I realize that I haven’t been on here with regular updates just recently and this is as good a time as any to reveal some of my activities in the last few weeks.

I had a pretty poor time with my sites in October, some slipped down in the rankings a bit, some failed to live up to their potential and so my earnings also slid slightly, I’ll dig out the numbers later. One of the reasons for that was because I chose to focus on some of the more seasonal events happening around this time of year.

I had a pretty well ranked site in the halloween outfit space but no matter how many visitors I got, I didn’t see the conversions I expected. There may be a lesson here for me in terms of learning my copywriting skills! Undeterred, I am also exploring the Christmas affiliate scene, so I hope to report more about that as the weeks go on.

In the mean time, and much more postiviely, I got involved with promoting Dan Brock’s latest launch. His Deadbeat Super Affiliate course follows on from Profitzon (that I bought last year) and so I felt I could offer some informed comment on the course.

Now, I’m not going to to claim overnight millions from this, but I set up an affiliate site, created a bonus and yesterday I had my very first $100 day. In fact it was a $130 day. So I’m pumped! I can finally see how this might work. I need to do more and work smarter, but this is mortgage money and that feels good!

I’ve decided to put online a few of my older bits and bobs that are doing nbody any good on my hard drive. Who knows, they may be useful to you. The first, Mindmap Mastery, is online now. You can find it linked at the top of the page.

I said on Saturday (Day 7) that I’d probably spend Sunday doing more reading and research than site updating and that is what I ended up doing.I like the old biblical idea of having a day off (at least a bit!) – it lets your brain catch up with life and re-energise in a way that our constant high-pressure lives don’t give us.

Having said that, I did spend some time getting my main site’s first post set up in “The Best Spinner” so that I can plug in a load of articles to UAW and also to Link Juicer. I’m pretty pleased with my text so far – it’s up to 91% unique in TBS and that’s only with a second paragraph for each existing one and no synonyms yet in place.

As a special bonus to those of you following along, I’ve also decided that Sundays will be “search for a keyword” day. What that means is that I’ll set some stuff in motion on Sunday that will make Monday my “Free Keyword” day. I’ll give you a new keyword and domain each Monday that has good searches and at least some potential for commercial exploitation.

So, tada, fanfare please. The first keyword is:

“Single bed with mattress”

Domains available: .com .net and .org all available

This bad boy gets 33,100 searches a month and Traffic Travis says that it is relatively easy to compete for. But check this before you wade in. This is a UK keyword. Check it out in Google Insights and you’ll see that it doesn’t even get a flicker of searches from the US…..so make sure you target the right market and you should be fine.

As a special, special bonus, I checked out the .co.uk for you and found that it has already been snapped, but (and get this!) it has been registered for 2 years to an individual, has a default unix directory listing as its home page and in a bizarre twist of fate is only registered until tomorrow (August 24)! Maybe a short wait will see this back on the market, but if not, I think the right offer will easily secure it.

I haven’t looked at commerciality overall, but beds are beds, right? People need to sleep, so I’m guessing this will be fairly evergreen!!

If you pick it up and make some good money with this, let me know. I’ll preserve any anonymity you want and a bit of encouragement helps everyone on their way.

Earnings for the last two days have been miserable, even when accumulated.

Adsense earnings:  7c despite adding a new  site into the adsense farm that gets a reasonable amount of traffic.

Pretentious title, huh?

I’m still in post-holiday mode at the moment, so you get to enjoy the ramblings of a deranged mind that was deprived of internet usage for a whole 2 weeks! It’s also an excuse for me to play a bit with WordPress 3.0 and Flickr and to dump my holiday images on you like one of those sad family slideshows from yesteryear.

Of course there’s a serious side to this all. As I was wandering around Seville in Spain taking these picture, I was struck (as is almost always the case) that the world at street level is a fairly grubby place. Apart from the stunning Spanish women, there is often a real lack of things to photograph when you look straight ahead and even when something amazing is down at eye level, it’s invariably blocked by cars or signs or workmen.

So, as you can see from the album, I started to look up and take pictures of the skyline of Seville. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out and I learned a lot about the city that I think can be applied to our IM efforts as well. The builders of Seville had to put up a load of buildings for various functions. Much of what they did was pretty utilitarian and much of what they built at street level has changed or been torn up in some way over they years.

However, as soon as you get above head height they built ornamentation and colour and twiddly bits all over the city….and the majority of this is still there and is as engaging now as it was when it first went up.

So how does all this relate to internet marketing? I think it’s in the way that we perceive things as humans. It’s in the detailing that catches the eye on a building and it’s in the detailing that holds the attention of your customers as they look at your own work. I’m as guilty as the next person of building sites that contain reviews that are “workmanlike”. They answer the basic questions but sometimes miss the very thing that would have my customers actually buy the product.

You can see this in the classic longtail traffic that your site log will tell you about. I have a website talking about TV’s and it does a good job (I think) of taking the reviews up a level….but when I go to my log file, I find folk arriving on my site because they want to connect their PC to the HDMI input and because they are unsure what a screen size really means. This is the stuff that will grow my traffic and I had no idea it was even necessary!!

So from now on, my sites will have reviews that try to go just a bit further into the worlds of my customers….not away from the subject completely but just extras that will help more of them straight away. Maybe in years to come, folk will be taking pictures of my buildings in the same way that I did in Seville.

Oh, and as an extra bonus, when I went to see “Knight and Day” last night, there was a long section set in the places I walked round in Seville  just last week. Fantastic!

Well, it’s early days and I have loads to learn still but I made my first sale today from an ebook in a small niche.

Looking back at the last 3 months, I can see an incredible amount of stuff that has just flowed towards me (based on a load of paypal transactions of course ). What’s amazing is that although I feel like I am only in the foothills of this particular IM mountain, I can still see for miles when I look back down. It’s like being at Everest basecamp!

What does this mean…..well, if I can learn enough to get something like this going….there is serious hope for all of you that have only just started in internet marketing. As I said in an earlier post, Daniel Wagner likened it to a line from 0 to 100 percent and said “No matter where you are on the line, others are to the left of you!”

I made the promise in my last post, that I would not be back here until I had filled my commitment to get my own company set up.

Well, I’m happy to say that it has all gone through and I am now the proud Director of a new UK Limited company. I may even reveal the name after getting it all up and running.

The act of making it all public on here was a definite driving factor. If you are still looking for ways to force yourself into action….just blog about what you are going to do.

I made a short video in the centre of London last week after providing some consultancy that morning, knowing that I would be able to book it against my new company….the feeling was exhilarating. I could definitely get used to this style of life.  I’ll try to put it up after a bit of tidying up.