Last day of the pay period here, so I’ve been keeping busy. Brent’s off with Ariel completing the application for the apartment we think we want, so I get some extra time to transcribe.

How I look forward to taking some time to do website work this weekend! If I can just do better this pay period at keeping up with my work during the week, I’ll be able to do a lot more website work and maybe have my work start paying off. Sure would be nice. Right now, while Google is spidering my site, it only has the home page and several pages I have since removed listed, arrgh! Teach me to let Google on before I’m certain of what I’m doing with a site. Not that Yahoo has done any better by me, and they’ve eaten a lot more bandwidth. I still have plenty of bandwidth, so it’s not a real concern, but I certainly would like to see it be put to better use!

It’s just not my day.

I went grocery shopping, came home and one of the bags broke, dropping a can on my big toe. Naturally the rim hit, so I have a lovely bruise. Shortly thereafter, I dropped a baby gate on the same foot. At least it wasn’t on my toe, but that left me with a nice scrape.

At least it all happened to my left foot, so I can still use my transcription foot pedal as I normally would with my right. It’s time to get to work.

I hope Ariel naps or at least relaxes today. I was making her bed after washing her sheets, when she did something and caused a part of the bed rail to pop loose. I can’t get it back in, so I took the whole rail off and Brent’s going to have to fix it later. I’m trusting her to not fall out if she does take a nap, but she’s still playing now after 20 minutes of being in her room, so I doubt a nap is happening.

Well, it’s quiet, transcribe as much as I can day again, so you know what that means…

I haven’t done as much as I should have already. I’ve just gotten started, after spending too much time on discussion boards, planning for tomorrow’s newsletter and so forth. I finally told myself to stop it and get moving. So of course, here I am. Bad, I know.

I’m finally getting better again about transcribing, though. Not enough better yet, but as my energy level increases with this little rascal, I’m getting things accomplished again. Still way behind, but not as behind as I’ve been. I’ll take what I can get and try to improve upon it.

I’m still working on submitting my site to directories.

Now, keep in mind, many of these will probably do me no good at all. I submitted to the major ones first, of course, and with these minor ones I can just hope the links do some good someday. It should be interesting to see what happens when the links do update for my sites.

I’m still deleting far more sites off the list than I am submitting to. Lots of directories that just don’t relate to most home businesses, overly specialized or I just don’t like the look of. Maybe I’m picky, but I do prefer to see something of a professional look to these things.

I’ve submitted to some 40+ directories since I began, with hundreds more to review and submit to. I’d like to at least end up with 200 or so links from all this and a nice solid resource to offer my visitors to my home business website.

Wow! Thank goodness for antivirus software.

I’m being good today again and submitting my sites to more directories while cleaning out that list. Just killed a real bad one, one that makes me wonder about the quality of the list if this kind of thing is on it.

Went to one of the links. OK, not a directory, but it had a links page, so I clicked to go to it.

Out pop bunches of porn ads, and my antivirus informs me it has stopped a trojan from getting into the system. Phew!

Now I’m running AdAware, to be followed immediately by Spybot.

Just can’t trust anyone these days, but this should be a good list by the time I’m done with it. If it doesn’t kill my computer first!

Well, I did it. Got a new article up on my jewelry website. It’s nice to be getting some things done on the site. Of course, you know what this means…

That’s right.

Ariel opted out of her nap again today.

She’s been taking them so well the past couple days, but today, nothing. Good bonk while she was playing in her room instead of napping, which got her to set up quite a howl and brought me up there, but no nap.

Oh, well. Good thing is that it means she should go right to sleep tonight. The past couple nights she hasn’t wanted to go to bed until 9 or 10 at night. Brent went into her room the other night because at 9:30 her light was still on, and she was sitting there flipping through a book. She informed him that she was reading and did not want to go to bed. That’s my daughter! Lots of bookaholics in my family! He read to her, then she was finally ready to sleep.

Hmm… I think I can sneak some transcription in now. She’s BUSY!

Well, I managed 10 directory submissions today. First day I’ve managed that since I decided to do it.

Of course, that’s 10 directories, but I realized after the first few that my other sites weren’t listed in most of them yet, so I added 1-4 sites to each directory. Glad I realized that before I got too far that there was no reason to be treating the submission of each site as a separate project to be done at a later date.

However, I probably deleted more than 3 times that many sites from the list I found. Lots of places I just didn’t feel were all that relevant, charged, nonexistant, etc. Should have a nice list by the time I’m done with this project.

Ariel’s been a pretty good sport about this. Now she gets her reward… Mommy’s coming to play!

Wow! I got to take a day off yesterday!

Well, from Ariel at least, and only for a few hours. I was helping my sister with her website. It’s still a bit rough, but it was so nice to be able to go over and not have a toddler interfering in our work.

Aside from that, I barely touched the computer yesterday. No transcription, only a few discussion boards… boy I’m going to play catch-up today.

At least once I’ve taken a break. Ariel got me up way too early and I haven’t been sleeping well. Ah, the delights of pregnancy.

I’d call it a pretty productive day… lots of directory submissions, as I said earlier, and five new articles. Wish I could do this much every day, but it’s not going to happen. I think, though, that I will try to maintain a rate of 10 new directory submissions a day for a time, until they’re all done. That will hopefully keep building my links steadily. Most days, in all honesty, I’ll probably be lucky to get one new article in. After all, I still have the transcription to worry about.

Maybe I can get a test ad going on AdWords now, before Brent gets home or Ariel wakes up. That’s right, she’s napping, so I have to get this stuff done now.

Just got some promotion started on my fine jewelry store. I’ve submitted to several search engines and directories (mostly directories; good search engines don’t need submissions). I have huge list yet to submit to. Hopefully this will get me a good start on backlinks. It’s a lot of work, but hopefully it will be worth it.

Now it’s time to continue with the content writing. I still have a few dozen articles I want to write for it, so I’m trying to alternate promotion with content production. Work, work, work… despite the myth of easy income, that’s the real life in affiliate marketing. Takes a long time to get things automated.

I think when I’ve submitted to 200 or so directories (my list is longer than that), I’ll make a list of the ones I’ve submitted to and use it as an incentive for the upcoming newsletter for my home business website. Who doesn’t need to know where they can submit their links? But first I want to be certain that I only include sites I know.