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...