Archmaille

Man… it’s been nice these last couple of months being able to blog here on Archmaille.com but let’s face it I don’t want to be sitting here blogging FOREVER! Especially with how SS and P3 have been acting lately! Yeah, I know they’re trying to salvage business by pleasing the advertisers… but seriously does that mean screwing the bloggers around every corner? Because that’s what you all are doing. I was very happy with the P3 campaign that I ran the last time for ArchmailleDesigns.com it just wasn’t quite enough to hold positions for too terribly long (happens because you get the front page of a site for a while and awesome quality, and then it falls off to further back pages as more entries are added) the goal as of now is to get TONS of new copper items up on the site… or at least five new patterns in both necklace and bracelet form… So 10 new items. I’m also going to be getting new supplies (beads, clasps, etc.) that will allow me to REALLY expand my copper jewelry market.

I’ve picked a number of terms for Google that should bring in about 50,000 searches every month and give me a good foothold. In total I’ll be buying about 50 links… of course requiring two incoming links one to the homepage which will be for silver jewelry (a term searched 673,000 a month on Google) that I’m currently on page 3 for… and of course the copper related terms that will bring in a combined 50,000 searches… If the rule of 10% has anything to say about how many visitors come to my site I should be looking at 5,000 copper jewelry lookers! And if things go well with everything else (raising LQ enough to get top 10 for my other stuff) I should be looking at about 100,000 visitors to my site every month looking for some sort of silver/copper jewelry! If that doesn’t bring in sales… well I must admit I don’t know what will!

Of course this will also be my last campaign until I make my money back from it as well… which in total campaign $350 new jewelry supplies $125 the old campaign already paid for itself in a matter of weeks, but then again that was also Christmas time… hoping to pull something off for Valentines day… but you never know. So I’m a little bit anxious about the whole idea… at the same time I’ve almost got to do it just to see if it all works out ya know?

Oh right… haha, and my other idea that I was throwing around… was to get rid of this website. I’d turn it back into a 301 redirect to ArchmailleDesigns.com like it was before… I really think I’ll only do that if things go well with the campaign to hold a more stable position… because I really REALLY enjoy having a PR3 blog to fall back on for P3 stuff… of course if all goes well I can spend $200 and make another site PR3 using P3… That way I’ve got some stuff to fall back on.

written by Archmaille

Wow it’s been a little bit of a lull from posting! There was that one week that I planned a lull… and then things got busy and I went to Michigan so there went another week… then with the wedding planning things went even MORE downhill for posting… But now that I am a married man, and the Holidays are coming to a close I’ll be able to pick back up and start making money again!

My main source that I’m worried about for money is ArchmailleDesigns.com It’s my sterling silver jewelry website, and well I’d like to get the site into full swing again! I did the best I’ve ever done over the Holidays this year… thanks to some recent moves in the SERPs my site got just the traffic it needed to start making a little bit of money! Now I’ve also launched a new shopping cart with it, with features like an affiliate program, downloadable items, discount coupons, and much more! So with the combination of that, and an increase in variety and stock here coming up I think for the upcoming Valentines Day rush my site should be able to make a little bit of money!

written by Archmaille

well guys and girls wordpress 2.7 is finally here.  Once again we have a redesigned backend, and many other exciting features!  This is one of the first times that I’ve not updated right away… but sometimes I like to wait with big releases for their updates as in the .1 releases to avoid any security issues.  I have been waiting for 2.7 though, so I’ll be updating very soon… that is as soon as I have a working computer again.  (Long story in itself, but lets just say I was stupid and fried my computer… for once not overclocking either).

For those of you who have been waiting for WP 2.7 as well watch this video to just get a taste of what there is to offer with the new launch!

written by Archmaille

In one way or another we’ve all now been effected by the economic slow downs. With everything from job cuts, advertising revenue dropping, and production slowing in some form or fashion everybody has had an encounter with the ever decreasing economy. Sometimes I get the feeling I’m the only person around actually trying to increase my production… I know it’s not true a good number of businesses have been taking advantage of the low costs on production to prepare themselves for the good times.

Now even the most stable of companies are cutting jobs. Viacom (who I was working for earlier this year) is cutting 849 jobs. The cuts are a preemptive strike at keeping costs down and preparing for “possible slow downs in advertising costs” as stated by Viacom. It’s a pretty funny change from when I was working for them two years ago where I’d report that I wasn’t following through with something yet because it would cost tons of money for little productivity on my part… to which they laughed and said “Don’t worry, we’ve got plenty of money just do what you were going to do and send in your time sheet.” But I guess that’s why they have so much operational money, they take action before there is any real problem… Chevy and Ford could take some notes from them

Personally I’ve felt the crunch big time. Being that 90% of my income is currently from advertising either ad clicks with my Yahoo, and ScribeFire accounts on my various websites, or from paid posting with SocialSpark and PayPerPost both on here and my personal blog CodySortore.com the remaining 10% of my income comes from sales on my handcrafted jewelry website ArchmailleDesigns.com I’ve seen a decline in all areas now though. My average cost per click went from 0.40 earlier this year to about 0.10 over the last three months. PayPerPost has been extremely hard to find opportunities, and at that they are paying less and less every day. With an increase of $5 opportunities it’s hard to make a living from only three posts a day, and with a decrease in the number of posts more $5 posts have been taken by bloggers. Jewelry sales have also decreased, making it nearly impossible to make a living in any of my respective niches. On one hand I’m glad that I don’t have to worry about being one of the 850 that is fired from Viacom without time to prepare, on the other hand I sort of wish that I had hung on a little bit longer and continued to bring in the cash flow from them while ramping up the blogging.

written by Archmaille

Jeez, I used to be king of the World of Warcraft Athentication Key world… and now I’m just sitting three pages back to never be found again! Not exactly sure what has happened, but apparently Google has changed up their algorithm MAJORLY in the last few days… I sort of wonder if it has anything to do with the remove/promote stuff I was talking about earlier ya know? I guess that could very well have a huge effect on what is going on with the search engines… but who knows, kind of scary, but some of my other pages are still holding top ranks, so who knows! I’ve still got to get in some MAJOR promotion points for both this blog here Archmaille.com and also for the blog on ArchmailleDesigns.com that has been pushed back to Monday though, since I’ll be doing a whole lot of nothing this weekend… it’s nice getting away, but I already took my vacation Now it’s time to start doing some catching up

written by Archmaille

Gah, there are some updates that are just a pain! I decided to go back to the old plan of having ArchmailleDesigns.com being my central website for basically everything. Everything points to Archmaille Designs in one way or another. For now of course the jewelry is the main thing, sooner or later I’ll also start on the blacksmithing and pimping out that part of the site… but until that day Sterling Silver Jewelry will be my main focus I also am going to get out a subdomain for chainmail armor. It will be a little bit different and something that I create with CakePHP because I want the option to be able to let people customize their chainmail. I’ll have patterns, they pick what pattern they want, then inlays / trim for the armor that they can customize what colors they want in their armor, and then materials. They can create whatever they want by how they like it.

But that’s not my pain… haha, updating the shopping cart on ArchmailleDesigns.com they had a new cart available! I’m gonna have to pay if I want to continue with updates after a year… but that’s fine because it’s a lot better shopping cart anyways. So I installed the new shopping cart, and now I can’t log into my old shopping cart It changed my password, and is just a pain… Moving from the old cart to the new one has become a bit of a pain in my rear side, and has therefore been slowed probably until after Thanksgiving since I’ll be in Michigan this whole weekend with WildIrishRose.

written by Archmaille

Everybody get ready for another update! Just before the wordpress 2.7 release we have an emergency wordpress 2.6.5 release with some XSS security fixes, and two bug fixes. Version 2.6.5 has been named .5 instead of 2.6.4 because of an insecure and unofficial 2.6.4 version that made its rounds and wreaked havoc on a few peoples websites, as the hacked version gave a backdoor to hackers, spammers, and others trying spread general mayhem online.

For your official update go to wordpress.org and download your own copy. I’m sorry I don’t provide a link because of how many trick websites there are starting to be popping up all over the place. It’s important that we keep the trust in the community. So to keep you safe, just go to wordpress.org and get a clean copy of your favorite blogging platform!

written by Archmaille

Do SEO “experts” have a impending crisis on their hands? According to Google the “Remove/Promote” feature they’ve implemented only affects the person logged in. I can believe that for now, but what about in the future? It’s not too hard to believe that one day the search results will be controlled by not only the search algorithm, but user feedback. This isn’t bad news for legitimate websites, but for those just skimming under the radar, or running sketchy virii filled websites look out! I’m kind of torn on the idea… On one hand my sketchy money making sites might fall a little bit, or a lot for that matter. But my legitimate websites may increase! That is if anyone finds them… not to mention you can game any system. Big websites with lots of money may pay users to create lots and lots of gmail accounts and promote their site, or remove the sites above theirs… Any time there is money to be had you can bet on seeing some players in the system.

So on one hand I’d kind of like to see the system implemented full scale to let users decide what goes to the top, sort of like Digg, or StumbleUpon for Google. On the other hand it really just might make the spam problem worse… which I’m sure is what Google is trying to figure out right now. Unfortunately they can’t figure it out until users results start to affect others, or peoples pocket books.

written by Archmaille