The Christmas break was a cracker for us this year. Caught up with the whole family, had great weather and made excellent progress with the renovation of our home.

I also made some discoveries and decisions about my home based business which I’ll pass on.

Focus On The Future
Firstly, I had my best weeks income over the break. It happened while I was away and not able to easily access the internet. I’ve got a habit of spending too much time checking visitors, sales and adsense stats. A new years resolution – be more disciplined and focus more on promotion (the future) and less on statistics (the past).

Keyword Density
Before I left for the holidays my search engine position for a major keyword dropped out of sight. Pity, since it was on the first page before the event.

I guessed the problem was keyword density, which had accidentally risen after recent changes. So I pulled down the density to about 3% and left for the break hoping I’d guessed right.

On return, the URL was back in the list and this time higher than before.

I resolved to double check that keyword densities are below 4% after each change – the anchor text on your links will lift the rankings.

Paid Surveys
I have some paid survey ads on the BestRealIncome site.

I have seen a lot of comment around the web about Paid Survey lists.

The detractors state that either the information is available for free, so being forced to pay for it is a rip-off or that the lists are a scam.

Very early on I paid for one of these lists. The website where the list was displayed was poorly designed. I applied to a few companies heard nothing and forget about them, then a few months down the track I was asked to participate in a few surveys.

I suspect that to be successful in the paid survey game you need to go after scale. Just like any other aspect of web life. You need to apply to absolutely every company and keep at it over a period of time. There are people who make good money at this stuff and they have worked hard over an extended period.

So the Paid surveys are the same as any number of network marketing companies on the web. Some are good some are not. You have to work hard to make good money.

I have decided to be a bit more selective with my home based business listings. Over the next week I’ll re-check check forums and scam sites to ensure my listings are of good quality. I do want to make sales, but equally want to ensure anything on my site provides good quality.

Article Directory

Our free article directory is going well. Have attracted over 1500 contributions in 6 weeks. So on track for about 13,000 articles by the end of the year. Traffic is slowly rising and a little bit of adsense revenue has been achieved. Focus now needs to go on site promotion.

Wordpress

Have been looking for a simple site CMS for most of last year. Have settled on Wordpress as the platform. I was able to fire up a simple work at home site, in record time. I’m excited about the possibilities. So easy to setup – lots of useful plug-ins and templates.

Will write more about this later.

Thats it for now, I wish you and your family all the very best for the New Year.

Regards
Brian