It’s very easy when you start out in Internet Marketing to think that this is a career that won’t require you to interact – with your customers, with your competitors and with other marketers. Everything is so neatly handled by being online.

Well, in practice, that’s probably the most damaging idea you could have. Removing personal interaction from your business (no matter how shy you are) can only end up hurting your prospects, no matter what personal comfort you gain from it.

I try to make a habit of going to at least 3 or 4 big events every year and if I get the chance, I’ll also attend a lot of smaller get togethers. Both have their place in my business.

The big events often turn into pitch-fests, where every hour you get a new call to action along with a price tag to make your wallet bleed. If you can find ones where this is not the case, then the opportunity to meet a lot of new people in one place is a huge benefit. Take lots of business cards and a notebook for names and numbers where others have no card of their own.

As an example of the latter, I just spent a weekend at Mark Anastasi’s Financial Freedom bash in London this weekend. Mark has arranged many conferences over the last few years (often multi-speaker wallet-bleeders!) but has moved more recently to running the show himself. The new format gets a huge thumbs-up from me, I always liked Mark’s speaking style and getting more of that and less of some other unpredictable speaker is a real plus. If he runs more shows like this, I’d recommend you check them out.

The smaller events work on a different level for me. It’s much easier to grab more time with one or maybe two people and really get to know them…this is where the real joint ventures are made. You’ll often hear more about what is really working (along with some smal but tasty tips) at this kind of meeting and you will also get a chance to be an answer to someone else’s questions. Don;t underestimate what you’ve already picked up…everyone starts somewhere.

One of the things that makes it harder to do this regularly is actually finding out what is going on. There doesn’t seem to be anywhere that regularly announces events, so watch out for an announcements about a new site that I’m going to set up just for this purpose.

So what did I learn over the weekend? Well, apart from being hammered by the “build a product” message, the big wake-up call for me was to build my list properly. If you’ve just started reading this blog, you’ll have seen my pop-up by now – did you grab it?   It was there because I think I’ve always known that a list of folk I can help is actually the same as a list of people who can help me, but when it comes down to it, I’ve never pushed that side of my business.

So, my commitment for the next 30 days (let’s see, that takes me up to something like the 11th of November) is that I will post my list-building efforts and results on here daily for all to read. As is always the case, I will probably end up doing too many other things as well, but that is the target.

In that capacity, I am going to set aside 2 sums of cash; the first will be just $100 to see what is possible with a small investment. The second will be more, I haven’t decided how much more yet, definitely less than $1000 but maybe not much less. This will be the real all out effort to build a substantial seed list.

As you can guess, I intend to buy traffic, but I’m also hoping to use other techniques like giveaways to boost my efforts. I will be tracking how successful everything is. Not only that, but I will probably also be following along with Valerie Duvall’s List Ignition WSO which you can guess is also about list-building!

Consider this Day Zero, I’ll update later in the day about the progress so far but just so we are all on the same wavelength, here is my rather small list on Aweber for reference:

If you are looking for ways to come up with domain name ideas for a new site, here are a couple of techniques that may let you get inside your creative mind and discover the perfect name.

First, I’d suggest that you take a look at an old post of mine which is fairly general (and maybe even a bit basic), but which will get your ideas flowing.

Finding a domain name.

Once you’ve done that, you can move on to combining words to get to completely undiscovered domains. If you can’t see this clearly, you can play it full-screen by using the button on the lower right of the box.

Of course, I mention Godaddy a couple of times in these videos, but I never really made it easy to get to them for buying a domain, so if you want to check them out you can go here: http://www.godaddy.com

Here’s that list of words that I used in the second video as promised. If you think of others, maybe you could comment here and I will add it to the list for everyone to benefit.

class
guild
academy
course
classroom
training
learner
learners
beginners
beginner
kickstart
boost
booster
starter
entree

I had a few questions about the details of this course, so I’ve made a quick video of the whole thing to try to clear them up. Sorry for the squashedness of it all….video is still eluding me, despite all the expensive tools!

One thing I forgot to say in my last post (Elite Niche Research Review) was that the course is going to be held at it’s current price for a while, but will be going up in price fairly soon so if you want to check it out, head over here fairly soon.

STOP PRESS – Elite Niche Research price increase.

I got one thing wrong in the video, but it’s pretty important. If you want to get ENR at the lower price, you don’t have until the end of the year as I said in the video. It’s going up in price on the 21st of December, so there’s even more need to get it sorted now.

I wanted to bring you all a quick review of Andrew Hansen and Josh Stanton’s Elite Niche Research before going back to some other updates on what I’ve been up to.

The observant (and not so observant) among you will have seen all the changes that Google has been putting their keyword tool through and have probably seen how that has affected all the niche keyword tools out there. One of those was generating me a bunch of great niche keywords and now it doesn’t work at all.

So, as a result, I’ve been working on newer ways to find niches and affiliate offers. I’ll bring you an update on some new tools in another post, but I wanted to fill you in on Elite Niche Research which has just been released. Andrew Hanson is a genuine super-affiliate and I grabbed a copy of Elite Niche Research to see what his spin on finding niches is all about.

There are four main sections of the product – Foundation Theory, Keyword Research, Affiliate Research and finally Offer Finding Techniques. All in all there are a total of 33 videos, with the majority being in the final section which concentrates on working out where the best affiliate offers can be found that are untapped by the huge majority of affiliates who are out there jumping on every clickbank release.

There is only a single upsell in the sales process and it just takes the theory from the course and applies it, so that you get a bunch of pre-researched niches to get your affiliate earnings kicked off straight away. You can get to these from the course by doing your own research, but this is a kickstart.

Andrew and Josh are also offering an extra live webinar in early January where they’ll be walking students through a case study on the webinar and actually doing some niche research on the call.

All in all, I’d give this a pretty big thumbs-up compared to a lot of the “blind” clickbank sales pages I’ve seen recently and I will be using it to re-instate the keyword of the week part of the blog.

If you want to check it out, you can find it here – Elite Niche Research

Ok, hands up. I confess I’ve been a bad person and not updated my experiment journal for a few days. As a result, there’s a load of stuff that I need to get out there today.

Before we get onto your free keyword of the week we need to cover some of the stuff that has been going on in the big, bad world of Google. It has only been a couple of weeks since I put up my first keyword of the week, but if you go back and check that keyword now, in the new version of the Google Keyword tool, you will find that the numbers have changed dramatically.

There has been a howl of dismay across a lot of Internet Marketing blogs in the last few days because Google is now reporting figures that are sometimes as little as a tenth of the ones you would have seen a week ago. In fact, if you check against the old tool (click at the top right of the new one) you will see that the old figures still show in there.

A lot of folk are saying that it’s great that we may now be seeing some more realistic numbers from Google but that doesn’t help you if you’ve invested a load of time in researching and building a site based on a hope of thousands of vistors, only to see a number one slot getting you dribbles of traffic instead of a flood. It may explain why you are seeing those results, but it doesn’t stop it smarting!

The only way forwards from here is to use the new Google tool for your research and since numbers are now so much smaller across the board, it might be a good idea to search for exact match keywords with good volume (if you aren’t already) and then seeing how you might expand those out with phrase and broad match search phrases letting you build a real authority site.

The biggest problem I can see with all of this is that the big keyword research tools all still use the old Google figures. That means that Market Samurai and Micro Niche Finder still show monster results for some keywords that are showing up in Google’s new tool as being pitiful for search volume. So, for the time being, be super careful with the results you see in them (do a quick comparison with the Google tool).

Still harder is the fact that Google themselves haven’t switched everything across to this new paradise. That means that tools like Google Insight are basically handing out duff information. For example, I found a keyword the other day that was just huge and Google Insight had the UK as pretty much the only place in the world where it was being used (something like 90% of all searches). That same keyword is down to a tenth of its earlier size and not only that, but it’s split almost 50/50 between the UK and the US…so a .co.uk domain name is now a giant waste of space!

Ok, now that’s out of the way, here are a couple of keywords for you as a bonus for being patient and waiting a day. Both of them are primarily UK based searches (even in the new regime) and both will let you set up your new clothing empire.

The first is “cardigans for women” – 1,300 exact searches in the UK, going up to 3,600 broad and the .net is available. Not so spectacular, but a good solid site if you know anything about womenswear.

The second is a bit bigger – “cheap designer clothes”. This one does 8,100 exact searches in the UK every month, rising to 12,100 broad match, but there are a lot of related phrase searches if you look in Google. Traffic Travis reckons this is “relatively easy” – all the top sites have higher than normal PR, but are all really young and there are no exact match domains.

So, as always, grab ‘em and tell us when you succeed. All comments welcome as usual.

I’ll be posting a second report later today about the latest results of my experiment in money making but for now, have fun with the new Google Keyword tool.