Kettei's Weekly Digest - 23rd Dec 2018

byKettei

1.4K followers

5 years ago

It's the end of the week so it's time to review how well I did.

Because it's the week before Christmas and I'm trying to get things wrapped up for my day job, I didn't expect to complete my five goals.

In this post:

• How I did with my goals over the last week
• Malicious site requests blocked from site.ru
• A quick intro to my new venture selling paperbacks on Amazon
  

So, what did I get done?

• Thanks to an Internet outage, I managed to find the time to write a 1100 word post for my bootcamp website. I constructed it using the new Gutenberg blocks to make it look a little more interesting which was kind of fun.
  
• I re-created my Amazon Associates account so that I could include some affiliate links at the end of the post (with the required disclaimer, of course).
  
• I experimented with and set up a table to record a video for my niche website but I didn't get time to record a video - I'm hoping to do that later today.
  

What didn't happen?

• I didn't write a new post for my niche site. Instead, I was creating an area I can use to regularly record videos for the niche site. I have a couple of post ideas prepared so I should be able to make up for this in the coming week.
  
• I didn't make any progress on my new child theme for the bootcamp blog. I'm still excited about this (as it's based upon the new Twentynineteen theme) but I needed to focus on client work for my day job.
• I didn't create a new video post for my niche blog, pretty much for the same reason that I didn't create a post at all - I'm still perfecting the video set up.
• Social media didn't happen at all this week. I just didn't have the time to get distracted with social media, again due to focusing on the day job.

I didn't expect to manage all the goals this week and I'm actually pleased I found the time to write one full-length post for my bootcamp blog so it's no big deal that I didn't get these things done.

Spam referrals

When I reviewed my visitor log for this week, I noticed that I'm getting a lot of visits referred from the domain site.ru. This immediately rang alarm bells (why would a domain in Russia be linking to my site?) so I did a quick search and found that the traffic using that referrer was probably malicious and probing for weaknesses on my site.

Thanks to the suggestion on this web-page, I've added a rule to my .htaccess file to send a 403 Forbidden response to such requests.

Selling Books on Amazon

In August, I started selling books on Amazon KDP (paperbacks, not e-books). I've been making a small amount of sales but I am making sales, which is cool.

Because I'm seeing a small amount of success doing what I'm doing, I'm going to redouble my efforts in the coming year to see if I can increase my visibility on the platform and increase my sales. I have not done any marketing at all on these books so far.

With this in mind, I'm thinking of creating a niche site in the new year purely to promote my own books but I need to figure out what kind of content would attract visitors to the site in order to show them the links to Amazon. I want to make their visit to my new site worth their time.

This week, I sold 4 books, which might not sound like much but it equates to about $5 in royalties. The previous week I didn't sell anything so my efforts aren't resulting in consistent returns (yet).

Goals for the coming week

This week is going to be quite busy as I'm going to be taking a few days off for Christmas and I still need to get some client work finished off but I still think it's worthwhile to set some goals to work towards.

1. Write a new post for my niche site
2. Create the first video for my niche site's YouTube channel
   
3. Promote the two latest posts on my bootcamp site on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.

I hope you all have a great week and where applicable, a wonderful Christmas.