Home Office Organization–21st Century Style

Archive for March, 2008

Product Name: 30 Minute Backlinks Tutorial
Creator: Michelle MacPhearson
URL: www.30minutebacklinks.com
Purpose: To generate large numbers of one-way backlinks to your site from sites with Google Page Ranks of up to 5, 6, and 7.

This is an ingenious way to create one-way backlinks to your site. It truly is brilliant.

I wanted to write and update you on the progress of the backlink building I did using 30 Minute Backlinks. I also wanted to write my review of the tutorial now that I’ve had sufficient time to use it. It’s been 30 days.

I haven’t done anything more since my last update to actively build more backlinks. I did what I was able to do with the time I had to devote to it during the first 11 days.

Here are my current statistics since my last post:

• Pageviews per day: 10 (up from 6)
• Visits per day: 9 (up from 5)
• Traffic from search engines: 13.6% (down from 23.7%)
• Traffic from referring sites: 65.9%
• Direct traffic: 20.6%
• Google search results page the site first appears on: 2 (It’s result #19, search term “home office organization“)
• Number of inbound links: 416 (siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com)

Benefits

As you can see, the number of inbound links to this site increased by 312 from when I started implementing 30 Minute Backlinks. I initially had 104 inbound links.

The Google search results page this blog first appears on improved from #7 to #2. It was on page one after 11 days but has fallen to page two at 30 days.

Daily pageviews and visitors also increased slightly.

The long-term benefits may be substantial, but I won’t know until 3-6 months pass. I’ll have to wait for the other software directories to scrape my content and add it to their directories.

The amount of work I devoted to getting the increase in backlinks wasn’t that much comparatively. I spent about 16 hours on it.

Downsides

I hate to say it, but there are several downsides to this tutorial.

The product hasn’t had the desired effect of bringing more visitors to this blog from the search engines. I’m still getting most of my traffic directly and from referring sites, which didn’t cost me anything but time writing content and submitting posts to the social bookmarking sites. I expect to spend time writing content and submitting posts to social sites because this is a blog, and that is what bloggers do.

Michelle says you don’t need any software-writing experience to use the methods she teaches, but I disagree. A small amount of knowledge is needed to understand the tutorials. Since I had no prior knowledge and some problems my first time through, I used the forum to ask how to solve my problem. The forum is the way you get help. I got a response that worked quite well, but it took 5 days for them to get back to me with a solution.

Thirty minutes is also misleading. The tutorial itself requires more than an hour of your time before you even begin to work on generating backlinks. It takes another hour or so to download all the programs you need to create the content for the backlinks.

There are 5 methods for generating backlinks. Once you have everything in place to start work, it takes about 30 minutes per method for 4 of the methods to create the basic content and use the free directory upload software you downloaded during the tutorial. Parts of method one don’t work as shown in the tutorial videos. The first method is actually two methods in one, so it takes an hour to implement the basics of it.

The 5th method requires you to create an e-book or long report. If you don’t have one already, you have to write one. I skipped using this technique because I didn’t have time to devote to writing a long report for this blog last month.

If you want to get the maximum bang for your buck, you have to buy the full versions of 3 programs, or you have to spend about 24 hours for each method each time you submit content by hand to the rest of the directories available. You could pay someone else to do that for you, but that still costs money. In either case, you have to spend more money or a lot more time to get the most out of this tutorial fast.

I’m using the slow option of waiting for the other directories to scrape my content into theirs. This will take 3-6 months to do what buying the programs or hiring help can do in a few days. Therefore, I’m not seeing the dynamite results advertised.

The 4th program, Snag-It, is software necessary to create some of the content and only comes with a 30-day free trial. Then you have to buy it if you want to continue using it. Snag-It is screen capture software and is extremely easy to use. If you plan on doing any sort of online marketing or producing any graphics, a good screen capture package is necessary. Although it’s another additional cost, it’s worth the money.

The cost of the tutorial is $100. The cost of each full software package is anywhere from $50 to $100. If you purchase the tutorial plus all the software the total comes to $400 - $500.

I didn’t have that much to spend, and I didn’t have 120 hours or more to spend submitting content by hand either. I have no idea what hiring help might cost for such a large amount of time. I figured it would be a lot more money than I could afford.

Conclusion

The 30 Minute Backlinks tutorial does what it says and teaches you how to create a lot more one-way backlinks to your site(s). In a few days, a few weeks or a few months you can have substantially more backlinks, depending on your implementation choices. This will lead to better search engine rankings.

It truly is a brilliant way to obtain one-way backlinks from high Google page rank sites.

However, it takes a lot more time than 30 minutes, and it’s not that easy if you can’t afford to hire help or buy the additional software, or don’t have much experience with creating software.

I think I would be much happier with the product if I hadn’t been led to believe it would be a lot easier than it is to use, or that I would have to spend more than the cost of the product for it to work. I would have been happier if the real cost and the real amount of time and work required had been made clear up front.

If you have the money to buy the additional software required, or you can afford to hire help, this product will get you tons of one-way backlinks and I recommend it. You can use the tutorial and programs over and over again to generate even more backlinks. You can use it on all your sites and blogs. Just lather, rinse and repeat.

You must decide if SEO and search engine rankings will really help you accomplish your goals. If you get or need to get most of your traffic from search engines to be successful, this is the tutorial that will do the trick.

You can find more information about 30 Minute Backlinks at:
www.30minutebacklinks.com

Sherri Joubert
30 Minute Backlinks user

Technorati Tags: 30 minute backlinks, product review, SEO, tutorial

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If you haven’t read my previous posts on 30 minute backlinks, here are the links:

• Easily Create One-Way Backlinks
• Update: After 1 Week of Backlink Building

Date: 3/2/2008

I really buckled down and produced 2/3 of the backlinks that you can build using the 30 Minute Backlinks Tutorial program on February 28th and 29th. I am nothing short of amazed at the dramatic move up in the search engine results I’m seeing and the increased number of backlinks to this blog!

Here are my current statistics:

• Pageviews per day: 6
• Visits per day: 5
• Traffic from search engines: 23.7%
• Google search results page my site first appears on: 1 (It’s result #4, search term “home office organization“)
• Number of inbound links: 170 (siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com)

The first Google search result where my site appears on page one is the link to the toolbar I created for this blog. It’s in position #4. My CHMOD calculator is result #11 in Google. The first reference to this blog prior to 30 Minute Backlinks was page 7, result #72. The number of backlinks to this blog has grown by 66 in the last 11 days.

My overall traffic count is down, but it was never steady. The high traffic I saw all came in one or two days of the month.

I’m working on the last 2 backlink building methods suggested. One is pretty easy to create, the other requires putting together an ebook or white paper, so that will take a bit of time and work. I don’t want to put together any substandard work just for the sake of extra backlinks.

I also haven’t done any of the power user parts of the tutorial. These results are based on the bare bones basics of 2/3 of the backlink building methods in 30 Minute Backlinks.

Another thing I haven’t done is lather, rinse and repeat for my other blogs. I plan to do that over the next month in between content production (which I need to do a lot more of).

Try 30 Minute Backlinks yourself and see what amazing results you can obtain in a short period of time.

After I thoroughly test it out, I’ll write a full review of the product.

Here are my statistics before starting the program:

Date: 2/16/08

• Pageviews per day: 20
• Visits per day: 13
• Traffic from search engines: 8.5%
• Google search results page my site first appears on: 7 (It’s result #72, search term “home office organization“)
• Number of inbound links: 104 (siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com)

This traffic count is a bit deceptive. I got 230 visitors on one day, January 26, 2008. This day caused my monthly average visitor count to appear considerably higher than reality.

Technorati Tags: backlinks, new product, SEO

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You’ve decided to work from a home office, whether you have your own business or are telecommuting. The next big question is where is the best place to put that office in your house?

This may not be an easy decision for many reasons:

• Whether or not you see clients
• Distractions
• Security
• Business Continuity
• How much you plan to mix business and home life
• Whether you need to shut yourself away to be productive
• Space availability
• Space for needed equipment and supplies

Space Availability and Seeing Clients at Home

This may dictate the location of your home office more than any other factor. You have to put the office where you have room, or you may have to clean out a space to make room.

This isn’t as hard when you have a large house, or even a garage you can turn into an office. I have an older house that has a formal dining room and living room in addition to a den and breakfast nook. My home office is in what was originally the formal dining room. I have a large dining room table, so I moved the table into the formal living room and put both leaves in it to use as a conference table. My office is right next to it off the kitchen. That’s great for those morning coffee refills:)

I occasionally see clients in my home and I do so at my dining room/conference table. Both rooms are directly in the front door, so clients don’t have to trek through other parts of the house or up any stairs. This is a big plus because I have less cleaning to do to get ready for a client visit. There is reduced liability by keeping the amount of movement of outsiders in your house to a minimum. Less walking around means less possibility of an accident or injury.

If you choose to see clients in your home office you must weigh the client’s perception of your business. Will clients see you as less professional if you work at home? Will you have a harder time marketing your business to your target customers?

If you have a small home, condominium or apartment, you will have to make some choices about clearing out a room or making due with a section of a room to set up as a home office. If a lack of space is a problem, try to look at it as an opportunity and approach it as a challenge with possibilities. You can find enough room to set up the essentials of your home office if you get creative. Remember, some of the biggest and best companies were started in someone’s garage (Apple Computer, Nike), or at a card table set up in the corner of the living room (Dave Ramsey’s Lampo Group).

Some folks want to do a serious amount of remodeling or add a room to the house for a home office. This is fine if you can afford to pay cash to do so. But if you have a fledgling business that isn’t proven, going into debt to make room isn’t a wise choice. It’s better to make due with what you have until you have lots of profits rolling in. Then you will be able to save up the cash to pay for an addition to the house from a position of success and not risk.

Productivity and Distractions

Some people require quiet and few distractions to be productive. A home office is considerably more chaotic than an office elsewhere if you have children, a spouse and pets, and you work at times when others are playing. If you live by yourself or you don’t have children and your spouse works outside of the home, you will have a lot more peace and quiet.

You must judge if you can handle the level of noise and chaos a family brings to your home office and your work at home. If you are easily distracted and get off track, you will have to choose a quiet location and perhaps have a space where you can close the door to keep disturbances to a minimum.

If you find you just can’t concentrate on business when you need to do so, you may need to find a quieter place outside your home to work, or you may have to work after you put children to bed for the night.

Don’t give up on a home office if you only have an hour or two of serious distractions a day. If you really need to get something done you can hire a babysitter for the day or afternoon, or have your spouse take the children out for some fun while you stay home and work.

If the chaos around your house is caused by older children and pets, you can pack up your laptop and head down to the nearest coffee house with free internet access. If you need to work on a physical project to make posters and displays, you can do that at your local library. Perhaps you can plan to work on the project while the kids are in story time at the library.

Clear rules firmly enforced can help a lot, too. Here are some examples:

• No bothering Mom/Dad until a certain time or show is over on TV unless there is lots of blood, fire, flood or someone gets seriously hurt (i.e. a real emergency).
• Knock on the door (or doorway) to the office and wait to be asked in.
• Do not disturb while Mom/Dad is on the phone unless it’s a real emergency.
• No matter what you want, the answer is always going to be no unless you follow the above rules to the letter.

Mixing Business with Family Life

One of the biggest reasons many of us choose to work at home is we want to blend our family and work lives to the benefit of both.

Please see my previous article, 8 Benefits of Working from Home, for a detailed discussion of this issue.

Security

I love the location of my home office because I can see who is at the back door and who is coming up the front walk from my desk. I feel more comfortable knowing who is coming toward the house and from where. It helps me keep track of my son and his friends, too.

One of the advantages of a home office is most people feel pretty secure in their own homes. But a downside is you’re usually alone or the only adult in the house. There is no security guard at the building entrance. If you live where few neighbors are at home during the day, you may think twice about how secure your home is to intruders.

An alarm system and keeping doors locked are important. A good smoke detector system and carbon monoxide detector system are also important because you don’t have the zoning regulations and OSHA rules that apply to commercial buildings. You have to provide those protections yourself.

You also need to have a lock box or safe on the premises for storing your business’s valuables, data backups and any money you receive to take to the bank.

Important papers can be stored in a bank safe deposit box with copies stored in your home office.

Business Continuity

You need a good business continuity plan for emergencies and extremely disruptive circumstances. My business continuity plan worked very well in the aftermaths of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Because of pre-planning, I was able to keep the business running at a level that allowed me to provide essential services to clients and keep adequate records for industry regulators.

You will need to examine your business and its needs to prepare a business continuity plan that will allow you to continue operations during prolonged power outages or if you must evacuate and operate from a location far from your home.

Once you have the plan together, it’s a good idea to provide a business continuity plan disclosure statement to customers so they will know what to expect if a disaster strikes your area.

Equipment and Supplies

Many home offices simply need a computer, telephone and all-in-one printer, scanner, copier, and fax machine. A storage cabinet for paper, supplies and books or manuals may also be needed. These don’t take up much room and could be placed on a small desk or table and printer stand in the corner of a bedroom if necessary.

If your business is a craft or you produce some type of tangible product that requires space for inventory, you have to take that requirement into consideration. Can you make the craft in one area and store the supplies and finished products in another?

When thinking about a home office you must ask yourself about all the above. You would ask similar questions if you were looking for an office to rent, so ask them of yourself when planning an office at home.

I hope this article helps you to decide where to put your office in your home. I’d love to hear your comments and ideas about where you put, or would put, your home office.

Technorati Tags: home office, home office organization, location

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