Mid June 2011 Notes and List

Well, I haven't posted on My Notes and Lists in a while, which of course means I have neglected the main purpose of this blogsite, and of course this also means that I have notes and lists scattered all over the place again!

So, here is one of my latest "scatterings"

List and notes (11 points below) of what to do regards the freelance work Tony and I do, and also regards getting more traffic to our sites, in particular our main 1pic4twenty site right now, as 1pic4twenty is the site where we list the services we offer, and work is pretty quiet at the moment, so we certainly need more traffic to the services and prices pages of our site, so that more people can see how affordable we are, and hire us!

1.
I need to write and get 3 articles off to ServiceR8d as I write a weekly article for this site, for their Work From Home column. I only really need to write one article today and email it off today too, since the ServiceR8d email newsletter goes out tomorrow, but there's a good chance our Internet bandwidth allowance may run out before the end of the month because I failed to properly monitor usage in the first half of this month, and have allowed my boys far too much time on the Internet so far this month, without realising the penalties Tony and I would have to "pay."

The boys have been playing some online games and Zooty has taken to learning some magic tricks by watching YouTube videos about magic tricks. Zooty has also been watching some YouTube videos about learning to speak Italian. Tony and I have also spent some time watching YouTube videos, so no more YouTube for us for the rest of this month, and no Internet at all for the boys for the rest of this month.

We cannot really yet afford to up our monthly Internet bandwidth allowance, so we just have to be ultra careful the rest of this month, and then in future, monitor our usage more carefully and more frequently. This is why I need to get 3 articles off to ServiceR8d soon, so that the next two weeks' articles are already sent too, just in case we have no Internet towards the end of the month. ServiceR8d is a local (East London, South Africa) WordPress site, that Tony and I helped set up for the owner, and although I don't earn anything for writing the articles, I do get to include a link to our workfromhomeideas.co.za site at the bottom of each article, and this helps give us a little more local exposure. Due mostly to the newsletter ServiceR8d sends out weekly to over 4 000 subscribers (so far,) the site does get a fairly decent amount of traffic.

2.
I've added a "new" service to our 1pic4twenty.co.za site (email address hosting) and I need to add the link to it on all our other pages of services (over 20 pages/services)

3.
We've only recently nicely split up the services we offer into separate pages that give details and prices, but I need to still rewrite each of these pages a bit for better SEO (Search Engine Optimization,) as well as do better meta title, meta description, and meta keywords in the coding. Hopefully this extra SEO work will get our services and prices pages found a bit more on search engines like Google, and people visiting the pages will also see the list of services we offer, down the right hand side of each of these pages (and they all link to the appropriate page for more details and price information) - it's handy that many of the services we offer all sort of relate to each other, so somebody who finds one of our services and prices pages, may also need one of our other services listed down the side.

4.
Once done with 2. and 3. above, resubmit the site to search engines.

5.
Get a bit more exposure and possibly a few backlinks by commenting on South African blogs. Of course no spam, so browsing through many South african blogs to find content that I really want to leave nice comments on, can take quite a bit of time. I need to do this quite urgently in the hopes that Tony and I can generate some traffic to our sites and possibly get some orders for our services, but, essentially, this is also something that needs to be done on an ongoing basis, from time to time, forever.

6.
Prior to starting a new surge of commenting on South African blogs, I need to double check that some of our sites (to which I would leave a link to when I comment on blogs [my name automatically links to one of my sites when I fill in the details eg name and website address when I comment on other blogs]) mention the services we offer, or at least link to one or more of our services and prices pages.

7.
Do research and write some seo-optimized articles for an overseas client for one of his sites - we have been paid in advance some time ago, and there's no major rush for these articles, but we do need to get in all those hours we owe sometime, inbetween trying to market for some more local clients.

8.
Prepare and write etc our 3rd Work From Home Ideas newsletter, and get it sent off to our few subscribers.

9.
Get as many articles as possible written, and added to our own sites, whenever we get the chance!

10. Refresh our ads on the online free classifieds site, Vottle, and perhaps add a few more ads to Vottle, perhaps also add a few ads to some other online free classifieds sites.

11.
Get off the Internet now, and go return two dvds we watched last night, before midday. The two dvds we watched were Black Swan and The American.

© copyright Teresa Schultz 2011