A Topic You Care About

Anybody involved in internet marketing for any length of time has heard all the rules. One of the biggest I’ve heard is it’s best to be involved in a niche you actually have some passion for. You know, if you care about it content will flow and you may even enjoy writing for it when the rest of your projects seem like nothing but a headache. Sounds good,huh? I mean we all need a sanctuary when our days are stressful. Some place we can just be ourselves and write about stuff we truly care about.

But what if that passion niche has yet to make you any money? It may be that you started it long ago before you knew what the hell you were doing and “just writing” was not making you any money. As you’ve gone along in the niche you’ve continued to use it as a place to do your best writing. So damn the money right? Not so fast.

A Niche Without Money?

I’ve got a blog in a niche I adore that I started way back before I really understood keywords or backlinks or article marketing or anything. I just wrote about things that I thought other people who enjoy the same pursuit would find interesting while maybe learning something. I picked a foundation product to base the site around loosely but tried hard to make it about the subject. Not just a load of affiliate links with wimpy content. I’ve since discovered I greatly misunderstood the niche and even though the site gets a good amount of regular traffic it just doesn’t make any money.

What Say You?

What do you do in this case? Try to sell it? Revamp it with what you’ve learned since? I don’t know. I’ve got a couple sites that are much smaller and make much more money that I am in the process of revising content and backlinks on. Trying to focus more on the terms people come looking for me for while trying to develop my authority for keywords I’d like to be known for. It’s a lot of work but fixing a site that’s already making money is a lot easier to justify than trying to fix a site that makes nothing.

Have you had this experience? Do you currently have sites that you love but make nothing? The biggest problem we all face is what? Lack of time. How do you look yourself in the mirror and say you’re doing everything you can to make money when you’re spending time with these time stealers? I am grappling with this very issue right now and I’d really like to hear from you about what you’re doing about it. Selling them? Fixing them? What?

Here’s my problem: selling them and really doing well means I will have to spend a bunch of time learning Flippa or some such service but revising them could take months. Keep in mind, I’m talking about sites that have PR, visitors,commenters but just no sales. I’m actually thinking about pulling my affiliate links for the site’s main product to see if it becomes more active. I’m also doing regular site marketing now which was nearly absent for the life of the site.

Please tell me how you’re dealing with these sites in your portfolio now? Leave a comment that says “selling”, “revising”, “deleting” or any other one word phrase that describes your approach. I’ll post the results after you weigh in. Of course, if you’d be kind enough to elaborate I’d love that too.

Giving Props

I wanted to pay tribute to somebody who has been instrumental in shaping my internet business.  I’ve followed a small group of internet marketers. Some of them I’ve lost interest in as they seemed to have lost their way. Such is also the case with Lynn Terry. She was the first person who provided me help with my internet marketing business when I was both penniless and clueless. Now, I believe both of us have come full circle in our businesses serving the people that helped make us successful.

Namely, you. Those who want to learn the tips and inside scoop on what works and what doesn’t without being buried in a sea of offers and spam.

A Bumpy Ride

I can’t remember exactly but I think it was 2008 or 2009 when Lynn, a then admitted hater of high-dollar affiliate programs, started actively promoting one of those programs which will remain nameless. I’m thinking it was at least two grand and I was confused. I understand that it was probably a great program and that she certainly paid money for it and didn’t get review access to it. My question at that time was is she trying to move out of the struggling internet marketer niche or has she just lost her way? All I knew was that price tag seemed completely incongruous with the Lynn Terry I had ‘grown up’ with since 2007. With the daily barrage of email and work coming my way, it only took a blink to put somebody off the most watched list and onto the someday list.

Still, I never deleted her from my daily feed.

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Getting Back Into Adwords…I Thought!

Part of my 2011 goals had been to get back into Adwords for my niche sites that have shown promise. I had run some campaigns back in 2009 with some success. I just didn’t have the time or budget for a large scale investment in it at that time. This year, I pledged to get back into it a little bit at a time until I was running a fairly large group of Adwords groups.

I selected as my first site one that has been busting my goals since about six months into the project.  A partnership I had set up for it had run into a roadblock due to the partner’s health. The partner was an expert at the niche the site was built on and I was counting on them for a good block of content and community engagement. With that temporarily on hold, I decided Adwords would be perfect to send more traffic to the site until it could be resolved. The site has a great foundational educational product that I had reviewed extensively so I thought that would be a great place to start.

That’s what I thought, anyway.

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Rant Warning

I just finished reading a post by a blogger I’m going to be following much less in 2011 and it’s got me so pissed I have to post about it.  My main issue is that they report their success but not all of the methods involved in it.  Let me explain.

The Whole Truth?

It seems innocent enough to report to your readers how you did in 2010, right? Yes and no. Yes, if you disclose EVERY method you use to accomplish your goals.  No, if you don’t. For instance, this blogger’s business model involves buying and building over 100 sites/year.  Nothing wrong with that if that’s what you want to do.

My problem comes when the people following them make the mistake I have in thinking that building 100 plus sites/year is the BEST way to make money online.  Again, no problem if you have all the info. Let me illustrate my point.

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Taking Stock Of Your Sites

I recently joined a new ShareASale program and received emails from Matt McWilliams the Affiliate Manager for the Legacy Learning Systems product I’m going to be reviewing. One of the emails that he sent talked about being compliant with the 2009 FTC disclosure rules. In it, he mentioned the FTC had looked over all of the affiliate sites for this product and noted that NONE of them were compliant.  At the very least, it got my attention.

Thanks to Matt, there was also a link to the FTC document, FTC plain language rules page and the DisclosurePolicy.org page where you can get a simple disclosure statement to add to your blog or site.

After reading the FTC rules I discovered that NONE of my sites were strictly adherent to the guidelines even if they all did have a disclosure statement on them.

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