Week 4 – add plug-ins, add widgets, and adjusting theme

This image to the right was purchased from istockphoto.com and represents the internal struggle I had with
spending $47.99 on images.  Just to let you know, this image was originally bought for a post on a different blog of mine… So, I am recycling the images I already purchased.

Time Breakdown: 14 Hours

Leah’s Time (0 hours):

• 0 Leah was busy and didn’t have time this week to help out.

Jason’s Time (14 hours):

• 1 hour Adjusted theme to make the google adsense links look somewhat like the links for the rest of the page.  Making it look more uniform and better designed.
• 1 hour looking for a new theme.  While adjusting the website and trying to get it to look like I want I was so annoyed I took time to look for a theme that I could use instead that had a similar look to the one I was using.  After the hour I gave up and decided I will stick with what I got until further down the road.
• 3 hours finding and setting up plug ins.
• 1 hour looking at widgets.  I ended up only using the search bar, but will add more down the road.
• 3 hour researching the topic and adding content to pages.  The SEO plug-in was saying we need about 50 – 100 more words for a few pages, so I was trying to write more but wanted to ensure it was relevant and helpful.
• 3 hours messing with SEO plug in settings inside the pages and posts.  Some needed a higher density of key words and they all needed meta descriptions.
• 2 hours finding, purchasing, adding, and optimizing images.

Plan

Here is an update list of our plans.  The difference is that we worked out more details of what we want to do for each week.

• Week 5: Create and implement Article Marketing plan.
• Week 6: Continue to do article marketing, while improving sites share ability via social media and social bookmarking sites.
• Week 7: Adjust marketing campaign towards what is giving us the most traffic.
• Week 8: optimize the wordpress site, google adsense, and the marketing.

Lessons

I learned several lessons this week while working on the niche site journal.  It has been a rough week because of Leah not being able to help.

-Taking breaks

On Saturday I put in a 10 hour day working on the blog.  I figure it would be fine.  During my Undergraduate work and Masters Degree it was common to spend days on end working on projects and papers. I thought it would be no problem to sit down and working for the day. It was a lot harder than I remember.

The thing that saved me was the five to fifteen minute breaks every few hours.  I kept finding myself trying to work and my brain wondering off. It took me about half a day to realize that without a break I was being unproductive and unable to focus.

-Perfection can hold you back

I can’t seem to get the WordPress theme to do exactly what I want and it drives me crazy. I have also realized that I could keep adjusting the theme for another 2 weeks before I would be close to happy with it.  Instead of doing that, I will just launch as is and when it starts making me money I will fix, adjust, and optimize the websites.

My Niche Site Journal:

• Week 0: Explaining Niche Site Journal
• Week 1: Choosing a niche
• Week 2: Wordpress Site Theme and Launching the Blog
• Week 3: WordPress Site Editing & Content Creation
• Week 4: Add Plug-ins, Add Widgets, and Adjusting the Theme
• Week 5: Back links and Article Marketing
• Week 6: Getting Indexed, Writing Content, and Waiting for Google
• Week 7: Back linking Strategy
• Week 8: We Made Money!
• Jan 2013 Update