SUNDAY... Coffee and Cake

Sunday - Coffee and Cake
weekly musings, articles and mostly babble...




Hermit Or at least I have been feeling a bit like a hermit, rather than actually being one. I guess it's because for the past week I have lost a couple of nights sleep (pregnancy related) after already having insomnia for many weeks, on top of trying to do my duties with my son, housework, Etsy stuff, research and somehow managing to take my son out to his various groups and little friend meetings. Being tired isn't the thing really, I guess it's just the whole lack of time I have spent really thinking about much else but the above, which oddly has left me feeling like I've been a recluse all week. But in all there has been some progress from all of this. My son is asking the all fun "why?" questions now, I made and listed loads of new prints in my Etsy store including a 2010 Calender dedicated to my print "Dreamweaver", my little baby has stopped booting me so hard now that she's running out of room!, and relating to the Etsy/blog side of things I've managed to move things around a bit, sorting out my unactive Project Wonderful box (I couldn't believe I hadn't noticed!), finally getting back into throwing my name into more search engines/directories and also ticked a few boxes on my to do list that have made a grand difference in my incoming traffic.
I thought I'd mention one thing that has been positive this week in terms of advertising, because it's something I reckon anyone could benefit from if they're prepared to take a little bit of time daily to make that bit of difference for their website/blog. Last year I came across something called "Link Referral" which is a great directory of various businesses that ranks your page based on a credit system... ie: requires some input from you, and input from others to position your webite in the big list on there. You have the option of paying something like $35 monthly if you don't think you can spend time daily doing the things it recommends you to do, which has the advantage of sticking you in the top 10 of your chosen catagory, or like myself you can just do the 5 things daily that consist of visiting a number of listed sites, writing short reviews, favouriting and contributing in the forum. Initially when even the idea of registering (I hate form filling) was frightful, finding out that you had to do these things daily to give yourself a good chance of being noticed seemed pretty far fetched, if not setting off alarm bells considering like most people that's tried and tested free advertising sites, they either bring you frig all traffic, or give you a tonne of poor quality traffic. So I was wary... but I thought I'll give it a go... there were loads of Etsy shops on there so I thought "hey... I'll conform for a day and see what the results will be like." The site claims to bring between 20-60 new people to your site if you rank high enough, which obviously means that doing it the free way means you may not get that much, but would probably notice a difference. And if I'm totally honest, the following day after checking my Google Analytics, I was pretty shocked to see a dramatic increase in my traffic. Dramatic I say because since my month of being ill, my traffic had dropped to an all time low. So you can imagine I was pretty pleased! But would this be consistent??? So 5 ish days later I'm still clicking and typing away on there for an hour or so a day (managing 2 sites n all) and hey presto, my traffic is still improved and the peak is definitely due to this site. The best bit is, even though it's not hundreds of people (yet... i hope) it is for once QUALITY traffic... people who are obviously looking into the niche I have stuck my work into and are visiting out of genuine interest. No click throughs, and high bouncers. Well worth it. So anyone out there that has the time try out Link Referral. See what is does for you. It may not be a massive thing unless you catagorise yourself into a popular catagory, or give them money so you don't have to do anything, but you will notice a difference.
So now that I have completed this post I'm torn between sitting still and knitting, or maybe working on a host of new prints I have planned... I think I may knit... I find a lot of tranquility in doing that to relax lol!!!

moonangelnay x