Week In Review – September 21-27

Ok so this Week In Review is a day late, normally I do them late Saturday night but I didn’t get home last night until 11pm and didn’t feel like writing up a post.

Niche Sites

Things have been cruising along at a nice pace with all the sites. I recently joined an article writing challenge over at thewahmblog.com. It is to write 20 articles in 20 days which shouldn’t be too hard. I’ve always wanted to get some article marketing done for my niche sites but never really had the drive. But now that I have accepted the challenge I must win, plus I am competing against 3 women…..I can’t lose!

A niche site that I created 2 weeks ago is already starting to see search engine traffic. I’ve only done a little bit of marketing for it and all of it’s terms so far are ranking on the first page of Google. Graned it is only a few hits a day but with the challenge I already have 2 articles going for the site and plan to add a few more along with it. The back links will help greatly and possibly put me in 1st or 2nd position for the main keyword. Because of the low traffic I have only seen 1 AdSense click netting me a whole $.21!! It’s ok though, slowly as I get more backlnks I will start to see more traffic, I am just finding a difficult time to find some sites to exchange links with as the niche I am in seems to be filled with a lot of old sites that nobody keeps up anymore. When I first got the site live and running I contacted 3 different sites about link exchanges and since then have never heard back. No worries, I will continue to slowly build up the site while working on others.

New Theme

As you probably have noticed I introduced a new theme this week. Yes it isn’t as exciting as the old one, yes there is less color but I wanted to make it simple and to the point. It is also setup a little bit better for search engines as well as user navigation. I may introduce a few minor changes and tweaks over the next few weeks but nothing major I don’t think. I like the theme, I have not heard any input on it so far from any readers but my traffic has remained the same so I assume that it is doing it’s job. I actually had the RSS icon and categories over in the sidebar before I set it live but switched them up under the main navigation bar as it looked more clean. Plus it allows for better expansion of the categories should I decide to add more.

With the new theme and the layout I had to go through and re-categorize and re-tag all my posts. Why? Because the structure I had before was all jumbled, I had categories and tags with the same names which makes no sense. I may or may not reintroduce the MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog widgets in the sidebar. I joined up with BlogCatalog because I heard it was a little bit more serious than MyBlogLog but ever since joining all I get are people messaging me to come check out their site and to please subscribe to their feed. Uhhhhh no? Maybe you could ask me to check out your site and then I will decide if I want to subscribe. People on BlogCatalog are way too hellbent on seeing their subscriber numbers higher.

Honestly I could care less how many subscribers I have. Not to say that I don’t want them, but people will subscribe if they find my content interesting. Sure I don’t have a lot of subscribers, it was at 7 yesterday (highest so far) but this morning it was at 4. So either FeedBurner is doing it’s thing again or I lost 4 people. No biggie.

2 Ebooks Planned

With my mini series that I wrote last week on finding a profitable niche I had to leave a lot out. I almost thought of even turning it into a few more posts and explaining it fully, but I decided that I should just turn it into an ebook, slap a small price tag on it and sell it. Now, this isn’t going to be your ordinary ebook that gives you a few tips and tricks on how to build a niche. Without giving away any details this is going to be big, bigger than any other ebook that I have come across and I think it will do extremely well once I get it finished. It is going to take me probably around a week or two of working on it but it will be worth the work in the end.

The other ebook is somewhat of a secret. I was talking with Garry Conn a few nights ago and he suggested an idea for an ebook that I could produce and charge some money for. So I have been slowly working on it, I was actually supposed to have it finished yesterday……but……well, I didn’t. So I am going to work on it today and hopefully have it finished by tonight!

Traffic Growth

There hasn’t been much growth actually, it seems to hang around the same number of visitors day in and day out. Which is ok, I haven’t been commenting as much as I used to because I have been focusing more time on working on sites. As I said earlier, I had a few extra FeedBurner subs yesterday but this morning I lost 3, nothing to cry over.

Posts Worth Reading

Who’s Audience Are You Marketing To? – WordVixen wrote up a great article about how you need to use the right images when you are trying to sell to a specific demographic. She came across a site that was targeting females but was geared more towards males.

My Web 2.0 Keynote in NYC – This was linked to me by a friend and it is a video of Gary Vaynerchuk talking at a conference. This is a MUST watch video, I have heard about Gary before but honestly have never watched his videos. After watching this video I scouted around on his blog and YouTube finding a few more to watch, Gary is a great motivational speaker.

That is it for this Week In Review, I may move these over to Sunday morning as it is a little bit more appropriate. Plus if I’m tired I won’t have to wait up late Saturday night just to write a post ;)