November 27, 2006

Labored Fruits

So I thought to myself, well, gee, I can write a website. I can put together a store front and give a set of affiliates a decent showing, do the SEO, get things set up all pretty, and have it all done in time for Black Friday.

And so I did. It took about a month, but the site is together. It has gone through three major design changes, a shift from HTML to PHP, a shift from tables to CSS, a shift from store-focus to product-focus, plus my own shift from sanity to gibbering fool. Why on earth did I think this was going to be simple?

As it turns out, it wasn't nearly as difficult as it would have been without the intervention and counsel of some dear friends and sisters. Thank goodness for the honesty and guidance, or what you see now would still be three weeks ago in a bad state of uninvitingness. But as it is, I rather like it.

November 2, 2006

Day 16 - AM Haiku in Silver Dust

Visa bill arrives
Adwords titters gleefully
Tomorrow looks thin.

During my enforced absence, feet up on ottoman as ordered by doctor, I fretted at not being able to work on all things computer. Well, I could have, but I type like an otter with arthritis on my inherited laptop, which has a nasty habit of curling up and going to sleep just when I get in the mood to work.

So instead I watched TV - lots and lots of it. I do that too often anyway, or at least I did before the mania of Affiliate Marketing grabbed me and ripped my life away. This time, though, I wrote down the name of every single company that displayed a commercial, the product or service or sale they advertised, and approximately where it was in the program's timeframe.

After a few hours of that hand-cramping exercise, I compiled it all into a single list, sorted it, looked for patterns and frequencies, then headed to the affiliate centers and looked for those companies, making it a priority to apply for their affiliate or publisher programs. I haven't heard back from several of them, but those which I did hear from, I got into place in my AM pages at Fern's General Store, as high up on the page as possible.

Why not take advantage of the ad dollars they've already spent, after all...

Day 16 - The Zen of the Tuba

Since discovering myself racing around corners and colliding with myself, I'm forcing a slowdown. It got so slow, in fact, that I actually slept an entire night without having to get up and check my affiliate network state of affairs and implement 'just one more thing' on the new website. I got a few things done on the game, though not as much as I would have hoped, and made contact with a new traffic service which began showing results within the hour.

Traffic is very good to Fern's General Store. Now if I can just keep people from racing by without stopping. Wonder if those spike sticks that LAPD uses in car chases will work on the Info Superhighway...


I take stock of my progress:

So far I've spent $226.
My revenue is at $0.
I have 3 hits on a Clickbank page.
I have 20 hits on Commission Junction placements.
I have 185 views of my Too-Simple Chili Relleno Casserole recipe.
I have 76 views of my Too-Simple Time Creation recipe.
I have 79 views of my Too-Simple Teensy Toffee Treasures recipe.
I have 103 views of my Too-Simple Clutter Confrontation page.
I have 80 views of my Too-Simple Chili Verde Soup recipe.
I have 20 views of my Too-Simple Ways to De-stress Holiday Shopping article.

I'm beginning to wonder just how effective article writing has been for my presence. I'll keep trying, of course. I am not prone to giving up...