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

Now that I’ve fully finished one of my websites to Flip / Sell, I’ve created a schedule of things I plan to do to drive traffic and build up interest in the site.

I emailed this to some of my friends that are working on their blogs as well to have some company on my quest.

Here’s my list:

There are tons of ways to drive traffic, but I will be focusing on a few simple ways to do this.

Once you get the hang of doing each of these quick and easy steps, then you can actually complete them all in 1 day.

The Goal for Traffic: 500 Unique Visitors

Day 1 | Signing up for EzineArticles.com and submitting a new article related to my website.
- helps to build traffic and for inbound links for page rank benefits
- extra credit: sign up on goarticles.com and searchwarp.com

Day 2 | Taking that article and turning it into a power point video to submit to video directories.
- Will be submitting to many video directories via Tubemogul.com
- extra credit post video as a video response to a related video on youtube and comment on related videos in niche

Day 3 | Create a Squidoo Lens (like an external blog) to drive traffic and help with page ranking to my site.
- Will be using the same article and uploaded video for this part of the project
- site is http://www.squidoo.com
- extra credit: set up a hubpages.com, weebly.com or wordpress external blog

Day 4 | Find Related Blogs to Comment On using http://www.icerocket.com
- extra credit: do 250 comments for the week.

Day 5 | Sign up on Answers.com and answer related posts and submissions for my niche
- extra credit: do the same on ehow.com, and wikihow.com

Day 6 | Search for related articles on EzineArticles.com and comment on them with a link back to my blog

Day 7 | Track Stats for the Week
- extra credit, email friends about website.

Hope you find some of these methods useful.

Each day I will be reporting on each task and what I’ve been doing.
- TRENDS

Image by wka

Man what an exciting day and experience!

I’ve finally done my 1st I plan to flip / sell on March 31st.

Here’s what I’ve done so far.

1. I did keyword research using Word Tracker to find related keywords I could create articles around.

2. I then took 8 of those keywords and submitted them to Need-an-article.net to get writers to take care of the writing of the articles for me. Learning to outsource bit by bit.

3. While the articles were being written I signed up for a domain name from Namecheap.com and hosting from Hostgator.com

4. Once the accounts were created I used the cpanel on my hosting account to create a blog for the website and then chose a theme from Elegant Themes that I thought represented the vibe of the niche that I’m focusing on.

Also used plug-ins for the site that will help with search rankings, catching spam from spammers, etc.

5. I then searched for content on Youtube.com for related videos I could post and articles on Ezinearticles.com that I could use with permission from the writers. This was just to add content in addition to the articles I had being written by my outsource writers.

Once i found this content I posted it on the new blog I created for the site.

6. I then approved the written articles which were pretty great for $6 and posted 2 on the website to add original content to the website.

7. Once I was happy with the content of the site and made sure everything was good. I monetized with Click Bank related products, Adsense and Kontera Ads. (Will be adding Amazon related Products as well.)

8. I then submitted the site to be indexed on Google and Yahoo. Also for Google to crawl the site for content and index the site here.

9. I also submitted the site to several social bookmarking sites: Technorati, Feedbite.com, Digg.com, Getbookmark.com, Stumble Upon, Pingler.com, 30 Day Challenge RSS Submitter

So far these are the things I’ve done for the first website I plan to flip. Once it makes some money and gets good traffic I’m hoping to flip this 1st website for $1000 on March 31st.

Some of these steps are a bit tedious, however I plan on outsourcing this whole model to once I test and tweak and apply changes.

I want it to be “so simple, even a caveman can do it”

Hope you find the info useful to you, off to get more work done.

I plan on focusing on marketing the website this week with the new content and also dripping in the unique articles I got written from need-an-article.com

I’m enjoying the whole process and having a blast

- TRENDS

Image Via chicchacha

The other day I was remembering bits and pieces from 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris and I thought to myself… “Self, why are you doing all these things yourself?”

Don’t worry I didn’t reply to myself, but I thought I must have been a mad man for wanting to take on every specific task related to the marketing of these sites.

Then the next main thing was that I was hoping to outsource all of the sites at one time. Big mistake, felt like I was procrastinating and in a holding pattern. So like I’ve heard before and I’m sure you have too… “You Don’t Have to Get It Right, Just Get It Going!”

So I’ve decided to:

1. Find talent to take care of part of my business. Right now a lot of article writing, which I’m not a fan of.

and 2. Outsource each site one at a time and then build into getting them all done.

When I did this on Tuesday it felt so liberating and amazing at the same time. Here I was overwhelming myself with something I didn’t like doing, when there people ready and excited to do the work for me.

I have now outsourced 8 articles to a website called need-an-article.com. The work has been great and the turnaround has been awesome.

Now I can focus on other important things, while these articles are being written for me.

Feels amazing, you should try it!

Liberate yourself, outsource and fly!

- TRENDS

Image Via Flickr

I found this great resource by checking out the winner of Alex Jeffery’s traffic competition.

Basically he used icerocket.com to find related blogs to comment on and drive traffic back to his site.

It’s nothing revolutionary, but it simplifies the process of finding related blogs for your niche.

Basically you go to IceRocket.com and type in the keyword related to your niche or website.

Ice Rocket then sends you the list of related blogs and shows you when last the person posted on the website. This helps you not waste time commenting on blogs not getting much traffic.

Another great thing is that you can specify to get results from Twitter, MySpace, the web and even find images related to your website.

An awesome time saving tool that everyone should be using.

Check it out, http://www.icerocket.com

- TRENDS

I haven’t posted here in a while, this after I said that I was going to post more regularly. People must be wondering what a clown right?

But I’ve been going full steam, crashing and burning and doing it all over again, but it’s been fun still.

What I’ve really been doing is actually getting some of my friends around me started with their own online projects and taking them through the initial process, so that they feel comfortable with everything. You can check some of them out at ThatsSoYummy.com, RachelMBrown.com and GAVFitness.com

So no I haven’t been just jerking off, I’ve been continuing my work on my projects and also reaching back to help other make great strides in their life. There’s nothing better than the feeling of helping someone win in life. You should try it some day

What really inspired my post today was a post from Dean Holland. You might be wondering who the hell Dean Holland is. Well he’s an understudy of Alex Jeffreys a leading internet marketer, and he’s killing it.

But yeh Dean was talking about how so many other members got involved in blogging along with him and for whatever reason, whether they lost hope, didn’t see enough results or decided to spend time watching TV reports “The Sky Is Falling” edition… whatever it was, there were less people active now, than when the project got started.

Now I’ve been in this same place before, getting all hyped up and then letting my energy trickle off from the project because I wasn’t seeing instant results. I mean this is America, land of instant everything of course.

But over time I’ve learned to be a bit more patient and can understand the full message from what Dean is trying to sell to his listening audience. IT takes guts, lots of heart and faith to plug away at a project and not see the type of results you want right away.

But you know what, if you have a solid plan, with a deadline and valid steps, you just have to keep plugging away, believing and the rest will fall into place.

So no I haven’t lost the fire for my online quest, Im still here working away and the desire is as strong as ever. I just need to be more disciplined to let you know on a regular basis what exactly is going on

That’s it for now, if you need a fire lit under your backside, definitely go read Dean’s post, you’ll be glad you did.

- TRENDS