Wikihow

Yesterday, I contributed to a few more wiki's at WikiHow:

How to Build a Classroom Library at Home
How to Teach a Child to Write Their Name
How to Homeschool a Preschooler

Contributing to an existing wiki is a great way to help the WikiHow community without building a wiki of your own. There are a great deal of existing pages that contain good info, but need to be fleshed out.

A Busy New Year

2009 is off to a great start!

I've been busy adding content to my new website, Successful Homemaking, and I plan to finish up sections on Easy Salad Recipes and Stain Removal Tips this week.

For my "old" website, Successful Homeschooling, I've created the following pages:

Secular Homeschooling
Secular Homeschool Curriculum

I've also written a Hub and Squidoo for those pages

Secular Homeschooling
Secular Homeschool Curriculum

And I've written the following articles to build links to my preschool pages:

Homeschooling Preschoolers
Homeschool Preschool Curriculum
Preschool Reading

Last Saturday, I took time to write a business plan detailing my content, traffic and monetization strategies for this year. I included a monthly, weekly and daily schedule and it's really helping me stay on track.

I've been reading a book called The 4 Hour Workweek and the author shares a lot about eliminating unnecessary activities and outsourcing. I'm taking his advice to heart and I'll share more about it as I continue to learn.

Blog Directories

I am trying directory submissions to create backlinks to my site. Tonight, I submitted my homeschooling blog to two directories - Blog Catalog and Bloggapedia.

Narrowing My Niche

I e-mailed Tomaz from Financial Freedom Ideas about suggestions for my site, and he said my niche was too broad. I do believe I can eventually land on the first page of Google for the terms homeschool and homeschooling. However, this year, I'm going to focus on winning the terms homeschool preschool, homeschooling curriculum and homeschool curriculum.

I spent the last few weeks updating my Homeschool Preschool section and adding affiliate links from my Usborne e-commerce site. I added a page for Homeschool Preschool Curriculum.

I also created these link lists at:

On My List - Free Preschool Resources
Whatali.st - Best Preschool Resources
Listphile - Free Preschool Resources

This month I'm going to work on creating 4 new articles that link to my homeschool preschool and homeschool preschool curriculum pages.

Finally Monetizing my Website

I'm finally monetizing my website.

I'm starting with Usborne books in my preschool section and I'll add others as the year goes on.

My goal is to introduce people to Usborne books, and have them use me as their consultant. I recommended specific books on my preschool pages, then created a separate page about Usborne and another about Usborne preschool books. I'm also going to add a page about Usborne's Frequent Buyer Club.

In addition to monetizing my homeschool site, I'm also starting a new site, Successful Homemaking. I am outsourcing some of the content and building this site a bit differently than I built my first site - focusing mainly on high demand/low supply keywords using Louann's technique of writing the pages her visitors are looking for, not writing what she thinks they need to know.

Once again, I'm starting the year off with a little experimentation. I'm excited to see the results!

New Ezine Articles!

Homeschooling Pros and Cons - The Truth About Home Education

Pros of Homeschooling - 5 Reasons You Should Home School Your Children

Article Marketing

I am getting back no track with article marketing, and I aim to publish 1 article per week. This week, I posted an article on lapbooking to coincide with my website page on lapbooks. I also posted an article about Abeka homeschool curriculum to coincide with my reviews of Abeka.