Whee! Just got a call from a potential website design customer I’ve been talking with. She really wants to go with my services, but it’s her husband’s site and he has a designer he wants to give another chance to. I’ve been giving her so much advice on this it’s just amazing. I’ll be hearing back from her in another couple days, Monday at the latest it sounds like, to find out if I have the job or not.

Phew! Just did a major update of my site map. It looks so much better and should be easier to use, not to mention having more keywords for the search engines to play with. I still have to add descriptions to some of the newsletter issues, but it’s going well.

I am so tired from staying up last night transcribing. Dinner was a hit with the inlaws, although they were a half hour later than I had planned for. All in all, a good day yesterday.

Well, I did pretty well towards my goal yesterday. 850 lines of transcription rather than 1000, but that’s not bad, considering I often do only 500.

AdWords can drive me nuts! I just went to check my stats, and it’s down at the moment. I really have to get transcribing, but I guess I’ll have to check back later. At least the outages are short when they happen. I’m testing a minimum of two ads on each of my campaigns right now, trying to get some decent clickthrough going. It’s pretty tough. Honestly, if you want to try advertising on Google or any other pay per click engine, read up on it first. You’ll save yourself a lot of money, and it isn’t easy even then. For the moment, I’d recommend starting with Google Cash, and once you’re going, then think about supplementing with the Search Engine Institute. They have some things in common, but they are very complimentary.

I decided to make it easier for other sites to link to me. I added a form for webmasters to fill out and four suggested links for them to use for my site. Each goes to a different page, so more of my pages have a chance to build relevance and links can be more relevant to the sites they are linked from. I think it will be a good strategy, but only time will tell.

Had a little fun looking over the stats for this blog. Wow, do a lot of people want to know about Dora Casso. I’m getting several searches a day for it. Wish I knew more, folks, but it just seems to be an odd spam. Just don’t reply to it, ok? If you want to see my email, which will probably be almost word for word what you recieved, I posted it on March 24. It’s certainly an interesting case, but let’s not encourage her/him. At least without a clear site the mysterious Dora cannot build link popularity, only lots of posts on the name by bloggers like me. At least she hasn’t made Wordtracker’s top keywords list yet.

Getting about the results I expected from today’s ezine send. I gained more than 100 subscribers somehow or other over the past week, I suspect from the virus or something, and I’ve lost the majority of those. Still more subscribers than I had last week. Most removals are from simple failures. There were some weird email addresses in there, such as a listserv one, which replyed to me that there were no commands it recognized. You can’t tell me the listserve subscribed itself! I really hope this can be resolved soon, or I’ll have to move my ezine which means, yuck, having to reconfirm everyone and update all my pages. Reconfirming a list can mean a 75% or more loss of the list, so it could put me back down to 100 subscribers or so. I really don’t want to do it, but what choice do I really have?

On the plus side, doing reasonably on the transcription today. I’m over 200 lines already, which only took me about an hour. I was hoping to beat 1000 lines (long shot, I rarely do that), which isn’t looking likely, but we’ll see how it goes. I had to go to the store to get supplies to cook dinner for my inlaws tonight, so I lost about an hour there.

This is most disturbing. I noticed earlier this week an odd jump in my number of subscribers, when I have not changed my marketing or anything. Today I recieved in my own email a confirmation to my ezine, when I had not done anything to subscribe myself. This is doubly disturbing because I have a double opt in, so subscribers have to respond to a verification email before getting the confirmation, so I am not sure what has happened. I am very concerned about spam complaints over this. I have contacted my ezine host to see what can be done.

Today’s going to be a busy day for me. My daughter is with her grandparents today, so it’s a serious work day. Going to try to get a lot of medical transcription done mostly. They’re coming over for dinner after, so I have to get supplies. I’m making Balsamic Chicken, which is my husband’s favorite.

Doing pretty good today, I think. Got some medical transcription done, and finally updated my Google AdWords. One very important tip when you’re using AdWords. Use phrases and put them in quotes or brackets. Your clickthrough rates will be much better, and your account is far less likely to be slowed.

Now for some housecleaning, blech!

Ah, the delights of working at home. Went outside with my daughter to play, and there was water coming from one of the pipes on the side of the house. Not just a drip, but a steady stream. This is one of the times that I am glad to be renting, and that my landlord (otherwise known as my sister) has a home warranty. The home warranty people have contacted a plumber, who should be contacting me shortly (2 hours so far) to set up an appointment to fix it. I don’t want to use any water I don’t have to today!. Lunch dishes are just sitting in the sink. The water is outside, and I don’t want things to get backed up so badly that the water comes inside. I think that’s reasonable. Plumber had better call soon, though.

All these things can keep me very busy, and make getting any actual work done difficult. My daughter went down nicely for her nap, so it’s time to earn that work at home mom title and get busy! Medical transcription, here I come!

Call it a reminder to have a carbon monoxide alarm in your house. Mine just went off today. It was a false alarm, I’m happy to say, but I had to drop my daughter with a neighbor while I went back into the house to open the windows and call the gas company. They were wonderful and the guy was here within an hour. EVerything is fine, thank goodness, and I am still very glad to have had the alarm in the house. Apparently, the older First Alert models are prone to false alarms, so we’re replacing it now.

Aak! It’s birthday season. Going to my sister’s daughter’s first birthday tomorrow, a cousin’s daughter’s birthday (one month older than my daughter) tomorrow, my husband’s birthday shortly after that, then another cousin’s daughter’s birthday (3 days older than my daughter), and then my daughter’s birthday. Maybe we all should have planned it better.

Got a bit of work done on the website amid all the shopping. A page on making your own cleansers to save money and have less toxic (in most cases) products. It’s at http://www.homewiththekids.com/homemade-cleansers.htm. I’ll be putting an article related to it in the newsletter this week, and linking the resource box directly to it. I’m thinking it might make an interesting linking strategy to link articles to relevant pages rather than to just my main page.