche, I’m running out of time and can’t afford to be original), at least in a reasonable amount of time. I’m absolutely determined to make some money while I’m on vacation, and so I’ve been pushing myself to get the stores I started finished (minus content since one of the stores turned out to be waaaay more trouble than I expected- good reason to pick tiny niches).

I just wanted to appologize for disappearing before I… disappear. I had planned to write a great post, but I decided to save it for when I have more time to develop it well. Since I’m taking my laptop with me, I may get a chance to work on it. Yeah right.

I’m taking my notebooks with me as well. Hopefully the land of magic will sprinkle some of its pixie dust on my creative mind, and give me the shot in the butt that I need. I’m loving my foray into affiliate marketing, and I’m learning a lot (should I decide the marketing side is not for me, I’m certainly learning skills that would translate well into freelance writing for marketers, as well as how to market myself to them). But I do miss fiction.

Hey CJ and Tracy! Maybe I’ll even get those reviews done!

Also, the site that was giving me so much trouble is an Oldsmobile store. I finally finished programming in the search terms, but I don’t have the time to tweak it before I go. Actually, this one may just end up being abandoned as a learning lesson, but we’ll see. Also, if you need tires for your Olds…. I built a shop for that too.

And, I transferred all the old reviews over to WordPress. So if you go to BandVox.com and take a look, they should all be there. I don’t plan to update that any more until I’m back.

Whew! I’d love to say that I’m going to go relax now, but I have to clean the house. Father-in-law is playing security guard, and the house has become rather embarrassing lately.

Oh! And I dyed my hair. Couldn’t find what I was looking for (dark brown with warm red undertones), but I kinda like the color I picked anyway. Husband loves it (and I mean loves it), so it’s all good. I’ll try and get pictures later.

A few weeks ago, I decided that I’d rather switch BandVox (my celtic punk music review site) over to WordPress instead of continuing to pay GoDaddy horrible amounts of money for website tonight. Website tonight is such a pain to use (though it’s better since they upgraded it- I still hate it) that I just stopped updating all together.

Unfortunately, I may get hit with a duplicate content penaltysince I can’t keep the review urls the same, but that’s really not a big deal since the main traffic I got were people searching for Ceann lyrics (which I didn’t have) and a handful of friends who liked to see what’s new. All I have to do is tell my friends that the platform is changing, but since the url is the same, no big deal.

The biggest change is that I’m planning to change the focus from Celtic punk to Celtic everything. Music wise, not everything. So, right now I’m just working on getting my affiliate sites set up as quickly as possible (the ones that I’ve started, I mean) so that my time is once again freed up for blogging. And… maybe for my husband too. We’ll see.

Also, I set up a basic Celtic music store to go along with BandVox. The logo is pathetic (but stupid photo explosion wouldn’t do what I wanted!) and I may have to change the colors…. plus I plan to add a few specialty menu links. But it’s a start, and I want to get it indexed before… yup, my trip. I’m telling you, I’m gonna make more money on vacation that I do when I’m working!

Now I’ve got to go eat so I have energy to tranfer all those reviews to the new WordPress platform. Wish me luck!

Most of you know that I check my stats obsessively. On weekends I generally roll out of bed, grab my laptop and start it up while I do the bathroom thing. Then sit and check stats, emails, and catch up on pro blogs for about 2 hours. Then I eat. Week days it’s generally the same, though I stop after stats and emails.

Anyway. I check my stats throughout the day as well. Particularly as I’ve been slowly inching my way up the ladder at Associated Content. I stopped writing there when I started doing paid posts, since the paid posts generally paid more, or paid the same but were easier.

And since then, of course, I’ve become obsessed with affiliate stuff. So I’ve been working on setting up sites, writing content, and rewriting PLR. (That’s the best part of the affiliate stuff- building skills and examples while earning money, but not risking my writing reputation).

Last night I got an email. A go-between (you sign up with them, they send you work when it’s available) company had an assignment for me. At first I was very excited. It would look great in my portfolio, and with how big the project was, it would probably be a nice slice of moolah. But then I really looked into the word count total, the research required…. and realized that I didn’t have time to do it. Literally! With vacation less than a week away, I’d have to take a day off from my day job, and you know that’s not a good idea so close to vacation. So I had to turn it down. *sigh*

Still, she asked me to let her know when I’m available again (good sign, since this was where I had my first client job!), and I was relieved that I’d be able to keep working on my sites. I want to get them up before I leave since I don’t know how my internet access will be.

And today I checked my AC account. I’ve moved up to the next tier! Yay! I’ve been thinking of selling them a few articles that I’ve been writing for my affiliate sites (just one or two per site), but I wanted to wait till I reached the next pay scale. After all, one decent pay out will pay for a domain, and I’ve been paying for a lot of domains lately.

And, as a last plug, I’ve found that when I link to my sites, they get indexed in a day or two. So, not to annoy anyone, but I’ll probably be dropping links at the bottom of my posts whether they have content or not. No pressure to click. For instance, my Olds 442 store. Still in progress, but almost ready. Anyone want to spend $40,000?