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...