The Nirvana of Internet Marketing. That’s what Dream Niches from Alex Cass and Alex Becker promises! Rank for a highly searched keyword and make money in 24 hours.

Bold claims, I hear you cry, so I thought I’d take a look at what this WSO has to offer in this little Dream Niches review.

Before we start, I should make it clear that this is just after my purchase and going through it. I can’t give you the longer term view yet, until I’ve put up a couple of test sites…..watch out for that follow-up post.

First up then is the sales page – meh! Standard graphical WSO monster that to my mind is a bit disjointed. It doesn’t flow as well as some of the ones I’ve seen recently and the dog image is going to “pollute” my mind for a long time – you need to check it out to see what I mean 🙂 The promise is still a strong one, so I bought it anyway.

What’s Dream Niches all about?

Dream Niches offers a (fairly) simple set of techniques that will help you to find keywords in many niches where you thought that the subject was tapped out. I definitely think there’s some power behind the technique proposed and you should be able to expand it out even further with a little thought.

The upsell is a set of videos that will take you through the whole thing again (but in video form) – if you’re a visual person, it’s a shame you can’t get straight to these without buying the pdf. In fact I’d say if you’re ok with just reading, you don’t really need this except for one small additional segment which is referred to in the book but never shows up until the videos! I’d say you should be able to work it out from the name.

There’s a lot to like in the original pdf – and I felt the videos didn’t add enough to be worth the upgrade. But hey, I can take my learning any way it comes!

Dream Niches nightmares

What I didn’t like was the constant “putting down” of existing Keyword tools – guys, there’s no need for it! It may be true that they don’t show everything in one subject in a single search, but that’s been true for ever. Make the point once and move on.

It’s not like the keyword tools have no value either, they are still good for helping with some of the checks suggested later on in this course. So don’t feel you need to throw away your investments if you buy this course. Use each for the bits it is strong for.

In the same way, knocking the idea of link-building and then showing how to do it feels a bit misleading. I guess you knew there would still be link-building, right? It may be mightily reduced, but it’s still there.

If I had to summarize Dream Niches, I’d say that it’s an excellent additional toolset for finding keywords. I might even go so far as to say that it could form the basis of building quite a nice base of niche sites if you want to get going quickly. I’ll be trying out the technique myself over the next couple of weeks and I will report back.

If you want to check out Dream Niches in the meantime, it’s still fairly low-priced in it’s dime-sale, look here

Do “Real-Life” and Internet Marketing ever intersect?

I like to try to keep my journey documented as well as use this blog for product reviews and training snippets and this was one of the things Dean commented on during his recent WSO course.

His opinion, was that personality (and personal detail) makes a blog so much more trustworthy as it proves that the writer has all the ups and downs of the readers – leading to more trust and hopefully more business.

I’m not sure if I think that is the whole truth.

There are obviously some bloggers who write awesome personal entries with all the power of Shakespeare, the dynamism of Tony Robbins and the knowing wit of Stephen Fry. For the rest of us mortals, it’s an uphill struggle to produce a personal story that has any relevance to our target audience without sounding like it’s a bad link made by a second-rate DJ.

So how do you do it? How do you write this kind of post without driving your readers into calling the Samaritans from boredom?

I’m going to suggest that it’s better to start with your “idea” and then wait patiently for life to throw you a matching situation than it is to try to force every part of your existence into some kind of “teaching box”. Now, that might make each post take  little longer before publishing, but at least it won’t end up being one of those forced essays we often see.

Email Marketing as Self-Flagellation

I’ve been trying to mail a bit more often to my list of subscribers recently, partly as a result of Dean’s course (again!) and partly because I really should be.

I’m not in a position to know what kind of lists my readers on here have, but it seems like a really great way to experience anonymous hatred to me.

I’ve always tried to mail just the stuff that I have tried or bought in some way and I’ve even grabbed a couple of offers recently that have let me offer a great product to my list for a (fixed) price less than that being offered by the creator on his own dime-sale.

Now, I’ve read this stuff, it’s useful and I’m selling it cheap(er) and yet I have had not just unsubscribes but also complaints on Aweber. It seems bizarre to me that such an email could cause so much angst in a person’s inbox, but there it is.

If this helps anyone out there just getting started with building a list, I’d say be prepared for the cynical and the haters no matter what you try to do to help their (miserable, pond-sucking) lives and wait for those rare rays of sunshine from folk who genuinely see the value in what you have sent. By the same token, don’t send them crap 🙂

The Call of the Gym

I promised to do an update the other day about my recent re-awakening to all that is holy in the land of keep-fit. It’s one of those things we all know we could do more of, but it needs a real habit to be formed around it, as it’s just too easy to justify not doing anything.

As I said in my other post, it’s about valuing things in your life differently.

Anyway, I promised to provide some baseline figures that I intend to change as my exercise regime takes hold. I’m also encouraged to do this by James Sides, who has gone one step further and posted some pics too (I am not that brave – yet!)

These are based around the bare-minimum figures from Tim Ferris’ book “The 4-hour body” and I haven’t been to all kinds of clinics and things like Tim to measure all my hormones etc etc. Not only that, but these are in centimentres, ’cause that’s what we got in Europe 🙂

Navel: 113cm  Hips:110cm L Thigh: 60cm R Thigh: 61cm L Bicep 31cm R Bicep 32cm

All of these were taken “at rest” not tensed up at all and the final crowning glory was my weight at the start of 99.9 kg (and that’s what woke me up!) – currently sat at 99.1kg after a week of gym.

If you’re keen to follow along, maybe I should add a weight-loss category to make it easier…..and if you have any advice, I’d be happy to hear your own trials and tribulations.