Confessions of a Home-based Business Entrepreneur

Dave and I went to lunch today with our Genesis Team staff
for a business meeting (away from office interruptions).
During our lunch an executive decision was made.

MORE BONUSES!

“MORE VALUE!”

What are we talking about?

It’s been quite an eventful time as we’ve developed the
“Claim Your Genesis Site” program. What started off as a
simple idea has turned into an exciting project.

http://www.ClaimYourGenesisSite.com

As we’ve developed this new program, we’ve had to make
some pretty major decisions.

- Do we simply provide our customers with a basic Genesis
site using our Genesis System?

or

- Do we take take it over the top and provide you with a
huge value-added system to end all niche opportunities?

From this email, you will be able to figure out the
direction we chose to go.

I can’t go into details here. The plans we have are
powerful. Some smart copycat marketers would love to
get their hands on this.

What I will say is that what’s coming in the Genesis
System over the next few months will blow every niche
website opportunity out of the water.

What’s coming?

We are developing a new module for the Genesis System.
The module is revolutionary (no one yet has developed
anything like it).

What makes this module so great?

It will potentially double, even triple your bottom line
as a Genesis Site owner. Best of all, it automates the
entire process.

It’s that powerful.

It goes without saying that we are very excited about this
new module. Once Round 3 closes, there will be a secret
meeting with all Genesis site owners, and they will be
given the nitty-gritty details.

Genesis site owners will be the first to test the new
module (and the first to make money with it).

But…

In order to put the needed time into this new module, we
have decided to postpone Round 4 until all Genesis site
owners have had a chance to use and test it.

This may take some time.

So…

If you don’t want to miss out on this new module and
haven’t yet claimed a Genesis site, you’ll need to act
quickly. Round 3 closes on Thursday.

It may be quite some time before Round 4 opens. At this
point, we don’t know how long it will take and we cannot
make any promises.

IMPORTANT…

The 48-hour sale we talked about in our last email to get
a Genesis site for only $497 ends Tuesday night. So, if
you want to save $100, go to

http://www.ClaimYourGenesisSite.com

no later than Tuesday at midnight (EST).

Topics are being claimed quickly. If you need a payment
plan, one is provided after you claim a topic and register.

Go claim your Genesis site!

http://www.ClaimYourGenesisSite.com

This is the second part of the story. If you haven’t read the first part yet, you need to read it before reading below in order for it to make sense. So read the 1st part and then come back to this page to read “the rest of the story”:
http://www.homebusinessonline.com/blog/2007/12/27/why-did-the-auction-cause-such-a-ruckus/index.html

The story continues…

When the second bid came in, the first bidder (not one of our subscribers) private messaged us to also express his disappointment that he could not go any higher in his bidding. He asked if we had any other Genesis sites we would sell to him.

Light bulb moment!

We really couldn’t sell an existing money-making Genesis site that already had good traffic and revenue for any less,

BUT…

Perhaps we could build him a new Genesis site from scratch for a lesser amount. We would fill it with content that would grow regularly and naturally without him having to lift a finger for the next 8-12 months. As the site grew each month, his traffic and revenue would increase. The Reader’s Digest version? … He knew it was a great deal, and he paid us $500 on the spot.

Can I tell you how great it felt to come up with a solution for this guy? Man, I love those “light bulb” moments!

But the light bulb gets even brighter in this story.

We still had our struggling, loyal subscriber who was left out in the cold. We could have made the same offer to him, but we knew he needed more. He didn’t have a lot of spare change and needed a huge amount of value for his money. And, after all, he had been a subscriber for some time. We wanted to take good care of him.

So, what did we do?

We gave him an offer he couldn’t refuse - the deal of all deals.

His response?

He said he had to “wipe his eyes” to make sure he was seeing the offer correctly.

The offer is too sensitive to post publicly. However, if you’re a subscriber to our newsletter, watch for our next email entitled “The Offer.”

As a subscriber, you’ll receive all the nitty-gritty details.

Dave and Heidi

If you read our last blog entry, you know we sold a Genesis website last weekend at auction for $1001. We were pleased with the outcome, and the winner got a very good deal. It was a win-win all the way around.

Or so we thought…

The reality is we had no idea this auction would cause such a ruckus.

A ruckus?

Yes, although both the winner of the website and Dave and myself were satisfied, two other groups of people were frustrated and… well… upset.

Who were these two groups?

1) Those who wanted to bid but realized the bidding was out of their league, and
2) The losers of the auction

What exactly happened?

Well, first we received an email from one of our subscribers telling us he would have liked to bid on the website, but even the beginning bid was already out of his league. He went on in a frustrated tone telling us how much we wished he could have afforded such an opportunity.

Point taken.

“What a shame,” we thought. This would have been a perfect way for him to begin making money online. But, how could we possibly have given such a valuable site and script away for anything less. The website and the secret proprietary script (plus a killer domain) were far too valuable. I mean, it was already a good deal as it was.

Nevertheless, Dave and I couldn’t help but feel badly, almost obligatory, toward this struggling but loyal subscriber.

If you’d like to see how this was resolved, stay tuned…

(to be continued in the next entry)

No one has known about our Genesis Network of sites until now. Our genesis sites are run by a proprietary script we built from scratch. It has an incredible array of features and methods for getting indexed and remaining indexed for hundreds of keywords. These are little goldmines. They auto-build naturally, create multiple RSS feeds, and have tagging and pinging built in. It’s a pretty incredible system. Not one of our Genesis sites has every been de-indexed. Cool! You can understand why we have not let anyone in on this little secret.

Until now…

Our accountant informed us that since we have done so well this year (thanks greatly to our Genesis Network), we’re going to have a very nice tax bill to pay the first of the year. Ouch! After some pretty fast and furious brainstorming, we decided to finally let the cat out of the bag. We’re selling a handful of these little goldmines with script that runs and builds them and all. Pretty gutsy!

The good news is that the first site we decided to sell has sold for $1001. Here’s the auction listing at Sitepoint:
http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace/auction/17608

A good start. We’ll only be selling a handful of these sites. They are far too valuable. If you’d like to have one of these little goldmines with the proprietary script that runs, manages and builds it, join our Home Business Newsletter. We’ll keep you informed as soon as we put another up for auction (very soon).

Heidi

This came up on the forums in a thread on persistence and not giving up in your business. It’s a story I remember reading in Napolean Hill’s excellent Think and Grow Rich.

When people are stressed during the holidays and worrying about their finances, I think it’s a good reminder to keep our business efforts in perspective. Persistence pays off. The following story “Three Feet From Gold” is a good reminder…

— story—

“There was a man who left home to search for a gold mine. He went into the hills and discovered a very rich vein of ore. He had the gold analyzed to confirm his discovery, and, sure enough, he had unearthed one of the purest veins of gold ever discovered. The man returned home to tell his friends and relatives so that he could borrow the necessary funds to cultivate the mine. He raised the necessary capital and returned to the mine to cultivate his fortune.

“The gold began to flow as easily as water, and soon the man had recouped approximately half of his original investment. Then, without warning, the vein ended. The man dug furiously but could not recapture the vein. Finally, he gave up, sold the mine and mining equipment to a junk dealer for scrap, and returned home, broke and a failure.

“Before scrapping the equipment, the junk dealer decided to hire a mining expert to study the mine. The expert, upon a detailed survey of the land, revealed that the vein had not dried up but rather shifted three feet to the left because of a fault in the earth. He advised that if the junk dealer were to continue digging in the new direction, he would soon recapture the vein and become fabulously wealthy.

“The junk dealer acted on the advice of his mining expert, went on to retap the vein of ore, and became one of the richest people in the United States. Meanwhile, the original miner had to live the remainder of his days with the knowledge that he stopped ‘just three feet short’ of the gold.”

—–

When finances are looming and your business just doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. This is not the time to quit. This is the time to re-evalute, and if you determine you need to shift your efforts in your business, DO IT!

Take the attitude that you may be only “three feet from gold.” Don’t give up.

Heidi

It looks like Google finally had a PR update. We are showing PR4 now. Not quite as good as the PR6 we had once upon a time, but we’ll take it! Hey, after going from PR6 to PR5 and then being delisted with no PR at all, a PR4 is a welcome sight.

Actually, from things I’ve been hearing from other online marketers, there is a huge contigency of websites that have dropped in PR. Some have dropped from as high as PR10 to PR6. Ouch! Some that have dropped have gone from PR7 and 8 to PR5 and 6. Most have gone from PR6 to PR4 and 5.

Of course there are also plenty of sites that have had a rise, while others have neither had a drop nor a rise in PR. Quite a few of our sites dropped by one point. A handful rose a point or two.

With that said, it may seem from my posts that I think PR is a big deal, but actually, I really don’t like to pay much attention to it. Because of what happened to HomeBusinessOnline.com, it was more of a curiosity thing for me. However, what DOES mean something to me is the fact that we were re-indexed in Google’s SERPs after having been de-indexed for several years. It made a big impact on our traffic when we were de-indexed. Dropped dramatically. Since we’ve been re-indexed, our traffic has slowly increased again. So, yes, being re-indexed IS a big deal. The PR in and of itself?… Not really that big of an issue.

So, now that my curiosity is placated and this whole re-indexing and re-PRing is done, let’s move on to bigger and better subjects now, shall we? I don’t think I’ll be checking PR for quite some time. Wastes too much time. Too many money-making projects in the works to expend my efforts on PR.

And, after all, I believe it was because we went about our business as if nothing had changed after being de-indexed and continuing the activities on HomeBusinessOnline.com ( putting up new content, etc.) that we were put back in Google’s SERPs.

Regardless… Onward and Upward!

Let me know in the comments how you fared in this recent Google update?

Heidi

related: home business | Google | Google SERPs | PR | PR4

We moved up another notch today on Google… #3 for the keyword home business online (both with and without “quotes”). Our little experiment appears to be working.

Now what?

I’m creating a whole new section on Home Business Online which I believe will do very well for both visitors and search engines. I’ll keep you informed here on this Home Business Blog and in our Home Business Newsletter when the new section opens.

No Google update yet, but we should be due for one anytime. However, I did want to let you know about a small change that took us up a notch within days in Google’s SERPs for the term home business online.

Before the de-indexing some years ago, we used to be #1 for the term home business. Call me demented… Crazy… Stupid… Whatever, for thinking this… But, now that we are re-indexed and Google seems to like our site once again, I’d really like to get back to the front page for that term. I know it’s almost impossible for such a competitive term, but I’d like to try.

Meanwhile, I made a few simple changes to the title tag of the front page of Home Business Online.com. I put in the term “home business” at the beginning, used a separator, then descriptively scattered the terms “home” and “business” a few more times (as well as “home business online”).

The results?

Within just a few days we moved up from position #5 to position #4 for the term home business online. Pretty cool to see results that quickly.

Will keep working on it and let you know what works.

Heidi

Well, it’s been almost a month and we’re still indexed in Google (crossing our fingers). Furthermore, by the looks of things, we have no reason to believe that will change. Yes, Google has decided to come back to dance with HomeBusinessOnline.com after having been deindexed for over three years (see previous post about re-indexing).

We had a pretty good idea the de-indexing had something to do with a suggestion we had implemented a few months before from one of our supposed “SEO guru” friends. At first, we weren’t sure about his tactic. In fact, it seemed a bit spammy. Nevertheless, our SEO friend assured us it would bring in large amounts of traffic and that plenty of other legitimate sites were using his method.

Indeed, the method DID bring in large amounts of traffic, even targeted traffic. However, it was short-lived. Once we were de-indexed by Google, our traffic plummeted. We immediately removed the suggested SEO tactics and restored HomeBusinessOnline.com to its previous condition in hopes that Google would once again re-index us.

Since there were a good number of other websites that were de-indexed along with ours, there was plenty of talk on the internet at that time. We perused all the SEO reports and followed Matt Cutts‘ initial advice to use a special email address to plead to Google for re-inclusion. The response was generic and nothing came of it. So, weeks later, we emailed again explaining that we had removed the offending code.

Nothing.

Some time later, Matt said Google was getting bombarded with too many emails and that we should use an online website for to file our re-inclusion request. We did so, and received another automated email saying we should check Google’s Webmaster Guidelines for the answer. (Trust me, we had already done this numerous times with a magnifying glass.) After some weeks, I let Google know we had not received a human response. They suggested I wait for up to three months. After the three months, I reminded them again and received the same automated email response about checking the Webmaster Guidelines.

Never heard another word. FYI, before the de-indexing, we were #1 in Google’s SERPS for the coveted keyword home business, had a PR6 and an Alexa ranking of 12,000.

Now, three years later, it seems Google is once again interested in HomeBusinessOnline.com. Still no PR. That’ll probably have to wait until the next Google dance.

But…

We are currently #5 for the search term ‘home business online‘ (#3 using “”s). Beggars can’t be choosers, we’ll take it! And, it would seem Google loves our Home Business Forum. They’ve been on it non-stop since my last post about getting re-indexed in Google. Actually, it is our active forum that has kept us alive these past three years. It would seem Google likes the fresh content, too.

So, how do you get re-indexed in Google?

The answer is simple. Are you ready?

Here goes…

Wait!

No, that’s not a command. That’s what we finally had to do… Wait. After we had done all we could to make sure we were in compliance with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and had attempted to be re-included, we simply continued as if nothing had happened and waited. We continued to put fresh content on the site and kept the forum active.

Yes, websites can get re-indexed even if Google has ignored your re-inclusion requests.

I’m very curious to see what will happen in the next Google Dance and PageRank Update (which could actually be any day).

Will HomeBusinessOnline.com be de-indexed once again?
Was this just a cruel teaser?
Or, is HomeBusinessOnline.com back in Google’s graces for good?

If so, I wonder…

• What page rank will HomeBusinessOnline.com be given?
• Will it be given PR as if starting from scratch?
• Will we move up in the SERPs for any other keywords?
• Or will things remain status quo?

I will say that if Google does keep us in the SERPs, we will have a lot of work to do. During these past three years, we’ve lost four times the inbound links we used to have. Before the de-indexing, everyone wanted to link to us. We had, in fact, 10,000+ inbound links and had an “above average presence.” (By the way, almost all of those links were natural links.) Now, our link popularity is under 2,500. A pretty pitiful drop.

After the de-indexing, the big talk was not to link to “bad neighborhoods.” Wow! We had become one of those. Websites were taking down their links right and left. We even had a member of our forum delete her forum signature saying she didn’t want to take the chance of a “bad neighborhood” linking TO her website! She continued to post and be active on the forums WITHOUT a signature.

Sheesh! Anyone who’s been in our same position knows what I’m talking about.

Oh, well. The point is that we will have to work hard to get those links back. But, that’s jumping the gun. First things first… Let’s see if Google keeps us indexed after the next update.

For now, a request…

Everyone cross your fingers that this re-indexing sticks after the upcoming Google Update. It would be a welcome relief after all the hard work that has gone into HomeBusinessOnline.com

Be sure to add your comments! We’d love to hear from you.

Heidi

Related: google pr seo serps home business

Around two weeks ago, I noticed an IP address ( 66.249.67.1 ) that was on multiple parts of our Home Business forum. My antennae went up as that can be a sign of spammers. After doing a search on that IP address, I found it was the Googlebot. A few hours later, it was not only still there, but it had increased to around 30 instances of the Googlebot.

The next day, the Googlebot was on the forum again. After looking over the logfiles, I noticed it had scoured over a good portion of our website non-stop for a week. Then, there was a short two-day break. Two days later, Google was back again, and it has not left since (for the last five days or so).

Now, this Googlebot behavior is quite curious.

You may be wondering why I find it odd when the same kind of Googlebot behavior occurs on millions of sites everyday. I have a very good reason…

HomeBusinessOnline.com was one of the casualties of Google’s De-indexing three years ago. We even wrote a popular article about our experience of being de-indexed by Google (Diary of a Google Gazumpee). Even though we tried several times to get the site re-indexed, our pleas fell on deaf ears.

Now, three years later, I was so curious about Googlebot’s activity these past few weeks that I went to Google.com to see if anything had changed. To my surprise, HomeBusinessOnline.com came up in Google’s search results. A closer look at the pages indexed turned up 151 pages.

While 151 pages represents only a fraction of our over 5,000-page website, it IS at least a hint that Google may want to dance with Home Business Online once again. At the time of the de-indexing three years ago, Home Business Online vascilated between the #1 and #3 position for the coveted keyword search “home business.” Plus, it had a rising Alexa ranking of 12,000.

I have seen one single search result briefly show up only once in Google over the past three years. It was only for the home page and it only lasted a day or two… then, poof! Gone again. So, it may be too early to know if this will actually stick or not. Nevertheless, the Googlebot and Google search results are promising. It is the first time in three years that we have seen this kind of devouring Googlebot activity on our site, and it is the first time we have seen a promising sampling of our site possibly being re-indexed.

There is no PR yet. In fact, Google acts as if it is treating the site as brand new and indexing it from scratch. If the indexing sticks, I’m hoping we’ll see new PR during the next dance (most likely within the next few months.)

Okay, everyone. If you have a site that was de-indexed in the past, check Google’s results now. You may find a pleasant surprise. If your site has come back, please leave your comments and let us know.

Keeping our fingers crossed.

Heidi

google search engine googlebot home business