Day 3 - Some Big and Needed Changes, But Falling Short

Tonight I sit here, with mixed feelings of both satisfaction and frustration. I'm falling short of my financial target(which I expected at this stage anyway), I'm falling short in terms of productivity, yet the positive changes I am making are vital.

With lots of help from my wife(who takes care of coding and such), our main niche site now has a really nice opt in form, with an attractive ebook ecover above it. Before, there really wasn't much of a call to action in terms of people signing up to the list, now they get a free ebook. I expect opt ins to increase dramatically. Since September we have only got 25 or so subscribers - we really should be getting that per week, and maybe even each day. When you consider that 500-600 on average search for the keyword term we rank for every single day, we should be doing much better. I'm really optimistic that things will take a turn for the better now. I also edited some of the follow up messages, and added a new one. I plan on adding at least 2-3 each week, with intervals of 3-4 days. I'll be adding similar set ups to most of my sites.

I also got a nice surprise when browsing one of the CPA networks I'm a member of. I saw a product I'm promoting with another network, but here you get $12 more per sale. I switched to their banner and link. I've already had a couple of clicks, I plan on driving lots more traffic there in the coming days. In fact, I think during this challenge that site, and that offer in particular may bring the majority of the money. One thing I do need to do is to cloak my affiliate links. I had no idea until I read it on someone's(a Warrior of course) blog last week, but apparently ugly affiliate links can hurt your search engine rankings. That makes sense, because this site was at number 11 for a couple of weeks, and when I added more affiliate links it dropped quite a few places. I haven't been doing much in terms of backlinks, but still I definitely think it has an impact. I'll hopefully get that done tomorrow.

There's not a lot else to report really. I'm pretty disappointed with myself actually, but maybe it was too much to expect I'd be able to work 8-12 hours every day after basically lazing around for the last 2 during Christmas. As a family, we've yet to get back into our regular routine as my son's school has been closed due to the weather. Hmmm, I sound like I'm making excuses......I AM making excuses - not good enough. If I carry on like this, I absolutely will not reach my target. I'll do better tomorrow for sure.