On a quest for homemade donuts.

So I was recently approached by a friend and asked for help.

Her hubpages revenue has tanked, and mine has been slowly trending upward.

I told her that I'd take a look at it, and we agreed that I would start by looking at her historical data and trying to figure out what has changed.

I'm officially on a quest to save what I am told is one of the Best Homemade Donut Recipes out there.

Personally I'm ok with that since the author - Marye - Is an old friend who has helped me out in the past.
That and I'm doing it to further the cause of donuts, and not just any donuts either.
Homemade donuts.
I'll do a lot for that.

So I think what I'll do is build a few backlinks for this page and see what happens.
Everything I build will be hand written and won't be comment spam since I'm against such practices anyhow, I think it makes the internet a poorer place.

Hopefully it will help.

A busy week.

As some people may have noticed it's been a few days since I posted to this blog.

I've been busy doing a few different things.
I have been manually creating backlinks to all of my hubs on hubpages.
this is timeconsuming because I refuse  to just spam links on other people's blogs or forums.  Instead I have been searching the net for article repositories and writing short original peices that link to my other articles.

It's slow going but it seems to help with traffic and it helps out the sites I have been writing for too.

Another thing I have been working on is adding to my negative keyword list on trada.

That has caused a jump in my ctr, which I expected but it has also increased my overall clicks per day which I find surprising. I'm still not sure why that is since I should theoretically be getting fewer clicks of higher quality.

I'm not sure why it works but I wont complaain about increased traffic!

A pleasant surprise.

I was pleasantly surprised tonight when I logged into Amazon to find that my store has referred 3 sales so far this month.
I was also surprised to find that even though it is over two years old and I have not really done anything to promote it my article on the anatomy of a computer is still drawing quite a bit of traffic.
Sadly my short series on gardening in the city and the pair of articles on the uses of herbs aren't doing so well...

Ohwell, I guess the saying that you can't win them all is true.
The important thing here is that I'm making progress, and that the kids were waiting for me at the door when I got home from work today.

Mixed news on the homefront

Well today I was sick, so I called in to work and took some cold medicine.
Sad to say it hasn't done much so far.
However the 6 hour nap seems to have helped a bit.
When I woke up from my nap I logged in to my sites to check performance.
I was happy to find that last month I made about 20 bucks from amazon sales, some from my recent interview with Danielle Kazemi and some from word of mouth advertising.
Trada has also been averaging about a dollar a day, and inboxdollars is giving me a few cents and growing.
All told it's not a stellar income, but it's growing steadily and it's not taking much time, so I can still work full time.

Backlinks - a right way and a wrong way.

OK, getting backlinks to your site is important, but doing it the right way is increasingly more important.

Over the past few years search engines like google and bing have gotten better at detecting spammed links, spun articles and copied content.

that has caused sites where blogs articles and comments are posted to get better at catching people who post stuff like that...

today I came across half of a blog post on hubpages with a link that said "read more"; which means copied content, a spammed link and an incomplete article. all three are violation of the hubpages terms of service.

I kept an eye on the hub and it was removed within an hour so the whole exercise was a waste of time for the person trying it...

Seriously. Don't spam links or copy content, the benefits will be short lived at best.

Recap

Over the past few years I have played around with a few different ways to make money online working from home.
Over the next few days I'll write in more detail on what I have done that has worked and what has not.
The purpose of this blog is not really to make money so much as a place to organize my thoughts about what has worked and not worked.
I hope it will be useful to someone else down the road.
The most recent article I have written can be found here.
I hope it's useful.
I'll post again soon, in the mean time have a good evening.