So, I check my keyword activity, and get this: Someone landed on this blog by searching for “how to find a prostitute in lancaster, pennsylvania” .

I’m not kidding. He (or she) landed on my “No Prostitute Whatsoever” post- a video on visually checking your spelling that I stole from Kathy at Screw You! (hm… maybe that had something to do with it?) a while back.

OMG. That so made my day.

In other news, I just loaded up my articles to my garb site. Go ahead and check it out if you’re interested. It’s not nice and polished yet, but it’s looking pretty good (I think). I have a few more that I want to do, but they have more to do with link lists and pictures of my garb than anything else.

I started having a little too much fun when writing the descriptions for the SiteMap though. For example, one page starts with the description “Shiver me ta-tahs!”. ‘Nuff said. If you want to see it, go ahead and click here, or go through the above link.

And to all the Lancastrians who just want to get laid. Know this, prostitution is illegal. If you still want to go through with it, and are too lazy to go pick people up in a bar like a normal person, most of the professionals hang out at or near Water Street. It’ll be cheaper if you sit on your porch and wait for the crack heads to come ask you for money though. An aquaintance just got 2 for $10. Deals abound for the patient. I don’t condone it, but I hate to see people waste their money.

I’ve also got a Tibetan singing bowl/meditation bowl up.

And if you’re wondering what I’ve been up to? I’ve been writing articles for the site that I linked up there. It takes forever, but I’ve only got… um… 5 more to go. And they’re how-to’s, so I should be done by the weekend. Then it’s editing, posting, and figuring out how to promote. I think this is my first fully built affiliate site ever. I keep getting bored after getting them organized and color coordinated and never get around to the parts that make them worth visiting. Though, for some reason, I do get sales through them. Weird. I even got a sale through a site that had NOTHING on it! Prepped it, but never built it…

Anyway, and I’m so proud of this, this is my first ever proper logo. As in, more than simply a cropped picture. Yay me! I keep loading the page and just staring it it. Ok, so it’s not overly professional looking or anything, but I did it. That’s good enough for me.

Here’s a sampling (not all) of what I have up now… not even close to what I haven’t photographed yet.

Mahogany obsidian. Isn’t it a gorgeous stone? I made matching earrings too, but the photo came out a bit blurry. Gold fill wire, not 14, 18, or 24 kt (sadly).

Cats eye cluster earrings. I probably won’t make them again, since the retail cost between the cats eye and actual gemstones is only about $0.50 per pair. Might as well go with the gems, huh? Pretty though. My niece talked me into giving her a similar pair along with a pair of rose quartz ones. So much for profit!

You know those flat marbles they sell near the fake flowers in craft shops? Yup. I bought a bag to practice on and got more compliments on them than I got on the real gemstones! So, I made more. Regular craft wire, which is a pain to use, but I like the pewter look.

I’m not sure what the blue stone is. I think it’s blue topaz, but it looks more like aquamarine (though I know that wouldn’t have been bundled with amethyst, citrine, and quartz), and sprinkled with black obsidian. Middle is mother of pearl and seed beads, and the right is amethyst and black obsidian. I actually sold three of those to a lady at work, along with matching earrings. She was stunningly quick to pay, so I have to wonder if I was under pricing myself?

So, I wrote those 6 reviews and knew that I’d get offers on them, no matter how low. And I did (For a grand total of $19 for 6 reviews. Anyone surprised? Not me.). The thing is, when I work up Sunday morning, I had an offer in my email for $5 for a little link on my chatting blog. That post is archived so far back that it will only ever be discovered by search engine, and for that I don’t care. Easy money? Totally.

I also have a load of Squidoo lenses. Way more than I need, though I plan to build a few more. The thing is, there were quite a few that I just didn’t want to mess with any more. So I built another lens to sell the lenses that I know longer want. None of them made me any money other than their share of the revenue share. So I listed two of them at $5, one at $10, and three as free to good homes. Seriously, I just wanted them out of my listing so that I could concentrate on the others.

Tuesday I got an email from someone interested in purchasing one of the lenses. Sweet. I sent him the details, then gave him the link to the sale page in case he was interested in the others. He was. I sold the two at $5 each, and he wanted the free ones as well (Seriously, they were free!). The only lens he didn’t take was the $10 lens, and I had actually said on the page that I didn’t really want to sell it. So maybe he was just being polite?

Either way, that $15 was almost like out of no where. Yes, I did a lot of work. But it was all long in the past and without the intention of making money (post link) or selling (lenses). Once I decided to sell, it wasn’t with the intention of making a lot of money. Just of getting something out of it.

On top of this, my BANS sites have started pulling in a bit of cash. Nothing to write home about, but every day I seem to be getting closer to my goal of paying off the laptop with my writing/site building. Once that’s managed, I’ll be working towards making a viable income from it.

Amazon Shorts is Amazon’s own digital publishing program for short stories and articles. You have to actually have a book for sale on Amazon to be accepted into the program (and Amazon lists self pubbed books), and they retain the rights for the first 6 months. After that, you’re free to republish anywhere you like.

Amazon charges $0.49 for each story (or article) download, and pays the author $0.20. I like that price, because an author that already has a fan base can make decent money off the downloads, and fans can get more of the author’s work for cheap. Plus, it opens up a whole new avenue to reach new readers. If you download a short for $0.49 and don’t like it, it’s still much less than $5 for a magazine or book that also turns out to not be your taste.

It actually seems like a great program to me, so I don’t understand why they’re not pushing it like they could. It seems to me that if these downloads are set to work with the Kindle, there’s great cross promotion just waiting to be exploited. It also makes the idea of a digital reader like a Kindle more appealing to me, as I wouldn’t want to read a whole novel on screen, but short stories is another matter all together. And that’s not even touching the possibilities with financial articles, and historical research.

I’m also seeing a great opportunity for an enterprising review blogger. A review blog based solely on Amazon Shorts? Anyone interested in the Shorts would likely stumble across the blog and stay a while. With a decent following, the blogger could make some change off the sales of shorts off their blog. A multi author blog could do very well covering multiple genres, with the minimal output of money (say, one short a week per author?) and ease of inserting their own Amazon affiliate codes into their posts.

Darnit. I’m always having great ideas for blogs, and no time to pursue them! Someone wanna subsidize me? Or maybe join up for that multi-author blog?

Since I also have a nasty head cold (not a typical cold though- more a matter of congested sinuses and a fuzzy head with an inability to focus), I’m going to leave any attempts at freelance work for a while until I can catch up on my personal projects.

My go-between asked me to notify her when I’m back from vacation, so I hope she’ll bear with me while I recouperate.

I also want to test the waters with article marketing and see just what my pay rate with AC will be now that I’ve jumped up to the next rank. Perhaps even submit a few more articles to Helium (I started out when they were having a contest last year- I made a few bucks, but I’d really like to reach pay out). And I need to figure out how to attach a file to WordPress blogs so that I can post another how-to to VixenCrafts. I’ve been receiving a steady stream of search engine traffic to that site, and I’d like to keep it updated.

I’ve also decided that while I do plan to keep my “I Feel Like Chatting” blog, I will probably be using it more as a “I wrote this here, wrote this here, and updated this today” kind of blog. With the occassional post that doesn’t fit in anywhere else (which is mostly what I’m using it for now).

I’ve got a lot of catching up to do, and I’m still working on catching up to all of your blogs. I’ve been through a few today, but I’ve got lots more to go through. And that’s not even counting the industry blogs. Yeesh.

I’ve got to get my butt in gear working on more content instead of playing with all the pretty colors.

Last night I put up the basics for a tea store and a coffee store. I have the logos up and most of the colors have been tweaked. Today I continued tweaking the tea shop, and I’m rather proud of how well the site is coming along.

Here’s the tea shop.

Now I’ve been adding content as well. Last night I bought a few PLR packages that fit the theme of sites that I was already working on. Today I rewrote one, reworked another, and wrote up a short one of my own.

When you click on the main page, that’s the PLR article that I reworked. Mostly I just chopped a few sentences off here and there, rearranged a few more, and rewrote a few for clarity, as well as the opening and closing. (The provider actually states that she doesn’t care how much of the article remains the same, so most of what I did with that one was to avoid duplicate content).

When you click on the “Tea” button on the left sidebar, that’s the content that I wrote. I’ll probably keep tweaking it for the rest of the week, but I really wanted to get some original content onto the site. My goal is to make as much while I’m on vacation as I make when I’m working. Not likely to happen, but it definitely won’t if I don’t get things set up first.

After you click on “Teas“, there should be more buttons with various kinds of tea available. If you click on the “Green Tea“, that’s the PLR article that I completely rewrote.

So far, I’m absolutely loving the BANS program, but it is very (very) tedious making even small style changes. I’m just glad to have some content up, and now that I’m learning how to make the logos and the steps to building the stores, I think it’ll all go much quicker and easier in the future. I’m even thinking of starting a separate blog to detail my steps in building an affiliate business so that I don’t bore you all with it every time I do something!

I purchased the Build A Niche Store. Why? Because I’m a glutton for punishment. Of course, I couldn’t just buy it and leave it alone, now could I? Nooooo. I had to build a store right then and there, just to try it out.

Well, it’s up and finished in its basic form. I have to tweak the design, find a logo, fill the the extra ads… but as it is, I can actually make money with it (as in, it’s functional).

If you want to take a gander (does anyone really know where that phrase came from?), check out my vitamin shop.

Anyway. I have the first post on two of my new affiliate sites. I’d appreciate any feedback you can give me.

My affiliate dating site

My affiliate internet techy stuff site

I haven’t spent all day writing those, only the past few hours (while watching brit coms), but I have been updating the plug ins and signing up for affiliate accounts. I can’t believe how many companies are out there that offer affiliate accounts! I thought it was all done through the big sites. I actually like using individual companies better since I have a better shot at being familiar with the product.

Also, something that I forgot to add to yesterday’s post: once I have practice writing these posts and articles, I should have a better idea of what to charge than if I just jumped right in.

Man those cookies smell good.

(That is a very, very brief excerpt- go read the whole post if you haven’t already), I couldn’t hold it in. I burst out in the comments with my own plans for doing just that.

Actually, I withheld quite a bit since I’m really quite verbose when not self-editing.

Anyway, thanks to the encouragement of Hope, Courtney (link above), and Alex, as well as the extreme exhuberance of CJ, Tracy, and their parents for me building a craft website, I’ve decided to expand.

Nothing is up yet, but I’ve been setting up templates for AffLove complete with niche directories. Yeah, not the domain I wanted, but everything seemed to be taken.

Anyway- the reasons for doing this are many. As Courtney said- marketers are paying obscenely low wages for articles, throwing said articles up on a few websites, and either collecting affiliate money or flipping the sites. While I have every intention of becoming a successful novelist, I’m also working towards becoming a web content freelancer. But if the marketers are taking my words and making money off of it, why can’t I do the same thing for myself?

So here are the reasons I’m starting an affiliate site.

1. I get the income. I’m not making a few bucks so someone else can rake in the bucks on the same words.
2. I’m not a freelancer yet. Sure I’ve had a client, and I review for TitleTrakk. But I still need to build my skills. By doing the same work I’d do for someone else, I’ll be building those skills on my own dime and not having to worry about being rated on my early work.
3. It’s a showcase for those newly earned skills. Potential clients may find me by my affiliate site, and I can use said site as a sample for potential clients.
4. It’s PLR fodder. I’d like to get into writing PLR. As I research the articles/posts for my site, I can turn around and use the same research to build PLR packages.
5. Similar to #1, it’s passive income. That’s something that I really want. Once each niche is fleshed out enough to be attractive to search engines, I can add to it as I choose instead of busting my butt to keep it going.
6. I still have a day job. If it fails, it’s just a lesson learned. A loss of time and a little money. If I wait till I’m already a freelancer, I’d be taking a much bigger chance. I’ve got my cushion, so why not use it?

Of course, it’ll take time to get it all off the ground- especially since I’m writing it all myself rather than… ahem, outsourcing. Though I do plan to buy some PLR and rewrite that as well since that’s another good sample to have. Besides, I wanted to buy some to see how it should be formatted and delivered; why not use it?

So, those are the basics. Hopefully I’ll have a brain this weekend and will be able to format the craft site the way I want it and get some basics down for the affiliate site. Anyone have recommendations for affiliates other than ClickBand/Commission Junction/Adsense/Amazon/Ebay?