Helping WAHMs Earn Money Online

It’s Canada Day! Happy Canada Day to all my fellow Canadians. I’m heading out to the lake later today to celebrate, but first I’m doing all my month end reports.

Month end reports used to give me ulcers when I worked at an office, but now that I work from home, I really look forward to them. I mean REALLY.

Looking back over all the numbers helps me decide what’s working and what isn’t. It lets me see what parts of my sites need improving, what parts are working really well, and what parts need to be scrapped completely.

It doesn’t take long once everything is set up, and the information gained from it is well worth the time investment.

All you need is OpenOffice or MS Word. I do all my reports in OpenOffice Calc. If you want to get all organize-y, you’ll need a printer, binder and a 3-hole punch as well.

I take all the info from Clickbank, Adsense, Google Analytics, etc. and pile it all into readable reports that I then print out each month.

I keep these reports neatly organized in my super cool binder. I bought myself a cutesy girly binder from Walmart and some funky dividers just to add some fun. As if month end reports aren’t fun enough right?!?

Now I can go through these reports and map out a plan to increase my numbers for next month. Since I’ve started doing these reports, my numbers have steadily increased. It makes such a big difference when you have a really good understanding of everything that goes on with your online business.

Now I’m off to the cabin to roast some wieners and drink beer!

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It’s time for June’s most groovy posts. Yay! Everybody sing and dance.

I took the list of posts I published in June and these are the 5 most popular:

1. Creative Ideas for a New Blog Header
   Some ideas that will hopefully inspire you should you happen to be designing a new header for your blog. Changing your header once in awhile is a great way to freshen up the look of your blog.
2. Clickbank Tip – Turning On Instant Notification
   Being emailed each time you make a sale in Clickbank is a nice feature instead of having to log in to your account each time you want to check.
3. Ergonomically correct monitor height
   Working at home, for most of us, means spending long hours sitting at the computer. This can wreak havoc on your body so it’s important to set your desk area up to be as ergonomically correct as you can, including your monitor.
4. Can You Write? Make Money In 5 Days!
   A ridiculously simple idea to write and profit from a short report. Create multiple reports and start earning a nice passive income.
5. Dig my new background?
   I added a background to my blog to spice it up a bit. I’m pretty pleased with the results. You can see the before shot and scoff at how boring it was.

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This isn’t really fair to the poor June posts that were published closer to the end of the month since they didn’t have as much time to generate traffic before I checked the stats – but oh well. Suck it up end-of-june posts. Maybe next month you should think about formulating in my head earlier rather than later.

Chris Brogan wrote a great post which is essentially a checklist for anyone who uses social media. Bloggers, if you use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., this is a list worth printing out and going through every day.

I know from experience that the tasks on this list are great ways to expand your reach, connect with new people, and solidify relationships. This in turn will mean more exposure to your blog/website and more customers/sales.

Why?

Because doing these things helps you stand out from the rest of the crowd.

A lot of marketers like to complain about social networks like Twitter and say how much of a waste of time they are, but if you manage the time you spend on them wisely, they can increase your business exponentially.

This list of “chores” will help you do that so you can continue to focus on maintaining and improving your site.

Do you write and submit articles to article directories like EzineArticles.com? I don’t know too many marketers that don’t.

If you do, take a look at your stats in your Author’s Area. Under Author Tools, “View My Article Reports” and make a note of your top performing articles.

The articles that have the most views, clicks, comments, etc. are obviously topics that people are interested in.

Now take those articles (providing they’re all related) and bundle them together to create a short report.

Expand on each article to make it unique by adding:

• photos
• screenshots
• a case study
• a worksheet
• a resource list
• an interview

Beef it up with valuable content and badda bing! You have a short report. You can do this all in one day.

Now profit from that sucka!

I just read some really good article marketing questions from Ashique. I posted my summarized answers on Facebook but I thought I would expand on them a bit here:

Q1. What is your Number 1 strategy in generating more Page Views to each of your articles?

A1. I don’t have a #1 strategy to generate more article pageviews cuz I’m a total badass. Occasionally I’ll link to them from a blog post on one of my related blogs or I’ll mention it in a newsletter to my subscribers, but at the moment, that’s it. Let it be known that I suck at that!

Q2. How do you write the Title of your article to get more traffic?

A2. I have a file on my computer of all the article titles that I thought were great. If I can’t think of a compelling headline on my own, I’ll take a look through this swipe file of mine for inspiration. I don’t typically do keyword research when deciding on a title. Another badass move, but oh well. I write for humans. Not robots. Robotic beings don’t rule the world…yet.

Q3. How do you write the body (main content) of the article effectively so that it gets picked up by the publishers?

A3. My first rule of writing content is NOT to write for search engines. I write to ONE person. I define the problem they have, and I write about the solution that I have to offer. I write as myself. I write how I speak. I write in a conversational tone and I inject some humour in there if I can.

Q4. What is your Number 1 strategy behind writing an effective Author Resource Box to get more clickthroughs to the link that you provide?

A4. I write a custom resource box for each article. I continue writing about the topic and offer a link for more info. For example: “To learn more about [good anchor text link], visit my blog at http://myblog.com where author [yours truly] shares her tips and experience.”

I include the anchor text for SEO purposes and my main URL for tracking purposes. (I have a google alert set up for my URLs so I know when an article has been published or someone mentions my site – this is also a good way to catch those sumbitches who don’t make the URLs clickable. Jerks.)

Q5. Got any tips for the newbie article marketers? Please share.

A5. My #1 tip is to focus on really great content. Don’t rehash all the other articles that have already been published. Come up with a really unique idea and cash in on it. It’s hard and a bit time consuming, and you may not end up with as many articles, but it’s worth it because people actually read and publish those types of articles. They also get a lot of clicks. Most importantly, they establish you as an expert which solidifies your brand and garners trust in your readers.

How about you? Do you have any article tips of your own to share?