Merry Christmas everyone!

It’s time for me to get serious about taking time off from business to enjoy the holidays as best I can, given the way things are going, and at the very least this is my last blog entry until after the move is completed.

It might take a bit longer to get back, unfortunately. My mother called last night to say my grandfather is back in the hospital, with about a 30% chance of surviving. He was in at Thanksgiving too, with worse chances, and made it, but that doesn’t really mean that much. All I can do right now is hope that the phone doesn’t ring with bad news.

My husband and I last night were joking (before that phone call) that this apartment might not be meant to be. With all the trouble we’ve had getting into it (long story) and the fact that it’s likely to rain on our move-in day, we’re really starting to wonder. But it is so perfect in most ways, with washer and dryer in unit and the playground right outside our patio I just can’t give it up.

I wish all of you a prosperous New Year.

Are you keeping up with CAN-SPAM?

New ruling on it just came out, and there’s a great summary at http://emailuniverse.com/ezine-tips/?CAN-SPAM-ACT—FTC-December-16,-2004-Ruling&id=1223&cat=strategy you should probably read if you do any emailing at all for your business.

This is making RSS very interesting to a lot of people, since it is quite a bit safer and has fewer restrictions. Of course, it’s very hard to track your readership through RSS, but that’s better than being hit with a huge fine.

Less than a week now until I move! With this going on, I’ll definitely be focusing more on developing my RSS reader base, so I’ll be buying and reading RSS Exposed just as soon as I’m reasonably settled. I’ll even get around to getting an RSS reader installed on my computer, which I’ve been skipping since I knew I’d have to move, and my own computer is not the one connected to the internet at this house. It strikes me as something pretty important for my business. I may even see if an RSS-only newsletter works on one of my sites. Could be an interesting experiment. I don’t expect it to get the same readership as an email newsletter, just because not everyone will be comfortable downloading an RSS reader, but as an experiment, just to see the possibilities, it is tempting.

Looks like Google is still working on that algorithm. My sites are coming back up on many keywords, which is quite a relief. Still short on traffic, but then considering my main visitors on this site are moms, well, this time of year most mom’s don’t have time to play online, so I’m being realistic about that part and fairly patient. My other websites are doing adequately, but since they are all much newer they didn’t have a lot to lose in the rankings. Ahhh, if only they had been the ones that gained when so many others lost!

It’s going to be quite a Christmas, or should I say quite a quiet Christmas here at home, hectic trying to see all the usual family. We’re moving into a new apartment December 27, so obviously we don’t want to have to clean up much here. There are the usual problems still to be settled of who we are visiting when, so celebrating with family always gets a little crazy, but both Brent and I like seeing our family members, siblings as well as parents, which means finding ways to see a lot of people in a short period without tiring ourselves out.

I do look forward to being moved into our new apartment, however. I really want to get settled so that I can work more normally again and make more progress on my websites. Maybe I’m a little overoptimistic in that regard, since there’s a playground right outside our patio in the new apartment, so I know what Ariel is going to want to do all day every day. I’ll have to see what I can do to work around that. At least it will help tire her out and encourage naps (please?).

It’s a special time of year at SBI! If you’ve been thinking of trying SBI, now is the time to buy.

Why is that? Because from now until December 25, 2004, SBI is having a special buy one, get one free sale.

This sale means if you buy one SBI site, you can give one to a friend or family member for Christmas. Or, if you prefer, develop them both yourself. Either way, this is a rare opportunity to get even more from SBI. You don’t even have to start the second site immediately. You can wait up to nine months, so no need to overload yourself with work.

Why do people choose Site Build It with so many other options out there?

Let’s see… great tools to plan your website, so you know what to do improve your odds of online success, tools to make it easy to build your website, proven results, keyword reports, search engine optimization help, newsletter delivery… the list goes on.

SBI is great for those who want a website, want to earn money online, but don’t know how to get started. It will help you with the parts you didn’t know you could do.

Remember, this offer ends on December 25, 2004, so you need to act now.

Wow! I hope my rankings come back soon!

With the changes in Google, my traffic is down a fair bit. Now, I’m used to a drop over the weekend, and today is Friday, which often is a bit low, but so far today is a lot low! Comes of being a work at home website, I suppose. Parents are too busy on the weekends to surf websites. But this is much worse than my normal weekend drop.

Well, maybe it will get better after the holidays. There’s so much to do this time of year that some of this could just be natural.

It’s interesting reading about this in the search engine forums. Some people are in an absolute panic. I’m more with the wait and see crowd. A lot of the time, these huge changes are only temporary, lasting for a few days.

My other websites haven’t really been hit at all, but then most of them really don’t rank well in Google anyhow. My Yahoo and MSN traffic are both more or less stable.