A day in the life of a HealthyPetNet Rep

Tracking hit statistics on your blog

2008-12-15T06:25:00.000-08:00

Once you set up your blog, you want to track hit statistics. What is the point of writing every week if no one is coming to visit?

I use the free hit counter, Http://StatCounter.com. They have good instructions on how to set them up and you get a good-sized log for each "project", totally free. You can set it up to email you your statistics every day. I've used it for years.

I started my new blog yesterday and wrote several articles. This morning, I added an invisible StatCounter to the blog. At this point, since there's no traffic, there's no point making the numbers public.

The goal is to begin to check where your visitors are coming from (the referring page), you know, how did they find you? If they were using seach terms on Google, what terms were they using? Then you can expand where you promote your blog and write articles that you know people are interested in.

Setting up a blog

2008-12-15T06:16:00.000-08:00

I am very fond of blogging. It's free and, done right, it can really help you capture interest. For me, there are so many demands on my time and everybody needs my help, blogging gives me a forum to share what I've learned.

This particular blog is set up on http://www.blogger.com, also known as BlogSpot. Blogger was the very first blogging tool that I ever used. It's run by Google and it allows you to use your own stat counters. It also allows you to post via email or text message.

For my larger blogs, I switched to another provider for one simple reason, and perhaps that reason has now changed, I don't know. It's that Blogger did not have templates that allowed you to create Pages as well as Posts. I needed Pages to help me organize my topics (take a look at The Holistic Pet Blog and you'll see what I mean).

The service I switched over to was Wordpress. I like WordPress but just know that they do monitor the blogs and if you are just using the blog to drive traffic to an affiliate or MLM business, they'll shut you down.

Just be safe. Use your blogs to express yourself and to educate. If it sends people over to look at your business or product, great, but make sure you have "value added".

How the Life's Abundance Wellness Supplement is helping me tame feral cats

2008-12-14T19:54:00.000-08:00

I stumbled onto a great training tool and wanted to share it.

Little Carrier Kitty

Two months ago, someone brought in an adorable black and white kitten who had been locked in a carrier and thrown away in a dumpster!! It was so sick and traumatized, poor thing. But while I was transferring it to a clean cage it got out into my house. I haven't been able to trap him so I've just been working on calming him down.

He's afraid of humans -- no telling how he was mistreated before whoever had him threw him away -- so he won't get too close to me for regular Life's Abundance dry food or the canned Instinctive Choice.

BUT he LOVES the new Life's Abundance Wellness Supplements. I buy them with the large bags of dry cat food so it cuts the cost a bit. You're only supposed to give kitties about five pieces per day. This stuff must be delicious because the cats go wild just over me shaking the bottle.

And this little guy comes RACING into the room to get it! Doesn't matter if I'm in the room or not, he does not want to miss out on these vitamin-treats!

If you know anything about handling feral cats or severely traumatized cats, you can't be forward with them, you have to be laid back and very gentle. So I don't try to grab at him. I just occasionally reach out to pet him. Slowly, slowly, he is calming down.

Mr. Tree Kitty

Then, right before Thanksgiving, someone called me about a cat up a tree. He'd been there for days and one fellow was even shooting a BB gun at him, supposedly to try to scare him out of the tree. He was at least 60 feet up in the tree and would only climb out further if anyone climbed up to get him, so they'd exhausted all efforts to get him. It looked like he'd been sick or injured before he climbed the tree because he was staggering and falling before he got up there. It was getting to be quite wet and cold in Denver and we had to get him down or he was going to freeze to the tree limb.

Long story short, after seven days in the tree, the fire department came and fired a water hose at him and blew him out of the tree. Two firefighters stood under the tree and caught him in kind of a trampoline-blanket so he was panicked but not injured as he fell.

He was a beautiful, small male, orange with white throat and paws. Animal control took him and determined that he was feral, he was so mean and vicious. They were going to hold him three days to see if anyone claimed him, then put him down. They don't adopt out ferals. But the people who called me had launched a letter-writing campaign and got animal control to release the kitty... uh... to ME!

So my friend and I picked him up the evening before Thanksgiving. Animal control put him in the carrier and brought him out hissing and spitting. They maintained he was mean. But they'd neutered him and microchipped him and adopted him to us for free.

We got him home and could tell right away that he was tame, or at least, had been tame at one time and had maybe been abandoned and was going feral. He calmed right down in my peaceful, cat-loving home. I guess he could tell he was in kind hands.

I kept him in quarantine in the back bathroom and he just slept and recuperated for days, it even took him awhile to want to eat. I started him on the canned Instinctive Choice, it's smells wonderful and is chock-full of nutrients. He wasn't in a condition to use the prescription canned foods, but I would have put him on those if he'd turned IC down.

But like the little trash-carrier kitty, Mr. Tree Kitty just LOVES these Wellness Supplements. I'd go so far as to say they have been helping him recover since they are so full of healthy ingredients and antioxidants. He growls and scares everybody out of the way so he can eat an entire plateful of supplements, so I just sprinkle out a few on his plate so he won't eat so many!

I try to keep several bottles on hand -- you get an additional discount if you buy them by the case, and shipping is free if your total order is $500 or more. Most people wouldn't use this volume but as a rep and someone with many kitties to care for, this type of volume is normal for me. I just try to order as economically as possible.

It's just so cool that if I have a rescue kitty who needs some accelerated socializing, the Wellness Supplement is so darned effective! It's making it so much easier to help the kitties get well and tame down so we can adopt them out.

How one of my friends set up a free website using Microsoft Office Live

2008-12-14T19:41:00.000-08:00

Holy toledo, look at this! One of my friends, Sherry Klemme, set up a website for free using the Microsoft Office Live Small Business tools. It's FREE website hosting from a very reputable place! Unbelievable.

They give you free professional templates, free support, free emails... I'm a professional Internet Project Manager and have done the web for 20 years. Let me tell you, this is very cool. I may drop some of my GoDaddy hosting and try this out.

http://safehome.health.officelive.com/

That was the site that she set up. Here is the link for you to set up your own free business website:

http://www.officelive.com/free-website

HealthyPetNet Business Goals for 2009

2008-12-14T19:10:00.000-08:00

I've sort of flown by the seat of my pants these first three years. I didn't even work it as a business for the first 18 months. I just shared it with about a dozen friends. The income potential didn't matter to me, my kitties just loved the food and treats and it was the best thing I'd found, so we stayed on it.

When the pet food recall hit, I was just in reaction mode. I signed up about 70 customers in 10 days and the growth was very good for several months afterwards. My blogging attracted a lot of interest but I can't say that was a GOAL.

After having trying many other MLM's and affiliate programs and work-at-home businesses, I found out what works for me and what doesn't. So that is going to drive my goals for 2009.

HealthyPetNet in 2009

Write an article per week for The Holistic Pet Food Blog
This is the best advertising so I'm cutting out all other methods to focus on this one
Provide stellar customer service (for Val and Joyce and I) by
a. Send an evite Thank You card for every order
b. Send an email and evite Thank You card for every new customer
c. Send hardcopy Christmas cards to every customer (Dec 2008)
d. Send evite cards to every customer (Dec 2008)
e. Build relationships so that our customers feel confident getting their questions answered
The purpose of this goal is to work with existing customers to increase sales
Attend the 2009 Trilogy HealthyPetNet Convention in Florida
Double my personal customer group's sales numbers
Add three new Executive Reps in my downline, with at least two under Valerie

I'm not comfortable with home parties so while Trilogy folks do them, I never have. I might do one this year but I'm reluctant so ... gosh, I guess part of this blog is going to be that you CAN stay within your comfort zone and still make money!

See the products: http://USHealthyPet.net

See the business: http://healthypetfood.biz

Coming up on fourth year with Trilogy/HealthyPetNet

2008-12-14T18:19:00.000-08:00

I signed up for HealthyPetNet on 1/1/2006 and am coming up on my fourth year as an Independent Rep with Trilogy/HealthyPetNet. My group sales have consistently ranged from $7000 to $8000 per month for the last year and a half, pretty good considering I work a very busy day job. It's something that I've stuck with and can't imagine being without so I thought, for this year, I would keep a blog on sort of "A day in the life" to show how much I learn, how much fun I have, and how I work it as a business. I also do animal rescue so I'll throw those stories in, as well.

My sister signed up as a rep on my team. We put all new customers in under her and I work the business for her, sending them thank you cards and answering their questions. My sister loves animals and does rescue work, herself, but she works a handful of part-time jobs and commutes an hour each way to her main job, so this is a way that I can help her. The way the pay structure works, we both earn money, so this is a good plan for us.

We've seen a LOT of activity over the last two years! We had the major pet food recall of 2007 and some pretty significant pet food recalls last year. My sponsor, Judy Bishop, who is a top rep in the company, was hit by Hurricane Gustav and ran her business via generators and a Verizon wireless card for several weeks!

I ran a year-long ad in Animal Wellness Magazine and also got lots of experience with various online advertising. (Don't call the phone number, hardly anyone used it, they preferred web contact, so I discontinued it).

I've maintained a Holistic Pet Food Blog ever since the pet food recall of 2007 and it has been a very popular blog!

I've learned how to share this pet food with others. Just recently, a neighbor and a friend from church started their pets on HealthyPetNet. It's all about genuinely caring about animals and it shows when you visit with other people and their pets. (It also helps if you put a handful of their old animal food in one hand and a handful of Life's Abundance in the other -- anyone can see the difference!)

I hope to blog about my business goals, my rescue work, new products, things I learn about healthy pet, people, and planet products, how I help my team, and the convention that will be held this Spring.

To learn about healthy pet food and to see if this is the right food for your pets, go to http://www.ushealthypet.net/

To see if this might be a home-based business that you could work and be successful in, go to http://healthypetfood.biz/