Decluttering Leads To Hidden Gems!

For a few weeks now, I have been promising myself that I'll organise my new home office, which has been stuffed full of boxes since we moved into the new house last month.

At the weekend, I finally got round to it and it seemed to take forever.

Now at last, my desk is clear again. All of the bills that lay unopened are now paid and I even found a couple of affiliate cheques along the way.

Instead of walking around boxes and clutter, I can now go to my super-organised cupboard and find whatever I want, quickly.

Rummaging through the various boxes, I came across printed ebooks and other courses I've purchased during my 10+ years online and there were some nice hidden gems amongst them.

I rediscovered a book that I accidentally deleted from my hard drive about three years ago. It's called Make Your Words Sell. It's not exactly a science, but it's written in a style that's easy to understand and, more to the point, it's written for online publishing.

All of those long sales letters that compel you buy stuff you don't really need are written in the same or a similar style to what's promoted in this book, but it does of course, go far deeper than that and explains how to vary your writing style to suit your audience.

That is something that some people miss out on with their web sites - they write according to their own style and mood and give no thought to what their readers or customers are looking for.

I was glad I found it.

Another thing I found was a disk containing software I downloaded in 2004 and before.

Amongst it was a package called Listings Manager (I bought 5 licences apparently) from InteractiveTools.com.

Having rediscovered the package, I loaded it up onto a site that I have left neglected since I lost my data in a sever crash two years ago!

That site is www.residentialrentals.co.uk and I'm using Listings Manager to create a free to advertise site for landlords and residential rentals agents in the UK to advertise properties.

I've produced the site in XSitePro2 and then amended the Listings Manager templates to suit the overall site design.

Like most of my sites, this one isn't finished yet, but I had to do something with it, because having checked the stats today, it's been getting quite a view unique visitors just lately, so there's little point in it sitting there doing nothing.

The interesting thing is that I am presently spending a fair bit of money having some sites developed for me using Drupal and other CMS systems - and this has been ongoing since December and January.

So, should I look at all these new fangled ways of "rapid site development" that have taken 6 months to get nowhere, or should I stick with my original philosophy of developing my own sites using software that I understand?

ResidentialRentals.co.uk has taken me 2 days effort with no help from anyone - and 99% of it works. The rest (advertiser set up) will work by tonight I hope.

The point of this post is to demonstrate that there are plenty of tools available to allow people like me to develop their own sites quickly and easily.

So what if the site doesn't look like Amazon.com or CNN.com? If it works and users can follow it, then that's all that matters in my opinion - and by that, I mean that people get response from their ads and that I get clicks from the Google Adsense links!

Now if only I could find an affiliate link for Listings Manager......