Nichefinder's Journal

I remember when I first started making websites. I had a site on how to get DVD's cheap, a video/audio site, a movie information site, and a website on an actress I idolized at the time. I spent hours making these sites for fun. It's kind of crazy to see that some of my past competitors that continued publishing their sites are now making over 6 figures. I didn't think that I could make money off of those sites at the time. It was all a hobby. I still see many fan sites that have tons of content, but don't generate any money at all. People spend tons of hours publishing free videos and podcasts on their websites. This might seem pretty cool, but I don't think it's cool if somebody is capitalizing on your ideas and making a fortune on them. If somebody is making money on great ideas and information, why can't it be you? Now, don't get me wrong. Their were tons of sites back then that made money, but looked like garbage. They had flashing banner

While thinking about an ebook to market, I ran across a website saying that I could actually make my own program with a program creator. I thought it was a lot of B.S., but after looking at some examples, I understood what it was all about. One of the great examples was a sales letter creator. Just type in a headline, sub-headline, and the benefits of your product or service. After clicking a button, it would spit out a great sales letter. Using this product in this way is great. I just didn't like the fact that the software insinuated that it could be used to make software (like any kind). I had to hunt around Google to figure out what it was about. It was a simple software program, with simple libraries, that could create basic logic programs. Although I thought I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out what it was about, it was a great brain stimulator. I hunted around for more software creators. I checked out download.com and sourceforge.net . I ended up stumbling

On January 9th, Rosalind Gardner finally picked out a winning card from her stash of cards. For those of you that aren't familiar with the contest, the prizes were Rosalind's Super Affiliate Handbook and the late Corey Rudl's highly acclaimed Internet Marketing Course . In order to enter the contest, anybody could send Rosalind a Christmas card or birthday card. I ended up sending a card early in December and on January 9th, I recieved a NetProfitsToday link via RSS. I was pretty excited to find out that I was the winner of the two internet marketing courses. That was on January 9th. Today, it's January the 24th. What took me so long to post this message? I've been so busy building websites. Since the beginning of the year, I've created 3 new websites with a total of over 70 pages of content so far. It's been hectic trying to do this, take care of my family with a wife and 2 kids, brush up my knowledge with some great ebooks, and handle my regular job.

For those of you that read my last post, you know I'm diversifying my publishing methods. There are information sites that I don't run subscription lists on. But I do have other sites where I want people to subscribe to a mini-course or newsletter. I read a post on some blog (don't recall) that the trend is for people to get get information on their own time , instead of newsletters via email; I'll still continue with my autoresponders and mailing lists, but I'll be adding RSS feeds to some of my new sites. I've realized the easiest way to do this is by using blogs. So, I had to sacrifice something to get an added benefit. So, back to Pivot . For those of you not familiar with this software, it's a PHP blog that is flatfile based (it uses a text database). I didn't want to add up my costs by getting MySQL added. So I ended up doing some hacking with Pivot. I changed things around so Pivot is more of a CMS than a blog. There was a feature to tur

Wow, it's the beginning of 2006! After reading all of the SEO books in my collection last year, it's amazing how things change. On my past sites, I've used the same strategy. After all of the news from the last pubcon came out, it seems like SEO for Google has come to a halt. With all of their algorithms fighting spam, their SE has become anti-SEO. So the rules have changed. I guess that's the internet for you. For the last few weeks, I've been thinking about what I should do with my future sites. Should I put my focus on just MSN and Yahoo? I soon realized that Google has been a big trendsetter in SE development, so it's just a matter of time that these other SE's catch on. So in order to deal with this change, this year I'm going to use multi-strategy SEO. With 1/3 of my sites, I'll continue to make them as I did. The next third I have come up with my own SEO rules. Their somewhat leaner that before. To give you a clue, I'll be usin