A book on Power Thinking inspired me to set targets for myself. My principle target for September was to earn $25 from the website looklovely.net that I publish with a partner. Our main source of income is GoogleAds. Tricia, my website partner put the ads into a new format that (according to other users) would yield more ‘clicks’.
Working on the basis that we would need more visitors to the site to gain more revenue, I have been trying to publicise the site to increase traffic.
This is an account of my activities on Day 19 of the Quest, and an honest report of the result in terms of revenue.
I have placed ads for looklovely.net on all the United Kingdom cities (bar one) covered by Gumtree.com. Gumtree is an on-line community notice board where you can post free ads. The one city that I have not got covered is Belfast, where the Gumtree site allows local posts only.
The Gumtree page for each city is continually updated, with the most recent ad at the top of the page. You are allowed to manage your ads, which means that you can ‘re-post’ them and they will got back to the top of the page – at least until the next ad is posted.
So, today I reposted the ads for Birmingham, Bournemouth and Cork. Not only did I repost, but also updated the ad to describe the post recent articles on looklovely.net.
I also posted a comment on a website called Craftingagreenworld. I originally found this site through Stumbleupon. It is a site for people interested in crafting, but with the angle that it publishes articles on fabrics and yarns that are organic or Fairtrade. This is very helpful as we sometimes feature organic or Fairtrade items on looklovely.net, but we feature mainly clothing, not materials. However, we have got some ideas from Craftingagreenworld, and some of our posts on their comments page have led to viewers for our website.
That is a very rambling way of saying that if you are trying to increase viewers for your website, it may be worth finding sites with related topics to get ideas, and possible new viewers.
Finally, I visited an independent dress shop in a nearby town and left a handful of business cards.
I intended to spend about 15 minutes only on trying to verify the website with Google Webmasters. You have a choice of using a meta tag, or an HTML page. I could manage neither. Hindsight tells me that I should have given up after my first attempt; instead I wasted about an hour and a half trying.
I made myself move on to working on content. Next week I am planning a feature on organic and/or fair trade jackets. I have picked out jackets from three sources, each in its own way very ‘on trend’ for this autumn. I contacted the three retails to ask for photo images, and all responded (positively) within 30 minutes. One response used the words ‘thrilled to be asked’. That cheered me up!
Our financial result for day 19 was 89 cents, which makes it our 3rd best day since the Quest began. Total earnings for September are now $7.51.
Could we leap forward to the goal of $25 for the month?
