Last Post?

Well unless I change my mind this may very well be my last post here. I have decided that I can make better use of my time improving the personalized books website, and blogging to the MadLuck Books Children's Literature Blog.

Staying focused while working from home

Lately I have been finding it more and more difficult to stay focused on well, work, while working at home. Maybe it started over the summer when the kids and my wife were home everyday. I would go (sometimes) into my basement office and do a little work and than come up and eat breakfast or lunch, than maybe take the kids to the pool if they felt like it or find some other excuse not to get back to work. We also spent several weeks on vacation, etc. etc. So when the kids and my school teacher wife went back to school I suddenly have this full day ahead of me to fill up with work stuff. And I have plenty of work I need to/should be doing - blog posts, improve the product listings on the website, write articles for distribution, the list goes on. And besides this obvious business related work, I had also hoped to have time to write fiction now that I don't have the big commute to go on. I have hardly even put pen to paper for journal entries. I could come up with excuses - I have physical therapy twice a week for my banged up knee (not to mention the twice daily home exercises), I have to help get the kids off to school and be here when they get off the bus, the dog needs walking, blah, blah blah.

So what is the solution? For the fiction writing I am going to give/force myself to sit down and write every morning - I have been doing that (for three days now) at least for journal entries (I use the journal as a way to warm myself up for "real" writing.) For work - well I believe it is time to bring out the time tested method of the to do list. Back at my day job I could not function with out a list. I would write it usually at the end of the day so I would know immediately what I needed/wanted to accomplish the when I came in to work the next day. I have for the most part avoided lists since I have been working at home, but maybe it is time to bring them back. I will give it a try - if anyone else has any good ideas let me know...

What's up with Google Part 2

Well the friendly folks at the Cre8asite Forums helped me discover What was up with google and my site rankings for certain keywords. It turns out that google has different datacenters or servers to help balance the load of the millions of searches it gets everyday. So when you do a search on Google, the datacenter that is the least busy is the one that your search request is passed on to. The variability I was seeing was across the different datacenters, not a variability over time. Does this make me feel better about my rankings? I guess so - at least on a few datacenters I still have my top twenty ranking for personalized story books. One of the members of Cre8asite, softplus, has come up with some search engine tools that allow you to test some of this variability across Google datacenters.

Back to the commute!!??

Well kind of. When I left my old job with the Fairfax County Health Department, I told them I would be willing to help out up to one day a week with installation of all this new air monitoring and meteorological equipment I had left them with. So after scrambling around to find a part time position that they could hire me back with (they can't pay me as a contractor like the feds) , they finally came up with something so they could pay me the 30 bucks an hour I wanted (or almost...) So this Friday, and than the following few Mondays I'll be back at the grind. I just can't wait to get back in that commute, NOT!

Blogs and the Cre8asite Forums

I have added a list of links to the blogs and forums that I generally waste my working day visiting. Most of the blogs I discussed earlier, and I talked about forums here. I have been spending quite a bit of time at the Cre8asite Forums, reading the posts trying to figure out this SEO stuff and how to better design the ol personalized books site for my few and far between visitors. I am learning a lot and have even felt comfortable enough to post a few reply's myself. They are very gentle to newbies such as myself. I am still trying to get up the nerve to submit my site to their Website Hospital...

Used Books Sales

I spent the last two Fridays looking through thousands of used books at two local library sales. These were BIG sales that I found about on booksalefinder.com. BIG is how booksalefinder described them - which means I think that they paid for a big advertisement listing on the site. They were also big in quantities of books. They were also my first experience with "professional" used book sellers. You can tell who are the professionals - for one thing they usually have two or three people with them. Then they gather up stacks of books and hoard them in a corner, where one of their team members checks the ISBN number on their cell phone or palmtop which is hooked up to a service that checks their current value on Amazon.com. Some even had little scanner thingys that they could scan the ISBN numbers in to check the value. And then there was me, by myself and with no fancy electronic gizmo's. I did okay. When I stuck to the older books - the ones with no ISBN listed I generally came up with something of value. I believe that the pro's skipped these books because they are too difficult to look up with their book checker thingy's. I had first heard about these services on Steve Webbers Book Selling blog - they are expensive ($40 bucks a month - far too much for me at this point.)

I did "screw up" on one purchase. The second sale I went to had a "treasures" room filled with books they thought were worth more than the set 2 bucks for hardbacks. The book I bought was called "What a Young Girl Ought to Know", originally written in 1897, my copy was published in 1928, and it is about sex of course. Though it spends chapters leading up to it and literally discussing the birds and the bees, the flowers and the trees. It is an interesting read, and though I won't be able to make back the $15.00 I paid for it - I think it was worth the price... (I can always give it to my daughters ).

Anyway, I am up to about 150 books for sale on Amazon. Now I just have to get them organized...

What's up with Google?

I was going to call this post "Google hates me," because my top twenty google ranking for the keyword "personalized story books" had disapeared. My top twenty google ranking lasted all of two days (if that). My rankings for all my keywords bounced around for a couple days and then settled squarely back to where they've been for the last few months (that is nonexistant for the other major keywords and in the 60's for personalized story books). But then I checked in the middle of writing this post and they were back up again and better than before - Number 15 for personalized story books...

Now I'm wondering what's up with Google? Is this normal behavior or are they rolling out some weird new algorytm to rank sites?

Banner day on madluckbooks.com

Yesterday was a banner day on the web site- with 29 unique visitor banging around looking at the personalized books. I even got a record 9 visitors at the children's books blog (they came over from the main site looking to pre-read the personalized books). Unfortunately it did not translate to any visitors here (I guess because I don't have any real links from those sites to this one.) Why did I have such a banner day? The fund raiser! The director of the league sent out a mass email (which I wrote) to everyone in his database. So about 25 of them clicked on the direct link in the email and there you go. Only one person bought so far (two books), but I am confident we will get more sales (that cheery optimism again)!

Blogger in Beta Strikes again

I keep running into more and more reasons why it would have been a better idea to hold off on switching to blogger in beta. I mainly made the switch so that I could label my posts and use that as a way to organize and manage them. It is a nice feature that just about all blogs (except old blogger blogs) have. But then there are the problems... First, once you update your template to a blogger in beta template (such as this one) you are no longer able to edit the html directly. Blogger says that it will change this soon, but what is soon - next month? Next year? Next decade? Then today I tried to post a comment to another blogger blog (Create Book) but was unable to because I was blogger in beta, and they were old blogger. Again the error message said that this would soon change, but I am not holding my breath. At least I had the sence to keep the old blogger blog template for my Children's books blog, to get around some of these problems (I can still edit the html directly, which is critical to the layout of that blog.)

The problem of course is that blogger is attempting to idiot proof the whole blogging process, and the more you simplify things, the more functionality that's lost.

Search Engine Rankings Again

I know I just gave my SE rankings on my primary key words just a few days ago - but because I am obsessed with improving my rankings (particularly with Google) I look at them every day. And Google has finally ranked me for my main keywords. In fact I got a

TOP TWENTY RANKING

for "personalized story books"

So here are my new and greatly improved search engine rankings for www.madluckbooks.com:

For Google:
personalized books - #69
personalized children's books - #119
personalized childrens books - #75
personalized story books - #17 ***YIPPEE!!!

For Yahoo:
personalized books - #26 -Top thirty on my primary keyword!
personalized children's books - #47
personalized childrens books - #44
personalized story books - #29

So we shall see how these new and improved rankings pan out for my home business. If nothing else I expect to see a rise in visitors (which should translate to sales...)

Fund Raising Blues

I spent much of last week printing out and folding brochures for the Soccer fundraiser. Also on the agenda - making sample books and preparing for the coaches meeting. The coaches meeting was last Wednesday, and everything went pretty smooth - I was able to "get rid of" about half my brochures. Whether the coaches will actually hand them out is anyones guess. Notice I said printing out brochures. I decided not to get them "professionally" printed - color copies or prints was going to run me something like six hundred dollars. Instead I went with black and white prints on brilliant yellow and green paper, using my black and white laser printer. Total estimated cost between paper, toner, head wear, etc. is about sixty dollars. So I save about $540 bucks. I suspect that if I had gone with the color prints I would have lost money on the deal. Now I am hopeful that I might earn a little. Hopeful - but not convinced. But hey I'm getting my name out there in the community and that has to be worth something? Right? Right?

I don't know - it depends on my mood, how confident I feel. Right now it's a lousy rainy day, and I keep spinning wheels and waisting time on things I want to do...

August 2006 stats

Here are the stats for August: (Just updated this 9/1, since I forgot that August has 31 days...)

Visitor tracking:

MadLuck Books Personalized Books: 389 page loads, 284 unique visitors, 10 returning visitors

MadLuck Books blog: 71 page loads, 63 unique visitors, 1 returning visitor

Home Business Blues blog: 44 page loads, 40 unique visitors, 0 returning visitors

Admittedly the MadLuck Books Blog, and Home Biz Blues Blog stats are tainted by the one day in August when I updated to Blogger in Beta (see Blogger Update), and through some glitch, blogger began sending everyone who clicked on the next random blog button to my sites, and I got about 15 hits each in less than a minute (they didn't stay long...)

Sales:
Personalized Books: 2 (Yay! More than one!)
Amazon Marketplace Used Books: 5

Gross Income: $120.50

The Good News: (I can't help it, it's just my cheery outlook on life to find the silver lining...) Page loads, and unique visitors are up for all three sites. Returning visitors are way up for MadLuck Books Personalized Books. We doubled the number of personalized books sold last month (1 time 2 equals 2). and more than doubled the number of used books sold (pretty good since the used books were shut down for almost half of August...) And income is up by 50%! What's not to be happy about. I can almost tell my wife she can quit her public school teaching job.

Blogger Update - No stats

When I switched over to blogger in beta so I could get the groovy labels for my post, I forgot one thing - to add in the html code for my stat counter (see Tracking Visitors for more information.) This means that I could have had hundreds, thousands, no millions of visitors to this blog since August 21, and wouldn't know about it. Oh well, I realized I wasn't tracking visitors because someone who stumbled upon this site clicked through to the personalized books site, where I was tracking...I've added the code back in using the funky blog layout thingybobber they provided with the update, since with their attempt to make blogger idiot proof, I can know longer edit the template html directly...

Now that that is solved I need to get back to printing out brochures for the fund raiser.

Search Engine Rankings

Of course the only way to get traffic to your site (besides paying for expensive click through advertising) is to get the search engines to rank your site high in their listings. A top ten ranking is the best, but a top twenty on Google or Yahoo will get you some traffic. One of my goals, hopes, aspirations, was to get a top twenty ranking in Google and Yahoo before the busy Holiday shopping season. So now it is about a year since I started www.madluckbooks.com and maybe a month from the busy season - where do I rank??? A few sites around the web make it easy to find out: yahoosearchrankings.com, nichebot.com, and googlerankings.com.

First you need to know what keywords you want to rank for, and nichebot.com can help you there as well. For Personalized Books by MadLuck Books, the key words I am most interested in are personalized books, personalized children's books, personalized childrens books (yes there is a difference), and personalized story books (how's that for gratuitous linking.) And the rankings (Drumroll please...)

For Google:
personalized books - Not Ranked
personalized children's books - Not Ranked
personalized childrens books - Not Ranked
personalized story books - #41 (that's better...)

For Yahoo:
personalized books - #44
personalized children's books - #84
personalized childrens books - #46
personalized story books - #29 (Almost a top twenty!)

So there we are, not quite where I want to be. But the good news is... Actually I am pleased with these results because they are all (well except for the non rankings on Google), improvements from where I was a month ago, again I am moving in the right direction. And though I would like to see better ranking from Google (any rankings for those top three keywords would be nice) - I do show up in the top twenty for some weird keyword combinations like: nursury books, and personalized story of a lifetime. And the MadLuck Books Blog is sixth on the list for Google for Newberry Winners.

Blogger Update

So I have updated my template so I can take advantage of the new features that blogger has added - mainly the ability to label my posts and sort by them. I've noticed this feature on other blogs (Work At Home Biz Ops,) I visit, (and was always envious of them. Besides I like the professional look of this new template. Makes it look like I got something important to say...

Soccer Fundraiser

I heard from the director of the Warrenton Youth Soccer Club, and my fundraiser idea has been given the green light from the recreation committee. Which means I need to get about a thousand brochures printed up pretty fast. Decisions, decisions - should I print them out myself using thetrusty inkjet printer and laser printer, or should I go get them professionally printed? Even scarier than that decision, is that Raul (the illustrious director) asked if I wanted to talk about the books in front of the coaches meeting. What? Talk in front of a group? I thought I gave up all such concerns when I quit the day job. I could always call in sick...

Other stuff - added a link in the sidebar here to my Used and Collectible Books for sale on Amazon.com. Check them out!

July 2006 stats

I'll make this a monthly update, visitor stats, sales, etc. from my "many' ventures (see Tracking Visitors for more info)...


MadLuck Books Personalized books - 281 page loads, 208 unique visitors, 4 returning visitors.

MadLuck Books Blog - 41 page loads, 22 unique visitors, 1 returning visitor.

Home Business Blues Blog - 8 page loads, 7 unique visitors, 0 returning visitors.

Sales: 1 (one, uno, eins, un) personalized book.
2 Amazon Marketplace used books.

Gross income: ~ $80.00

Good news (yes there is good news...): page loads, and unique visitors are up for the third month in a row for both the madluckbooks.com and the MadLuck Books Blog site. August is on track to continue this trend, and even this blog (homebizblues.blogspot.com) has seen a sharp increase in visitors (easy to increase from 1 every 4 days...) So the trends are good...

On Vacation

So I have been on vacation since July 29th, over a week now - what does that mean for a one-person home-based internet business? First I had to shut down my used books listings on Amazon.com. They require a two day turnaround on shipping books, and I couldn't carry my inventory with me. I just left the personalized books site up and running, I've only been averaging one sell a month anyway. Of course, after five days of vacation I finally found a wireless connection strong enough to connect to (I parked outside a big Hotel on the beach road, never fails), and found I had two orders for three books. So I had to crank out a couple of emails explaining that since we were short-handed due to summer vacations their orders would not be processed until August 12th. (Create-A-Book does have a drop ship program where you can get another dealer to process your orders for you, but I don't think that is necessary at this time - a two week turnaround isn't too bad.)

I also heard from the director of the soccer league that I am hoping to do a fund raiser with, and he let me know the Recreation Committee would decide on the fund raiser at a meeting today.

So business goes on, more or less, as I soak up the sun and laze in the ocean...

Google Base

I started posting items to Google Base when Google moved Froogle posting to Google Base. I had listed all my personalized books on Froogle through the Froogle Merchant pages, and than discovered Google Base when forced to check it out to keep my products posted. So what is Google Base? I am still not sure to be honest, and I think Google is still working that out themselves (it is still in beta testing). Google's answer to "What is Google Base?" is this "Google Base is a place where you can post all types of content and have it show up on Google." OK, good enough, though that is still kind of vague. One thing it does allow for self promotion of web sites and blogs. And you can post things on it even if you don't have a web page or blog (it seems to be getting more blog like as they go along tweaking it.)

So what have I posted there? My products of course, so they will continue to show up on Froogle. Lately I have been posting "Reference Articles" from my MadLuck Books Blog.
These are Product Spotlights, Lists of award winning children's books, and anything else I can think of to promote the website. Where do these items show up? I am not really sure at this point, but I have faith that it is doing some good (I know the Google Bot is crawling from them, so that is something in itself.) The plan I know is for them to show up in regular google searches, but than the question is how will Google rank them? Oh well, one more Google mystery to deal with...

The Home Office

A post from Chuck Huckaby at the work-at-home-business-opportunities blog made me start thinking about my own home office. My office is in one of the two "finished" rooms in our below grade basement. Prior to its transformation into my work space the room was the typical catch all storage room. So I cleared out all the junk (bought some new shelving for the greater basement to hold what I didn't want to throw out), scraped off the strip of hippopotamus wall paper (in a former life with previous owners it was a child's bedroom - for some reason we always called the room the rhino room, even though the deco was obvious hippo's), and threw on a coat of paint. The previous owners had taken the carpet with them, leaving us with the bare concrete floor. After shopping around for rugs, carpeting, remnant carpets, I decided I could get by with two old rugs (one oval and one rectangular) that combined covered maybe 80% of the floor. We had an old computer desk that worked fine for my laptop and small laser printer. The larger combo inkjet printer/scanner was relegated to a 70's era sofa end table that was a hand me down from my mother-in-law. We had some old unused dining room chairs, so I claimed one of these for my desk chair. After sitting on the wooden chair for more that a couple of hours my butt starts hurting so I added an old sofa throw pillow for cushioning. I did buy two portable folding table and a storage shelf to hold my book making supplies and inventory.

Total cost in setting up office? Maybe $200.00 (not including computer equipment.) Though I may have to look around for a used office chair to replace that old dining room chair with the green sofa pillow...

Tracking Visitors

I use StatCounter to track visitors to my various web enterprises (including this blog). I chose them because they offered a free INVISIBLE web counter (don't need anyone else seeing my statistics). The statistics they offer are things like visitor paths, visit length, returning visits, came from, etc. I like looking at the visitor paths because it shows me where my visitors came from and where they went on my website. Of course most of my visitors are search engine robots and spammers looking for email addresses. The negative with StatCounter is they only keep a visitor log of 100, (unless you want to shell out some money...). Anyway so here's the stats for June 2006:

MadLuck Books Personalized books - 219 page loads, 173 unique visitors, 171 first time visitors, 2 returning visitors.

MadLuck Books Blog - 15 page loads, 13 unique visitors, 13 first time visitors, 0 returning visitors

Home Business Blues Blog - 12 page loads, 11 unique visitors, 11 first time visitors, 0 returning visitors.

Pretty impressive, I know - especially those stats for the blogs... And sales for June?:
One (count them One, 1, uno, eins) personalized book
Plus
One used book sold on Amazon.com.

So things are coming along great...

Raising Funds

As the days and weeks go by without an order (though I did sell two used books on Amazon.com recently), I am beginning to reevaluate this whole Personalized Book business. I knew things would be slow this time of year, and there is a lot of competition on the web, but this is getting rediculous. So if I can't make money through the web site, I'll have to make money the old fashion way, that is sell locally, and use my local contacts.

I called this post Raising Funds, but that is really a play on what I am really talking about - FundRaising. I've been putting together order forms and brochures, looking to offer my fundraising plans to the Elementary school where my kids go (and my wife teaches) and the soccer club where my kids play (and my wife and I both coach.) I feel weird mixing my business with this other side of me - My Family life, but as I said I am getting a bit desparate. I sent an email over to the director of the club yesterday, still got a bit of work to do before I contact the school (or rather the school parent organization that handles fundraising.) No word yet from Director Raul (he is from Spain so perhaps he is still mourning Spain's exit from the World Cup).

World Cup Fever

Okay, I admit it. I have taken time off from working to watch some of the World Cup Games. Not all of them mind you, just a few minutes here and there. Or maybe a few halves here and there...

But that is the advantage, right, of owning your own business and working from home-you can take of whenever you please and set your own hours. It is also the danger of course, so many distractions so close at hand, easy to get off track and not get anything done. Summertime now and the kids are off from school. My youngest daughter usually makes an appearance in my office arround 7:30 or 8:00, with something to show me, or to hint that she wants something for breakfast that she can't make herself and doesn't want to wait for mom to get up (my wife is a school teacher, so she is also off from school/work, and relishes the opportunity to sleep in). Hot afternoons, I want to take off and go to the pool with them. We've promised them day trips to the zoo, the museums, hiking to the waterfalls, Kings Dominion theme park. So what does all this rambling mean? Just that I can not really afford to watch any of the World Cup games- I do have a lot of...stuff (crap, work?) that I need to get done. But... but Brazil plays Ghana this morning, and so it goes.

I did add the Soccer Personalized Book to the highlited books on my homepage in the spirit of the World Cup...

Webmaster Forums

I have been lurking around a couple of webmaster forums, for the last several months, trying to garner any information that will help me get the web sales moving. (My last order was on May 29th, and that was from a woman who works with my wife so doesn't really count...)

Best Practices Search Engine Forums focuses of course on Search Engine Optimization and has sections on specific search engines: google, yahoo, msn, etc. and directories: yahoo directory, dmoz, joeant, goguides, etc. etc. To be honest I have hardly glanced at most of the forums, focusing instead on the Google and yahoo sections. But there is a lot of good info there and seems to be well moderated.

Cre8asite Forums focus is more on overall website design with of course SEO thrown in. One of the most interesting forums they offer is the Website Hospital, where you can submit your website for review and have the forum members critique it. I am trying to get the courage up to submit the ol' Personalized Books website to it. (I do not take criticism well...)

Business Blogging

Besides trying to blog regularly (stress trying) on this blog, I also post a couple times a week to MadLuck Books blog. The MadLuck Books Blog is the official (as opposed to this blog which is more or less just for fun) blog of madluckbooks.com, my personalized books ecommerce website. I have been having a terrible time trying to figure out what to post on the MadLuck Books Blog. For a while, I thought of posting weekly "blog specials". Putting four or five books on sale and listing them on a post each week. But that meant having to change prices around all the time on the website, updating my Froogle listing, etc., etc.. And than the posts are still there once the week is up and the prices change again. Do I edit them? Do I delete them? I even had trouble deciding on a template, and have changed it several times in the last few weeks (which means redoing all the customization of the template). What is the point here besides whining about my indecision and all the extra work it causes me? The point is that I have figured it out (I think...)

So the new and improved MadLuck Books Blog will showcase all the stuff that I don't have room to put on the website because of the stupid hosting plan I am under (that is another ten blogs in itself). I already have three parenting artcles blogs posted and today I posted my first Product Spotlight - the Mother Goose Personalized Book is in the spotlight. Of course putting all this "quality content" (look at me throwing out the SEO terms) on blogspot.com is optimizing blogspot.com as opposed to madluckbooks.com as the SEO experts would say, but what can I do? I say I am optimizing for my human visitors, not those nasty little search engine bots.

Selling Used Books on amazon.com

Before I came up with the great idea of selling personalized children's books, I tried selling used books on amazon.com. I even bought ten or twenty first edition novels from a local library (they only cost about a dollar a book) to list on Amazon. When I went to list the books however, I found that most of them were already being sold for as low as a penny a book. I couldn't make any money that way so I gave up on the idea.

Well a couple of weeks ago I stumbled on Steve Weber's Blog - Selling Books. Apparently he has been able to make a decent income doing just that - selling used books on Amazon. Needless to say my interest was renewed. Weber published a How to Guide - The Home Based Bookstore, which I haven't purchased but I did read enough of the sample pages to find out what I had done wrong in my first attempt to sell used books. I tried selling fiction, novels, when I should have been selling Non-Fiction. Apparently, Publishers tend to over print fiction titles and there are always tons of extra copies around. Non-fiction titles are published in smaller batches, go out of print quicker, and are therefore more valuable from a used book point of view.

So I went to my local library sale, Friday, (which had halved the prices on all their books because they are getting ready to shut down for renovations). and bought seventeen hardback non-fiction titles for a total of $10.00. I have them listed on Amazon now, along with a few other books I had lying around the house. I did pretty good picking books - of those seventeen books which cost me $10.00, I'm listing one for $45.00, two others for $35.00 and $25.00 and most of the rest for between 5 and 10 dollars. Now I can actually make some money that way...

Offline Marketing Part 2

So that was not too bad. I did have to shower and shave and get out of the sweats, put on the khakis and the collared shirt - something I haven't had to do since I quit the day job back in April. I ended up taking my books, all ready with with their envelope pockets stuffed with order forms, to five doctor's offices (actually one was a dentist and the other an orthodontist). Everyone smiled and agreed to take them (or at least show them to the doctor's for their approval). No hard sales needed (I was giving the books away afterall, and everybody loves a freebie...)

Afterwards I got my hair shaved off and was able to post a business card on the board at the barbers (Offline Marketing Part 3?) .

Back home in time to catch the last ten minutes of the Costa Rica/Germany World Cup Match (after changing thankfully into shorts and a t-shirt.)

Offline Marketing? Part 1

That's what I am getting ready to do - Offline Marketing. Otherwise known as wandering around town sticking personalized books in doctor's offices, (and dentists, autorepair joints, etc., etc.) If they will let me, with the big order forms in the back... (I know, that's not really a sentence there.) I am not really looking forward to it - too much like a traveling salesman gig or something. So why am I doing it? Necessity, the mother of invention. I have sold all of two, count them two, books from the internet site in the last month or so. Not really going to pay the bills that way. So I will go out and Slay the Dragon, fight the good fight, and hopefully sale some books... Offline Marketing Part 2 will follow upon my return.

Google top ten listing

Well we reached a milestone with the personalized books website - a top ten listing on Google. I was checking my visitor stats on statcounter.com (I only get three or four visitors a day and half of them are search engine bots) when I noticed a visitor had come to the site by way of a search on Personalized Story of a lifetime. So I clicked on it and there we were, madluckbooks.com listed number five on Google's results. And I thought all this time that Google hated me for some reason... Of course a search on nichebot came up with something like only two searches a year on Personalized Story of a Lifetime, so I don't expect to see much traffice from it. But hey, at this point I will take whatever I can get. Now if I could just get them to list me for personalized books, or personalized story books, or personalized children's books...(Think I can add in anymore gratuitous links?)

ABC of SEO

Ok, so the only way I am going to make any money selling personalized children's books on the web is to get the big search engines to realize that my website exists. And the more I mess around on forums for webmasters, the more I began to get a feel for this thing call Search Engine Optimization or SEO. So I stumbled on this book The ABC of SEO quite by accident. I clicked on an advertisement on another Blog (not sure which one now, but it does go to show that some ads do get clicked on), which took me to a page by some guy who wrote a book about how humans are consious robots controlled by our genes. I didn't buy his book (so maybe advertising doesn't pay after all), but his website did take me to Lulu, the website where David George published his book the ABC of SEO. Anyway, long story short, I purchased the book (admittedly as much to check out the quality of lulu.com publishing as to get help understanding SEO.) But it's a good read- I was able to read it in bed for an hour last night without falling asleep, which is saying a lot. And I was pleased with the publication quality from Lulu...

Home Business Blogs

So I have been browsing blogs to see if any offer some good information for us newbie home businesspreneurs. There seem to be a lot that are gateways to every internet home business scam out there. But I did find a few that I want to keep an eye on.

Work From Home Mamma has some good advise that I could relate to even though I am a WorkFromHomePapa.

Chuck Huckaby from Work At Home Business Oportunities seems to spend his days surfing the web looking for what else - Work At Home Business Oppurtunities. Most of what he finds appears more or less legit - I don't think he makes any promises.

And finally, Des Walsh's Thinking Home Business is at least a very well organized site with an index and keyworded posts. I probably need to spend more time there to figure out all that it has to offer. Maybe it was that "Thinking" part I didn't like.

Of course no one had anything to say about the wonderful world of personalized story books.

Timeline Part 1 - Before The Beginning

I want this blog to be a journal of my complete journey in setting up my home business , but since I started MadLuck Books Personalized Books back in September of 2005, this post will be a timeline of everything I've done up to June 2005. Well probably not everything. (I know I got link happy back there but I just discovered the little link button on the toolbar - so much easier than going in and editing the HTML.) Next Post will be the timeline from June 2005 to the present.

Summer 1996 - I quit my job to stay home with my first born child, Maddie, while my wife goes back to work as a teacher. I am supposed to be finishing my Master's Degree in Environmental Science and Engineering (I had completed the course work and "just" needed to finish up the Thesis.) Instead I spend most of my free time (you know, when I am not changing diaper, feeding, reading to, playing with the rug rat) doing one of two things - 1) Writing fiction and dreaming of publishing that bestseller novel. 2) Thinking about starting a home based business (hey, I liked this staying at home thing, what can I say.)

Spring 1998 - Second daughter, Lucia is born. I go back to work, my wife stays home with the kids. I get a job that pays me for 40 hours a week but only takes about 5 hours of my time. I just about finish the Thesis during the "free" time.

Fall 1999 - Real job as an Environmental Health Specialist, doing ambient air monitoring. Finish thesis and get M.S. in Environmental Science and Engineering from Virginia Tech.

1999-2005 - Work, work, work; commute, commute, commute. The commute is only 25 miles one way, but with traffic, the drive can take up to an hour and a half. I begin working earlier and earlier - 8:00 start, 7:00 start, finally 6:00 am start. I get up at 4:00 in the morning to get to work by 6:00. At 5:00 am the traffic is often bumper to bumper. They keep building more houses and the commute gets worse and worse. The job's ok, as far as jobs go, fairly low stress, boring at times, for a while there I actually found time to write fiction on my lunch break (the novel, no best seller, unpublishable at least for the moment.) They cut our work force from three to two which cuts out the time for writing. Blah, blah, blah.

June 2005 - See The Beginning


Next Post - Countdown to Quiting the Day Job (Timeline Part 2)

Families can be a pain in the ...

I had not planned on this being the next post on this blog. I expected to go into the promised timeline or maybe the expenses of setting up my business. But a single phone call can change everything...

If you haven't read The Beginning, or even if you have, you will not know that I started my business selling personalized books back in September of 2005. I finally quit my day job on April 25th. I sent an email out to my extended family (brother, two sisters, dad) this past Friday to tell them I had quit my job. My brother should have known - I told him six months ago that I planned to quit in April. My one sister knew it was coming soon, my other sister in Texas had no idea. My dad...Now that is the difficult one. I had not told my dad either that I was starting up this business or that I planned on quitting my job.

Why not? That is a tough question, and the answer has a lot to do with father/son relationships in general, and specifically the relationship between me and my father. First of all neither me, nor my father are particularly communicative. It was actually my wife who told my one sister about the business, not me. And after the phone call I spoke of above (which came from my brother, not Dad) I raged to my wife that if my father dared (he wouldn't) ask why I hadn't told him, that I would say, "If you had once asked how my job was going in the last three or four months I would have told you about the business. But you didn't so I figured you didn't give a damn." Something like that. But of course that is not all there is to it.


Some info on my father is needed here. Dad grew up a poor Wisconsin farm boy during the depression. He worked his way through college (probably the first in his family to go to college) earning a degree in Electrical Engineering. He spent time in the AirForce, met and married my mom, and ended up settling in Mom's hometown in Virginia. Worked fulltime, earned a Master's Degree in Engineering, helped raised four kids (all four of whom went to college, three of the four, including me, getting Master's degrees themselves.) (My mother was the typical Super Mom of her generation, by the way - worked full time plus single handedly handled every household chore and child rearing duty.) Then Dad decided to start his own business. And of course succeeded readily. Dad's owns a small engineering firm, with million dollar contracts, and twenty or thirty employees. A far cry, he must think, from my sad little personalized books business.

I am forty-one years old. I should not need the approval of my father anymore about the decisions I make in my life. But that, I believe gets back to the nature of father/son relationships. I didn't tell my father about starting the business because I did not think he would approve. Of course, I knew he would have to find out sooner or later. We live only thirty-five miles apart, we see each other regularly. He comes up for the kids (his grandchildren's) birthday parties where my wife's family (all whom of course have known for ages about my business) attend. So I sent the email Friday, before telling him became too awkward.

And than the phone call yesterday. The call came from my brother. My wife answered because I was out happily walking the dog. So I didn't get to/have to talk to him. So Dad had called Steve (my brother) and got him all worried about this horrible thing I was doing with my life. And Steve called me. What are they worried about? I take it they think I am going to drive my family into deep debt by trying this stupid business venture out. I must be wasting my time and money on a foolish internet scheme. I am obviously too stupid to realize what a silly thing I am doing.

I love my wife. She has supported me, if not 100%, than at least 99.99%, through this whole process. As she talked to my brother she got angry, and she let him know her feelings. Her view, and she is probably right, is that they, my brother and Dad, believe that there is something demeaning in selling personalized books. That it is somehow beneath me, or beneath someone in their family. "Whatever," to quote my ten year old daughter.

Dad I understand. He has always been a self-absorbed elitist. I love my dad dearly, but I also see and accept his flaws (as I hope he sees and accepts my many flaws.) My brother, I am more surprized and disapointed in. He is the one who has studied Buddhist Philosophy, who spent two years in the peace corps in Africa, who has traveled throughout Africa, Asia, etc. I thought he would have accepted and appreciated someone who decides to try something different with their life. Who doesn't want to follow the same path as everyone around them. I guess I was wrong (he said dripping with self-pity.)

So I spent the rest of the day yesterday angry, sad, struggling with oncoming depression. It didn't go away until I coached my eight year old daughter's soccer team to a 7 to 2 victory. I love my family.

The Beginning

When is the beginning? Was it back in June 2005 when I first told my wife that I wanted to quit my job and set up a home based internet business? Or was it back in 1996, when I stayed home with our first born child, supposedly to finish my Master's Degree, but instead wrote fiction like a madman hoping to publish something, anything, that would lead to more publishing, mayby a novel, whatever so I would not have to go back to work. I also messed around with a book indexing correspondence course back then, but was too bored to complete it. Or was it even further back in time...

Ok, I'll start with June 2005. That is when I told my wife that I wanted to start a business. I even had the business picked out. I would sell personalized books over the internet.

Why personalized books? Several reasons really. First, I had been perusing a book on the best home based businesses (don't ask me what it was call - I have regularly checked out one book or another on starting a home based business for the last 10 years or more), when I saw a listing under the publishing section for Hefty Publishing, Create-A-Book Personalized books. I was interested in something in publishing, probably because of my so far failed attempts to get my own fiction published. And even though selling personalized children's books is not really publishing (though my eight year old daughter, who wants to be a writer herself, expects me to publish her first novel, The Magic School), it is at least related to the publishing field. Secondly, the start up costs didn't seem too high (I'll get into expenses in a later post), I could always sink some money in and than get out without losing my shirt if things didn't turn out ok. Thirdly... I don't know, maybe there isn't really a thirdly, and maybe, probably, I didn't really think it through that well.

So then, I had a plan (or well an idea), I had a business that would be easy to get started. What more did I need? A name, of course. And the winner, after very little competition was MadLuck Books.

"Why 'MadLuck' Books?" you say. I can answer that one by quoting directly from the FAQ section of my website- "MadLuck is a play on the first three letters of our two daughters’ names: Maddie and Lucia. But it also refers to the crazy luck you have when you discover a magical world in a great book that you open up for the first time, and the crazy luck which has allowed us to be able to start this business." I know what you are thinking, "How corny can you get?"

The truth is, MadLuck, or MadLuc, or Mad Luck were the names I had given all my imaginary ventures - you know MadLuck Farms, MadLuc Enterprises, Mad Luck Publishing. So now we would have MadLuck Books. And for the internet madluckbooks.com.

So that is where we will end for today. Coming soon - Spending Money, and A Countdown to Quiting the Day Job.