I’ve been noticing something very interesting lately that has somewhat began to haunt me during the day, while I work, during the night and at all waking moments of my days.

It’s the fact that people that I’ve been helping set up their blogs and getting them started are finding some great success with their blogs while I’m just all over the place with mine, running around like a chicken with its head cut off.

I’ve offloaded everything I’ve learned about blogging, I’ve even helped tweak some of the blogs to be optimized properly, sat down and given advice, you name it I’ve done it for my friends. Then these friends have taken it an ran with it and I’m very happy for them.

“What separates them for me?” is the haunting question.

What makes them so special?

What are they doing that I’m not?

I’ve scratched my head and have done some soul searching and have realized a very important thing…

They all have a very singular focus.

Unlike me who has a bunch of irons on the fire, they just focus on that one iron, that one blog and that one vision. Go figure!

So it’s not that I don’t know what I’m doing, and it’s not that the methods don’t work, it’s the fact that I’m focused on too many things at once, when I haven’t gotten one project fully off the ground yet.

It’s time to figure it all out again and press go, because it’s getting ridiculous.

Soon my students will be sailing yachts and I’ll be bragging how I taught them what they knew about blogging, while at the bar in some random town down on my luck yapping to a drunk bystander. LOL!

Maybe you’ve been through the same dilemma, any advice?

- TRENDS

Image Via Flickr

So last week I decided to get from behind my computer and meet some real people in Atlanta doing the same things I was doing.

How did it turn out?

Well it was pretty interesting connecting with a new group of people and trying to fit in when it seems like they’ve all been meeting together for a while. I wasn’t the only new newbie to be sacrificed at tha altar, there were also a few others who were welcomed into the fold.

There was of course brief discusions between everyone, finding out what they were doing and then there was a quick presentation on building your blog readership by David of Tutorial9 fame. The presentation was life altering or anything, but it went over some of the blogging basics that we sometimes overlook.

Blogging Tips David Covered Were:

• Being Consistent in Your Blogging
• Focusing on The Quality of Your Posts
• Making Your Content Appealing to Your Audience

Sometimes in trying to keep up with all the latest tips and tricks, twitter, facebook, on and on and on, we tend to forget that providing valuable content for your audience is often the most important thing you can do to market your blog and website.

All in all it was good meeting some new folks and I definitely plan to make the monthly meetings so I don’t get warped and start blending in to the walls at home.

Other cool bloggers I met were Redd, Chuck and Go Green In Style, check em out.

Do you find yourself feeling claustraphobic working from home as well? What’s some of the ways you’ve been coping with it? Lemmi know.

Thanks,

- TRENDS

If you work from home and get stuck behind the computer hours on end, you’ll drive yourself crazy and everything turns into 10101010101010s.

So today I’m getting out for some fresh air and going to meet up with some local bloggers here.

I got this tip from listening to an interview online with the legendary Willie Crawford. (Yes I do listen to a lot of interviews online.)

Basically the interview mentioned how he got a lot of business for his internet marketing services and also to network with others. Sounds like sound advice right?

Yes it will be great to go and network and generate more business, but I thought that it would also be an awesome way to go meet some people who are doing what I’m doing, blogging and internet marketing.

It’s fine to connect with even your current friends but sometimes they tend to go blank when you start talking about twitter, stumble, pinging, social bookmarking and html etc… hence the need to hang out with folks who are doing the same things as me.

Hopefully I’ll meet some movers and shakers and get to hook up with a few local people to chat it up and encourage each other every now and then.

I found this group of people on MeetUp.com by the way, which has a ton of different groups listed on the website.

So if you feel like you’re about to go crazy working from home and on the internet and don’t want to look like you’re speaking a foriegn language when talking to friends and family, definitely join a group in your area and get from behind the computer.

Do you feel the same way about crunching for hours in solitude behind the computer screen? What’s your take?

- TRENDS

So it’s the end of the 1st quarter of my challenge and boy have I learned a lot already.

By the way sorry for the lack of updates, still trying to balance it all, but I’ve definitely been working away in the background.

OK… No I’m not rich yet, but as I’ve mentioned, I’ve learned alot by testing and tracking and applying the different aspects and skills I’ve learned.

Some key things I’ve learnedare…

1. Success takes Time

As you know, I’ve already put up my 1st niche site to sell later on this year. By doing this, I have created a schedule of things to accomplish, tasks to complete and many action steps.

From all this work, I’ve learned something very interesting… Everything works.

Video marketing, article marketing, social bookmarking, blog commenting, social communities etc all work and work very well indeed when you’ve done the proper niche research etc. But here’s the thing, you have to do them in a huge volume and many of these tasks are pretty time consuming.

Not only are they time consuming, but they take time to provide the results you’re looking for. So yes they work, but success takes time.

2. Outsource: Get A Good Team Together

Due to the fact that this one project took up so much time I’ve been looking into tons of directions to get some good outsourcing done for my internet marketing.

From Oliver the Outsource King, to Traffic Sage, etc, I’ve been comparing the value all of them provide and how I can leverage them all to take care of these time consuming, yet valuable tasks.

I’m realising more and more that in order to create the success that I desire by the end of the year I have to spend the money to leverage as much talent as possible.

Which leads me to point number C lol…

3. Am I Being Realistic?

I was watching an episode of My Story Marketing with the great Jimmy Davis and Howie Schwartz and Howie brought up something that triggered this question in my head. Howie basically said that there are a lot of people who have the goals of creating say $10,000 a month from internet marketing, but they go about say, setting up a bunch of adsense sites or selling $27 ebooks as an affiliate not realizing how many damn clicks and ebooks they would have to sell to make that $10,000 goal.

Ding ding ding… You need to have a heck of a lot of volume or focus on higher end products.

So again more soul searching… this whole Internet marketing deal can have your head spinning. The funny part is I’ve been consulting with a lot of friends on creating an online income and it’s because of all these different options why I don’t introduce them to a ton of forums and sites to get information. Information overload!!!

Other than my head spinning in all sorts of directions, I’m happy to know the detailed plan I’ve laid out for setting up my niche sites is working and is generating some positive (although minimal) income.

For now I’ll continue to work on the model while I figure out the direction for the rest of the year.

Site flipping? Authority Website? Membership Site? … decisions decisions.

The quest for greatness continues though, thanks for tuning in.

- TRENDS

Spent some time to go through the stats from some of the marketing efforts last week for the first full website I set up. Like they said if you don’t track your stats, you have no business at all.

Based on results using Google Analytics, I’ve found that the mix of things I’ve done has created some traffic so far. Only things that haven’t resulted in traffic yet are the articles posted on Ezinearticles.com, because they have not approved the articles as yet, sucks!

But that’s because I’m still in basic account mode, which takes a little while. I plan to upload more articles now so I can pass the basic stage. This means your articles get approved faster and you don’t have to wait over a week. Geesh!

Video Submission

I used tubemogul to submit a video I created to a ton of video sites. I thought I’d have to shoot a powerpoint video with slides on my computer screen, but I found a way around that. I just created stills using Photoshop with bullet points of my articles and a quick sentence below each bullet point.

The slides also had the address to the site on it and the final slide told the viewer to visit the website.

Tip: In the description of the video I added the actual link to the article page on my website. This helps with backlinks to your website.

I’ve found though that I haven’t had tons of traffic coming from the posting of the videos with tubemogul. 1 good thing though is that links from youtube are being shown as backlinks to the site.

Squidoo

I have created a squidoo lens already. It has only gotten 1 visitor to the page though, however I’m hoping that it gets picked up as a backlink to the site to help with the page rank.

I still need to work on posting comments on related blogs though using Icerocket.com. I’m figuring doing this will help bring more immediate traffic to the website.

From everything I’ve done so far, I’m realizing that it’s going to take much more effort. Basically a thing of volume volume volume. Can’t expect to get tons of results from just a few days of activities.

So I’ll be ramping up on the effort to get things going for this site. Also I won’t just stop and dwell on this one site, will be moving forward on the other sites I’m working on as well.

So more articles, external blog pages, video submissions, commenting and tracking this week.

Will report back on efforts and results!

- TRENDS