Well, after 2 years blogging on this site I have decided not to renew my domain and hosting. They expire at the start of February and the reasons are many but mainly the following.

1. The reason I started this blog was to interact with fellow Masterclass students and hopefully pick up some knowledge in the process. This happened initially when everyone was enthusiastic and had expectations of making money out of internet marketing but unfortunately many realised this just wasn’t going to happen for them and their enthusiasm waned. Their posts, which once were regular, dropped off and many hadn’t posted for months. A lot of the people I shared comments with are no longer on the scene and to be truthful most of the remainder are posting on subjects that I have no interest in.

In January I set a target for the end of September for the completion of a project I had started work on. However targets and actually accomplishing them are two different things. One of the benefits of ageing and having retired is that I am not unduly worried about it, but I do realise how difficult meeting targets must be for people in full time occupations who are trying to progress an online business.

I am way behind schedule for my new project ‘Walks In Tameside’. Originally I thought it would include a maximum of 25 walks but some intensive research on maps means I am now up to 37 walks and hoping to make it a round 40 before it’s completed.

After 19 months blogging I have finally reached post number 100. Having retired 3 years ago and realising that sitting in a chair all day was a path to an early grave, and that I had the need to be involved in something to occupy my time, I started a course on information marketing. The intention was to write ebooks on real world business opportunities, I had no desire to write about ‘how to succeed at internet marketing’, ‘PLR’, ‘list building’, ‘traffic’, ‘SEO’ or ‘how to build an eBay business’ etc, etc. I felt too many people were already doing this and the established experts and so called ‘gurus’ would be taking all the cake with their followers mopping up the crumbs. Is this a negative attitude? I prefer to think it’s a realistic attitude and you are of course entitled to your own opinion but that’s my take on the situation.

Do You Have A List Yet?

In Internet Marketing we are all told that the money is in the list. All well and good but how many actually build or have the pulling power to build a list the traditional way? Not many that’s for sure, and all the while we are ploughing $19 per month into Aweber’s coffers. What if there was another easier method to achieve a large following and the price was $2 per month, with the added bonus of a free autoresponder account and the opportunity to get your outlay back and more besides.

A Dilemma Not The Song

14 months ago I joined the John Thornhill Masterclass, not necessarily with the intention of making lots of money online, although it was a nice thought, but to further my knowledge of the technical side of the business, which was limited to say the least. Even now I am still an amateur but have learnt an awful lot in that time, thanks in the main to my techie friend Adrian.

Markets & Niches – Assessing The Commerciality Of Your Niche

Commerciality can be said to be the measure of potential profitability of different keyword phrases.

Certain keywords can have a great monetary flow while others can only produce a dribble of monetary flow. If you pick the right keyword phrase it can produce great amounts of profitability. Pick the wrong ones and you will make little or no profit. You may have keyword phrases that are very relevant to your site, that have high levels of traffic to your site and low levels of competition, but you may find that nobody buys your product or products. This will be because your site has low levels of commerciality. Get this very important point wrong and all your hard work will have been in vain.

Markets & Niches – Assessing Market Competition

The best way to achieve visitors to your website is obtain a page one listing in Google. Unfortunately only 10 listings are featured on the first page for each keyword phrase and of course there are many websites competing for this front page position.

The number one reason why people fail in an online business is that they fail to assess the strength of the competition. They blindly jump into a niche and start creating content on their site and just hope that Google will magically list the site on the front page.

The Bloggers Curse

Recent posts on spam by John McNally  got me thinking what response I would make if I was replying to the real ‘writer’. Here’s a few recent ones I have received with my replies in italics.

Hey, Good to see the blog is still live. what do you believe gonna happen next?
I think you are going to return and leave another spam comment.

I have been producing for Ghost Writers for a while now, and they pay me good to write blog posts like this, or articles. I clear $100-$200 on a awful morning.
What do you clear when it’s not raining?

Markets & Niches – The Importance Of Keyword Phrases

This is the first in a series of articles relating to market research for online product development.

Understanding Markets, Niches, Micro Niches and Keyword Research

A market is a group of people that share a common interest in a particular subject, e.g. Health.

A niche is a subset of that market that relates to a specific topic in that market e.g. Weight Loss.

A micro niche is a further subset of a niche e.g. Diabetes Diet Plan.
 
Keywords or keyword phrases are the words that members of that market type into a search engine in order to explore a particular niche.

Stuart Turnbull has written a great post on a step by step plan of how to make money in Internet Marketing. He is also giving away a free guide that he wrote, on how to create a free wordpress blog. If you are a non techie like me this could be an invaluable tool for you.