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How We Make Our Website Work:

Ever wonder how Humorous Homemaking is set up?  How does the content get out to the world and how can we get everything delivered?  This is your resource!

  • WordPress – WordPress is the best blog publishing platform PERIOD.  Free, easy to use and customizable in every way you can imagine.
  • StudioPress/Genesis Framework – For a long time, we used a free theme for this site.  It worked, but it was hard to use and updating it was always a little scary because it wasn’t maintained.  At the recommendation of friends and fellow bloggers, we upgraded to the Genesis Framework and we’ve never looked back.  A VERY GOOD investment if you are serious about blogging.
  • Bluehost – Consistently rated #1 for WordPress blog hosting, we’ve used Bluehost for many years, from their inexpensive shared hosting packages to their largest VPS offering. I highly recommend you start here no matter the expected size of your site. We use Bluehost on several sites.
  • Feedblitz – A very powerful email marketing and blog RSS service. It will take you some time to learn how to make it work because there is so much it can do. Thankfully, if you get stuck, their tech support via phone and email are fantastic.

How We Measure and Test the Website:

  • Google Analytics – The world’s leading website measurement tool, Google Analytics gives you tracking on who’s visiting your site, where they came from and what they did while there.  For free, you can’t beat this measurement tool to give basic traffic data and much more.
  • GTMetrix – This tool “grades” your page according to the page load time, the cleanness of your website coding, etc.  We use this tool whenever the site loads slower than usual or to make sure any site changes we’ve made were for the better.
  • Alexa – This tool also “grades” your page, but does so to compare your ranking against other websites.  As your site grows, you can use Alexa to provide demographic data, site visitor data and look for basic visitor trends.

How We Make Money on the Site:

How does Humorous Homemaking make cents?  In addition to the banner ads and so forth that are manually put up when working directly with a company, here are some products we use to help make money through Humorous Homemaking.

  • Coaching and Speaking – Both Stacy and Barry of Humorous Homemaking offer private or group coaching, and both are regular speakers at events, conferences, and similar. Stacy specializes in helping women find the right balance of home management and work (especially work from home), and Barry specializes in financial coaching and personal finance issues.
  • Google Adsense – Several of the display (banner) ads on the site are generated from Google Adsense and we are paid each time someone clicks an ad (PPC).
  • Amazon Affiliate Program – Since we already love Amazon, it is pretty cool that we can get some commission if someone uses Amazon and just happens to use our referral link to get there.  It is easy to sign up and commissions are based on sales.

Blogging Books We Recommend: