“The RoseBouquet”

Where can you get ideas for web business-sites?

Easy. From your own experiences and passions. If you get a SiteBuildIt! web business, the very first phase you go through will be a guided brainstorming session to see what you have the most interest and experience in. If you already know a lot about a certain topic, you can share your information, and that will create a solid info site. We all know how people are turning to the internet to research whatever they want to know. When I wanted to know about recipes for cat food, I did a Google search and read up on various sites until I found what I wanted to know. Another example; on my new aloe-vera-and-handy-herbs.com site,I have already put a photo lesson on how to eat your aloe vera for your health.

If you know a lot about computers, find an angle there that you could share and teach on. If you know all about dealing with a child with autism, for instance, or are ready to research it in depth and share your findings, there is another topic for a site. Once you have prepared about 30-50 pages of information, you start adding links to related affiliate products, and AdSense ads. Presto, the commission checks are your new income stream!

Meet some other people who have followed their passion and turned it into a web business; Case Studies of Passion turned Business

I just came across some nifty advice for writing effectively on the internet. There are at least three kinds of readers you want to reach, by using this little rule you can reach all of them each time you write an article or a web page, or even your emails.

The man who was trying to describe this used the analogy of three train tracks, but I think a three-strand braid works better for me to visualize this truth. Let me use that imagery for when you braid together three strands of anything, whether it be yarn, ropes, (I’ve even made a cat leash with braided pantyhose) - or in this case, three writing styles, you always end up with something strong and useful.

Have you ever braided hair or anything else? You keep over-lapping the left and then the right strand over the center one. This constantly changes their position, so that each strand gets to be in all three positions in a rhythmic pattern. Neatness makes for a strong, attractive braid.

In our writing on the internet we want to reach two kinds of people. There’s the right-brained people who are creative and respond best to stories and illustrations to discover a point (they are often left-handed). Then there are the left-brained people who look for facts, and statistics, and they want proofs, and quotes from reliable sources to assure them that this fact is well-grounded.

The third reader category you need to please for your writing to catch some public attention, is the search engines’ robots. Okay, so that’s just software invented by smart left-brained people, but the robots are trained to count the number of times your keyword appears in your article or web page. Each robot is tuned to watch for a certain ratio or percentage of occurrence. If your keyword shows up often enough, the search engine serves up your URL more readily to people who are doing a search for that keyword. If your meta tags contain a keyword that doesn’t even show up on your page, they will click away without a backward glance. They have no sympathy.

When you do any of your net-writing try to include some picture language and illustrative stories to make your point, but be sure to include some factual evidence too. (Here’s my weak spot). At the same time, braid in the use of your keyword or phrase into every paragraph, or where ever possible.

In the end you will see positive feedback and the search engines will deliver more and more readers to you! Just what you wanted!

Yes, by 4:30 pm last Tuesday, my new water heater was in place, and I was presented with the bill. Whew! I had just a few weeks earlier, received the last installment of my inheritance (the portion divided five ways after the governments and all the professionals had their last piece of Dad). I’d put it away in a savings account for emergencies. Well this emergency took it all, plus what was in my checking account. Except for $4.17. Another miracle to praise God for!

Yesterday I heard from the inspector about my RRAP reno projects. It appears I may have to give up on the windows, but he thinks all the rest can be done for me. I should be hearing from him again soon. I’m pleased that things are moving along so quickly now.

Sunday was a special day for me. June 1 last year, I got possession of my house here. I became a real home owner for the first time! One realtor has suggested that after a year I should serve cinnamons and they’d come to see how much I had changed or improved this place. Well, he and his wife were taking a cruise this weekend, but I called the man who sold me this house and invited him and his wife to come see the changes. They didn’t come, but I had also invited some friends and they did drop by on Sunday afternoon. It was a very pleasant time for me.

A couple of weeks ago I had a small Saturday yard sale and through that met a neighbour up the street. Bev wanted to learn how to make cinnamon buns, so when she heard me mention this plan for a wee celebration she asked if I’d teach her. So Saturday I invited her to come over and help me make these buns. The batch of dough turned out bigger than I’d thought, so I let her take one pan full home to bake at her house. Bev is definitely a new friend in my Bouquet of Roses/friends!

This is a fairly small house and my living room consists mostly of a circle of three or 4 comfortable chairs. However, it worked out just fine, because the friends that came and went were always just enough for the number of sit-upons I could rustle up. I’d spread out the food buffet style on the small table for two, and my friend Anna saw to it that the platters got passed around often enough.

We also made several visits out to the backyard to see my garden, most of which seems to have popped up out of the earth in just the last week. This kind of socializing strikes me as great fun. I enjoyed all my guests heartily!

More struggling to get in as much as possible on all fronts and ventures. The extra mornings spent at the office means I’m making progress in preparing the donated computers, some to be used in my office and some I will turn into sets to give away or sell at give-away prices.

I’ve started renovating my novel’s site, Ruthes-SecretRoses.com from the beginning again, as I had discovered new improvements to make before I finished the previous go-round, and now I want to make sure all the pages have the same advantages. Hopefully this go-through will not take as long.

I seem to be reading and thinking more again about marketing my novel. Oh how good it would be to have some interns or virtual assistants to help me with this. There’s even new books out that explain how to use Amazon and social networking sites in self-marketing one’s book.

I need to sit down for a good planning session to work out how to go about that, but for now I’m just letting ideas percolate in the back of my mind so I can get a clear sense of the efforts that will be required. The ideas may have to wait until I have recruited students to take my four month course, starting in September. Then when I am multiplying myself through others, it will be easier to take such book promo steps.

As I’ve said before, I often have more ideas than I can shake a promising finger at and say, “I’ll get to you yet!”

What do you do when ideas just rain on you?

As you’ll see in a minute in my article below, I’m sharing one idea with you, that could become a solo web business for you, doing something you already love to do - read. What’s more - this is the kind of thing I plan to train my students/interns in my Azaleas Virtual Assistants course. Yep, how to start and run a solo web business just like that idea.

______________________________________________
The RoseBouquet is a weekly blog. (You’ll need to register as a user to make comments at the blog. Registering helps me screen out riff-raff who fill the comments section with garbage).

You can also get The RoseBouquet as an RSS feed in your news Reader. Just paste in this link; Ruthes-secretroses.com/RoseBouquet.xml

Or subscribe to it as an ezine.
_______________________________________________

Peter Bowerman stumbled into business writing, and discovered that he could live quite well off his services to businesses, which need someone to write their brochures, sales letters, web content, advertising and so forth. He has written some books, and set up a web site to show that anyone who can do the work, should be able to make a very decent living at writing. He recommends that you don’t charge less than $50/hour for your services. Those that take his advice are finding it true. They can get clients with his suggestions, and before long are able to work just where and when they want to work.

You really don’t have to be a starving writing! Question is, can you do the work?

The Well-Fed Writer

Here’s an idea for a web business you could run from home; read books, write reviews and put them on a web site.

Do you like to read books? Are you able to articulate your reaction to each book, and indicate what it is about? (If we are talking fiction, we need to add that the review must not give away the surprise ending).

If you have written a book of your own, you will already know that one of the best ways to boost sales is to get good reviews of your book. However, I was reading yesterday that the big name reviewers cannot keep up with the desperate need for reviews, AND that those who keep their hand on the pulse of these things, are finding the informal, peer reviews from readers, such as you find at Amazon, are the MOST effective in marketing a book of any kind.

So if you have an author friend, you can do that friend a huge favour, by reading that book and then going to find it on Amazon, and writing up your own review of it. Five such reviews knocks that book up to a favoured position and suddenly Amazon starts recommending it to others buyers of similar books on their site.

Therefore, if you want to try that out, go do an Amazon search for my novel, Ruthe’s Secret Roses (assuming you’ve read it, otherwise you do more harm than good), and write your honest impression of the book, and whether or not you liked it. Apparently, mentioning something you see as a flaw about a book, works in its favour too, so you don’t have to keep the review all honey and syrup.

Then I got to thinking, if writers are so desperate for good reviews, a website which presents book reviews on a consistent and growing basis and which gets good traffic (ah-ha, just what an SBI site is great at!) - it should go over very well. Naturally, a book review site would lend itself perfectly to be also an info and affiliate site for online bookstores!

I already do this with the book reviews in my Sharing Library on my novel’s site. On each review page I add links to where people could go purchase that book. Naturally, those are my affiliate links, so that if they do end up buying that book, I will get a small commission. I’m afraid I’ve been busy in so many directions that I haven’t developed that section of my site as much as I could have.

My more recent experience with building a new site using the SiteBuildIt software convinces me that a book review site on that hosting service would soon have hundreds, likely thousands of visitors a day. It is quite possible that the site owner would be able to recruit other friends to read books and write the reviews just to keep up. She would likely be able to pay those reviewers for their services!

How would authors find such a site? Easily enough if you used the right keywords and got some good quality reviews up to show what you do. These authors who want to promote their books are constantly searching the internet for book reviewers. Many of them set aside bundles of books to give away to any reviewer in the hopes of getting a review. They would gladly mail them to you, or send you the e-book version to read on your computer, and of course, you get to keep those copies if you want.

I used be a book reviewer for Provident Bookfinder, a special quarterly newsletter with nothing but book reviews in it. One of the fringe benefits was that I could keep the books once I’d read and written my review. Any that I wasn’t feeling terribly possessive about, I would set aside to give as gifts to friends and relatives. I didn’t get any financial return but the books were my reward.

Now, as I look over this idea, I see that with a well-trafficked site that has Google AdSense ads and affiliate-coded links to amazon and half a dozen other online bookstores, it would be quite possible to make a handsome income from doing something I, and any book lover, does as easily as breathing.