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.

We Need To Save Our Ideas

All of us are constantly looking for ways to streamline our businesses and become more productive. One of the ways we do this is to consolidate our planning and doing processes.  We’re being told all the time to keep a small notebook with us so we can write down ideas that come to us.  Whether they’re for articles or products or ways to expand our reach, we’re told to get as much down as we can as quickly as we can so the details don’t slip away from us.  We all know how frustrating it can be to look at our chicken scratch note and not be able to figure out what the hell we were thinking.  We could end up like Jerry in the Seinfeld episode where he writes down a joke idea half asleep and then spends the entire episode trying to get it deciphered only to find out it was crap to begin with.

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We All Do It

We’ve all got friends that we “know” have it made.  They’ve been working in the same field they graduated college with a degree in for years.  We’re “sure” they have their retirements almost set and their investments all in a row.  When they retire, they’re going to travel the world and move from one beautiful place to another until they’re too old to travel.  Then, they’ll just stay in whatever country they find themselves in, right?

Is this reality?  My point here is what if it is?  What difference should that make to us.  Other than using this fiction we create to make ourselves feel inferior or lesser in some way how does this help us?

It doesn’t.

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Not Getting Stuck In A Rut

I found an excellent post on the SitePoint blog dealing with how to keep your business moving forward.  As you can imagine, it deals a lot with ways to not getting stuck in the “same ol’, same ol’” mode and finding ways to celebrate your victories while challenging yourself to move forward.

Here are some of their suggestions:
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Your Goals At 3 Months

OK.  You’ve set out your goals over 3 months ago.  Hopefully, you’ve been reviewing them at least weekly.  I also hope you’ve rewarded yourself for those you’ve accomplished to date.

My question is: how is it going?  Have you found yourself week in, week out staring at the same list?  Does it seem like you’re never going to achieve them?  Have you taken any time to stop and ask yourself why you’re not achieving them?

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