Category: Site News

It’s time for another change for the blog.

Phase One of the blog was the initial phase, where the focus was on regular posting and education. This was a year long phase, and most of what I was sharing was what I was learning as I was going, although a portion was the typical “Here’s a new program” sort of post.

Phase Two also focused on regular posting, although not quite so often, but more on mentoring. That phase focused more on posts from my actual experiences, designed to be helpful to those just starting out. I also started an official mentoring program over at The Advisory Panel, but that didn’t do well. It’s apparently tough to find people actually willing to put effort into being mentored.

Phase Three has come upon me as a bit of a surprise, because of other (non IM related) projects I’ve gotten involved in. I haven’t had the time for regular posts for a couple of weeks now, so I’m going to make it official. From now on, every post on this blog will be directly related to IM projects I am working. There will be no more of the “Here’s a new program” type of posts, unless I have tried and seen value in the program.

Frankly, I expect the irregular posting to kill my search engine rankings. I’ve made some good money in the last year and a half from Google sending people my way (and continue to do so, through residual income), but I’d rather increase the quality of the posts than keep them coming at regular intervals.

So, what can you expect as an RSS subscriber? Less frequent posts, so don’t delete the blog from your RSS reader. The posts will all directly apply to either a project I’m working on, or a technique or service that I have personally tried (whether I’ve seen positive or negative results from it).

I hope you all stick around for Phase Three, and enjoy the posts!

My apologies to my regular readers who missed a post here last night. I’ve been using my online time to work on a new project.

This one’s an ebook, but rather than a general information ebook like Link Cloaking 101, this one is going to be a down and dirty, nuts and bolts, how-to for creating your own neglected niche sites.

I’ve posted now and then about my neglected niche sites, and how they’ve done surprisingly well, given how little work they require. In the new ebook I walk you through creating and promoting such a site, using one of my latest as an example. The site I use as an example is currently on page 1 of Google and in the #1 spot on MSN for its keyword, so you’ll be able to verify that the techniques work.

The ebook itself is ready, but I’m determined to do this one right, so I’m setting up Rapid Action Profits to handle the distribution of the ebook.

I’ll let you know when it’s ready for download.

I’m sure all you EntreCard users out there have seen the announcement about the partnership with SezWho.

SezWho is a commenting service that will combine with EntreCard to earn you EntreCard credits for commenting on SezWho enabled blogs. I’m a bit skeptical about the whole thing, because the quality of EntreCard traffic is pretty bad already, this may just lead to a deluge of junk comments. Supposedly, you can rate down junk comments and the person who left them won’t receive EntreCard credits for it.

Personally, I want to test the integration between SezWho and the WordPress comment moderation system. WordPress does well at allowing me to not publish junk comments, so if SezWho plays nicely with WordPress, I shouldn’t have to worry too much about more spam.

I’m excited about some of the features of SezWho, including the ability to follow a specific individual’s comments across all SezWho enabled blogs. If someone leaves an especially good comment here, I can see what they’ve left elsewhere, too, and subscribe to their comments no matter where they leave them. It’s a bit like subscribing to a blog, but with comments instead.

SezWho has a lot of potential to create a sense of blogging community, but we’ll see how it goes. I’ve just enabled the plugin on this blog, so the theme integration may be a bit off until I get a chance to work with it more.

What do you think about SezWho?

I’ve decided to cut back on my posting a bit during the summer.

There are lots of good reasons for this, including spending more time with my daughter. What’s really driven me to do it, though, is the fact that we’ll be taking two weeks during June for vacations. I’ll be out of Internet contact for those two weeks, and am facing the prospect of writing enough posts ahead to cover the time.

When you start to think about writing that many posts ahead of time, you start to realize that most of what you write won’t be good quality. It’ll be filler, because you’re forcing yourself to write a lot of posts in a short time frame, rather than wait for the post ideas to arise naturally over the course of doing business online.

So by cutting back on my posting, I hope to keep the quality of the posts up even during the time when I’m not online. Rather than having five posts a week, one every weekday, during the summer I’ll post every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

I hope everyone out there has some fun plans for the summer, and takes the time to enjoy them!

As I mentioned in my blog anniversary post, one of the things I’ll be doing this summer is testing monetization on the blog.

Unfortunately, I have had little time to even get anything up to test! I do have one banner up right now, that will appear above the post title on the index and single post pages. For now I’m going to stick with CPA banners, the ones that pay me for a visitor clicking through and taking some action (signing up, typically). Eventually I’ll add a few more and they’ll rotate.

I’ll try that for about a month, and then switch to a PPC model for a month to see how that goes. I’ll report the results back here, of course, when I’m through with a test period. The results should apply well to any blog in the same niche.

For anyone who has followed the contests over at The Advisory Panel, you’ll know that Connie of Brain Foggles won the blog promotion package in April’s activity contest.

Part of the prize was a month of banner exposure on this blog. You can see the banner over at the top of the right sidebar. That was the easiest place to put a banner, since I haven’t quite had time to work out adding banners to other spots on the blog yet. The banner will run for at least a month (a month plus however long it takes me to find time to replace it).

The idea behind the blog promotion package is to provide some new traffic to an existing blog from a variety of sources. In addition to the banner here, I’ll be writing some articles and submitting them to EzineArticles.com, and I’ll be paying for a bit of banner promotion over at Project Wonderful. With any luck the combined effort will give Connie’s blog a traffic boost.

While you’re reading this anyway, head on over to Brain Foggles and see what Connie has to offer!

Today is this blog’s one-year mark. My “welcome” post was posted April 18th, 2007.

The blog has come a long way since that first post. My original thought with the blog, to chronicle my experiences in Internet Marketing, so that others can learn from them, is still my guiding mission. The level of sophistication in the tips and techniques has risen quite a bit, though, as I advance through the learning curve.

Most blogs don’t last six months of daily posting, because of the huge pressure to create posts. I’ve survived only because my posts are drawn, generally, from my experiences in Internet Marketing. That’s key…I’m actually doing what I talk about, and so always have ideas for new posts (generally from problems I’ve solved lately, or screwups I’ve made).

What does the next year hold for the blog and for me? Here is some of what I see in store:

Mentoring

I see so many people approaching Internet Marketing the wrong way, promoting the latest system or product launch using the same tired techniques that other people who don’t know what they’re doing tell them to use. I’ve tried creating targeted email courses to help people learn more effective techniques, but people sign up for the courses and then you never hear whether they learned anything or not.

This year my focus will be on personal mentoring. I certainly don’t know it all yet, but I’m far enough advanced on the learning curve to save newbies a lot of time and money, perhaps keeping them on the curve instead of having them quit in disgust, several thousand dollars poorer.

My mentoring will be available to Advisory Panel members only. It’s a free forum, so there’s no risk to joining to take advantage of the mentoring.

While I regularly help out Advisory Panel members with keyword research help, and we have regular contests for participation, the level of help my mentoring students get will be a cut above that. I’ll create a private forum area for each mentoring student where we can discuss what they’re doing and how to improve it, and measure progress.

Mentoring will be free, but there will be a limited number of slots (I only have so much time!) To qualify for mentoring, you must:

1. Be an Advisory Panel member
2. Be willing to take advice that might contradict what you’re hearing on “guru” lists
3. Be motivated to do the work!
4. Be prepared to be in it for the long-term

Read more about this offer and how to apply in the Announcements section, the thread titled Mentoring Available.

More Guest Posting Opportunities

This week’s guest posting binge was the first time that someone else’s writing was featured on the blog. For the next year, I want to provide other bloggers in the niche with a regular opportunity to get their writing posted here. They benefit because of the extra exposure, traffic, and backlinks, and I benefit because that’s one day I don’t need to write a post.

Guest posting will be limited to a maximum of once a week. Posts must be high quality (generally higher quality than my “one off posts”), and should link to non-spammy sites. Educational types of posts are the rule, although if you want to review something, go ahead and submit the idea. If I have no interest in reviewing the product, and think it would be useful to my readers, I may give you the go ahead.

To apply for the next available guest posting slot, use the contact form on the blog.

Monetization

Yes, this blog will become monetized this year, in some way.

Right now, the only monetization on the blog is from affiliate links to products I have reviewed. I stick an affiliate link even into negative reviews, figuring that if you buy it even after I’ve told you it isn’t worth it, I might as well benefit.

The affiliate links on the blog actually earn very little. By the time I review any particular product, the chances are good that every “guru” has not only sent a ringing endorsement out to their list (said endorsement usually written for them by the product owner), but they’ve also offered tons of free bonuses for you to buy through their link. Affiliate marketing works better in other niches, where you don’t have the same culture of gurus and bonuses.

For the amount of time I invest into the blog, I’ve decided it needs to pay for itself. I’m not sure yet what method of monetizing I’ll use, but I still want to make sure that nobody mistakes an advertisement for something I endorse, as happened on John Chow dot com (somebody used Adsense site placement to place a graphic ad that said, “John Chow Recommends This”).

I will likely test various monetization options over the spring and summer, giving each two or three weeks to see what works best. I plan on using the Who Sees Ads plugin to make most ads not show to regular readers, but you’ll still see them until the plugin decides that you’re a regular (however it makes that decision).

Mostly Same Old, Same Old

I might cut back on the number of posts each week if I think that I can produce higher quality posts that way, but right now I don’t have any plans to do that.

Otherwise, you can expect the quality of content on the blog to remain the same, and for the sophistication of it all to increase as I continue to learn.

Thanks for being a reader!

I have several great guest posts lined up, but could use a few more if anyone wants the exposure.

For anyone who didn’t catch the first announcement, I’ll be doing a guest posting marathon just before the one-year anniversary of this blog. I’ll do the actual anniversary post on April 18th, but the days leading up to that will be guest posts by readers, to give their writing and their sites exposure to a new audience.

Posts must be educational in nature, and not an opportunity review.

So far the line up includes a great tutorial that will be of interest to anyone using WordPress, a post about getting the most out of guest blogging, and a post that gives great advice on doing network marketing over the Internet. There’s a lot of ground that could still be covered, though, so if you have an idea for an educational post that you think readers would like, contact me and ask about being one of the guest bloggers.

We have only about a week before I’ll start running the posts, though, so don’t delay too long!

Want to have your writing featured here?

Looking ahead to the one-year anniversary of Online Opportunity, I’m interested in doing something different than I’ve done before. The anniversary, measured by the date of my “Welcome” post, will be April 18th, just a bit over three weeks away. I’d like to take a little time off daily blogging during that time, and give readers who want some more exposure for their writing an opportunity to guest blog here.

So if you think you want to give guest blogging a try here, contact me and let me know what topic you’d want to write a post on, and give me a couple of links to posts or articles you’re especially proud of. If your post idea sounds on topic, I’ll ask for a first draft. If that looks good, you can finish the post and be featured here in a few weeks.

Some ground rules:

1) Posts must be of the educational variety. You can post a tutorial about something, you can explain something that is widely misunderstood, or whatever. But no posts that simply advertise the latest opportunity, and no opportunity reviews.

2) Posts should contain an “About the Author” section at the end where you say who you are and have two or three links to sites of your own. I reserve the right to disallow links that are to spammy sites, since in Google’s eyes it’ll be my blog recommending that site.

3) Inside the post, link appropriately to sites you recommend. An affiliate link is okay, as long as it adds value to the post’s topic. Again, no links to spammy sites, unless they’re an example of how to not do what you’re teaching.

I’m willing to take a fairly large number of guest bloggers for this, assuming the quality of the posts are suitable. And one person can do more than one guest post if you want, although I’ll give preference to showcasing as many different authors as possible.

I’m looking forward to driving some traffic your way!