Again, since our goal is to eliminate debt and increase our wealth without changing the important aspects of our lifestyle, we decided to think of ways to increase our revenues. We are looking at a number of different ideas -- no get rich quick schemes but businesses that look promising, maybe second jobs, I'd love to "flip a house," but I don't have the time or the money for that. However, I did see a business that I thought could be really interesting and that is in my field -- education, so it's in the back of my mind.
Also, although I did not start out this web site this way, it has become a vehicle for potentially earning some extra income. This has been an extremely difficult endeavor which I have chronicled, up to a point, in my weblog. It is very difficult to create a website, you have to have something to say, and you have to be able to write. And, believe me, I've been reading a lot of web sites lately and a lot more people are very good at writing sites than I might have guessed and many are much better than I am at designing them (I'm using what they call a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) type of program that allows me to put in some code in some places to place ads. Anything more than that is not within my realm of expertise. Even so, it took a lot of work to create this site.
And then, oddly, (the old-timers can stop laughing now), it doesn't just "appear" in Google or other searches. Lots of sites are out there in the world that talk about money and finance. They don't say what I say and I don't say what they say; however, since there are so many, I have to figure out a way to make mine visible. Now, Google does tell you that there is an "automatic" crawling process that puts your site on the search engine, but you can also apply to them and Yahoo and the other search engines so that they can become aware of your site. In my research, I found that some people advise against this, but I could not find a compelling reason not to do it except that it took time. I did ask, and I got indexed about one week after I asked. (It is a lot of work to go through this step, but, I do believe it was worthwhile). However, why I got indexed is probably because I submitted to a carnival. A carnival, as best as I can explain it, is sort of a forum for one particular topic (in my case, "The Carnival of Debt Reduction," or "The Carnival of Personal Finance.)" You can find carnivals on all sorts of topics at Blog Carnival and you can also use the forms there to submit your own articles to carnivals.
One piece of advice: the first time I entered a carnival, it was very last minute, and I submitted MY WHOLE SITE: clearly, a newbie mistake. What you should do is take one well-written piece to showcase and you give the information to take people directly to that article. Now, if you are going to do that, be sure you are at least set up with trackbacks (which I'm still learning about, so I'll get back to that topic later). Then, you may get credit for the traffic. As I understand it, submitting an article creates a link to your site which is great for Google rankings (and other web site search engines as well). What it also does is gets other submitters, at least, to see your site. When I submitted, I made sure to look at other people's submissions and go through some of their sites and make comments. I think there is, for me, a spirit to which I want to approach carnivals: I'm going to read everyone else's stuff (or at least attempt to), make comments when moved and, if I like the information, look around to see if they are advertising anything that I want to look at.
I'm trying every day to learn more and more about gaining traffic. In fact, some days I just think I'm talking to myself, which, in some ways, is not the worst thing, because it is keeping me honest -- meaning, making me continue with the underlying project of taking control over our family's finances. But, I'll try to update you with my own and other people's ideas as I come across them. For some good sites that can help you down this road should you choose to go, see the links on the left of the article. I'll be posting about how to get affiliates at a later date.