Last week I downloaded and installed WordPress as I’m going to add a blog to Buy Organic, if I can ever work out how to integrate it into my current website design, that is. I had been putting off doing it for quite a while because I don’t know anything about PHP and I thought it was going to be, not difficult, but tedious. If fact it wasn’t at all and it worked straight away without any problems.

I read up on how to integrate it into my own design but that really is beyond me. I’ll give it another go this week but I don’t think I’ll be able to do it myself. I think I’m going to need outside help. I wonder where I can find someone to do that for me without breaking the bank.

Seeing the installation was so easy I think got excited and set up three other domain names, which I happened to have lying around, and now I have 3 more blogs, just like that. I especially love how the themes work. Being able to change the look of the site with a flick of a switch is great. Plus the ease of setting them up and adding posts and pages is fantastic. I’m going to do all my sites from now on as WordPress blogs.

This time though the installation wasn’t so easy. I kept getting the error ‘There doesn’t seem to be a wp-config.php file’ and even though other people had the same error I couldn’t find a solution. Well, after spending all day trying to figure it out I discovered the problem and the solution. I will post about it in case anyone has the same problem, which I’m sure they will.

So now I’ve got to get to work on these other blogs. Firstly there is Bingo Bombshell which is about bingo website reviews as well as other game reviews including free online games. Secondly there is Tips and Advice which is just that. I will be posting articles on a daily basis. The third site is for my husband. It is a dating review site for Albanians. Seeing he is Albanian he is going to write the reviews in his language. The site is called Albanian Hearts and I think it will be a success as Albanians seem to like using the internet to meet people. I have so much work to do now!

I added quite a few organic products today to Buy Organic. It’s quite difficult to find products which are 100% organic and some products only contain one or two organic ingredients. I’m still promoting those as well as products which don’t contain natural ingredients but are natural products made without the use of preservatives and other chemicals.

Products added today include:

Organic Baby Skin Care
Natural Men’s Skin Care
Eco Friendly Cleaning Products
Organic Vitamins and Supplements

Tomorrow I’m going to work on adding some organic cotton clothes. These suppliers are difficult to find, especially in Australia. The only companies I have found are in the US and no one tends to buy from these companies, preferring to buy locally. I’ll give it a go anyway and see how it goes.

I never drank the tap water in Paris simply because I was told it is not fit for drinking. I’m now starting to question if that is really the case as I know a number of people who do drink it. I have tried it and even though it doesn’t taste that great there is nothing wrong with it. It won’t make you sick.

Some French mineral water companies have suggested that bottled mineral water is better for your health but there is no scientific evidence to support this and the French government themselves say that tap water has the same benefits as bottled water.

The French are drinking less bottled water, especially the more expensive brands such as Perrier, Badoit, Evian, and Volvic. More people are drinking cheaper supermarket brands of water as well as tap water. Personally I buy the cheapest brand at my supermarket which is only 18 cents per 1.5 litre bottle and it’s fine. I don’t see the need to pay more than 50 cents a bottle for the other brands. You’re really just paying for the brand name, they are not any better for you.

I think if you don’t mind the taste of tap water then go ahead and drink it, otherwise go for the cheapest bottled water you can find.

I didn’t know if it would be worth promoting organic personal hygiene products or not but I’ve had a few requests for them so I thought I’d see how they go. The range includes organic deodorants from Avalon Organics and Miessence and a deodorant stick from the Aromatherapy Co which is especially for men. My husband uses this and he says it’s as effective as any other deodorant.

I’ve also started promoting the Mooncup. The mooncup is a feminine hygiene product which is used in place of tampons. I haven’t tried it but it sounds interesting. They have been around for decades and are more environmentally friendly than tampons as they are reusable and can last up to 10 years. Check out the Mooncup website for more information. They deliver internationally but payment is made in UK pounds.

I’ve added a new page to Buy Organic which is all about organic lipstick and organic lip balms.

One of the most popular products I have are Badger Balms. They are lip and body balms and there is also a sleep balm and a balm which helps you breath if you have a cold. You just rub it on your chest and it can help you to feel better. This is proving especially popular now during winter.

Wild Elixir also have a great range of products which I use myself. The exfoliating scrub and the lip balm are fantastic.

I also added some links to Avalon Organics which is a new range I’m promoting. They have organic body lotions and organic shampoos and conditioners. They sound great and are on my list of things to try.

Sales at my Buy Organic site are starting to pick up. I’m getting a lot more hits and from each of the major search engines. Some products are turning out to be quite popular. The organic cotton baby clothes are by far the most popular items. The site also got a mention on mothering.com in one of the forums. They were discussing bamboo socks and someone placed a link to my article on bamboo clothing. I was quite happy with the free advertising and it generated quite a few hits. I couldn’t have placed the comment better myself. No, it wasn’t me who posted it. They say that commercial posts aren’t allowed but there seem to be a lot of links like that. Maybe I should develop more of a presence in forums like that. So things are picking but there is still a long way to go before I’ll be happy with the visitor count and the income generated.

Paris is an expensive city but there are free things to do and these are often some of my favourite things to do.

Visit a Park
There are so many beautiful parks and gardens in Paris that it’s difficult to pick a favourite. My top picks are the Jardin du Luxembourg, Place des Vosges, Parc Monceau, and Palais Royal. These are all very well known parks but some of the nicest are the small parks hidden away in the different quarters. Walk outside of the main tourist areas and you’ll find a great park to sit in and watch the world go by.

Go to the Louvre
The Louvre museum is free on the first Sunday of every month so there is no excuse for not going. Except for the long queues I suppose.

Stroll Down the Champs-Elysees
It may be a bit of a cliche but the Champs-Elysees really is the most beautiful boulevard in the world. It may be touristy and full of overpriced cafes but you can’t go to Paris without walking down it. Plus it’s free.

Window Shopping
Everyone wants to go shopping in Paris but not all of us can afford the expensive designer stores. Of course there’s no reason you can’t go in and have a look around. Besides, half the fun is in looking.

I was very happy to see that I sold a copy of Dreamweaver through my Cheap Web Templates website today. I use Dreamweaver for all my web development work and I recommend the product on my site because I really think it is the best for web development work.

I am a little surprised someone would buy it though because unless you are going to be developing a few sites it is quite a large expense. Not that I’m complaining but I was always under the impression that people buying web templates from my site are just working on one project and so they need one template and that’s it. Then again I’ve bought a number of templates myself and I am a web developer so who knows.

Anyway I was really excited to see the sale as I’ll get a very nice commission from it. Hopefully I’ll start making money from that site now. I think I’ve got my AdWords campaigns working profitably so it’s looking good for the future.

Okay, I wouldn’t say my Buy Organic site is a financial success but people are visiting it and that’s making me happy. They are reading the articles and product recommendations as well as signing up for the newsletter. I am making a few sales but I don’t think I’ll have many more until I add more products. It’s just not that easy to find organic products available online in Australia. I see most websites promoting the same products. My site needs more variety that’s all.

I also need to add a lot more articles to get more visitors. It’s the article pages which seem to get the most hits. I have quite a few ideas of what I can write about. In fact, looking at my to do list I have around 50 ideas for possible articles. I should probably stop writing in here and starting writing them! I enjoy researching the articles but I find the actual writing of them quite tedious and time consuming. Then I have to do keyword research to make sure they are optimised correctly so people can find them. Anyway, this is my full time job now so I should get to it.

After using AdWords for a couple of months to promote my Cheap Web Templates website, I’m finally having some success.

It took quite a while to work out how to reduce my cost per click to make it profitable but I think I’ve got the hang of it now. The point is to use LOTS of keywords as the cheaper ones are those which not many people are bidding on. The problem with this of course is that not many people are bidding on them for a reason. Not many people are searching using those keywords. This means that I now have only around 10 hits on my site per day from AdWords. It’s not costing a lot but I’m not getting that many sales either. I’m selling around 1 web template per week.

My next plan of attack to sell more web templates is to start a blog. I thought I could post tips on how to use the templates and examples of templates in action, so to speak. Maybe I could post about different uses of the templates, all the while throwing in relevant keywords. At least with my adwords campaign I now know which keywords are best and which are only searched on occasionally. It has been very good research.

I launched a new site yesterday called Stop Yawning. It offers tips and advice for people who aren’t getting enough sleep. It mentions some of the causes of sleep problems and insomnia. Some topics include:

Lose Weight – this can help as your breathing may be restricted at night and this might be affecting your sleep and may cause sleep apnea.
Quit Smoking – you might be keep awake by your ‘smoker’s cough’.
Baby Sleep Tips – if you get your baby to sleep it makes sense that you will sleep better too.
Reduce Stress – if stress is keeping you up all night then read these tips to become stress free.
Stop Snoring – it’s pretty obvious that snoring is a major cause of lack of sleep for both the ‘snorer’ and their partner.
Insomnia – tips to cure insomnia.

Check out the site to see if you can improve your sleep.

I was surprised to receive an email last week saying I had sold a couple of t-shirts from my Albanian Designs t-shirt shop. I’m not convinced the designs are particularly good (I’m not a designer) and was surprised anyone would spend money on them! Still, I’m not complaining.

Since then I’ve added another 10 or so designs. I’m not sure they are very good either but I’m doing my best. Hopefully someone will like them.

I had my first sale on my Buy Organic website today. Someone bought some organic cotton baby clothes. The sale was for $80 so I got an $8 commission. Not a lot, I know, but at least now I can see that people are willing to buy online if they find what they are looking for. I now need to focus on building more pages with a lot more products and some relevant organic articles.

The customer service people at CafePress are useless. I’ve been having some trouble with my Albanian Designs shop at CafePress lately. About half of the designs aren’t coming up in their Market Place search engine. I was really annoyed because they are all correctly tagged (the means by which their search engine finds designs) and they were showing up when I first designed them.

There was no help from the CafePress forums so I emailed the customer service department. They were unbelievable, unbelievably useless that is. The first response took 24 hours and they guy just cut and pasted info from online FAQs. I clearly stated in my email that I had followed these guidelines and the problem was with their system. It looked like he didn’t even bother to read my email.

I then replied, sarcastically thanking them for their HELP and asked them to actually read my email and do something about the problem. I then had to wait another 24 hours because my email went back to the end of the cue rather than straight back to the guy who was ‘helping’ me.

The next email from them wasn’t even from the same useless guy, it was from another useless guy. He apologised profusely for the delay in replying and suggested next time, if I need an urgent reply, that I should call their customer service number in the US. As if I would waste my money on a long distance call to, probably, be left on hold for an eternity. After all his apologies he didn’t bother to answer my query. He just said, sorry for the delay, call us next time. What??? What happened to helping me?

I then sent a nasty email and it’s been 24 hours and still no reply.

I’ve actually now found out what the problem is but I’m going to continue to annoy them with nasty emails. The problem is with their system, it is a BUG in their system. I’m going to tell them but I’m sure they won’t believe me or won’t bother to do anything about it.

It’s a shame I already paid for a premium shop, otherwise I’d just drop them. Seeing I’ve paid for the shop I’ll have to fix the problem. This involves removing all my images and putting them all back up again. It’ll only take a couple of hours. Should be fun.

I just noticed that 2 of my websites now have a page rank. PageRank is shown on the Google toolbar if you have it. This doesn’t really mean too much as far as the positioning of my site in the search engine results but it does mean that there is a bit of action going on with my sites. They both have a page rank of 3 which I think is fairly standard for a small site. I only started them a couple of months ago so I’m fairly happy with that.

Hopefully with the next Google update I’ll be up to 4 on the page rank. I’ll have to add a lot of pages and content to get that as well as more inbound links but I think I can do it.

I just got my first sale of a web template. I’m so happy. My Adwords campaign has been going for 3 days and it’s working already. I was really surprised when I logged into my account this morning.

I thought maybe no one would buy the templates because the purchase process is more difficult than you usually encounter on the internet. Instead of just entering your credit card details and then receiving an email with download instructions, you have to send the head office, in the US, a copy of your credit card. This is obviously to reduce fraud but I don’t understand why they need to do that and no one else does. So to complete a purchase you have to scan your credit card, black out the credit card number using a program like Photoshop, and then email it to the customer service. Or if you don’t have a scanner you can fax the card details. There must be plenty of people who don’t have a scanner of fax so you’d have to really want the template to go ahead and buy it.

I received a US$12 commission which about equals the amount I spent on advertising. All I need to do now is to work out how to reduce my advertising costs and I will be in business.

I started my first Google Adwords campaign today for my web templates website. I’ve read a little bit about Adwords on internet forums but I’m still not too sure what I’m doing. I’d like to buy one of the many books about it or even some software which is available to help with bidding prices and keywords. Unfortunately my budget doesn’t allow that at the moment so the only option I have is to keep reading the forums and to use a bit of trial and error with my campaign.

The good thing is that Google allow you to set a maximum daily budget so there’s not chance of my costs getting out of hand. I don’t understand how to get a low cost per click. To get my ad in the top 4 places I have to bid around 70 cents per click, sometimes though it’s over $1.20. I don’t want to pay more than 10 cents so I guess I’ll have to work on my ad copy and on the landing page. This is what I don’t know how to do.

I’ll keep reading over the next few days and keep a very close eye on my costs per click, just to make sure things don’t get out of hand. There’s not point in paying $1 per click and then have no sales. I’m a bit nervous about how it’s going to go but I think once I get the hang of it there will be plenty of money to be made.

I made my very first forum post today. I only really started reading forums in the last few months. I’d read them before but only if I was looking for something specific or if I came across something in a Google search. I now tend to read them on a regular basis to see what is happening in SEO or in affiliate marketing or whatever else takes my interest.

I started a CafePress shop about a week ago selling Albanian Designs on t-shirts and other products. I created about 20 simple designs, text designs for Albanian cities. It was only when I saw them in the search results that I realised I had made a mistake with the images. I couldn’t figure out how to fix them so I had to post to the forum. I don’t know why but I was a little nervous about it. I thought I really should have known the answer to my question, I am a web developer after all, and was a bit embarrassed to have to ask such a simple question. In the end I got a simple, polite answer and everything worked out ok. The only problem was that I then had to change the 20 or so images I had already made and recreate all the t-shirts. Not a great way to spend a Sunday afternoon, believe me!