The Family Project

Who We are

I recently got a divorce and I was lucky enough to keep my 3 kids.  I started paying alimony and more and the bills kept getting tighter and tighter.  The divorce was / is hard on all of us so I choose to do something with the kids that we could all get involved in and be proud of what we were doing.  So first let me introduce you to the players.

• Dad – 41 years old and has work in software for 20 years but the majority of the time programmed for the advertising industry.
• Donovan – 14 years old and has interest include video games (including programming) and Airsoft guns.
• Samsara – 12 years old and interested in fashion and acting. She is fun and trying to find her square self in a round world.
• Jules – 11 Year old with a passion for skateboards and just having fun.

How it began?

I knew you could make money online because I had do it before.  I was on a roll and had started getting traffic to a blog several years ago but my editor was not as passionate about it as I was (my ex-wife).  So I thought I would try it again with the kids and see where I could take it.  I started watching free webinars and learning more and more.  I then settled on Auto Wealth Maker for my platform.  I sat down and explain what a niche was to the kids and how it all worked.  We went through the corporate structure and revenue sharing (which I think they liked the best).  Next we look at each person and choose a topic.  There were misses and a bug in the software for a couple of days.  We found the first topic of Skateboarding Logos.  About a 2 dollar a day site.  Airsoft Guns was listed at 30 dollars a day and bohemian cloths was about 5 dollars a day.  This was the hard part.

How is it Going so far

Well Airisoft Guns site has had many bugs which as delayed it greatly but we finally started over and everything is good now.  Skateboarding Logos is doing great and driving some traffic but very low revenue.  Bohemian Clothing needs work but is getting hits via Google search and moving up the ladder.  When ever we make a move to improve our search position the Kids are involved.  The kids inspect the websites for what they like and help with design aspects.  It is my hope that over the next 6 months we can get to a point and bring up an addition 9 websites.  For my purpose on this I have turned to hub pages to build smaller sites and generate some quicker cash flow verses the long term sites I am setting up with the kids.

Important Lesson for All

There are some important lesson that I am trying to instill in the kids.

• The value of money
• The importance of relevance
• The importance of value

Use the proper tool and combine your Efforts.

The categories of websites for this discussion are as follows

• Small Website - This is one that will be maintained and added to over time. It has all the relevant stuff like networking and contact pages. It is a niche that is direct but can and does have other niches that can flow off of it creating additional pages in a very nice website. For my purposes a small website will never be completed but I do not plan on adding more than ten to fifteen pages.
• Single Page – This type of website will be created and then left alone. The only maintenance is for comments.
• Blog – This I an ongoing discussion. The page you are on is my blog.

The proper tool for the job

• Blogger – I use this for my blog but any blogging tool will do. I used this because I already had an account and no other reason.
• Hub Pages - I use Hub Pages for my single page websites. I get traffic on hub pages from day one. This type of page needs a lot of work in the beginning but once it is done it should be stand alone. Make sure you do keyword research for your niche and proper word densities. I know there is controversy about I that will get your site found or not and here is my answer. Yes it will help no matter how smart Google becomes but more importantly is the monetization methods use this to deal with the types of ads placed on your page. The key word on this website should be a high volume long tail keyword (long tail meaning more that one word).
• Auto Wealth Maker – I have read some bad reviews that are saying that this software is a rip off. I will tell you now that in the one month I have been using it I have not made my money back and I have 3 websites up and running. Beyond the hype / sales pitch the software is good with some bugs. Support is not bad and they do a weekly training for free. It does not have a monthly hosting fee and the software is relatively easy to use. I am not an affiliate for the purpose of full disclosure. It does the job and has a great wealth of information.

Linking it all together.

My blog links to my other pages and as we all know a blog get crawled pretty often with new content. This means my other sites will also get crawled. My other sites also link back to my blog on the contact page. Every time a change is made to any site it gets a tweet and an FB link. So after reading a great deal on this topic I have chosen a linking strategy that I can completely control by having a blog as the hub for all my websites to find each other. You could blog about the websites which might be pretty powerful but I am blogging about their creations and have the links to the side.

The Family Project is 4 members strong with 5 websites and growing. We tweet and have a FaceBook page. Please follow or like us and see how we grow.

Tweet Adder 3.0

I read an interesting review of this product today.  It was a sales pitch from an affiliate marketer of Tweet Adder 3.0.  I thought about this product and how it was being marketed in this case.  Te gist of the review was to create multiple twitter accounts and set this product on autopilot to gain followers and it will tweet your messages for you based on what you tell it to send.  This will drive traffic to your sales websites and you can make money.  The number of twitter accounts was based on the how much your computer could handle. So with this product you are going to leave running 24 hours a day to generate tweets, followers, and money.  Theses all go hand in hand and it sounds kinda good but wait …

Internet Bubble of 2000

As an IT professional I recall this.  The advice I am seeing from several different places on information marketing is all about money.  This is cool, it is why we are here, it is what we need to survive and we are all just trying to get a piece of the pie.  What about adding value?

The Family Project

I started this project with my kids to make extra money and teach them a few things about business.  The first business lesson that they will learn is about adding value to what you are offering.  So I am offering you a link to Tweet Adder 3.0.  The 2 questions you should ask are do I use the software and is this an affiliate link.  The answer is no I am not buying it as of yet but yes this is an affiliate link.  After reviewing Tweet Adder 3.0 I noticed that this is a very powerful piece of software to manage your twitter accounts.

Manage not Run

If you use it to do some daily task then it is a great piece of software because we all need to automate something.  If you let it run your business then you will never add value to the people you are serving.  I know that is not what you normally get from someone that just wants you to click on a link so we can make a few dollars.  But I want to add value and this software can add value to an established person that is creating a valuable services verses just trying to live the dream of making a lot of money on autopilot. Yes it will make some money on autopilot but that should not be the point.