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I’m in a weird place right now. I thought I was going to lose my CafePress store, but then it got saved for another year. I was scrambling to learn Zazzle and get set up there, but now it’s not a crucial hurry. I need to make money, but I’m not sure where I should put my energy and attention.

I have a lot of little things that I’m working on, and I’m not sure where I should be focusing my time, or which one is  likely to bring me the money I need in the shortest amount of time.

The online job service I’m using offers nearly instant payment, but most of the jobs are $0.50 or less, so it’s a lot of work for small returns. Putting my art in CP and Zazzle can make money in the long run, but it takes a lot of time to get the stuff up and active, and then do the marketing to get people to the items, and hope that they’ll buy, which is never a guarantee. I have all the other little things, like my articles and blogs, but those are kind of an ongoing trickle, and not something that is ever going to generate a lot of cash. There just something that will eventually add money to the pot.

I wish I knew what to be focusing on. I know that I need to narrow my focus, and work on just a few things instead of everything at once. However, the stuff in my stores is going to take a lot of marketing, and about the only thing I know how to do for that is to blog, Twitter, and be active in blog networks and things like that. Marketing is SO not my thing. I wish I had someone that could do that for me.

I hate not knowing what to do. It makes things so annoying for me.

I know this is something I should have done from the very beginning, but I didn’t think it was all that important. Now I have hundreds of posts to go back and tag. Luckily, I found a smart plugin that helps suggest tags, which makes life easier. I figure I can tag one page of blogs, per blog, per day. That’s 45 blogs tagged every day. I have no idea how long it will take, but hopefully it will make the blogs easier to navigate, since people seem to like tag clouds. And, I’m hoping that all the tags will be search engine fuel, that will make my blogs rank higher in the engines.

You may also notice that I got a new layout. I was never really happy with the other one. This one originally was a car theme, but I changed some of the graphics to make it look cool. I think it’s easier to read too.

I’ve been sitting here today writing more “About the Art” segments for the store’s blog. I figure the readers might want to know a bit about the designs I make, and it’s good for the blog to have more content to draw in new readers and subscribers. It’s hard to come up with things to say about some of them, but I’m doing the best I can. I’m starting with the ones that have a story behind them that comes to mind right away, and I’ll work toward the ones that don’t have so much of a story later.

I’m trying to keep fresh content in all the blogs. I’m running short on new ideas for the Vampire’s Lair though. I don’t really have time to go looking for new stuff, when there’s so much else that I have to get done in a day. I really wish that I could get some reader participation. I may have to do another post asking the readers to help me out. I know that’s how a lot of other sites get so big, they have readers submit things for them to use.

I really hope that all this blogging pays off. It’s a whole lot easier than running web sites, lemme tell ya that. It feels a lot more natural to just write and post than it did when I was running traditional websites. I know they say that getting high ranks and traffic off a blog is harder than doing it with a web site, but people are getting into blogs more and more these days. They want something that is new and fresh on a regular basis. Blogs offer that. I have even gone so far as to optimize my RSS feeds, make a newsletter for the store, and I’m trying to find ways to add other content and interactivity to the blogs.

I love the fact that I can feed all the blogs into Twitter, and they than all go into my FaceBook. Not that I use MySpace anymore, but I even have a widget over there with my Twitter feed in it. I have my StumbleUpon and my Delicious feed into my FaceBook too. I’m really trying to have everything connected n one big web, so you can find anything I do from anywhere I do it. I mean, look at the sidebar, it has all the links to all the stuff I do.
I really need to come up with more how-to articles. I don’t know why I can’t come up with more to add for that.

If I could find the time myself, and someone with the time to help, I would have someone take photos while I make jewelry, so I could do step-by-step jewelry how-to articles. I think that would be cool.

Of course, I’m always trying to think of more ways to make money, and ways to use the same content for multiple purposes. I think I’m going to try taking my eHow articles and putting them on Squidoo. I have a little over a dollar waiting over there. If I had more on the site, there’d be more chance for me to make money off of it.

I’m also trying to think of more ways to make money off my poetry. I was really pissed that the compiling software I was using to turn my poetry into an executable e-book is no longer supported. Now I have to find something else to get that job done. I don’t want to be sending people a big ol’ zip file with all the pages and images and stuff in it. I don’t think that would be very good. I’d rather have it compressed into an executable file that I could distribute. There’s also a problem with my print version on CafePress. There’s something wrong with their system, and I can’t edit the book anymore. Hopefully we can get high-speed soon, and I can get in there and do it over. I’d love it if people would buy the print version, but if I can get a digital version out there, I’d be just as happy with people buying that.

I’m also trying to think of some kind of content that I could put on the Vampire’s Lair that people would be willing to pay a subscription fee to see. I haven’t come up with anything yet, but I’m keeping it in the back of my mind.
Ok, I’ve gone on for long enough, I need to get to work now.