What Have I Been Up To?

Lost mojo, no inspiration, hard times

What have I been up to? Well, nothing really. In this case, you might object that I've been up to something. And I'd confirm that I was up to nothing at all. Not all actually, but not much. So I didn't do a lot of work these past months. 

Also when I join my partner in his country, I just don't have any will to work, not even the will to turn the laptop on and check my sites, my Facebook pages, the groups or whatever. I feel so fine without any Internet connexion (my partner has one, but I never exploit it or very rarely) and without sites to update. 

The upsetting side of online working

First thing: yes, I lost my mojo. With big G's new algorithms and changed rules, all these animal updates (panda, penguin, hummingbird... what's next? rat???) it seems more and more difficult to make blogs/sites/pages stand out.

My sites suffered from these changes. And nothing seems to please this big brother. Believe it or not, some of them get more traffic after the season than during the season. I haven't found a reason; but this means that I didn't target the wrong keywords.

After big G, there's HP. There too, there is no way to make me work at all. I fear any unfeature of my remaining pages, I just don't dare updating them at all; and leave the pages as they are. What a pity... The low payment rate isn't any incentive at all. Why would I work hard on these pages for peanuts or worse: nothing at all. I haven't reached payout yet. Oh because I still have some former Squidoo lenses without a new home, I could add them to HubPages with some work done on them to comply with their rules. But I can't do that: too much work involved for constant traffic drop and no reward.

Thus what did I do all this time? Well watching TV series and believe it or not, I watched ALL Dallas episodes! Not the 2000 series, but the 1978 one. It was boring, it looked useless, I didn't feel any kind of pleasure while catching the episodes. But I did. And am glad I did. Because it changed a lot of things.

Hard times seem to be over, I'm recovering 

 

Now hard times seem to be over; I'm willing to work, once again. I have to thank Dallas for it. There are 14 seasons to watch. One after the other the quality becomes worse, the episodes are more and more boring. And if I hate something more than all these changing rules online, it's being bored. 

So as time passed, I stopped paying attention to the series, I didn't listen any more, and was thinking. Thinking about renewing my way of working online. 

There are two problems: the sites to rethink entirely and the fact that I still travel to my partner's country; which keeps me away from Internet and my sites. Therefore, I must draw my new site design and configuration while at the same time decide on a schedule that enables me to leave without losing touch with my sites, my Facebook pages and all the groups I'm member of. Not to mention that I have to find room form me prepare all my articles before leaving and schedule their publication. This means a lot of work while I'm home. Perhaps too much work. 

Rethink my marketing practice 

 

Yesterday, I made a purchase... I profit from a flash sale and bought the Affiliate Marketing with Amazon Masterclass from Pajama Affiliates and joined the groups that go with the purchase. It was a first step in the right direction. Watching the videos and chatting in the groups helped me a lot even though I was just over there for 24 hours.

As said earlier, things online have changed a lot. What worked 8 years ago do not work at all today, unless you built a highly popular site in a very specific niche as well as a huge following (plus mailing list). My sites were once popular but the day I put al my efforts on Squidoo and worked for some too exigent clients, I lost my traffic as my sites were neglected.

There was once a way to market products while writing a bunch of stuff - historical facts, and other things people do not actually look for. These types of pages attracted different types of readers: those who were looking for information and those looking for products. You could earn from Adsense type ads and also affiliate links. 

Nowadays, things are different. If you wish to provide information, you'd rather skip the affiliate marketing steps. Some closely related products at the end of the article are fine, yet they won't make you earn a living. Instead, Adsense type ads will provide you with the money you expect to earn from your work.

Instead if you want to earn money primarily from affiliate links, you will need to focus on products, product descriptions, examples of use, product images (lots of them if you review one product), etc. Your potential buyers don't mind the actual history behind the product, the year people first used them or which artist created a statue of a woman out of garage hoses.

In the past, people could spend time on the Internet looking for something and one could build pages that woud mix history, blah-blah and products. Today they want to find what they're searching for right away. Therefore, one must narrow our niches. You can object that there's nothing new under the sun. Yet the modus operandi is different from the past years when we already used to narrow our niches.

I can see it in my sites stats. Some categories always drive traffic, some don't. Some pages with low traffic rate but lots of products do make sales; the pages with lots of content and few products do not make sales. And even though I carefully choose my keywords, I have to rethink that side of the work too. 

The other thing I must change is the way I work:

• Have a strict schedule,
• Take time to prepare my articles from A to Z so as not to have to rework them five minutes after publication,
• Posting regularly instead of posting like a fool during the season (I quickly end up tired and disgusted),
• Prepare the same amount of posts as I usually do and schedule them for publication when I leave,
• Stop wasting my time,
• Stop procrastinating.

Ok long post after a long period of silence. I'm going back to my Affiliate Marketing with Amazon Masterclass as I don't want to lose my brand new mojo and inspiration.

See you soon!

Images in this post are courtesy of Pixabay.com

 

Posted by Holly Day a WAHM who is able to turn any day into a holiday.