Recently, Google made certain key changes to Google Analytics. One of the most important was the ability to report real time statistics. In lieu of the changes, I have decided to release a second edition of my book, ABC of Google Analytics. I am yet to start on it, but rest assured, it will be done soon. I need to get a hold of my lower spine. If you haven’t downloaded the first edition, please do so here. It is free.

I sent a message today to all those who downloaded the book. I have moved my mailing list to Aweber. Since, I imported the mailing list, they require every subscriber to confirm again. Look forward to a mail from Aweber in a day or 2 and please make sure to click on the link. I assure you, your privacy won’t be abused.

So much for the week, take care all.

Sunday Blogbits – An Update to ABC of Google Analytics

In my exercise, the one positive characteristics I noticed, I developed was the power to focus. My introspection contained the questions “What is it that keeps me going?, How have I tackled life after the breakdown of my health?”, etc and I realized I had developed a powerful feature inside me. The Power to Focus.

Take a look at yourself. You have been online for a few weeks, few months or a few years, in the hope of making a living online. You have either barely made it or miserably failed. Take no offense, because I mean it in a good way. The fact that you read my blog proves that you are looking for that hidden gem. Why do you think you haven’t cracked the magic moment?

Lack of Focus. This is one reason why you aren’t where you planned to be when you set out your journey. Among the ingredients you collected, you forgot about Focus. This is what most of us do. This is what I did too. I literally wasted about 3 years jumping from one opportunity from another. It taught me valuable lessons but my pockets were always empty.

If you are just starting online and if you are reading this, then work on your weak areas as well as your strong areas, and if focus is your weakness, then work on it. Add re-enforcement. This one quality will propel your online career by leaps and bounds.

My health honestly does not permit me to go on. I hope you have understood my point. Do your research, pick a niche and stick to it. Success and wealth will follow.

Oh, by the way, what has been your experiences lately? I would love to hear about them.

Sunday Blogbits – The Power of Focus

Google has been indexing the blog regularly and almost all articles are currently included in Google’s database. I am updating the blog once every 5 days. The major update I have is that 2 of the main keywords have appeared in Google’s search results. One of the keywords is on the front page while the other is on page 4. Both the keywords have good search volume every month.

The links are also finally showing up in Yahoo and other databases. As of now, the Search Engines have indexed about 130 backlinks. In total, I have built about 600 backlinks spreading over 6-8 keywords. In my opinion, the results are slowly beginning to show. In the coming few weeks, we should see some major progress in terms of keyword positioning and search engine traffic . The project, let’s say is entering the critical mass mode.

Stay Tuned while I bring you more in the next few weeks!

Sunday Blogbits – Micro Niche Marketing Update

Affiliate Marketing -

Uber Affiliate

Aojon

Search Engine Marketing -

Johnon

Search Marketing Standards – They have a print magazine too.

Stuntdubl

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Watch

Ask Kalena

Search Engine Guide

Grey Wolf

Miscellaneous – They each have a purpose

Caroline Middlebrook

Entrepreneurs Journey

Daily Blog Tips

Seth Godin

Copywriting

CopyBlogger

These are some of the many blogs I have subscribed to. There are many, but not all are worth the mention. Enjoy your Sunday reading with these gems.

Sunday Blogbits – My Favorite Blogs

Make sure you read to the last. I have something for you at the end. You shouldn’t miss it.

The Micro Niche Marketing project has been going on very well. I have decided to reveal the name of the niche I am working the project on as well as the URL. But before that, let me give you some stats. I have focusing on about 5 main keywords and about 15 long tails. Among them, 5 keywords have already entered the Google Top 100 list with one keyword hitting the second page of Google. The main keywords, the last time I checked were on the 80^th page of Google. It is going to take a long time to make it to top 100 as the domain is brand new and has very few backlinks. The link Building process is an ongoing one.

What I have done is, prepared a total of 20 articles and timestamped them with an interval of 5 days till the 15^th of March. This way, I do not have to pay attention to its growth and the blog will be updated regularly. Thereafter, I plan to update the blog just once a week, to keep the SE crawlers busy.

Okay, now to unveil the secret.

The niche blog I am building is on Acne Cure. I researched the most profitable micro niche keywords having low competition within Acne using Micro Niche Finder. The software made my job a snap. Visit Acne Cure Blog.

My brother sent me this news piece about the Tumor man. His name is Huang Chuncai and he hails from southern China’s Guangdong province. Take a look at his pain.

Huang Chuncai poses before his second operation to remove his tumors, which currently weigh around 10kg (22lbs), at a hospital in Guangzhou, southern China’s Guangdong province, January 3, 2008. Huang, a 32-year-old native from a remote village in China’s southern province of Hunan, says he is relieved after a part of his facial tumors, which originally weighed about 23kg (50.7 lbs), was removed last year. His second operation will remove another part of the tumors, which weighs 4.5kg (9.9lbs). Huang suffers from Neurofibromatosis, which is a genetic disorder of the nervous system that primarily affects the development and growth of nerve tissues. Picture taken January 3, 2008.

I honestly cant fathom the depth of his pain. Anyways, I will leave you all with this thought.

Great Sunday
Al

Sunday Blogbits – The Tumor Man

To start off, The blog made 3 Clickbank sales off one review that I wrote in the beginning of the month. It was for Micro Niche Finder. The total commissions ended with $91. It isn’t a great amount, but it definitely is not bad for a plain review.

The Blog received 330 visitors from Google and a few from MSN and Yahoo. The most searched were “Worlds weirdest homes” and Micro Niche Finder”.

According to Google Analytics, the blog received a total 6700 visitors and 10575 pageviews, much less than December. However, I am happy that the quality of visitors were better than what it was in December. I observed it from comments and personal feedbacks, as well as the source of the traffic.

The RSS Subscriber was static for the most part of the month. It changed last week after Yaro Starak from Entrepreneur’s Journey mentioned my book in his blog. RSS subscriber base jumped from 137 to 150 in the last 6 days. Not a great development, but a development overall. Thank you Yaro for sending the traffic as well as new readers.

I had a goal of 3 guests posts every month. I completely missed it. I am going to work better towards hitting that goal. Last month, I started off the Micro Niche Marketing experiment. It is still going on. I will give an update in a few moments.

Do I have a goal for February? Nothing specific really. As usual, I would like to see myself fire up top of the world posts, would like to increase my readership, linkbaits, etc. If there is one thing I would like for my blog, that would be to maintain the quality I started with. Everything else, in my view will be bonuses.

Now to the Micro Niche Marketing Experiment. There hasn’t been any progress in terms of Google ranking, as it is a pretty new domain. I have been building links slowly. Last week, I managed to get about 50 links. In my opinion, 50 links a week is pretty good. I am targeting the same keywords I did before. I am positive Google has sandboxed me. It may take a couple months before I am released from it. I am going to continue building it.

I have been getting a steady 50-100 visitors everyday from referral sites like StumbleUpon, etc. This traffic will help me expedite the time to get out of Google’s sandbox. Hopefully.

At the moment, the experiment is pretty boring. Next week, I will reveal the niche I am running this experiment on. Hopefully, that should bring in the excitement.

How was January for you?

Sunday Blogbits – Performance Report and more

A pretty slow week for me, after the accident I met with. I haven’t really monitored anything in the Blogosphere. To top it, my wife’s aunt expired today due to completely unknown reasons. After spending over $10,000, the doctors could not diagnose the cause of death. I guess, our medical system is still in its growth stage.

I have made certain changes to the Micro Niche Experiment I have been working on since 2 weeks. First off, I have demolished the 1 year old domain I picked up. I registered a new domain related to the same niche. I went to Google Webmaster tools and removed the entire site from Google’s index and Search results. I had about an hour free yesterday, so I setup the new domain with Wordpress Blog, performed the basic SEO duties on it and posted the articles for the same dates as the previous blog.

Why did I do this? As strange as it may sound (to me), I had 2 personal requests to conduct the domain on a brand new domain rather than a 1 year old, somewhat trusted domain. I gave a thought over it while on bed rest and concluded in the favor of the request.

It was a bit of hassle initially, especially when I thought of all the link building I had done. Now that everything is set, the hassle is history. Google has already indexed every post in the new blog. Pretty fast, I should add and an encouraging start.

There is nothing to report regarding the project apart from the above. I will start building links once I am out of bed, which should be in a couple days. I am as excited as I was in the beginning. So, stay focused with me.

Before closing, I just took a look at couple of blogs and found this Yahoo Search Marketing $100 free credit at UberAffiliate.com. I thought, I will share it with you. Go ahead and sign up right away.

Sunday Blogbits – Micro Niche Marketing re-visited

I came across a pretty interesting argument at “King” Paul’s UberAffiliate.com about Shoemoney and JohnChow, both excellent marketers in my view, but absolutely useless bloggers. Every time I come across their name, I am reminded of the circus trained monkeys that entertain crowds. Nevertheless, the article is pretty interesting. I could sense Paul’s frustration in the writing.

PepperJam, the Internet Marketing company launched their much awaited Affiliate Network this week. If you are an Affiliate Marketing bum, take a look at their program.

So much for the week. I am sure there are other events, but I can’t cover them all. Let’s move onto the Case Study.

Basically In the past week, I did the following:

1. Acquired the domain officially in my account from TDNAM on Tuesday

2. Setup a Wordpress Blog and necessary plugins.

3. Upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress

4. Performed On-page Optimization with keywords from my initial research.

5. Converted the Wordpress Structure to become more SE friendly.

6. Penned down a brief bio for the About page.

7. Submitted 5 time stamped articles starting from Jan 1^st with a posting frequency of once every 3 days.

8. Optimized each article with an almost perfect keyword density and other SEO factors.

9. Stumbled each of the post for some overnight action, and yes they did.

10. Lastly began the Link Building ritual.

As of today, Google has about a 100+ links indexed according to Google Webmaster Central. Of course, that is no where enough, but I am building them steadily. Haste may lead to waste. Currently, Google has indexed all the pages and has also assigned ranks to a couple keywords. I had started the project with 5 keywords, but during the week, I added 2 more keywords. Here are the rankings in the order of importance:

1. Keyword 1 – Not in Top 100

2. Keyword 2 – Not in Top 100

3. Keyword 3 – Not in Top 100

4. Keyword 4 – Rank 79

5. Keyword 5 – Rank 58

6. Keyword 6 – Rank 35

7. Keyword 7 – Rank 10

So, Keyword 7 has already entered the first page in Google. It is keyword that is searched about 3500 times every month and a exact match competition of 9410 results. Pretty good if I rank number 1. I can definitely attract a chunk of the Search crowd.

So far so good. I will keep you updated on the progress. Just so you know, the case study will run for a total of 12 weeks and we are now in our second week.

Great Sunday!

Sunday Blogbits – Micro Niche Marketing Case Study Part 2

This case study was basically an inspiration I received after purchasing Micro Niche Finder. I decided to run a live experiment to rank a Micro Niche keyword in the first page of Google. I already did my research in the beginning of last week and picked up a fairly profitable niche that has about 50,000 per month search count in Google and an exact match result of 800,000. I am sure you are keen to know the niche, but I fear the Devil. I have already received a threat:

So, I have decided to keep the niche a secret at the moment. Let the ball roll and I will reveal it. I have chosen 4 other keywords apart from the main niche word to rank for. The following are the tools I will be utilizing extensively all through the experiment:

1. Micro Niche Finder: Though the initial job of finding the Niche market is over, I will continue to use it to find better keywords to rank for, within the niche.

2. Keyword Elite: I will use it basically for Keyword research purpose. Very helpful tool.

3. SEO SpyGlass: This tool will help me spy on my main competitors and give me an idea of the level of competition and help me gauge my progress.

4. Rank Tracker: This software will enable me to research my keyword positions in Google and other Search Engines on a week by week basis.

I have decided to go with a Wordpress Blog rather than a static website, simply for SEO reasons. The following are the plugins I plan to use on the Blog.

1. Akismet anti-spam

2. All-In-One-SEO

3. Challenge

4. Google Analytics

5. Google XML Sitemap

6. Maintenance Mode

7. Open Web Analytics

8. Permalink Redirect

9. StatPress

10. Wordpress Automatic Upgrade

11. Duplicate Content Cure

12. WP-Sticky

Each one of them has a purpose in assisting me in my journey. I have chosen them after careful consideration.

Domain name: I had a choice of registering the perfect domain name for the niche, but instead I went to TDNAM and picked up from the Live Auctions there. You ask me what is the benefit. I did it mainly to avoid Google’s Sandbox and delay the results. The domain I now have is over a year old and is indexed in Google. It also has 4 active and related backlinks from a Pagerank 8 authority source. Lets say I was lucky. It cost me just $13. The owner probably wanted to do away with the name. I was his messiah.

My goal is to have about 50 pages of original and quality content in the Blog. I have found a Lady writer from the U.K who has agreed to deliver the content. I can probably settle for 10 pages of good quality content, but I want the SE spiders to visit the Blog regularly and in order to maintain their visits, I need to feed them good content constantly.

I plan to maintain a posting interval of 1 article every 3 days. As of now, the Blog has no articles at all. I plan to post the first one tomorrow and take off from there.

I know this post was pretty boring as it contained pure facts and no spice. But stick with me and I promise you will love it. It will be a great opportunity for you to gain live “as it happens” knowledge and someday probably repeat the experiment on a personal level to make your fortune on the Internet.

Stay Tuned!

Sunday Blogbits – Micro Niche Marketing Case Study Part 1

Caroline Middlebrook has released her long awaited ebook on Wordpress Niche Marketing. She was supposed to have released it even before I released my book, but certain issues in her personal life, as she puts it, prevented her from doing so. I encourage you to download and give it a go. There surely is some interesting information there.

JohnCow has released GoogleTime.info, a set of Made For Adsense Splogs. Another false dream of creating automatic cash. I am not sure what John has in mind. Maybe he wants to create a Global Warming phenomenon in the Blogosphere by polluting it. Maybe his bank account is empty. Whatever it maybe, I am not surprised.

That reminds me, I am working on a Wordpress Adsense and Affiliate Blog. myself. Oh, it isn’t a Splog. The contents are original and of good quality. I just started work on it 2 days back. I will cover this in the next week’s Sunday Blogbits. This is a Live Experiment I will be updating here for all my readers with weekly statistics of the development. Believe me, it is pretty exciting project and I urge you to stay abreast by subscribing to my RSS feed or email.

Now to the meat of the edition. My Affiliate Marketing Policy. Last Thursday I announced that I will be launching an Affiliate Review section. I want to slowly and steadily introduce monetization channels for the Blog so it follows a self funding route, especially when I get in paid guest authors.

In doing so, I, in no way want to ruin my reputation by promoting anything and everything. So, I have come up with a few “rules of the game”.

1. I will promote a product I am convinced about.

2. Where it is possible, I will buy the product myself before recommending.

3. I will review each product with as much detail as I can gather.

4. There will be only 1 product every week.

5. I will, if possible write a value post in relation to the product.

6. I will talk about the good and bad and leave the court open for readers to judge.

7. I will, in no way be influenced by the compensation level of a product.

8. I will place priority to Quality and usability of the product.

9. If there is a catch, I will be the first one to expose it.

10. Lastly and obviously, I will expect the affiliate URL to be clicked upon and bought .

So, this is my Affiliate review policy and I will follow it closely. If I break my rules, I won’t worry, as you, my readers can correct always correct me.

Look forward to my first issue of Affiliate Review coming Thursday. At this point you will agree with me that you have much to lose if you go without subscribing to my Blog. Subscribe to Blogrepreneur.

Sunday Blogbits – My Affiliate Marketing Policy