Carl's Journal

I'm BACK!!!

Yes, it's true, it really is me, I'm back and ready to get back to work again. The last couple of months have been crazy, me, my backpack, a small tent, and nothing else, no laptop, no phone, just me and nature touring Spain on foot. What a blast, but it's time to get back to work again.

The funny thing about taking a couple of months off is the amount of spam messages filling your email box, or the number of comments you need to clear from blogs and websites. It took me all day to get back to a state that I can start working again, but hey, I enjoyed my walk so that's the main thing.

Being back in front of my laptop after a couple of months is interesting, it's amazing to see which websites have performed, which are just sitting there costing me money, and which domains I don't really care about any more.

Actually I recommend taking a couple of months away from your websites every couple of years, because only by doing nothing to a site do you appreciate which sites are attracting organic traffic growth, and which really depend on SEO for their income.

So a few of the sites were deleted this morning, I'd rather focus all my energy on sites that have a baseline of organic growth, then all I need to do is build on that, instead of starting from scratch with link building.

Aside from that I've also decided I really need to see more of Spain, this really is a beautiful country. Sorry no photos of my trip, I made a decision at the beginning of the walk to leave my camera behind, otherwise a holiday would seem too much like work since I also own several travel websites.

Thanks everyone who sent messages, I'll reply to them all later today, Carl

One of the things I do in Spain is provide consulting services to people here who want to know how to promote their websites, too many people who own websites are also computer illiterate, it isn't their fault, but it means they have a lot of catching up to do.

I could waste a lot of time showing them how to create squidoo or hubpages, teach them how to blog, encourage them to join forums, but the reality is that none of these promote their business website fast enough. Article submission on the other hand is easy, effective, and a heck of a lot faster.

Article submission can still be time consuming if you write every article from scratch, and of course submitting the article also takes time. Now multiply that by however many article sites you want to join, and the workload becomes unmanageable.

Consequently I spin articles and then use an automatic article submitter, and I gotta tell you this works a treat. In a couple of hours I can write one completely new article, spin it using rewritten phrases, sentences, paragraphs and even synonym swapping, then submit the article to over 100 article directories. That is a huge return on my time investment.

Some of you reading this post will say, "Ah, but spinning never reads well", and I'd say you're doing it wrong! Read More

This Valentine's day I got a curious surprise from a friend who listening to my endless stories about renovating houses, repairing cars, and my fascination for space travel decided to challenge me to prove myself to her.

Now I don't know why I agreed, maybe it's one of those goofy guy things we do when we like a woman, or maybe she knows me well and the challenge is just an excuse I'm using to do something again, regardless I now find myself the slightly dubious owner of a project for her house in the countryside.

I should tell you my friend does a lot of cycling, and she struggles to life her bike off the drive and onto her patio, so she asked me to build a ramp. I've renovated houses, built a stoop and stairs, but I have no idea how to build a ramp.

When I think about a ramp I know it has a slope, and I guess it only needs wooden slats, but is the angle important, and how do I arrange the joists? Researching projects like these is much easier now that we have the Internet, and I love it!

Without the Internet you'd have to go to a library and hope they had a book that was on topic, or wait for them to order one, same thing with buying books, your local bookstore only has a small selection of books, but with the Internet you can pretty much find everything you need, including free information like the How to Build Things website.

My favorite page is how to build a rat rod, heck I didn't even know what a rat rod was until I read their article but it sounds like a really cool ides. Only problem here in Spain, I've yet to see a car older then 40 years on the roads, oh well, the ramp project is enough for now.