Project Update: Purple Women Blog & Book

To date, 135 Purple Women^TM have taken the survey. The online portion of my research will conclude when the number of valid surveys hits the intended goal of 200. My heartfelt thanks to all who have participated thus far. When the survey is over, I will begin a publicity blitz about the project and release the results of the first half (quantifiable data) over a period of two weeks, taking on one question per day as a blog topic. I hope this will spur some good conversation.

If by chance you have started the survey and not had a chance to finish it (yes, you can quit and come back to it), please do so soon and by all means tell a childfree lady friend (living in North America, the focus of the survey) if you haven't already.

I am now able to focus 100% on developing Purple Women^TM, the blog and the book. In the last few weeks, I have concentrated on recruiting new blog team members (ideally from all over the world), developing and maintaining good content, and building a readership (who hopefully will also feel compelled to comment -- bloggers live for comments). Now, it is time to sit down and develop a book outline and create a book proposal.

You may have noticed some changes to the sidebar. There will be more to come. Click through on GeoVisitors to view what part of the world (yes, it's a global publishing medium) our audience/readership is logging in from. I've also added a free StatCounter to track a ridiculous number of detailed statistics for our team blog. At some point I may make the results public, but not until its news worthy.

Technorati has made some nice upgrades to their free service and I am taking advantage of their metatag solution for making a site easier to search. Try typing in the word "book" to the search tool I've added at the bottom and see what happens. We're a literate group! I also added a bit of code that they provide which allows a blogger to assign searchable tags to their individual posts (see below). This will help visitors search for topics within the blog or within Technorati. When I have time, I will go back and edit all my previous posts to include these tags. I have also used their tag system to make external, free searches more successful by tagging the entire blog with these terms:

• child-free
• child free
• childfree
• childless
• non-parent
• no kids
• lifestyle
• women
• woman

A while back I added a small Amazon.com ad to the sidebar. I have so far hand only one click through on my Amazon Associates account. If you're looking for your next good read (perhaps a PW book review has inspired you?) please click that button. A portion of the purchase will go to support this site.

And away we go -- blog on!

Technorati Tag: Childfree