My son, who is learning internet marketing, accidentally deleted his WordPress installation while he was performing his first backup! Talk about a hard lesson. At first we thought that he had been hacked, but eventually he determined that it was due to a mistake he made in Fantastico while moving a sub-domain to a different folder. Just suffice it to say that multi-tasking is overrated.

Enter our web hosting company. I have a reseller account and my son has a hosting account with me. My reseller account is hosted through HostGator. While everything has gone well so far with my reseller account, you really don’t know how well until you have a problem.

With this problem, I found their service to be excellent.  I opened a ticket and they responded within a few hours (on Sunday) with instructions on how to request a restore.  The cost of the restore was $15 which my son was happy to pay. I entered the restore request last night and woke up this morning to find it done.

His website is up and working again like nothing ever happened.  My son has learned a valuable lesson. I have learned that HostGator truly does have good service.

Disclaimer: This blog post contains affiliate links that will provide compensation to our company if a purchase is made.

A couple weeks ago I laid out some steps I am taking with my on-line business.  The first one was to update the look and feel of this website.  I am happy to announce that the major work is done!  I used the DynaBlue WordPress theme designed by WebDesignLessons.com.  I must say that I am really pleased with this theme.   Here are some of my favorite features:

• Google Adsense integration
• Ready for Twitter
• Nice graphics for RSS and Twitter
• Configurable ads in sidebar and header
• Contact form
• Featured post carousel
• Big text
• My daughter said it looks professional!

One upgrade I wanted to accomplish was to add polish to my email opt-in form.  I always felt that the standard forms from Aweber didn’t look too good.  I really liked Lynn Terry’s form, so I started poking around the SSWT forum looking for clues.  Well, she pointed me to where she got the graphic! (I didn’t intend on picking the same color that she did, but blue is what matched the new theme.)

I want to share with you where I got the custom email opt-in form.  It is part of a great offer containing 120 Squeeze Page Designs.  When you follow this link, you will have the opportunity to get 2 free squeeze page templates.  One is an email opt-in form and the other is an optimized squeeze page.  Here’s where it gets good.  For only $37 you can have the full 120 Squeeze Page Templates.  You could not even get the email opt-in form completed by a web designer for that price!  I think it is a great deal.  (Of course, I bought it!) It is so important to have a good, Web 2.0, look to your web pages in order to increase opt-in rates.  This package will definitely help you with that!

All in all, I am glad that this step toward building on-line income is complete.  It is time to move on to step 2 – launching my first affiliate marketing site.  I’ll keep you updated along the way.

About a month and a half ago, I posted about roadblocks keeping me from starting a project.  As with things of this nature, it took longer than I anticipated to get past the roadblocks.  Once I cleared the major roadblock, a couple of other detours ensued.  Now that I am past those, I am ready to get going.

One other thing that has changed is the project I wanted to start.  I am putting that on hold to focus on something that will generate some quicker cash flow.  I still want to do that project, but my online business has bills to pay, now!

As an exercise in accountability, I am posting here my plans for the upcoming weeks and months.

1. This website needs a facelift.  I am going to update the look and better integrate with social media.
2. I am launching my first affiliate marketing site.
3. Create more affiliate marketing sites.
4. More consistent posting on all of my blogs.
5. Profit!!

As this is a blog about my journey to work from home, I will keep updating you on my progress and what I learn along the way.

I have been busy creating a new website. It has been a lot of fun and things are coming along well. with that, I have also been working to learn how to make money on the internet. I have been reading various emails, blogs, websites, and other materials from “internet marketing gurus.” The amount of stuff out there is truly overwhelming!

Truth be told, the “internet marketing guru” portion is not going so well. There is so much advice out there and it is often hard to tell who is a real “internet marketing guru.” Many people are buying and selling content, but I am interested in people who are generating useful content that I can apply to my projects. I could list the folks that I have decided to ignore for now, but perhaps it is more constructive to list who I am going to pay attention to.

In no particular order, those are:

1) Jonathan Leger
2) John Reese
3) Joel Comm

Why did I pick these three? For one, they all give valuable advice for free! Each of their websites offer many things you can do to help your business and it is given in the spirit of giving back. Also, for the most part, there is very little hype for these three. They tend to recommend things they have already tried themselves and they do this with straight talk, including the down-side of product or technique they are recommending. In other words, they are real pros.

Click over to their websites and give them a try. Also, share your recommendations in my comments section.

Life has been very busy so blogging has been light. I am getting to the point where I can start blogging again. One thing I have been thinking about is the merits of niche marketing. Conventional wisdom, on the web, is that successful websites are targeted to a particular niche. I am thinking about pursuing a strategy of combining multiple niches in one site, effectively creating a “multi-niche” e-commerce site.

Today my e-commerce website, www.TenFootTable.com, is most successful in selling Celtic Sea Salt. Some of my plans are to expand the marketing of related items on this site. Salt, while a good seller, is a low-margin product. I want to create cross-sell opportunities for higher-margin sales. This fits well into the niche marketing concept.

It is appealing to add unrelated (to salt) items to sell on the same website. My main reason is that as a small operation it is time consuming to maintain multiple websites and the associated back-ends and/or business entities. Our business is also a family business. As a family, we have varied interests. Is it possible to market to many niches in one website? It will be interesting to find out.