My Site Officialy Up For Sale

Omg my site is officialy up for sale. I'm quite nervous actualy.

All I can do is sit here and keep my fingers crossed.

If you want to check out the auction it's listed here

http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/auctions/37080

Good luck me :).

Running Into Difficulties

Well my site isn't up for sale yet :(.

It seems every time I manage to get something going something else gets in the way. My site was all ready to go two days ago, when I decided to pop onto the Warrior Forum for a browse. I came across a post about someone trying to transfer their website to someone else.

So I thought to myself "That's something I'm going to need to know, if I'm planning on selling websites". So I decided to do some research on how to transfer my website to the new owner.

I found plenty of helpful sites but I just can't get my head round what I need to do. The more I read the more confused I got. I even sat at the computer screen at one point trying my hardest not to cry.

I am still sat here now without a clue as to how I properly transfer the website quickly and easily. At first I thought that without knowing this there was no way of me being able to sell it.

But I went to bed last night thinking about it, and now this morning I have made up my mind.
I AM NOT GOING TO GIVE UP!!. I spent days constantly working on the site and I'm not letting it go to waste.

So this morning I am putting my site up for sale on Sitepoint. How am I going to transfer the site?

Well, I am going to clearly state in the auction that the winning bidder must transfer the site themselves. I will have to give them my username and password. If someone is even more clueless than me I can transfer the site for them but I will have to do it the long way, by installing wordpress in their hosting account and transferring it bit by bit.

I will learn how to do this one day, but for now I am not going to sit and dwell on it wasting even more time.

Finaly Finished My Site

Yay I have finally finished my niche site that I plan to sell on Sitepoint. It did take me a while because I wanted everything to be perfect.

I am quite scared actually lol. I don't know why, maybe I am worried that it won't sell or that absolutely no-one will be interested.

Oh well I will never know until I try will I?

A quick update on the bum marketing:

I have not made one single sale yet!
Probably because to be honest I haven't put as much effort into it over the past week. I've been too busy perfecting my site after I lost it last week.

Anyway I am off to do some housework to calm my nerves before listing my website for sale on Sitepoint this afternoon.

I will keep you posted. :)

Half Price Credits At Sitepoint

Yes that's right Sitepoint are offering half price credits up until May 26th. This couldn't of come at a better time for me :).

I've had a migraine the past two days, so havn't really done much, and then I've been beating myself up over not doing much, making my migraine worse. Then this afternoon whilst checking my emails I see one off sitepoint telling me of this offer.

So instead of listing my site for sale for $10 in the turnkey site section I can list it for $5. I have gone right ahead and already bought my credits to list my site, and it's given me the motivation to get it finished as soon as posiible.

For those that don't know Sitepoint is probably the biggest and best marketplace online for buying and selling websites. In fact it's not only about websites, you can also list domain names for sale, and offer your services wether it be article writing or web design.

Every Cloud Has A Silver Lining!

Just as I was putting the finishing touches to my niche site that I plan on selling yesterday, something really strange happened. I'm not sure what it was exactly but it wiped out my entire site. I was so mad and annoyed I couldn't bear to look at the computer screen for at least an hour.

When I had finaly calmed down I reinstalled wordpress, only to find out that I could only install the older version of wordpress, and that I needed to upgrade it.

I was sat there for well over two hours trying to figure out how to update to the new version of wordpress. The longer I was sat there the more frustrated I was getting. I really couldn't imagine what the hell I had done wrong for this to happen to me.

To cut a long story short, in the end I finaly managed to reinstall wordpress, and upgrade it to the latest version. Of course all my hard work was lost, BUT....WOW the latest version of wordpress is just awesome.

So even though I lost all of my hard work, if this hadn't of happened I would never of upgraded my wordpress installation, and this may have caused me problems when it comes to selling the site.

So really the moral of the story is if sometimes things don't seem to be going your way, don't give up hope, sometimes these things happen for a reason. I think you need to have this attitude especialy in this business, because if you give up everytime something bad happens you will never get anywhere in life.

P.S. The other moral of the story is to always always back up your work, if you are using wordpress like me then here is a handy plugin to back up all your files. I will definately be using this from now on :).

http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup/

My First Ezine Article Accepted

Yay I had my first ezine article accepted yesterday, and boy did they make me wait :). I submitted the article near enough a week ago, and I was beginning to get a little bored from waiting too long.

Whilst I have been waiting I have been working on my first website that I'm going to flip. It's nearly finished now, just have to do a bit of cleaning up on there. Once I have finished the website I am going to go back to some more article writing for my bum marketing challenge.

The idea is to get at least 30 articles out there for my first niche. Once I have my 30 articles published I can begin to test and track what works best, for more click throughs and more product sales.

I don't want to just stick with ezine articles. So I'm going to write my original article, submit it to ezine articles, then I will rewrite it and submit it to a couple more article directories.
Here are a list of my top 10 article directories I that I will be using, I hope you find it useful :).

Ezine Articles
Go Articles
Buzzle
Article Base
Article alley
Article City
Article Dashboard
Articles Factory
Articles-Hub
Article Biz
Article World

Money and Goals

I know I know money doesn't make you happy, but in my honest opinion I think it can definitely help. I have two beautiful children, a wonderful boyfriend, a pain in the butt dog called Jess :), one cat called chips and two cute kittens, so you could be wondering that I have pretty good life. Don't get me wrong I DO, but I am sick and tired of worrying about money.

These days it's money this and money that, everything costs money. The bills are mounting and I am always in a panic because we can't always afford to pay them. The reason I want to earn more money is to provide a better life for my children, they don't get an awful lot and it would be nice to treat them once in a while.

Well that's enough of my ranting :) (for now anyway :p).I kind of have a short term goal of £5000 (about $10,000). That would be enough to pay off my debts and take my children to Butlins.

So how do I plan on making £5000?

Well I am still continuing with bum marketing, as you can see in my last post I have my first squidoo lens up and running. I have wrote a few articles for ezine articles to promote the lens, but I'm still waiting for them to be approved. While I am waiting I am working on my first website flip. I will also be writing some articles to sell.

As of today I have made zero amount of money from the time I first started this blog, but it all takes time. I will keep working towards my goal, and see where I end up.

Until next time :)

My First Bum Marketing Lens :)

OK so it's not my very first lens, but it's my first one dedicated to bum marketing. You will find my lens here:

http://www.squidoo.com/kingdomofpets-sitstayfetch

I was going to do a squidoo lens and a blogger blog promoting the same product, but yes I've changed my mind again. I think it would be pretty pointless at this moment in time. I would just have twice as much promoting to do, and I am eager to just start promoting this lens.

To be honest I am not overly pleased with my lens, but I am happy I made a start, and it can always be improved upon as time goes on. I would love any feedback on it :).

My next step is to use all my keywords I looked up on my keyword dig tool and write some articles to send to article directories.

I have a couple of other things in the pipeline too :). I really really wanted to buy a domain for this blog and move it over to a self hosted wordpress site. But I didn't want to spend my last few pounds in my paypal account on this in case I could think of a better use for it.

I have previously bought a domain that I'm doing nothing with so I plan on building a website with that domain and selling it on sitepoint. It costs around $10 to list a site for sale in the turnkey section on sitepoint. So I figured if I use the money for this, and my site sells, I will have money for a domain name for this blog and maybe make some money back.

So fingers crossed and be sure you check back to see how I'm getting on with my article marketing campaign.

p.s I've just realised us Brits have to work twice as hard to make money online ;).

Keyword and Niche Research- Is it essential for a bum?

I havn't managed to get any squidoo lenses or blogger blogs up and running yet as I have had a busy couple of days looking after (omg) seven kids. No they're not all mine :), five of them were my sisters.

What I have managed to do is a little niche and keyword research. Is this essential ? Well yes I would say it is. I will explain a little more about this in a moment.

First I should tell you I have decided that I am not going to do three niches in one go, instead I am going to do one niche a week for the forseeable future. However I am still going to do one blogger blog and one squidoo lens for each niche, to test which one converts better.

Anyway back to keyword and niche research. For the first part of my research I went to clickbank to check out their marketplace. I had a thorough dig around all the products and chose one that I would like to promote.

I chose a product in the dog training niche. I know dog training is a popular niche and it may well be over saturated, but as I have a dog myself, and I know how hard it can be to train them I wanted to give this niche a go.

To do my keyword research for the dog training niche a downloaded a free tool called keyword dig. It is a completely free download and if you want you can download it from here.

I open keyword dig and type in my main keyword which is "dog training". Then I click on "gather keywords". Keyword dig then brings up a load of keywords that are related to dog training. Next to the keywords it also shows how many times that each particular keyword was searched for on the search engines.





I don't know how much you can make out from that picture, but you get the general idea right?

Next I click on "Gather Data" and then this tool will show you how many competing websites there are for this particular keyword.

To make good use of my keywords I want to find ones that have a high number of people serching for them, and a low number of competing sites. Keyword dig shows daily figures. So I am going to take note of all the keywords that have no less than 33 daily searches and no more than 50,000 comptitors. For some people these figures can vary they may want keywords with less competitors for example. But this is what I am going to stick with.

I will use these keywords to write articles to promote my my lens and blog.

So that's niche and keyword research summed up for you. My next step is to build my squidoo lens and my blogger blog promoting the dog training product. I will post a link to both when I am finished so you can see exactly how I have set them up.

This has been a rather long post so I'm gonna leave it there, but if you have any questions or have anything to add to this please feel free to comment.