This is a tactic I haven’t tried in almost a year, so it’s time to do it again and then some! Writing a press release really isn’t easy, since it’s a different style from my usual, but it can be very much worthwhile.

For distribution, I made a $30 contribution to PRWeb. It’s the first time I’ve tried paying to improve my distribution, so it should be interesting to see how things go. They’re a pretty reputable site in terms of getting press releases out there.

I’m not doing this site this time; I’m doing my Home with the Kids website’s new scam section in the release. If this works well for me, I’ll have to try to do it more regularly. If not, maybe it’s time to pay a writer to handle my press releases.

In other words, I haven’t been keeping up with the weekly goals lately. Too much going on around here. Fortunately, I have been getting some interesting work done on my sites, so it’s not that I’ve slacked off completely.

There are definitely areas I need to work harder, though, particularly in terms of link building. Content is fun for me to generate, but link building gets tedious fast.

Next week is when things will get really tricky. My brother-in-law is going in for heart surgery and will be in the hospital for about two weeks. Guess who gets to help take care of his and my sister’s kids? Yes, that’s right, I’ll be dealing with four kids ages 4 and under. Two mine, two theirs. My mother will be helping, but still, it’s going to be exhausting. I hope my brother-in-law recovers quickly so he can be home in time for Thanksgiving. He’ll still be on bedrest then in any case, as I understand it, but better to be home than stuck in a hospital. By the current schedule, he will make it easily.

With any luck, I’m now heading towards back on track for my weekly goals. I finally managed to launch the site I’d been working on, which is a big step. It’s still at a point where it needs a lot of building, but not in ways that would be excessively obvious to users. Just needs more original content. It’s a gourmet chocolate site, so this has been a fun one to work on!

It’s hard to create sites quickly while maintaining quality. Any good website requires a lot of work at first, even if the bulk of it comes from a datafeed. You still have to do something to get the search engines’ attention, after all, and differentiate yourself from the crowd using the same feed.

Now comes the fun part - trying to build some sort of traffic to it. I need to get links to it, which can be done as I build links to my other sites. One of my goals is to build links, with a goal of 20 submissions per week. That’s not a lot, and my first week I went over that amount. Of course, not all links will happen. Directory submissions won’t always be accepted, especially for affiliate sites. Link exchanges can fall through.

Really, the part I look forward to is writing the first articles to see if anyone cares to publish them, and get links that way. That doesn’t go toward my link building goal, of course - it goes to my article writing and submission goals. It’s not a topic that exactly has a lot of newsletters, so I have to come up with ways to get the word out on other relevant sites. I don’t expect that to be too hard to doo - there are too many topics for which chocolate can be relevant. Think gifts. Think weddings. There are relevant websites out there.

I did pretty well, though, all things considered. I made a lot of my weekly goals for my first week, but with the kids getting sick and getting sick myself, I think I did all right. However, I’ve been slow to start on the goals for the new week.

Some of that couldn’t be helped; I started this week out by possibly breaking one of my toes. I haven’t been to the doctor to get it checked, since pretty much all they do is tape a broken toe and give some pain meds. It’s hard to walk, and that means it’s hard to get up to check on the kids when I’m working; therefore, I work less so I can keep a better eye on them.

I’m quite determined to make progress, even if I don’t meet my goals every week. They do drive me to do more than I did before, and I knew they wouldn’t be easy to achieve even in an easy week. That was the idea.