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!

One thing that I really like to do is write. It seems natural then for me to work out a way to make some money from my writing. I was inspired by an article I read about a blog called Dooce. You can browse over and read about it for yourself. The part that inspired me is that this family makes their living from their blog because of the traffic they generate for their advertisers.

I already had a blog, www.mikesmind.com. I had also started another blog, www.freetofarm.org. Finally, I have started this blog, www.daddyworkathome.com. These three blogs are the basis for my AdSense income. My efforts started by reading a great ebook called The Blogging Cash Machine by Danny Warner. Then I purchased AdSense Videos by Michael Cheney. Both of these resources helped me get started.

While I haven’t made any money on AdSense, yet, I believe that I am off to a good start. My basic blogging platform is WordPress. I chose WordPress because I became familiar with it through my blog, www.mikesmind.com. It is also a great platform because of all the themes and plugins that are available for it. The final benefit is that it is free software. This means that you can use it for free, you get the source code for free, and you are free to modify it to suit your needs (within the terms of the license agreement). They will even host your blog for free!

I have been writing content for my blogs. My goal is to become consistent in my posting. The next step is to build traffic to all three sites. I have been reading on the email lists of Jonathan Leger, Dr. Andy Williams, and John Reese, trying to learn as much as I can. Right now, traffic is mostly a trickle. Here are my stats (page views) for last month, September 2006:

www.mikesmind.com 2,583 pages

www.freetofarm.org 595 pages

www.daddyworkathome.com 3,767 pages

I am publishing these stats in order to establish a baseline before starting serious work in building traffic. As a reader of my blog, you will see my progress too and I will share what worked for me.