Chat last night was awesome!

It was our first official Make Your Site Sell chat and we reviewed 3 websites. We had many participants looking to have their sites critiqued by their peers too which was great. However, there's only so much anyone can accomplish in 1 & 1/2 hours. So next Tuesday, 3 more sites:

Pantry Essentials, which should be interesting as I know both the owner and the designer :) The whole site was recently overhauled by WebPageOne and they also added a shopping cart. Both the owner and designer will be present for the site critique, so it will definately be interesting to hear the comments of others!

SM Creative Marketing is another very new website, and I've only just recently had the pleasure of meeting it's owner, Seth Mellin - who also happened to be our first male member :)

And the third site will be Incredible Impressions. Patrysha, the founder of Incredible Impression is a friend of mine, and a great girl. I expect to see her business really do well, and look forward to helping her create the perfect site!

Next Chat - Tuesday, January 11th at 9:30 pm in the Wahms United chat room - everyone is welcome to join us!

If you're interested in reading the edited transcript, you can do so here.

~ Dianne ~

What a busy week already!!

The New Year is upon us, and I haven't been posting here as much as I should be. I've been swamped with working on my website...

I've added a new resource & link exchange directory which is already seeing new link exchanges happening. Now, I know that it's much more beneficial to just exchange with sites that have a higher Google Page Rank... but unless I spend countless hours every day contacting those sites, I'm kind of stuck as to how to achieve this lol. I have soooo many projects under way right now, and my first priority is to my members at the moment. Making Wahms United THE resource site for work at home parents ain't easy ya know ?? lol

Speaking of our members, we increased our annual and semi-annual membership rates to $49.95 US and $28.00 US respectively, and Nancy has already brought in 3 new members! I have one new one pending, so hopefully she'll contact me soon :)

It's really tough for any work at home parent to find enough hours in the day to accomplish all of the tasks on our to-do lists... especially when you have a large site, and people are always asking for help, advice etc. Not that I mind... no sirreeee! That's why I started WU, and why I love it so much. But sometimes it would be nice to accomplish everything I set out to do in a day *grin*.

So what is my major goal for 2005? Well, I have a few actually. First, I want to increase my targeted traffic, and several ways I plan on achieving this is by stepping out of my comfort zone and host seminars, workshops, chats and write articles and submit them to directories. Also included on the list is to work some more on my SEO. I love the SEO class on Yahoo

My next goal is purely financial - to increase my monthly revenue. I've hired an advertising firm to help me out with this, and though I'm not ready to say who it is I'll be working with just yet, I certainly hope they pay off... and will report here on how things are going with them over the next few months.

With all the goals that I set, I write them out, and under each main goal I create a list of steps or smaller goals that will help me realize that main goal. I find that this type of planning is crucial to obtaining your goals. Without a set plan in place, I bounce all over the place and get very little accomplished.

Think that's about it for now :)

~ Dianne ~

Make Your Site Sell

a weekly chat dedicated to enhancing your website to improve your visitors experience. Our goal here is to raise the number of visitors that just visit, to visitors that convert to paying customers :)

Chat Location: http://www.WahmsUnited.com/chat.php
Date: Every Tuesday
Time: 9:30 pm EST

Each week we'll take a look at participant's websites for *critiquing* by fellow work at home parents that could be potential customers for you. We'll discuss openly and honestly what we think of each website (constructive criticism!!), and brainstorm improvements.

This week we're looking at:
http://www.sweetlywrapped.com/
http://www.soleutions.ca/
http://www.crazybeegifts.com/
http://www.wahmsunited.com/

This chat is currently open to everyone, so feel free to invite your friends :) Attending doesn't mean you have to participate in the website critique... most ideas will be suitable for any site, with some minor modifications :) If you have a second to stop by each of the sites listed above, we'd love to hear your comments on them as well... the bottom line is, if you were a customer, would YOU buy from the site?


~ Dianne ~