Now it is time for my monthly update to Case 2008. At lot have been going on and many things have changed. It is funny that it sometimes seem like time is moving at an incredible speed and you’re not able to get anything done but when you look back at the things that have happened it can actually be a lot.

Because of the many things that I would like to share with you in this months “issue” of Case 2008 stats, I’ve decided to split the post into smaller posts. I don’t know whether I am the only one but I can sometimes get a little stressed when I see these really long posts in my RSS reader but I only have a few minutes to spare. More that often I find myself clicking “read” without having done so simply to avoid stressing over wanting to read it but not having the time to do so.

So in this post I’m going to cover the following topics that have changed in September for the Case 2008 website:

  • Redesigning the website
  • Finding and losing ghost writers

A redesign was implemented

I felt that the previous design was limiting the opportunities for the site. Now only was it hard for the readers to find the RSS button to subscribe but the site also lacked a way for me to start using 125×125 ads to see whether I was able to make some addition income through affiliate sales.

The new design is far from finished but here is what it looked like before:

and how it looks now:

I’ve used a standard design and changed it a little bit. There is plenty of room for improvement but I just haven’t gotten around to doing that yet.

I think a logo would give the site a more professional look and a “subscribe to email” newsletter (opt-in form) is badly needed. Right now I am leaving visitors “on the table” and in the end that means I’m leaving money on the table. If you have a website but are not capturing email addresses you should start NOW. An email list is a great way to drive both traffic and sales to your site.

I had a writer

First I thought I had a writer and then he bailed on me because he couldn’t make ends meet. He had to go back to his job in order to pay the bills. So for the first 7-10 days I spend time looking for a writer that would not only be able to write the articles I needed but who could also do the actual posting directly to the blog.

If you’re used to blogging and using Wordpress then this might seem like a no-brainer, but what I found was that most of these freelance ghostwriters had now clue whatsoever about how to post on a Wordpress blog.

Secondly I have had it with ghostwriters from India or any other country where they have a hard time speaking and writing English. That also meant that I narrowed down the field of people that I could choose from because the price per article still had to be reasonable (to me).

I found a great writer and lost her temporarily

After communicating with a fair bunch of people I finally found someone that sounded like she knew what she was doing. She didn’t know about Wordpress but I figured that I could easily teach her what she needed to know.

This would also give me the benefit of having to write an easy-to-follow guide that I could reuse if I were to launch other sites in the future. An after a few emails back and forth I now have a great guide that any future writers can use.

She began posting and I had asked her to post one article per day. She could write them all at once and the pre-schedule them if she wanted to. I gave her a list of keyword as inspiration and she started typing.

After correcting a few layout challenges everything seem to be moving along great. I had a lot more free time because I didn’t have to post but even more importantly I didn’t have to spend time thinking of it. I knew that she were posting daily so I could spend time on other things like building links as well as grow the business as I wanted.

Then it happened. I received an email that she would no longer post because it was taking up to much of her time. I was a bit amazed since she had only been writing for 12 days so I had to ask her what was up (at first I was angry but luckily I waited a day to respond so I could calm down).

It turned out that she had been diagnosed with a disease (I didn’t quite understand what it was) and that she had to focus on that for the time being. She was however glad that I had responded the way I did (phew) and told me that she would be glad to come back and write at a later stage.

So now I am back to ordering chunks of articles and posting them myself. An advice I would like to share with you is to always have some articles lying around for a situation like this. I didn’t have that so I had to wait a about 5 days before I was able to put new content on the site (I didn’t want to write it myself).

The good thing about this “unfortunate incident” is that I have now found another writer that is almost quite as good but for half the price. This fits great into my article marketing strategy that I’ll tell you about in another post.

Damn…

I wasn’t really planning on writing this much about these two topics as I have several other topics that I would like to share with you. But I’ll give them to you in my following posts so you’re not going to drown in text. So until next time (which will probably be later today).

Take care,
Mikael

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