I have been busy creating a new website. It has been a lot of fun and things are coming along well. with that, I have also been working to learn how to make money on the internet. I have been reading various emails, blogs, websites, and other materials from “internet marketing gurus.” The amount of stuff out there is truly overwhelming!

Truth be told, the “internet marketing guru” portion is not going so well. There is so much advice out there and it is often hard to tell who is a real “internet marketing guru.” Many people are buying and selling content, but I am interested in people who are generating useful content that I can apply to my projects. I could list the folks that I have decided to ignore for now, but perhaps it is more constructive to list who I am going to pay attention to.

In no particular order, those are:

1) Jonathan Leger
2) John Reese
3) Joel Comm

Why did I pick these three? For one, they all give valuable advice for free! Each of their websites offer many things you can do to help your business and it is given in the spirit of giving back. Also, for the most part, there is very little hype for these three. They tend to recommend things they have already tried themselves and they do this with straight talk, including the down-side of product or technique they are recommending. In other words, they are real pros.

Click over to their websites and give them a try. Also, share your recommendations in my comments section.

Life has been very busy so blogging has been light. I am getting to the point where I can start blogging again. One thing I have been thinking about is the merits of niche marketing. Conventional wisdom, on the web, is that successful websites are targeted to a particular niche. I am thinking about pursuing a strategy of combining multiple niches in one site, effectively creating a “multi-niche” e-commerce site.

Today my e-commerce website, www.TenFootTable.com, is most successful in selling Celtic Sea Salt. Some of my plans are to expand the marketing of related items on this site. Salt, while a good seller, is a low-margin product. I want to create cross-sell opportunities for higher-margin sales. This fits well into the niche marketing concept.

It is appealing to add unrelated (to salt) items to sell on the same website. My main reason is that as a small operation it is time consuming to maintain multiple websites and the associated back-ends and/or business entities. Our business is also a family business. As a family, we have varied interests. Is it possible to market to many niches in one website? It will be interesting to find out.

Somehow, I forgot to post December traffic. Here is an update with both December and January traffic counts.

December 2006

January 2007

My website www.mikesmind.com is the only site out of the three that doesn’t have AdSense ads running on it. Based on traffic count, I should get busy adding them to the site!

Here’s my monthly update on traffic. Free to Farm continues to decline in traffic. Mike’s Mind and Daddy Work @ Home are picking up again. Regular posting is important. I need to keep up on that. I have plenty of ideas for writing, but need to plan time to do it.

On a related note, Jonathan Leger has an interesting series called “A case study on the traffic-building power of article writing.” I’m going to give this a try for my websites. Time is the main issue.

November has been busy! I will be trying to get back to posting regularly. In the mean time, here are my page views for October.

Obviously, my lack of posting has hurt my website traffic. This is an important lesson!