It’s been a long time since I updated this blog, due to being very busy with my growing amount of websites, blogs and life. A lot has happened so I’ll briefly list the important things.
Family
My 78 year old mother became ill just before Christmas and fell in her home. She couldn’t get up from the floor and was lying there overnight until my brother called round and saw her through the window. The police and ambulance were called and once they got into the house my mother was given treatment for a viral infection and seemed to be picking up.
I stayed with her Christmas eve and day and another brother stayed with her on Boxing day but she worsened and was rushed into hospital. They said that she had a gall bladder infection and Septicaemia. She is getting better now thank goodness but it is worrying.
My daughter moved home, a lovely house but unfortunately for me it’s further for me to travel to see her and my grandchildren. However, they have an extra bedroom with my name on so I can go and stay sometimes.
Business
BB Articles has gone from strength to strength, but I am finding dealing with the article directory very time consuming. It would be lovely just to be able to let articles be approved automatically, but the quality of some of the submitted articles is very poor and then there is plagiarism.
I set up a travel article directory at the beginning of last year with a different software called Memberspeed. I wasn’t happy with the software and have recently changed the site to the Article Friendly script. Much better and easier to use.
My favourite software and I think my best investment is XSitePro 2. I have built a few sites using XSitePro and find it quick and easy to use. The websites that I have built with it so far are:
UK Travel Guide, The Creative Writer, Money From Writing, Mega Music Site, Articles Abroad (the front page) and Ebook World
Three of the designs are my own and 3 from the templates provided with the software. I’ve been integrating DLGuard software for selling digital downloads with Ebook World and am pleased with the outcome with lots still to do. I wouldn’t have been able to do that when I built this blog so I’ve learned a fair bit in that time.
Blogs
I’ve messed a bit with blogs in recent months and currently run 3 on my own domains which are Yorkshire Pudding Recipe, Hot Resell Rights and Mega Music Talent. As with this blog they have been a bit neglected but several months down the line the statistics make interesting reading.
Top for traffic is Mega Music Talent, but that has had more regular work done and more promotion. Top for keyword ranking, position in search engines and percentage of available traffic is Yorkshire Pudding Recipe. Bottom for everything except making money is Hot Resell Rights. With little traffic it does better than any of my sites and blogs for Google Adsense earnings, something I will have to work with this year.
Work
My day job never ceases to be interesting. We had a major refit just before Christmas – the worst time of the year for a refit but head office knows best. It was hard work but everything looks nice and clean and we are now on top of things. It was very busy over Christmas and we found like usual that somebody at head office had deleted lines that are popular with our customers and added lines that don’t sell. Very frustrating when you have to keep telling customers that we don’t sell something any more.
Happy New Year!!
