I’m always talking about how little work I do and how I should have done a lot more each month and how other things seem to get in the way and I always put the work part off. Well, the past few days I have been hitting the laptop (not literally, I would never harm my beautiful new Mac) and I thought it might be interesting to some of you nerdy folks out there to know exactly what I get up to when I finally sit down to get things done.
I have four main tasks to work on: promoting my volunteering ebook, starting a huge new project that will involve building a site from scratch, filing my 2009/10 tax return, and building links back to existing sites. I’ve been in Durban for over two weeks and have only been working hard for about five days, but those five days have been pretty productive.
Ebook Promotion
Working on this basically means nagging people to review my ebook, to accept a guest post from me to put on their own blog, or to hit me back with some other idea which sometimes results in interviews. I have a big list of blogs that I think has readers who might be interested in volunteering. It’s all in a spreadsheet with the blog owner’s name, their contact details (including Twitter and email), their blog’s address, and the status of my request. If I’ve contacted them, I put the date of the email. If something has been agreed like a blog post or a review, I put a little note along with whether I’ve actually sent a review copy or written the blog post yet. Then if I have written something for them, I put the link to the article in the spreadsheet and highlight the line as a way to tell me to stop harassing them.
I’ve got a lot more bloggers to approach but I think the problem is that I’m sticking with people in the same niche of travel and a bit of lifestyle design. I have a few big blogs publishing guest posts or reviews soon which will give sales and exposure a bit of a boost, but I really need to find new markets. I might hit up Lonely Planet’s Thorntree with some posts and look for blogs in the college/university area. Plus everyone is telling me to start an affiliate program to really get things going, so that’s on the agenda.
So far I’ve written a handful of blog posts, sent out a few more review copies and chased up some people who haven’t posted their promised reviews yet. This is an ongoing thing but I’m fed up with it for now so will need to come back to it next time I get a chance to get work done. In 2011? Maybe.
Huge Project/New Site
I have grand plans for a new site but it really will be biting off more than I can chew and it’s not something I’ll be able to do on the road, a little at a time. If I’m able to rent a place and stay in one place for awhile, I will dive into this project and give you all the details.
File my 2009/10 Tax Return
I spent all day yesterday going through my old bank and creditcard statements and Paypal records and adding everything into my terribly neglected tax spreadsheet. I cleaned up the spreadsheet too which will hopefully make doing this year’s taxes a lot easier and inspire me to keep track of more receipts. I’m really bad with keeping receipts and don’t claim half of what I could. I did, however, spend a lot last year on content, advertising, and new domain names which, combined with the fact that I didn’t have a great year for earnings, means that the tax bill is far lower than expected.
Building Links
I have finally and stubborning admitted that building links are the way up Google’s rankings and the easiest way for me to build links is through article marketing on sites like Infobarrel and Ezine Articles. The idea is that you write articles on the same topic as your site and link back to your site from the article. It’s easy and it works. The only problem is that I absolutely hate writing these kinds of articles.
This is where Textbroker comes in. You can post articles that you want written to this site along with what you’re willing to pay per word, how long the article should be, a deadline, and any details the article writer needs to know. Their interface is easy, it’s affordable, and I get articles written really quickly and to a higher quality than I would expect.
Once I get the articles, I post them up to article marketing websites. You can also find people to do the whole process for you through sites like Elance, but I don’t mind the actual posting part, just the writing part. I started working on this today and people are writing me articles as fast as I can post them. I have about 30 articles coming at me about the London 2012 Olympics as well as 15 for my moving to New York site (although these articles are for content building… the article marketing part will come later). I have a bunch of sites to build links for so I will just keep doing what I’m doing whenever I get the time.
My Olympics site is at the top of page two on Google for my target keywords and I’m hoping this little push will kick it to the front page. The trick will be keeping it there but I’m hoping that it will have an advantage once the Olympics roll around because it’s been there for awhile. Who knows, though. I’m really curious to see how this site does and look forward to sharing the results with you in a couple of years!
So that’s what I’ve been up to for the past few days and what I will be up to for the next couple of days before heading up to Tanzania. Did I tell you yet that I’m heading north? I’m off on July 5th to couchsurf for a few days and then on to Zanzibar to catch up with my two Aussie friends who will be at the end of their overland tour. Then on to Rwanda to stay with a friend there for a bit and then… who knows? Maybe stop somewhere and work? Maybe go live with the gorillas? I will keep you posted.
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