My adventures in internet marketing began in September 2006, looking for a way to work from home to support my family, fitting in with the many commitments of motherhood, the main one at the time being breastfeeding twins, which I did at the computer. 

Yes, I’ve been told before that my sentences are too long.  I have other things to worry about.

We were dirt poor and struggling, I had three babies and two school kids, and getting a job would have made us worse off financially as well as other problems.  So I Googled and dreamed, Googled and dreamed….

I'd seen all the work from home ads, and the fact that selling ways to work from home was a business topic in itself, what they call a niche, was not lost on me.  I was naturally suspicious, and they mostly turned out to be selling membership to a list of companies which pay you to take surveys, dodgy looking sites where you get peanuts for looking at ads, or affiliate marketing for products, which, well, don't seem to exist, are really MLM, or stuff which made no sense to me. 

I was starting to take notice of blogs, and was fascinated by them, and wondering how to make something like that work for me.  I was a fan of BellyBelly (all about pregnancy, birth & parenting) which I'd joined during my last pregnancy, and had also recently been introduced to Flylady.  Both great examples of women doing something genuinely worthwhile online.

I Googled something like “how to make money on the internet” (probably broad match), and ended up purchasing The Waterhouse Report, an e-book written by Neil Waterhouse, a fellow Australian, which explained how to research a market and publish an e-book to be marketed using Google AdWords. 

Having decided to follow this path, of finding a workable internet business, something I could run from home based on my own writing, I told myself each morning in the shower (my “meditation” time) that the answer was coming to me about what my topic would be, my niche. 

It did.  Wow, that really worked.  I love the topic and the keyword research supported it.  I would write about home organization.

So I followed Neil Waterhouse’s instructions to the letter, read the Perry Marshall book thoroughly, and went ahead and published an eBook.  I was pretty pleased with myself.

Making it profitable was another matter, and I drowned in a sea of technical difficulties, from shopping cart service problems, tracking problems, and lots of silly little mistakes I made along the way.  I found it very difficult to do the technical stuff. 

Although my attention to detail is bordering on obsessive, meaning I should have been very good at managing an AdWords campaign, the fact that only about half my sales managed to be tracked to their original keyword search phrase made it very difficult and discouraging.

The lack of clear, accurate information relating to what I was trying to do frequently reduced me to tears.  Even with my gumboots on, I stood in a few slimy places where “information products and software tools” promising to help me, didn’t. 

Still, I managed to get a small but clear profit going once I turned on the content network and made up my own system of monitoring the stats (nobody else offers one!)

I re-wrote my eBook to a higher standard I felt much happier with, and started offering a monthly newsletter to my subscribers as well as the introductory free tips.  It was going ok for a while and keeping the wolf from the door, just barely.

But I got distracted, ill, depressed, and bogged down by the strange little things I didn’t understand about AdWords, the blatant contradictions in the available information (which I had paid for, with money), and the lack of answers to my questions. 

Like in the Beth Orton song, “some may sing the wrong words to the wrong melodies, little things like this that matter to me”.  They mattered to me so much they paralysed me with indecision.  That, combined with my emotional state and my chronic anaemia, brought things to a screaming halt. 

When the Google bill consistently exceeded the sales, I just paused it, scrounged up money, restarted it, paused it, scrounged up money, and so on.  Strangely enough, on paper I still made a small profit.  Strangely enough, all those hard earned subscribers stayed with me even when I didn’t write anything for months.

Googling general personal development stuff, as I tend to do, I came across Steve Pavlina.  Wow, he was just writing his own personal development blog and claimed to be making obscene amounts of money.  It looked so clean and simple, and I wanted to do something like this too.

I noticed some other cool looking blogs too, like Zen Habits.  Ideas were forming.  I was trying to get the idea, but still never did understand how RSS feeds work and stuff like that.

Seth Godin, Webmaster World and any other places I bookmarked to read and learn mostly seemed to be talking about stuff I didn’t understand, and affiliate marketing is still a complete mystery to me.

It did not escape my notice either, that there were an extraordinary number of “made for AdSense” sites, rubbish sites claiming to contain articles, but usually just crappy headlines leading to ads or bits ripped off out of context from other people’s articles, without permission, or just really badly written articles, just long enough for Google to see the keywords.

I already had a rapidly expanding collection of longish articles I had written for my subscribers, so I decided to create my own personal development blog, and started YvetteWrites.com  This allowed me to add extra categories for my writing as well as the organization category.

Real content and a good subscriber list, honestly earned, were valuable, so I kept hearing.  So what to do with them?

I hired some lovely guys from the local computer shop with the intention of setting it up with a nice WordPress theme, like one of those created by Chris Pearson.  They suggested Joomla instead, and I’m happy with that decision.  (Wordpress might have been better in the short term as it turned out, but now I’ve got the New Improved Joomla).  The idea was that this would allow all my articles to be Search Engine Optimised, giving them a fighting chance of showing up on an organic search with Google or the other search engines.  This would cut down my advertising costs, and if my site got enough traffic, I could sell some ad space on it and create another source of income.

The site looked much slicker than the one I hand sewed using FrontPage, but unfortunately I never did learn how to use the system other than the absolute basics.  The site never did have its SEO set up correctly, and the old Joomla version I was on didn’t allow for Search engine friendly URLs, which help with SEO.

And here we are, the latest developments being that I have found ‘proper’ web development people now to work with me designing and setting up my site so that I can achieve what I want, which is to stop being poor, provide value to my subscribers, attract new ones, and concentrate on my writing, which is the bit I enjoy.

I know I still have to keep learning the technical stuff, and I hope one day to understand it enough that I am better able to question, challenge, ignore or even correct, many of those annoying internet marketers out there flogging bollocks.

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