Day 16 – Niche Sites Update

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The biggest problem with long weekends and public holidays is that they seem to be taken as an opportunity to “do some DIY”. Those little five minute jobs that expand to fill the entire universe and soak up all the spare time.

Well, we’re just coming out of that hell here in the UK, so I’ve not been working on my sites as much as I’d hoped as you can guess. I did manage to get a new Amazon site set up yesterday and to sort out the hosting and base setup for a second, so it’s not all doom and gloom.

Bizarrely, one of my old sites has suddenly hopped back up onto the first page of Google after a long absence, no link building, no new content and here it is again. Sometimes I just don’t understand Google. It’s like they knew I’d said on here that I was going to do some updates to these sites and decided to reward me in advance – I wish!!

Real work begins again tomorrow. I have a lot more sites to get up and some links to build.

Earnings for Day 14 and 15 are all Adsense. $0.60

Day 14 – New domains

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There used to be a fairly famous saying in photographic circles that dealt with the whole idea of grabbing opportunity as it comes along. “F8 and be there” talked about setting your camera to some fairly mid-range settings, with a big depth-of-field so you could grab anything from closeup to “infinity” and then just taking the shot.

There are two key elements to this. The first is technical – making sure that the camera could (possibly) grab an image in a wide variety of light that you might be able to tweak at a later date. Remember that there was no autofocus and autoexposure back then….it had to be middle of the road to even have a chance of catching anything at all.

The second crucial item is “be there”. With the best will in the world, you won’t get the shot if you are nowhere near when that split-second of image occurs.

Here’s a second saying that I’ve often heard in corporate sales. “Isn’t it amazing that the salesmen who land the lucky deals are also the ones that have done the most work in that area already”. Again, it’s all about being prepared and being in the right place.

How does all this relate to internet marketing? Well, I guess the preparation is fairly easy. No matter how much we’re all told that you don’t need to be technical in this business, we still have to know how to join the dots to make a sales funnel actually work. There is an element of preparation involved in making this stuff into a business. So, just at a raw level, I’d encourage you to learn as much as you can about how things work, even while you are outsourcing it to others to get it done. At the very least you may spot the rogues in the outsource world before you get ripped off.

As far as the second part goes, it’s all about being out there. That’s market presence after all. If no-one can find your stuff (or isn’t even looking for it) then you can have the shiniest web-site in the world and still make no money. If you have a bunch of kick-ass concepts but still haven’t bought a domain, how will it ever take off?

Here’s my trivial advice and it’s trivial because it is so easy and yet so difficult to do. Buy your first domain!

This simple step held me up for several weeks when I started…it’s like some kind of giant leap or something, but it really isn’t. A .com will cost you around $10 for a whole year.

Secondly, get some hosting. Get it cheap if you have to but this is part of “being there” – it’s you on the internet. Pay $5-10 a month and you’ll end up with a host that can handle multiple sites all with their own domains. So, the initial outlay may feel painful, but you get to reuse the host for every other domain you buy (and when you make some money, you can think about how to change that account for something with more features).

What about me? Well it seems that I’ve turned into a serial “preparer” – this is also not a good thing, I need to finish some of these things!! Yesterday was a day of misery helping set up sheds and things, so no real progress was made on my sites, but I treated myself in the evening to a little keyword research.

This seems to be the bit of IM that I really like. Maybe I should offer you all a service, I’ll look ’em up, you build ’em. Anyone interested?

Anyway, I digress. I spent a bit of time digging in some electronics areas and have bought myself a load of sites that are product related but Google says are still trending upwards. Think of technology like camera resolution. Folk searching for 2 megapixel cameras are starting to drop away but people buying 12 megapixel cameras are on the increase. If you can get a couple of good domains in future (but close) technology, you should be able to get set up in advance of the big wave. As a result I’m going to building out these sites in the next week and getting them up in Google before my competitors even care about the stuff!

My mini net of related sites are all doing ok, most are sat at around 18 in Google for both broad and phrase searches (if anything, they’re doing better in broad than phrase searches – huh?) I’m going to try to set up a run of UAW today, but weekend family commitments are looming large at the moment.

Earnings for the last 2 days: $0