Sunday, December 30, 2012

Make Plans for Your Writing in the New Year

Make plans for  your writing in the New Year?

You may be asking why you should make plans for your writing. You write for fun? Or do you write for income?

Either way you should be looking for which online publisher is serving you best. What methods of driving traffic to your work has worked in the last year and what has failed.

If you plan to examine your strategies every quarter and set goals for each quarter then you can adjust how you work and work smarter, not harder.

In your plan set limits on time. You need to work on writing but not all the time you have.  Set time for family and set time for marketing.

You need to have family time and creating a marketing plan will help you drive traffic to your pages, if those pages are monetized then that means more potential customers.

Breaking down the year into quarters is easy and you soon find yourself thinking in those little thirteen week blocks. Maybe even consider using the seasonal titles, Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn ( Fall).

Set small goals for each quarter, write X amount of words/pages. Spend X hours on marketing. Spend a weekend away. Set research time.  Anything that sets a goal is ok. As many goals as you can possibly achieve. Not so many that you fail.

Having a quarterly plan and checking goals against actual results also helps you see seasonal changes. Do your readers go away over holidays? Do you see increases in traffic  during the Summer? This is knowledge that businesses need to be able to thrive and you should be aware of trends and potential wasting of your time.

So as a New Years resolution, set the goal of making a quarterly plan for your work in 2013..

May you all have a Happy and Prosperous New Year.

Monday, December 24, 2012

Fall in Views over The Holidays?

Are you seeing a fall in viewing figures over the Holidays and New Year period?

Are you concerned about this?

Well first thing DON'T Panic.

I have seen all this before.. Remember that most people actually look at the internet and World Wide Web at their workplace, they take a break at work and low and behold they go onto the web.

Since they are not at work for the next week or so then you can expect some fall off of traffic.

Also bear in mind those people who may be viewing from home at normal periods may be away visiting relatives and friends or may be having friends and relatives visit them.

So in short don't worry. The decline in views is perfectly naromal and your viewing figures will come back in mid January.

It is not some fiendish plot by Google or search engines to steal money from you.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all!

Sunday, December 23, 2012

Think about Zazzle.com for Long Term Residual Cash

If you have a blog and are looking to monetize it by means other than Google AdSense maybe you should consider becoming a zazzle associate.

In order to receive income from zazzle.com you do not need to create goods for sale. You can create an advertisement in the form of a Flash Panel selling goods related to your blog and placing the ready-made HTML on your blog.

Be sure to create an account with zazzle.com first then create an associate account, very simple.

Then go to "Create a Flash Panel" in the associate menu. You can gather several designers items by using a keyword search or download a panel from your favorite designers goods.

When someone clicks on the panel and buys an item from any zazzle store on that visit you receive both a referral payment and also as the number of your referrals rises you also get an increasing sales bonus which starts as low as just $100 of sales.

You can receive a payment when your associate payments reach $50, payment is then paid to your PayPal account or you may receive a check or bank direct payment with a minimum payment of $100.

If you do not receive the minimum amount in time for payment that cash is carried forward until a minimum balance is held in your account.

You also need to wait three months for a pending sale  payment to become confirmed. This is to allow for any item to be returned by the purchaser.

Only confirmed sales are elligable for bonuses and payments. But as your account grows then times between payments grows less as goods are constantly moving from pending to confirmed.

It is just the initial period where one needs to wait three months that seems to take a long time.

A good reason for taking this option is that you do not really have to work hard at designing. You can always design goods if you like, but if you are selling other peoples goods they create the design and you receive a cut of the sales you generate for them.

Give this system a try. I have found it quite worthwhile generating some useful cash income in recent months.

It costs only a few minutes of your time to set up and once set up you can have as many flash frame store fronts on any blog of your choice  as you want.

Tie in the choice of product with your blog closely and it can pay you well over the long term.

Saturday, December 22, 2012

Ancient Greek Inspiration for a Bumper Sticker




So looking around for inspiration for a topic for a slogan I turned to ancient Greece. I have recently read a history of the Battle of Thermopylae, so the first thing that came to my mind was the message inscribed on the monument erected in the 19th Century near the battle site.

"Go tell the Spartans" the message goes on to tell of the heroic stand of the 300 Spartans who stood with King Leonidas and a few Corinthian Hoplites against the massed Persian army.

In the end they bought time for the Athenian navy to defeat the Persian navy at Salamis and thereby it could be said that the stand of the 300 Spartans saved the Western world as we know it today.

A fitting motto for a bumper sticker I think.

Go Tell... Bumper Sticker Click HERE

Saturday, December 15, 2012

Broaden Your Horizons

The world of internet publishing is a fickle friend. What with search engine tweaks and constantly rising and falling viewing figures.

The world of community pages such as HubPages is always a dangerous one. At any moment the owners of the community site can throw a spanner into the works and blow all your hard work away.

One tweak of their algorhytm and you are history in search engine parlance.

So for this reason I would say keep as many irons in the fire as you possibly can.  Don't throw away HubPages but spread out to other sites. Blog for yourself, maybe move into online retailing opening up affilate links to sites such as zazzle.com, cafepress.com and godaddy.com.

Affilliate sites pay some good referal bonuses and with sites like zazzle and cafepress you don't even need to produce designs yourself these days you link to a certain keyword product list and bang you can start earning cash without having to make anything.

If you need to write, try squidoo.com too or List my 5.com they are both different from HubPages but they offer you an outlet and a chance of marketing your work if any one of the sites you use botches their search engine standing.

Friday, December 7, 2012

Loss of the HubPages RSS Capsule

If you are like me and have more than one blog you may be looking at the loss of the HubPages RSS capsule with some nervousness.

The Capsule is set to be retired in the first week of February 2013.

My blogs generally get about 50% of their traffic from HubPages and the RSS feeds on various hubs account for a lot of that extra traffic.

Since I heard the news I have modified some of my links to try to help some traffic.

First I set my HubPages profile to show my largest blog as my website.

Secondly I began setting RSS links to my other blogs on my main blog.

This will enable visitors to my main blog to see the latest posts on several of my blogs thereby allowing the blogs to maintain visibility and hopefully traffic volumes.

I estimate a drop off in traffic anyway due to the loss of high traffic hub RSS feeds but hopefully the steps I have taken will mitigate any serious losses.

Time will tell. All the best for Christmas.

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Jump in Views over 10,000 views. An Internet Myth?

When I began writing online, just about four years ago now, not many people had seen large viewing figures.

At that time what seemed an internet myth began to grow.

"Get 10,000 views and you'll see your traffic rise dramatically."

Of course 10,000 views is easy to get. Well it took me two years to get 10,000 views on HubPages, less time on Yahoo and even less time on List my 5.

But there is truth in that old internet myth.

Having reached 10,000 views in July 2011 I reached 15,000 views on HubPages just five months later. Now I am well on the way to 21.000 views my goal was 20,000 views by the end of 2012.

This is in part due to luck, one of my hubs about making a cold drink called 'Shandy' was a big hit this last summer. All that thirst and a fifty or sixty view per day hub was not bad.

But all in all most of my hubs are generally evergreen. History or disabled issues, people look for links to disabilities like blindness for hints and tips on resources everyday.

So if you are a struggling writer looking at your viewwing figures creep slowly up towards 10,000 hold on. Relief is coming.

Pass that and my general experience from more than one site is once passed that magical figure, your traffic will jump and hopefully for you so will revenues.

All the best

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

HubPages to End RSS Feed Capsule

At the begining of February, 2013, HubPages will be retiring the RSS feed capsule in our hubs.

Personally I will be upset to see this. Much of my traffic here on Blogger comes from those RSS feeds through my hubs.

Since I don't get much traffic flow from HubPages where I have not included RSS feeds then I can see a future drop off in traffic to my blogs.

I guess it had to come. We all have to move with the times and things do change. It will be sad to see the RSS feed go though, they did carry information for several posts and it meant the spread of other blogs and past posts was available to a wider audience.

Anyway there are about eight weeks to prepare and I am looking at possible reductions of my blogging and focusing on other things in the coming year anyway.