Archive for the ‘Jenn's Work’ Category
Friday, June 13th, 2008 |
I haven’t posted to Jentrepreneur in quite some time, so I thought a good place to start would be to post an update on some of my Web-based projects:
- I’ve stopped taking on new PR consulting work, to focus more exclusively on my PR writing and business writing.
- I’m in the middle of the first e-book in the Web Writer’s Guide series I’m putting together, and have launched that site at WebWritersGuide.com.
- I’m still working on a non-fiction book tying together online PR, small business, and music.
- I’m lining up quite a few interviews with independent artists for the re-launch of AudioXposure.com (which seems to be forever “pending”).
- I’ve gotten my small business blog (BizAmmo.com) back on track with posting. This is the site that used to be a PR6, then got slapped by Google down to a 0 because I sold text links as advertising (which I still hold as a perfectly legitimate business model). It went back up to a 2 not long ago, but it’s back to 0 again. Just posting because I’ve noticed it. I have no intention of changing how I run any of my sites for Google still - good thing I was smart enough to not rely on them for my traffic, huh? Of course it helps to have my background in PR, which makes it easier for me to build relationships with folks who are great at spreading the word via word of mouth (which I still insist is the best kind of traffic you can get - as it’s work out of your hands, so no constant SEO work, and it often results in recurring visitors).
- I’ve also revived my book marketing blog.
- On that note, what I’m featuring at All Book Marketing mostly right now is my progress on a novel I’m writing (in the outlining phase until the end of June). During the following month (or after a short break), I’ll be moving on to outline a second novel. I reviewed two books on my freelance writing blog a little while ago, each promising to teach you how to draft / outline a novel in 30 days - so I’m doing this to go beyond the reviews and to actually test and compare the methods more thoroughly.
- I’m gearing up to make some changes to All Freelance Writing Writing Jobs - I’ll be changing the types of gigs I add there, changing the theme to match the main freelance writing blog, and keeping the job board on the main page so it’s always updating (with my job list posts being featured mostly through the email subscriptions - although still accessible on-site).
- I sold two of my blogs recently to clear some of the clutter - AboutGreenLiving.com and FreePressReleaseWriting.com.
- Naked PR is still going strong, and I did some interesting interviews recently (a feature I plan to continue in the future) with Todd Defren, Darren Rowse, Joe Beaulaurier, and Andreas Charalambous. I’m still planning a new feature addition or two over there when I have time to hash it all out - one will be a lot of fun and let me not only by my somewhat snarky self there, but also give me a chance to be a bit more creative.
As always, there’s a lot going on (and obviously I have client work on top of that), but I think that about sums up any current developments.
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Monday, March 10th, 2008 |
I’m eliminating a few of my sites and projects. I’m in the process of unloading my freelance writing forum at the moment to someone willing to take it over, and I’m selling my unique PR3 Web directory - FreeDeepLinks.com.
Since I didn’t have any buyers interested in the full site, I’m now selling just the domain. It’s currently being auctioned at the DigitalPoint forums if you’re interested - visit the auction. All offers need to go through that auction please. The auction ends Wednesday evening, and there is currently a high bid of $50. The reserve price has not been met yet (it won’t be sold without the reserve price being met during the auction). There is a BIN (buy-it-now) price of $500 for this domain - keyword-rich, simple domain highly relevant to its niche, and with growing traffic already heavily from word-of-mouth and past users of the directory.
There was a BIN price of $1000 for the full directory / site. You can still purchase it at that set rate if the domain doesn’t meet the reserve price in the current auction by Wednesday, or you can make another offer privately at that time for the site or domain. If I don’t receive an acceptable offer for this first-of-its-kind niche directory or domain, I will likely simply hold onto it for a little while until I have time to improve it and re-develop it.
Traffic info and other details are available in the auction thread.
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Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 |
Back on January 18th, I launched a 14 day e-book writing challenge on my freelance writing blog. The idea was simple: to encourage people to really get moving with their e-book ideas while being able to support each other along the way.
Interestingly, I’ve seen people say 14 days is far too much time for this challenge, and just today I saw some comments on another blog about it saying that 14 days is too little time to write a quality e-book. What are your thoughts on that?
Personally, I think it’s more than adequate. I wrote my first e-book (albeit short), and had it online ready for sale, within just five hours.
I’m obviously writing an e-book during the challenge (although not the longer one I’ve been slowly working on about pre-launch book publicity). I’m not going to go into too much detail about it other than to say that it’s targeting freelance writers.
Although I’ll be detailing the process a little bit over at All Freelance Writing, I’ll likely be updated here at Jentrepreneur regarding sales and such after the fact. What I know for now is that I’m not going with a traditionally long-form e-book sales letter, I’m using e-junkie as my payment processor / delivery service, and I’ll be setting up an affiliate program (my first, so that’s bound to be an experience).
Wish me luck, and if you have any tips along the way (especially the post-publishing area or dealing with affiliate marketing), feel free to let me know.
Posted in Jenn's Work, e-books | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 |
I don’t spend too much time generally worrying about SEO. I don’t believe in mass-link-building (prefer my links naturally as much as possible), and it’s worked well enough for me so far.
However, I’ve noticed that a specific blog of mine (my freelance writing blog) was doing decently in the SERPs for a few pretty basic terms, and so I’m challenging myself to get top ten rankings for them.
Here are the sites:
AllFreelanceWriting.com
AllFreelanceWritingJobs.com
Note: The second domain was just broken off of the main domain a day or two ago, so it will take a little while to get in the SERPs at all, and all placements listed below are for the first domain.
Here are the keyword phrases (and current rankings):
Freelance Writing - 16
Freelance Writing Jobs - 11 (this result should hopefully be replaced by the new domain)
Freelance Writing Gigs - 8 6 (I’d like to get this in the top 10 with the new domain; preferably the top 5)
Freelance Writers - 17
I also target “writing forums” and “freelance writing forums” for a subdomain - writingforums.AllFreelanceWriting.com. It’s currently ranked 4 and 5 respectively for those terms. I’ve used the second domain above in the past, and it always ranked extremely well for the targeted terms, so I have high hopes for it (it’s why I revived it and pulled the jobs off of the main domain again).
Wish me luck. 
EDIT: Not even 24 hours after I just posted my positions in the SERPs for these keyword phrases, and my blog seems to be completely wiped from the results for those terms (not de-indexed though). Now why the hell would that happen? It doesn’t feel like coincidence, but who knows? Can you think of any reason it would happen right after I posted here? I know Google’s completely wonky at the moment anyway b/c of the apparent pagerank update that’s taking forever to finish, so I’m hoping it’s something that just passes in a few days. I suppose we’ll see. If nothing else, I was reminded why I don’t waste a ton of time on SEO, and instead focus on more reliable traffic generation (like publicity, networking, and building word-of-mouth exposure by building a reputation in my niches). For the record… I despise Google… pretty much always have… probably always will.
EDIT 2: Some interesting updates:
1. The rankings have pretty much corrected themselves (updated numbers above for any that changed). Hopefully they’ll stay that way. (The new domain isn’t ranking at all for the targeted keywords yet.)
2. If they don’t, I’m fine with that too. While I can’t explain it, my traffic increased significantly for the first two days after disappearing from the SERPs, and then went right back to normal ranges thereafter - so the Google traffic lost was more than made up for by some good old fashioned promotion and word-of-mouth.
3. I do still despise Google. I’m not a fair weather fan. I also don’t have many plans to do a ton of SEO work other than trying to improve rankings on these few keywords. Quality content will definitely stay the primary focus.
Posted in Case Studies, Jenn's Work, seo | No Comments »
Sunday, December 16th, 2007 |
This year is coming to a close, and it’s time to re-think some business strategies and projects, and make plans for online business in 2008. While I have additional business goals (mostly revolving around print writing), here are some of my goals for next year revolving around my sites, digital products, and services:
1. Re-launch AudioXposure.com (my indie music webzine) - It’s been stale for a little over a year now I believe. It never monetized well. Well other sites started earning significantly, I let this one slide. But it was my first site, I love the niche, and I want to give it another go. It’s being moved to Wordpress sometime before the Spring (content’s already on the system on a subdomain). I’m also adding a forum and directory (which will replace my current indie music directory at IndieGuru.com). I’m also going back to managing it completely independently, at least in the beginning while I work out the kinks. I’m pushing this re-launch, as I’m also hoping to focus on another indie-music-related publishing project or two, and move more back to my music publicity work through my PR firm.
2. Change the BizAmmo.com theme - This isn’t a terribly high priority, but I’d like to get this moved probably to one of Brian Gardner’s themes (probably Revolution News). I want to revive the dead forum attached to this site, add a business directory, and finally finish up the small business ideas collection (I may release a limited set online and compile the rest into an e-book). This site is my highest earner, but becoming a chore and a place I really don’t enjoy posting to. I’m hoping that by freshening it up a bit, I’ll regain some of my passion for the project.
3. Post more regularly to my PR blog - This blog (NakedPR.com) often has my highest monthly traffic, because I write a good number of highly controversial posts there. It’s more of my “playground” than a serious business endeavor, but I’d like to find ways to better monetize it (it’s not unusual to get $1.00 + Adsense clicks here, but the audience isn’t the type that clicks ads often). While I don’t expect it to ever be a big income-generator (and that’s not the goal), it would be nice if it were earning at least enough to justify spending more time on it (and away from my development projects).
4. Redesign my business site and add a blog - My biz site (jhmattern.com) is also being moved to wordpress on another theme by Brian Gardner (Revolution Theme). I’m planning to add a more instructive PR blog here, and keep NakedPR for the controversial posts that amuse me.
5. Launch my E-book for authors - The e-book is a 90-day pre-launch publicity plan to help authors of books or e-books build pre-launch buzz prior to release. If it goes over well, I’ll be releasing a second version targeting webmasters about launching a site or blog.
6. Pull my first e-book off the market - My Press Releases Made Easy e-book will be pulled off the market once its replacement is underway. I’m expanding it, adding case studies and additional templates, and more. I also won’t make the mistake of offering resell rights on the expanded version, and will likely use affiliates to market it.
7. Overhaul my deep link article directory - This directory was the first of its kind (deep linking only to articles around the Web), and I still feel strongly that it has a lot of potential. However, the name, FreeDeepLinks.com hurts it with users looking for articles. I’ll be moving it to InfoLovers.com (I think that’s right) sometime in 2008, upgrading the directory script, and changing the design.
8. Re-launch CreativeSelfPromotion.com - This blog will be a lead-up to a book I’m planning to pitch to publishers hopefully before the end of the year.
There are quite a few more goals, but those are the ones at the top of my mind right now. As I complete them, I’ll post about and work towards others.
What are some of your online business goals for 2008?
Posted in Jenn's Work | 3 Comments »
Friday, November 23rd, 2007 |
Since announcing that I’ll be discontinuing my PLR business articles (and pulling any remaining sets off the market) after 2007, I’ve been selling a decent number of sets off. I’ve still only really promoted the death of my PLR articles on one webmaster forum.
Now I’m trying to figure out how to push as many sets as possible to pull some extra income out of the project before the end of the year. As of now, I’m considering a few options:
1. A press release at the beginning of December
2. Pushing them on other webmaster forums
3. Getting it mentioned on webmaster-targeted blogs (paid or otherwise)
4. Decreasing the price again much closer to the end if they’re still not going at that point (this is the least likely option).
I’m not expecting to sell all of these sets, because frankly they’re not worth enough to justify spending a ton of time marketing them compared to my other projects and client work. I’ll update here on what strategies seem to work, and what doesn’t though as I try a few new tactics in coming weeks.
Posted in Jenn's Work | No Comments »
Friday, November 9th, 2007 |
Throughout 2007, I’ve been selling specialized PLR business article packs as an experiment to show Web writers a potential additional income stream. That project is now coming to a close.
Around the first of the year, my PLR business article packs will be no more. I’m completely pulling them off the market at that time. (more…)
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Monday, November 5th, 2007 |
This is my first in a collection of weekly posts to let you follow the progress of Jentrepreneur.com.
Long-Term Goals
Thursday, November 1st, 2007 |
While I did say I won’t give specific stats and earnings info for my larger sites, I was checking on their overall traffic trends for October, so I thought I’d share a little bit about whether they went up or down, and why. I’m surprised the stats weren’t much worse on these sites last month actually. (more…)
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Thursday, November 1st, 2007 |
I’ve already mentioned here that I’ll be using several websites and business projects of mine as case studies that you can follow here on Jentrepreneur. They may all be successes. They may all be spectacular failures. More than likely, they’ll fall somewhere in between. The idea is to let you watch and learn, either from what I do right, or from the mistakes I make along the way.
This blog won’t be following my larger or older projects (like my business blog, PR blog, and freelance writing blog). Instead, I’ll be showcasing my newer projects and sites, so you can watch them from the very beginning. Today I’m going to give you a preview of some of these projects: (more…)
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Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 |
I launched another new project yesterday - a free press release writing guide at FreePressReleaseWriting.com. I think we’ll make this the first project that I let readers of this blog follow along with on its progress towards success or failure. Here are some of the details: (more…)
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Sunday, May 6th, 2007 |
As an online PR specialist, I’ve been asked repeatedly if I’d consider writing an e-book on press release writing. I finally have. My first e-book was just written yesterday, and is now available through my PR firm for $17. Here’s what the e-book covers:
- What Are Press Releases?
- The Benefits of Using Press Releases
- Old School vs. New School Press Release Writing
- The “Secret” Formula for Perfect Press Releases
- What Makes a Story Newsworthy?
- How to Write a Press Release
- Types of Press Release Distribution
- Choosing a Distribution Model
- Measuring Press Release Results
- Sample Press Release Template
- Press Release Distribution Services
- More Press Release Resources
- About The Author
Posted in Jenn's Work | No Comments »
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