It’s been one of those weeks. For those who dread the terrible twos, it’s nothing compared to what a 3 year old can come up with. My daughter turns three on Monday, and she has been getting more and more stubborn and difficult. Admittedly, with a baby brother in the picture, she has a lot to get used to, but it’s still amazing how difficult she can be some days. She ran away from me the other day as we were coming into the apartment, after refusing to come inside. It’s not easy hauling a 3 year old through the door while carrying a car seat with an infant inside. It’s going to take a lot of work to get through these next few months.

On the plus side, we get a break tonight. We have tickets to see Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy tonight. I have no idea if they did a good job or not, but the ads make it look like they may have done all four books in one movie, which is not exactly promising. But it is opening night, so we should at least have the most interesting crowd to see it with.

I wonder how many people will bring their towels?

Quick treat for affiliate marketers who go through Linkshare. You can get a free subscription to Revenue, which is a great magazine for affiliate marketers. You have to sign in, then it’s on the left. I’ve read Revenue before, and it has some very good information.

For those who have been wondering how AdSense is doing this month, well, let’s take a look at the numbers I can share. Now, my traffic did about double this month, due to some very important keywords showing up in the top 10 in searches on some engines. But my income is up nearly five times. I can tell you that this is greatly due to how I moved my ads on this website – I still haven’t done the others, but then my other sites don’t get near the traffic that this one does. My CTR on some pages is nothing short of amazing. I can’t disclose that number, of course.

All in all, I’d say the advice in AdSense Secrets works and works well. Can you figure it out without buying the ebook? Maybe, but if you can do it faster with help, isn’t it worth spending the money?

Some days are easier than others. Ariel’s in one of her moods where she has no interest in giving Mommy any peace at all. We’re going back and forth between the living room and the bathroom as she tries to get rewards for using the potty. Gage is his usual hungry self, which is wonderful if exhausting. I just keep reminding myself that he has to grow well enough to convince the neurosurgeon that he will be strong enough for his surgery.

At least I get a break soon. Going over to my sister’s place to watch some movies today. Ariel will no doubt run around after the cats and have a lot of fun and tire herself out.

It can be hard to balance priorities. I love playing with Ariel, but I love working on my business too, and I know that the sooner I prove I can keep my income up, the sooner I can quit medical transcription, which will give me more free time to play with Ariel and a much easier schedule. It’s quite a challenge right now getting enough done, but if things keep up as they have, life should get easier soon. I may even be able to quit transcription around the time Gage has his surgery, which is my current goal.

How about two? It’s time for May Madness. If you buy one SiteSell website, you can get a second for an extra $100. This is a great bonus, especially since you have up to 9 months to start the second site, so you aren’t stuck trying to do two sites at once unless you really want to.

Why SiteSell? It has what is probably the best collection of tools that help even novice webmasters get their websites up and running. Experienced webmasters can appreciate the tools as well.

If yo’ve been thinking about getting a website online, now is the time. This deal ends May 1, so you only have a little bit of time to think about it.

You might appreciate my latest article I’ve added, Searching Craigslist for Work at Home Jobs. Craigslist is not the easiest site to search, as it is intended for local use, but it is not uncommon for work at home or telecommute jobs to be open to people outside a particular area, and not all employers know to mark it for all cities. However, as Craigslist offers an RSS feed as well as email notifications for searches, it is relatively easy to keep up.

Now, some of you may be wondering why I don’t just take advantage of the RSS feeds and place them on this website. They’d be great content, after all.

That’s quite true, but I don’t feel my use of them would be within the terms of use for Craigslist. I’d want far too many of the feeds, and they would only want me to take a couple cities at most. I feel it is far better for me to tell you how to get the feeds than it would be to risk my IP being banned from Craigslist.

We’ll have to wait until next week probably for results. The hospital told us 3-5 days, which I assume means business days, until the doctor calls us with the results. Gage recovered quickly from the anesthesia with no problems, aside from being very hungry, as he had not been fed since 8:30 a.m., and he woke about 1:30 p.m.

I’m very happy to have this next step done. Next week is going to be very busy for me. Gage has a routine doctor’s appointment on Monday, so he’ll be getting his 2-month vaccinations, and an appointment with one of the surgeons on Wednesday. I’m hoping to bring Ariel up to my sister’s place one day next week, probably Tuesday, so she can start getting used to my brother-in-law watching her, as he is the most likely person to have to care for her during Gage’s surgery. We figure their two daughters, who are close to Ariel’s age, will provide a good distraction for her.

My AdSense numbers are still up. I broke $100 for a single day for the first time yesterday. I hope that happens many more times. I still need to make placement changes on some of my other sites when I have a free moment, but since some of them are more sales focused than content focused, the placement is not so simple. Still, I think AdSense Secrets has a lot to offer if you aren’t getting the CTR you think you might be able to get. It has a good guarantee, so if you don’t find it as worthwhile as I have, you can get your money back.

It’s in so many ways a relief to have things going again, even if it makes me a bit nervous, since they’ll have to use anesthesia. No other way to get the information the doctors need, however.

I’m almost glad we had someone call here last week thinking they were supposed to schedule his CT scan through their office, even though they were mistaken and it meant that I had to do some calling around to confirm which place was the right one to go. If it hadn’t happened, I might not have found out that he was also scheduled for an appointment next week for one of the surgeons to look at him. No one from his office bothered to call and tell us about it.

But it can be well worth it. I’ve spent about the past hour and a half submitting to free directories that don’t require a reciprocal link. It’s tedious, but I hope it will be worthwhile. The hardest part is that there is rarely a way to know if the directory is still active or no.

However, it is one of those things I can do one-handed, so feeding Gage doesn’t do more than slow things down a little. That boy can eat! I thought you didn’t have to worry about how much boys ate until they were older!

Honestly, it’s fun, even though it is tiring having to feed him so much.

I’m just loving how my AdSense numbers have held up. If you can’t figure out how to improve your AdSense clickthroughs on your own, I definitely recommend trying AdSense Secrets and saving yourself some time. The time you save in research should pay you back for the ebook very quickly. Even on quiet weekends such as this one, I’m earning more than I used to.

It’s just been one of those days. Ariel wanted to play all day… very normal, of course, but she was more determined than usual to include Mommy in her games, but Gage was very clingy and needing lots of attention. These kinds of days are exhausting and it’s almost impossible to get things done.

It’s amazing how tiring this can be. Ariel wasn’t even home all day, but it feels like I didn’t have a break. She was out for more than an hour with Daddy shopping. Now she’s off to spend the night with cousins, so I do get a break.

Naturally, this was one of those days I wanted to get things done. I’ve been working hard on my credit card site, making changes and updates. I haven’t gotten as much done as I would have liked, but I’ve made some fair progress. Looks like it will take me a while to complete the changes, though. I still have to transcribe tonight too.

AdSense revenues were a little down today, but that has a lot to do with lower traffic. This site is much quieter on weekends than weekdays, and I’m sure lots of people who might otherwise be surfing the net are finishing off taxes instead. The CPC and clickthrough rate held pretty steady, so I can definitely attribute this drop to traffic, not any failure of ad placement.

Just a small one… 3.9, but it was a lot closer to San Diego than most I’ve experienced, so it felt stronger. First time I’ve ever heard the “freight train roar” that is sometimes associated with earthquakes too. Didn’t wake Ariel or Gage though, so I went back to sleep after checking out the earthquake website. It’s quite a way to start a day, though.

My AdSense earnings are holding today, but of course I want to give it some time before I call it an absolute success… more or less from sheer stubbornness. It’s hard to not go checking my stats every hour or so. I haven’t been this anxious about my AdSense stats since I first signed up.

Really up today! Let’s just say double what it was before. I’d say it has definitely helped to move things around. From what I understand from reading around other places, my CTR was already higher than average, so I’m quite impressed by this increase. We’ll see if it holds, of course, or if today is a fluke. If it’s not a fluke… well, you’d better go get your own copy of AdSense Secrets!