Counting Down To The End Of April

TS Elliot was right: April is the cruellest month, at least it has been the cruellest so far this year. In fact, April was absolutely vicious towards me in some ways. I am looking forward to May and hope it will bring a fresh start and some changes for the better.

Two days to go until it ends but what should have been my most profitable month so far is likely to turn out to be the least profitable. I won't say I don't mind, that wouldn't be true but I don't mind as much as I might because I know what the problems were and what I did wrong. The main problem was Easter and everyone says Easter and the spring public holidays cause a major slowdown online so I know I was not the only one suffering but that only helped a little. If I had thought ahead, indeed if I had realised how badly the holidays would affect traffic, I would not have spent so much on advertising on high traffic websites, I would have concentrated on PPC but hindsight is always a wonderful thing. The month started off so well - steadily increasing until I hit my biggest single day's profits so far. Pity it all went downhill from then on, but things have been moving again for the last week and I had another record profit day. Now I'm trying to find out why profits fluctuate and how to keep up to the high levels.

Then, to round off a bad month, I really messed up my PPC experiment and ended up paying for a lot of useless clicks. Should have reduced the daily budget cap when I was testing the new keywords. Silly, silly. Still, a lesson was learned and I won't be doing that again. Thank goodness for SFI and Empowerism, at least they are still being good to me.





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If you want to work from home on the internet but don't know where to start, visit my Work From Home Directory at Hunting Venus.com You'll find all the help you need.

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Bird Flu Has Arrived In Britain

After the scare when a dead swan was found in Scotland, bird flu has now been confirmed as being present on a farm in Norfolk. As Norfolk is a centre for the commercial breeding of turkeys and chickens for human consumption, this could very well be the start of a major disaster.

The current news is that it is not the mega-bad strain of bird flu but even so, all the chickens on the farm have to be destroyed. That is so awful. It has been a little while since the TV new broadcasts showed scenes of bird slaughter in other countries but it seems as if those days will be back with a vengeance if the bird flu spreads.

Spring in England is as beautiful as ever: the daffodils are just about over but tulips of every possible colour and size are in full flower, everywhere looks fresh and green but it is as if there is a black cloud just over the horizon that just got a bit closer.

About tulips: why do our local councils insist on planting displays of red and yellow tulips when there are so many other beautiful colour schemes available? I wonder if there are special heavy duty disease resistant varieties that only come in red and yellow. I bet they aren't squirrel-proof though. If only someone could invent a strain of tulip and one of crocus that were not attractive to squirrels.

Oh well, enough rambling, time to start a new work at home related article.




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If you want to work from home on the internet but don't know where to start, visit my Work From Home Directory at Hunting Venus.com You'll find all the help you need.

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St George's Day and Shakespeare's Birthday

St George's Day and Shakespeare's birthday.

A disappointingly wet Sunday morning when I had planned to take a couple of hours off to work in the garden. Tried to do some work on tidying up my honeysuckle yesterday but it was amazingly hot, so hot in fact that I had to give up gardening and come inside. Did intend to do some more tidying up when the day cooled down but by then I was involved in writing some stuff for my new website that's been in the planning stage for far too long. See what happens when you put things off - the weather changes and you are stuck.

Good new this morning is that profits were up yesterday. Maybe we have now come to the end of the Easter/spring holiday that's slowed things down so badly. That alone is sufficient inspiration to work faster on getting the new site up and running. After weeks of thinking, I now have an idea of my niche, ideas for several articles, ideas for several web pages but no idea of the design. I intended to plan this out carefully before uploading anything and take it one step at a time. Looks as if this is going to turn out like all my projects: weeks of thinking and then just do it all in one go!

I wrote to Google the other day to ask if there was any way of me having a new Adsense account even though my previous one was disabled last year. I can't make out if it is an individual who gets banned or just their domain. The answer was that I would have to appeal and an appeal would only be considered if I provided full information includng my publisher number and the exact date my account was disable. I can't remember either of those things. The account was closed down in about August 2005. Do they really expect me to remember the exact date and recall the publisher number which was about a dozen digits long? I give up, I'm waiting for Yahoo!

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If you want to work from home on the internet but don't know where to start, visit my Work From Home Directory at Hunting Venus.com You'll find all the help you need.

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Mad Mystery Shopping Woman Has Gone Quiet

She had the weekend, then another week but the crazy woman who accused me of stealing her copyrighted material has not given me a substantive reply to my email asking her exactly what I was supposed to have copied.

What a nerve, that was obviously just a try-on to see if I would give her a free link to her boring website. Guess her retained attorney was just a figment of her imagination. Maybe I'll email her and demand an apology. Maybe I'll just forget it and move on: more important things to do.


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If you want to work from home on the internet but don't know where to start, visit my Work From Home Directory at Hunting Venus.com You'll find all the help you need.

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I Won A Prize!

Wow! Just heard from Search Warp that I won their writing competition with my little article, Easter In England - Tradition And Superstition. I was quite amazed. I never thought for a minute that I'd win, I just decided to write for the competition as a change from writing about working at home. It was lovely to write about a different topic and I thoroughly enjoyed writing about our Easter. This earns me a month's free text ad on Search Warp's home page. I'll try to keep on writing for the month's category as an exercise - not likely to win the same competition more than once!


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If you want to work from home on the internet but don't know where to start, visit my Work From Home Directory at Hunting Venus.com You'll find all the help you need.

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My Advertising Banner Was Stolen

Some people are lower than a snake's belly.

On 20th March I paid to have an advertising banner made (a 125x125 button to be exact). I designed it but as I was in a hurry, I got someone else to construct it (I really must learn how to do that, it will be very useful). I paid to place my button on various WAH sites and within a couple of weeks noticed that the link from by button on one particular site went to a completely different url, a one page affiliate site and nothing to do with me.

I contacted the owners of the site to tell them they had screwed up by using my banner with someone else's url. They were adamant that they had not made a mistake, so I emailed the woman whose link it was to tell her about the mistake and ask for her help in getting it put right. No reply.

I emailed her again to repeat my request. I also pointed out that I was ok because I was using a different button ad but her ad looked silly as it was so obviously not related to the button. No reply. I began to suspect that this woman had stolen my button. I could hardly believe it: one because it is such a low trick, two because you can use a button making service for under $10 and three because she would have to be stupid if she thought she could advertise alongside me and I wouldn't know it was her. HELLO!

I sent another email saying that her failure to reply to me etc made me suspect that she had deliberately copied my button. That got a reaction! The low down lying bitch said it was her button and I must stop harassing her and she was only using the button ad until the end of the month and I couldn't tell her what to do. She acted just like a little kid who had been caught out doing something bad, all bluster (combined with rudeness). Pathetic lying cow. My new button has my website url on it, wonder if she'll try stealing that one.


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If you want to work from home on the internet but don't know where to start, visit my Work From Home Directory at Hunting Venus.com You'll find all the help you need.

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Who Put The Mystery In Mystery Shopping?

I received an email from some crazy woman accusing me of stealing copyright protected material from her website. She alleged that one of my articles Mystery Shopping An Excellent Way To Make Extra Money was "havily" borrowed from her site. Well, if I was going to steal material, I wouldn't steal from someone who can't even spell "heavily". The email went on:
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So here's the deal. I am sure this was done inadvertently, and I do usually happily partner with other mystery shopping sites who use my work WITH MY permission and proper crediting of my material attributing it to me, posting my copyright notice and a link to my web site.
If you will make these corrections, you may use my content. If not, you must remove all such content from your site immediately as I do have an intellectual property attorney on retainer who will contact your ISP to shut
you down and we do sue to protect my intellectual property rights. I trust we can come to an amicable resolution of the matter.

Please advise your intentions immediately.
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I had a look at her website and was as certain as I could be that I had never laid eyes on it before. It was not even the sort of website I would have any reason to visit. I got someone else to look at this website and at my article and his opinion was that there was no similarity and my article, in fact, contained more information. So I emailed this woman and said I couldn't find a single paragraph or sentence we had in common and asked her to point out to me exactly what she was alleging had been copied. She emailed me back to say that she didn't know and needed the weekend to think about it.

If I had found someone had copied my original work, I'd know word for word what had been copied particularly if I was going to send threatening emails.

It seems she was just hoping to scare me into giving her a link to her pathetic website. Huh! Some chance. Let's see how she backs up her allegations.






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If you want to work from home on the internet but don't know where to start, visit my Work From Home Directory at Hunting Venus.com You'll find all the help you need.

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Easter In England - A Family Affair

At last, I seem to be on a bit of a roll. Decided not to mess around with my Easter article. Instead I worked on the second one and submitted it. It was accepted into the Home/Family category so it is now on its way around the Internet. Hard to believe it is nearly Easter, Good Friday is in just a few days' time.

I must, must, must do some work on my garden and get some more veggies planted. My cactus plant collection needs an overhaul and a prolonged re-potting session has to be scheduled. The lovely spring sunshine also reveals the full horror of the interior of my car which has been a stranger to the vacuum cleaner for far too long.

Now to prioritise: what really needs to be done before I spend a few days on horticultural pursuits (car can wait a bit!). Work on next article, find articles for next monthly newsletter, work on Google Adwords, find some more high traffic targetted sites to place ads, build niche website, add some new offers to the "beginners" page on my main site, spend some time working on link exchanges, delete hundreds of things from my hard drive, read my current book, add to my novel. Well those are the essential jobs, I don't think I can face listing the minor things. Good job I'm organised but there are still too few hours in the day.

My new Easter themed article is: Easter In England - A Family Affair

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If you want to work from home on the internet but don't know where to start, visit my Work From Home Directory at Hunting Venus.com You'll find all the help you need.

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Easter In England - Tradition And Superstition

Wrote an article about Easter today. Actually, it turned into two articles but I only sent one to Search Warp for publishing. This article is nothing to do with working from home, I decided to try to write an article each month for Search Warp's monthly competition. I don't expect to win but it is good to write something unconnected with work.

I had intended to submit it for publishing generally but then realised it doesn't really fit into any particular category. I think I just got a bit more unique content for my website! - Good job I enjoyed the writing.

The article is Easter In England - Tradition And Superstition I think I'll have a try at revising it to fit a category.






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If you want to work from home on the internet but don't know where to start, visit my Work From Home Directory at Hunting Venus.com You'll find all the help you need.

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A Milestone Reached And A Disaster

Yesterday was a bit of a red letter day - My Clickbank profits for that one day were double my whole gross revenue from my first month working with Erich Winnecke's 3 Phase Profit Plan. It was not a fortune but it is respectable and it proves the system works.

Probably due to the excitement but I could not sleep - managed about 4 hours and felt like a zombie most of the day. I had intended to take advantage of the bright dry weather to take by baby granddaughter for a stroll but I was too tired. A bit of dry fresh air and some gentle exercies are definitely a good idea - maybe I'll have the strength tomorrow.

Not a good day to be working - I managed to delete an index page and had to rebuild it. What a nightmare. Just one wrong click and away it went. Oh well, can't be helped, I've managed to put a temporary page together and I'll work on it tomorrow. The only comfort was that I had intended to replace it - I just wanted to do it in an orderly manner. Must get some sleep. One day I'll look back on this and laugh!



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If you want to work from home on the internet but don't know where to start, visit my Work From Home Directory at Hunting Venus.com You'll find all the help you need.

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