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...