Bum Marketing Adventure

I gave up counting days, lol.

I'm in a bit of a rut right now. I'm having trouble making things work. I've hit a lot of setbacks. Things just aren't working well.

I'm making things easier on myself. I've been getting frustrated, so I decided to just let that go. I would spend all day working on this, yet really get nothing done. I'm changing this. I have a very simple goal for each day. Make one good site. That's it. If I feel like more, I can. If not, I can forget about IM for the whole day. It seems to take 2-5 hours to do, depending on how quickly I get a good idea. This goal guarantees that I get something worthwhile done everyday, without wearing me out. I've stuck to it for a week now.

I'm also not worrying about money right now. The fact is, as slow as it's been lately, I'm still way ahead of where I thought I would be. So I'm just going to go about this slow and steady.

My biggest problem now is, with Squidoo not quite as good as it once was, rankings are harder to come by.

Days...a lot... - Bum Marketing Adventure

I realize my posts have grown rather infrequent and for that I apologize.

Things have gone downhill lately. I won't really get into it, but I've been having a hard time making things work. I'm not giving up but I'm a little exhausted and frustrated.

The couple ideas I had seem so powerful, I just can't quite crack the code to it. I KNOW there is huge gains to be made, I just need to come up with a really good plan to exploit it. I'm so frustrated because I know I'm right there, I can feel it...I just can't quite get over the hump. Hopefully I can figure this thing out before I go crazy.

This month has been by far my worst. I plan to make next month my best.

Days 67-72 Bum Marketing Adventure

Wow, long time no update.

Well, I'm still unsure on Squidoo. Some of them are still doing ok, others aren't. From what I heard, the reason many sites dropped (or get deindexed) was because a spammer got a hold of Squidoo and made something like 70,000 lenses in just a few days. I'd imagine it was someone using a scrapper (script to steal content from other sites to make you a bunch of automated sites. Individually not very effective, but 10,000 plus can add up. And it's completely automated.)

This, of course, made Google frown on Squidoo. Squidoo contacted Google to try and rectify the situation. While it seems somewhat fixed, this is bad news for us Squidoo users. First of all, it brings Google's eye on Squidoo. So, if they weren't before, they're now well aware of IMers on Squidoo. Secondly, Squidoo may have to drop the hammer a bit on spam lenses. While most of us should be ok with that, it may cause some problems. I'd expect to see some captcha on there as well. They do have some when you make a lens, but apparently that's not enough.

That said, to call it dead would be stupid. It's still pretty powerful and its future remains to be seen. If you can get your lenses some links, it's still very powerful. And even if you can't, it still works ok.

I, as usual, continue my poor attention span ways and waste time doing a million things. Oh well, at least I enjoy doing that. Although I have stumbled upon a new idea. If I can get creative enough, it could be huge. We'll see.

Day 64, 65, 66 - Bum Marketing Adventure

Well, it appears the Squidoo drop wasn't just my imagination. A couple of you have noticed it as have a lot of people at the Warrior Forum. While I wouldn't call it completely dead, it does hurt the viability of marketing that way. I knew it was only a matter of time before this happened. Squidoo has almost NO real information on it, just IMers trying to make money. Squidoo even advertises itself as a "get high ranks in google easily" tool. Those two pretty much spelled its eventual doom.

I've been trying to find ways to replace Squidoo. I might have a couple ideas. For now I guess I just target less competitive keywords, as they still rank ok. This is a bit of a downer...ok a huge downer. I guess that's the life of the starting out IMer. Big highs and big lows.

Day 63 - Bum Marketing Adventure

...perhaps my new goal might not be as achievable as I once had hoped. Perhaps I'm wrong and just unlucky but I'm starting to think that the Google love to Squidoo is wearing off. While I don't keep a close eye on all of my lenses, I do watch my more important ones. In one day, nearly all of them dropped at least 4 spots. Many of them are dropping off the first page. I had also noticed that my last 4 or 5 new lenses were ranking way lower than I would have guessed. Sometimes you get a shocker that doesn't make it as high as you'd think, but in general I could make a good guess as to where it would land. So I'm very afraid that Google has finally dropped the Squidoo love. This day was inevitable...but for now I'm hoping it was just bad luck on my part. Perhaps things are ok and it's just a strange string of coincidences.

If it's not just bad luck, I'm due for some crappy times, because pretty much all of my eggs are in Squidoo. On top of that, I don't know much else about internet marketing without using Squidoo. So I might be back to square one for awhile. We'll see. A little disheartening for me but hopefully things pan out.

Day 61 and 62 - Bum Marketing Adventure

Holy cow, I can't believe it's the middle of the summer already.

My lack of updates is really only because I'm at the same things. I keep remembering to update the blog really late at night, lol. Nothing really new or exciting happening, just me trying to keep the cash flow going.

Sales have been really slow lately. So I'm starting to up the ante a bit. That's something I've realized about myself. Success doesn't motivate me to work harder to achieve more success. Failure motivates me to stop failing. I suppose that's a good thing, but it's also a crappy thing. I'll be "just getting along" all my life if I can't shake that attitude. I feel as though my summer has been good so far and I'm way ahead of where I thought I'd be, so it's allowing me to slack off. It's the procrastinator in me. I need a new goal. How about 100 a day by the end of the next 60 days? If I get my butt back in gear, I think I can do it. Maybe it's a bit lofty, but what's the point of a goal if it isn't lofty?

I think that was my mistake. I achieved my goal easily and now I'm coasting. We'll see, but I should give it a shot. I never achieved my last goal of another 100 dollar day. I'm actually mad at myself now that I think about that. It's time I get going.

Day 59 and 60 - Bum Marketing Adventure

No update yesterday. I hardly do anything on Sundays.

Today I did a couple lenses and worked on my tool some more. I actually got a semi-functioning trackback harvester created. Not bad for a days work from a guy who hardly knows Perl, lol.

I think I'll get back to making more pages tomorrow...I've had enough programming for one week, lol.

Day 58 - Bum Marketing Adventure

Not a great day...it was one of those days where everything seems to go wrong. Nothing big in particular, I just kept messing up little things all day and frustrating myself.

I'm going to start getting back to really working on what's paying me. I've been slacking in that department (not that I haven't been working, but I've been working towards different things).

My pay is starting to sag a bit, so I'm thinking I should up the ante a bit here in the second half of the summer.