Change of plans!

on Sunday, October 12, 2008

Isn't it amazing how fast time goes?! In the back of my mind I have been thinking to myself that I must blog down my 'master plan' and changes in life but there never seems to been much time to keep several blogs updated.

A lot has happened since January and I have a couple of ideas for my own business (on the net) but they are still in the infant stages so I'm not going to share details at this stage. It involves Norwegian/English translation but I am weighing up the pro's and con's.

When I started this blog I had this idea about working from home and spending time with my children. Well, I'm going to try and put this as gently as possible - I must have had rocks in my head!

As mentioned I am working on some business ideas but quite honestly - I need to get out and meet people! So in the light of my 'emotional change' I have considered many more options. But they do still revolve around the children because I'm not quite ready to let go yet.

Another option that I am considering is English teaching. But I am trying to find out what I need to do to get a Norwegian English teacher's qualification as well as a British one. Working as a teacher would allow me a schedule which would accommodate the children. I have been spending some time at my youngest son's school and I quite enjoy the primary school.

Unfortunately I did a BA in psychology and History in South Africa so I would definitely have to take on a few subjects to make up for teaching subjects.

So with all these plans whirling around in my head and an 18 month old daughter who is only at creche 2 half days pr week (working on that one). - my grand master plan is not developing as fast as I would like it to.

It's seems the little princess is awake. I will be back...sometime sooner than last time.

Lost the plot

on Friday, January 25, 2008

Boy oh boy! Are things getting hectic in this household, I had forgotten how fast a baby can crawl! You know that independence idea I had and all that talk about taking more time for myself and getting a tan and working on that sixpack stomach? Nowhere near it!

Hubby has finally decided to do that seminar run in South Africa and the response has been overwhelming. The initial 350 seats were sold out within the first 24 hours so he has another 200 people to accommodate. The man is working 24/7, he worked through the night last night and now he has just passed out in the bedroom. But there’s enough limelight on him – this is my space – my corner!!!

I decided to take some steps to ensure my route to independence so I have found somebody to assist me with cleaning the house once a week for a couple of hours. Today is Friday and the cleaners have just left, the house is clean and I have two hours before the boys come home from school. That means two hours to ‘play’ and discover new things in cyber world-what a luxury!

And I found a brilliant babysitter down the road who will be looking after the kids (all 3 of them) one night pr week so that hubby and I can romance. This is a quite a big step for me with the little one being 10 months old. We had a trial run last week and everything went perfectly fine and my little one loves her new ‘friend’. I did consider installing hidden cameras but decided against it. Our little princess is worshiped and adored by her older brothers so there are watchful eyes on her all the time.

My friend from Norway will be spending the week with me next week so I have written the week off for socializing and entertainment. She is one of my most precious friends so I can’t express how excited I am.

I haven’t had much time to play in cyber world this week but I did learn something interesting today from Bloggernoob about private ad sales. People actually trade ads to make it look as if their blog is earning lots of money and that way they can sell their money blog for more – fascinating!

My daughter is trying to pull the Sony TV screen off the stand – this would be the same TV that her brother drew a cave man on a few months ago. What happened to good old fashioned glass TV screens – they were so easy to clean. Ahhh the good old days…..

GoogleAnalytics and linklove

on Friday, January 18, 2008

So I’ve been jumping around cyber space lately (that’s in between dealing with a teething baby and family emergencies). I am overwhelmed with the stuff that I am learning from bloggers all over the world, there’s just so much information out there!

What started out as a little project to keep friends and Business Warriors updated on the progress of our move has turned into something completely different. It never occurred to me that strangers would want to read my diary but apparently they do. I feel as if I have crossed the threshold into a completely different world and there are all these friendly strangers who want to teach me stuff and tell me about their life experiences – it’s just amazing!

I started reading RennyBA's Terella because I wanted to teach my husband about Norwegian culture but instead Renny has introduced me to
technorati and Blogcatalog and other blog things that I never worried to check out before. There’s just so much to learn and so little time!

During the first year of Migration Diary I didn’t even think about monitoring traffic or joining blogging communities but then one day hubby decided that he wanted to see how many people were reading my blog so he enabled Google Analytics (this was a couple of months ago). Once I realized that quite a few people were reading my blog I became quite fascinated with the whole ‘traffic’ thing so I started looking at other blogs to see what other bloggers where doing.

Now I’m jumping around technorati, MyBlogLog and Blogcatalog meeting other bloggers and having a wail of a time learning all kinds of new stuff. I was a little disappointed in Amatomu.com though. They were monitoring my traffic quite nicely for one week and I made it to number 138 or something on their list but then I had a few hundred clicks last Tuesday(due to Petesweekly) and all of a sudden they cut me off. Now I can’t read my page impressions or user sessions on their chart anymore and I’m plunging to the depths of the Amatomu blogging chart!

Hubby said it’s because they probably think that I cheated or something when they saw the numbers jump so high within a few hours. Ah well, my claim to fame – I got ditched by Amatomu. I’m still getting linklove though, I’m not sure how that works but I’ll try to learn all about that this weekend.

Time to put baby down for a little snooze, the journey will have to continue later.

AdSense makes sense?

on Tuesday, January 1, 2008

I was thinking about AdSense this morning when my mother phoned. With panic in her voice she informed me that my youngest son had managed to lock himself in the kitchen and now they couldn’t unlock the door. It took me five minutes to get there, I managed to crawl through the kitchen window but after two hours we had still not managed to open the door. Hubby gave it another try with his famous tool box but he was just as unsuccessful. Eventually we gave up and I went hunting for Chinese take away for gran as she was starving. Unfortunately nothing was open with the exception of Tesco express and I managed to grab the last sandwich on the shelf.

Back to AdSense, I searched through the forum to find out what other people thought about AdSense and weigh up the pros and cons. At first it seemed so simple but then according to some people it wasn’t that simple. I understand that if you have a site which has it’s main focus on making money from ‘clicks’ or advertising then it would work well but that’s not exactly what I have. Hell, I don’t even know what I have yet!

I went searching for my guru (my husband) and asked him to give me one simple reason why I wouldn’t want to use AdSense on my blog. I already knew why I should use it but now I wanted to know why I shouldn’t. The answer was quite simply;- because I don’t want to redirect traffic away from my blog. I want to have affiliate links on my blog so that I can earn $49 dollars pr click instead of a few cents. Now that just makes so much sense to me! Quality not quantity - that works for me!

So now I have decided to search through clickbank and find some really good ebooks that I believe will add value to somebody’s life.