The one thing I really know about myself is that I’m not a good finisher/completer. I think the Myers-Briggs test told me I was an owl or something daft like that because I like to think about things and strategise.

Well, yesterday was an owl day. I sat down to write my articles and got completely side-tracked into generating more keywords for my sites. Now in a way this is good, because I now have a load more topics I can add to my sites and use as articles in the outside world, but in another way it sucks because I didn’t get on with the work – lousy finisher/completer!

The upside to this is that the keyword research made my smile grow bigger and bigger throughout the process. I was using a little technique I’d seen before to ramp up the number of my keywords from an initial few seed words. Now, I know that these already form the basis of a good few sites for use with Amazon but I couldn’t believe how many keywords I was finding.

It looks like my little niche has turned into a monster market (with relatively little competition across the board).

If you haven’t tried it yourself, what I was doing was building a keyword list using the Google external keyword tool. You may need to switch to the old interface using the link at the top right of the new page. This version gives you suggestions for more related keywords in the results – not to self….must investigate what the new version really does!

What you can do, is “add” all of the suggested keywords. This moves them to the right hand side in a kind of temporary storage. From there (on the right) you can click to get more suggestions and that copies all of your saved keywords back into the search box and goes rond again. It greys out any words already found, so you can just select any new ones,  or you can just hit add all again since it eliminates duplicates.

The difficulty with this technique is that eventually you get too many keywords to put back in the search box and it blows up. So, what you have to do at this point is to export all your saved keywords to a file and then just cut and paste them back in manually 50-100 at a time. I recommend staying with a lower number as the suggestions from the first few of your pasted keywords will fill up the 200 keywords limit and you may never see the suggestions for the last of your pasted words. This sounds long-winded but will give you a stack of keywords in the end that you can use for months.

As I said, the greying-out of keywords gives you a good idea if you are nearing the limit of what can be discovered….eventually it will all be grey.  The reason I got so excited was that this didn’t happen to me for a veeeery long time yesterday. What that means is that I kept finding new untapped avenues for new keywords and just kept going and some of those keywords were monsters.

I’ll try to put a short video together to illustrate all of this stuff in case I have described it poorly, but in the meantime I have some articles to write!!

Earnings for Day 2:

Adsense $1.40

Amazon $0

Welcome to Day 2 of this new journal.

My commitments for today include producing content for my new sites. I bought 4 domains yesterday – all in a single topic area and I will use 3 of them as feeder sites to the fourth but they will also have their own target keyword.

All four sites are going to be Amazon US affiliate sites and I’m going to use the review stuff as detailed by Wanda and Paula at http://www.affiliateblogonline.com/.  I think that writing copy that converts is an area where I can learn a lot, so we’ll see how this gets on.

The feeder sites are themselves going to be set up in a similar way to the Info Product Killer techniques that Craig Kaye teaches. He has just released a 2010 update to this package and I like it a lot for the (new) price.

Once I have a post ready for each site, I’ll be updating the main site and building the other three and getting them all set up – including all the analytics etc.

I’m going to also commit to setting up 2 more UAW (Unique Article Wizard) runs for my existing sites and also looking at monetizing a couple of other in Adsense (and maybe Amazon).

Yesterday’s earnings. $0 across the board. Time for that to change!

I’ve noticed a lot of people doing regular daily posts as a way to keep themselves on track in their new internet marketing career. Not only that, but just recently the phrase “keep a journal” has cropped up several times too….as a way to make commitments for each day and then to follow them to conclusion.

So, what I have decided to do is to take the advice and copy the daily update route. (I may also keep a more personal journal, so you don’t get to see the actual site names etc.)

So, this is Day 1.

A quick update for those that don’t know where I have got to so far. I have set up several Amazon affiliate sites over the past year – great keyword research if I say so myself, absolutely lousy subject choices since they all paid out about 50 cents in commision for each sale! Lesson 1 learned….aim higher in price for Amazon.

Lesson 2 for Amazon was to steer clear of electronics – locked to 4% commisions – even though that’s where I am most comfortable.

Lesson 3 was a really painful one and that was to stay away from the UK for big ticket items. It was tempting to sell locally but I then found out that Amazon UK cap single item commisions to £7 – OUCH!! That means that even a modest TV sale (still at 4% remember) gets capped out at 7 lousy quid instead of 12. Sell in the US Amazon folks!

I also have one or two sites where I am experimenting with Adsense, these sites will grow over time but are a wee bit thin at the moment, so I am treating them fairly gently in case I get them dropped from Adsense before they even get going. These are not bad subjects, not hugely interesting to me but at least they have a big enough subject that I can write articles fairly easily without drifting into IM waffle just to make up the pages! Lesson 4 here is to make sure that you have a broad subject to write about (and preferably one you care about too)

I also have a single book up on Clickbank. Again a subject that I knew little about before researching and writing the book. Not a big seller despite the global interest, maybe I need to work on my sales page for that one.

So, as you can see, I’ve played with almost everything over the year. The Amazon and Adsense stuff has shown some results – not huge, but enough to show that it is possible to make some money. All I need to do now is scale it all up.  You can effectively set the daily income meter from these sources to zero (while I am making some money off helping others online, I’m not counting that).

Commitment for day 1 then is to finish some research in some more Amazon niches (not electronics as detailed) to buy the domains related to the subject and to get them all up and running with a single post ready for the start of the week tomorrow. I’m still playing with Amazon review plugins, so that may make up part of another day’s post.

Feel free to follow along, I’ve created a “Journal” category for all these posts to keep it clean and by all means comment if you think I’m doing well (or being stupid) at any point!

Earnings reset: $o