Update 15 October, 2010

Hi Jeremy,
Sorry I haven't been in touch much. I had the holidays to deal with among other things.

Tasks accomplished recently:
1. I did make single blogger sites for each of the models with keyword based domain names, linked them together and then linked to them from my Squidoo page. Within two weeks Google had shut down three of them for triggering the spam filter. So I removed the remaining ones immediately as well as the links from Squidoo. I see that domain squatting is not simple, and I don't think it's really my goal to learn how to do it.

2. Traffic on the site is still low. The webmaster tool in Google is showing more of the profile back links, as well as the ezine article links and such. I aggregated my profile URL's into an RSS feed, and went ahead and linked to that from my blog. Currently there are only 50 profiles, but the majority of the other sites that I checked on Knowem.com have little or nothing to offer. I subscribed to the newsletter mentioned in the  forums, Paulie Ciara's Backlink newsletter, and  try to choose one of those each week to add.

3. I am working on a downloadable ebook like I had in my wireframe. Mostly I am cutting and pasting information from my site so that it's not hugely time consuming. I signed up for the Netbook Buyers Guide ebook from NetbookReviews.com, and they do a nice set of follow up emails afterwards as well.

4. I made a Facebook Page.

Questions:

1.  I started the clustered posts, but I need to solve the menu problem for me to even easily navigate the site. What day would work for you this week for a Skype session?
2. I'm not too keen on signing up for a paid newsletter service before there's traffic to the site. I set up a mailing list in the Cpanel, but I am not totally familiar with the settings in cPanel, as I use different hosting. What are your suggestions for being able to capture email address for two or three brief follow up emails to folks who download my ebook?

Hope all is well after that fire!

Best,
me

10 days of silence again

Well, the email from the 19th of July stated that Jeremy would be in contact mid-week, but here it is 10 days later.

Still no forums. No further contacts.

Is anyone out there interested in starting our own forums to at least give each other support in what we can?

A sign of life

We received an email from Jeremy today letting us know that he'd been "off the grid the past few weeks", which sounds like since the last round of partner calls.

Hopefully the forums will be back up soon so we can get support from other partners.

If it was any quieter, I think I'd hear an echo...

Forum is still down.
No new partner emails updating all of us.
At least some new tasks appeared in the partner portal relating to link building.

JeremyPalmer.com has a new squeaky clean WordPress install, so hopefully that's a sign that there's been some progress with either moving servers or staying put on HostGator.

Are we moving all the partner sites or not? Nervous partners want to know.

New items in task list related to Organic Traffic

I forgot to mention that my whole reason for going to Knowem.com was Jeremy's suggestion in our phone call last week. I added the twist of fiverr.com.

A good sign today was seeing added tasks in the partner portal. Still no forum, and no word on whether the sites will indeed move server or not.

Moving hosts.. shudder...

I got my reply to my ticket submission requesting a content review and Jeremy wants me to schedule a phone meeting. All the slots on his Jiffle calendar are post midnight my time zone, so I'll email to try to set something up for next week. 

He also mentioned that there have been some issues with HostGator for the Partnership project, so they'll be moving the sites. 

I backed up my site and am downloading the whole directory JIC. I can't imagine trying to move 59 database sites. 

Since I started hosting at FutureQuest.net, I've only had nightmares with other hosts. So yes, I pay a bit more in hosting, but for my peace of mind it's worth it. Today I just put in my request for MySQL5 upgrades on my sites so I can be a good girl and keep my WP versions up to date. I'm out of date on all of them.

59 sites to move. This sounds like a disaster in the making, I have to say. It's not like they're static sites, they're all WordPress based. I think I'm going to try some of the new dark rum based drinks I downloaded from recipezaar.com soon...

Forums down, sigh.

The Partner forums are down.  Been working on starting to add affiliate links and having some unknown problem in WordPress.

I put in a support ticket for a content review, since I am sure I need more, better, and some honing of what I posted. However since I am finding working in WordPress so challenging, I want to get focused with some constructive feedback.

Meanwhile I built a Squidoo page as a feeder to the site and unabashedly asked all my Facebook friends to at least click through, preferably add comments and rate the lens. That should start the lens rising slowly and hopefully by the time the site is actually ready for prime time the Squidoo page will be sending some nice traffic.

Also writing ezine articles, and taking advantage of the Title Tool at EzineArticles.com. So far I'm not impressed with the results of using the tool. Nice for brainstorming, but a quick look at Wordtracker or SEOBook has always been  successful for me at finding titles that get my article viewed.

The advantage of the Squidoo page is that it's very Squidooly to compose in the first person. I wrote from very much my own head space and experience, which was fun and informative.

Okay, back to WP. Guess I should put in a support ticket.

First draft ready!

Three comparison categories, three top contenders in each category. I have enough material to post a couple more reviews of products that didn't make my top contenders lists, too. Then I will have to check what's new again in the niche... it's a fast moving niche and my Google Alert comes in every day with more material.

I spent some time on the side bar widgets in WordPress last night. My default template still doesn't seem to take hold and I end up having to make the same side bar for every category template that I've used.

Then I also wasn't satisfied with how to link to the comparison pages in a navigation tab so I created a new subcategory called comparison under the review category and moved the comparison pages to that category. Beware if you put a slug in the box for a category, WP uses that for the link archecture and doesn't always find the right category template. Sigh. I made the plug the same as the subcategory and WP found the right page template.

Today I will request a content review from Jeremy's team. I reapplied at Amazon.com for Associate status for the site. They had rejected the application when the site wasn't functional. I also reapplied at Shareasale.com, for the same reason. I'm a long time affiliate, so both of them can look at other work I've done, but I wanted separate accounts for the Partnership site. Still have to reapply to the Ebay Partner Network for the same reasons.

Time to start getting preliminary feedback from social networking and driving some traffic from article marketing. Though all my friends on Facebook are actually people I know from my real life, some of them are in the market for this product, just as I was.  When I mentioned I was building a site to compare this product niche, many were interested. I plan on being shamelessly self promotional and asking everyone to click through, bookmark, tweet, Digg, and pass on to all their friends a link to my site. While this is not necessarily big time traffic, it should be a nice natural start to link building and traffic building. Not to mention free content review comments from people who know me. ;)

A page a day...

Gone back to the baby step method of  "a page a day" so I can feel like I'm keeping a decent schedule for getting the site finished.

There have been problems with the CSS, I'm not always getting problems once I've pasted my HTML into WordPress, so rather than break my head on technical stuff right now, I'm posting the pages I need to get posted and will worry about the CSS and WordPress related style problems later.

Currently I'm working in Dreamweaver, my favorite since purchasing it in 2002 or so. Then copy and paste the relevant bits into a WordPress post or page. I've never used WordPress for a whole site, so getting the navigation elements and category structure is not coming totally easily.

But it will get done reasonably quickly with a page a day. More if I can get some days off...

EFQM - The Europoean Foundation for Quality Management -- defining excellence?

Had to attend a lecture on the EFQM process that is being undertaken at my day job employer, and was piqued by the mission they have.

In the late 1980's Europe found itself being outdone in the business sector by Japan and the U.S. They decided to win back market share by promoting excellence in business.

What I liked about the EFQM model is that is based on facts and measurements (as Jeremy says, "If you measure it, it will improve"), and process is a large part of the level of excellence as well as results.

So the lecture I attended adapted the EFQM concepts to a medical environment. Hmm... so really we could adapt this concept of "defining excellence" (or measuring excellence and the processes necessary to achieve it) to running a website. :).

Here's a PDF of the 2010 EFQM model . I think that this would be a great way to measure excellence in a content website. If it can be adapted to medical care, it can be adapted to niche marketing!

Granular tasks for Site Launch

I've had affiliate accounts for over 10 years, though I closed my LinkShare account in about 2005. For the Partner Project I need a new Google Account so I can share this with Jeremy's team for analytics, Adwords, etc.

For some reason, I was having trouble getting the new Gmail address. Not sure why, and after two tries, Google informed me that my cell phone number (they wanted to send a verification SMS) had opened the max number of Google accounts allowed. Grr. So then I tried at the day job, since I could at least send and SMS to a friend's phone. Low and behold the verification was sent to my Yahoo email address that I put in as my contact. Okay.

Then after adding my billing information to AdWords, I remember that you can invite others to your AdWords account. That makes a lot more sense to me than giving a team of people my Google account password which would access all things Google in that account. I sent off an email to Jeremy inquiring about this option.

After signing up at Commission Junction, I recalled that there also is the option of adding users with their own access to the same account. Again, much more sense than giving a team my log in information, it would seem to me.

Then on to ShareaSale to open an account. Late at night, after my full day of work at the day job. Okay, at the end they want to send a verification to an email address at the domain itself. Fine, I had set up one POP box on top of the default. Just to be sure, I put in the default address.

No email from SAS. Okay, dufus, did you test your email? No. So I send from my new Gmail account to the default email address. Bounce. Oooof. I had not been able to set up my Windows Live Mail with the information on the site, but I figured it was just some glitch... now I realize that there's a serious problem with my email on the hosting account. I send an email to the host with the error message generated in the bounce, and get a copy of the inquiry from an email associated with Jeremy! The email says, "Your inquiry was sent to the server administrator because no contact information was configured on the server. Attached is a copy of your inquiry for your reference:". Oh, man, I don't have access to the domain registration, that's Jeremy's part of the partnership.

Maybe this is a problem with cPanel? I try setting up a forwarding and still get a bounce. I can log in by webmail to both email addresses, but nothing has arrived.

By this time I realized it was time to get some sleep and see what the next day will bring. At this point I do have the new Google account and Commission Junction set up, and most of the tasks for the WordPress install accomplished. I want to double check my categories before checking it off of the task list, though really they can be changed later also.

And here we are in the middle of March. I think we are going to need to extend the Partnership to three years. ;)

Excellent vs. Good Content

A bit of an eye opener webinar last night. Admittedly I have been a "back burner" affiliate for over 3 1/2 years now since going back to a day job full time. In that time it has become nearly impossible to make money with what Google considers to be "thin" affiliate sites, and even "good" affiliate content has a lot of competition.

Jeremy emphasized the need for excellent content rather than just good content. It's a lot of work. On the other hand, it's doable. Unlike having to learn a new programming language every few years or the newest internet traffic trick, you can learn to produce excellent content once and continue to do so for the long run. Sure, you may have to learn a few new skills as time goes by (video was NOT a viable media for common use 10 years ago due to bandwidth and storage limits, for example), but the general skills learned are constant.

I actually realized how much more I could build up the content on my remaining affiliate sites. The original content is there on many of them, not all, but mostly it's good content, not excellent content. And one site that has some excellent video content really needs more excellent written content to support it.

But right now my main focus is the partnership site. With a full time job and a commitment to 10-12 hours a week for the 2010 Partnership, I don't have a lot of time to fiddle with my remaining affiliate sites right now. That's okay. It's never too late, and I've only kept the ones that I felt I could eventually commit to developing in terms of content.

Excellence is a far more demanding goal, but in many ways, it's a far more worthwhile goal.

Of Niche Immersion and Wire Frames

There aren't currently any new tasks, so I have been immersing myself in my niche. I'm using Evernote to put together a swipe file of site design "do's" that I'd like to incorporate into our site.

Here's a good blog post on how make and use a swipe file for inspiration during website planning: http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/06/02/swipe-file-for-inspiration/ .

So I've been visiting sites and making note of things that I like (like the design, like the navigation categories, like the search feature, this one is along the lines of what I'd like to do with a different focus...). I keep in my Evernote file a screen capture, the URL, and notes about what I liked.

Then I also keep a Google spreadsheet with extra notes about sites, and have sorted my keyword intent spreadsheet to narrow down categories. This is all giving me a clearer idea of how I want the site to develop.

The clearer a vision you have of what you want from your site, the more information you can provide designers who will code the site. I'm in general not a visual person, so spreadsheets actually help my creativity.

Jeremy is coding a WireFrame Wizard, and for very good reasons. It's not ready yet, so I am using this time to get a clear picture of my niche and what I want for our site. A long cry from some thin affiliate sites I put up in 2004 or so in about 4 hours from domain registration to full site up on the web. Hopefully with longer term success, too!

Niche Marketing -- you need content

I'm caught up on our current tasks, and am trying to wrap my mind around wire frames. I haven't done them previously, most likely to the detriment of my sites.

Mean while, I wanted to share one of the tasks we had in researching our niche. Make a list of 10 forums and blogs in your niche and then note 10 topics that are most popular on each site. Boom, 100 content ideas. This gives you a glimpse of the customers out there and what their questions are, what interests them, and what bothers them in your niche.

There you have 100 article ideas that already serves the community interested in your product. Or perhaps less than 100, as you may see some of the same topics come up over and over. That's also important, as those topics are the ones that you really want to make sure you address with your content.

Jeremy has begun providing our task worksheets in .csv format rather than an online form to fill out, which I prefer. I open the form in my Google Docs and work on it from anywhere. In fact, on my new desktop I haven't purchased MSOffice, I've gone with Open Office and Google Docs. Since I still have a day job, I like having my documents "in the cloud".   

Niche Selection Pro Milestone finished!

Niche selected!
A 1-on-1 call with Jeremy was great. First, he is so polite, positive, and friendly. He said, "Nice to meet you", but of course his voice was familiar to me. Shortly after he was nominated for the Horizon Award in 2005 with Commission Junction, I recall listening to a podcast of an interview with him. And of course, I hear his voice on the  2010 Partners webinars.

Even with the worksheets, I was still feeling not totally confident about choosing a niche. "What if" kept running through my head.

So when Jeremy asked about my enthusiasm for one of them (it is based on a wish list purchase I'd like to make), that helped put the pieces in place. Now I can focus and start pulling all the tools and skills together on this one niche topic.  Bonus for the niche is that Jeremy has researched a similar niche previously, so he has a lot of information to share.

I do seriously hope this ends up being worth his time. He's got phone calls to make, webinars to give, record, upload, the partner portal to keep up... and the deal is only 10% of the website profits for him. I'm sure he did his math before taking this project on, so here's hoping everyone's successful so it's well worth his while. On the partner side, the training and information we're getting is invaluable.

USP development - a Unique Selling Proposition

You hear about USP from all the good marketers. After measuring niche demand and analyzing the competition, we have to start honing in on a USP.

Jeremy has been great about providing the framework for each step as a worksheet format. Part of the step of building a USP is the SWOT worksheet. Essentially, you examine your Strengths and Weaknesses, which are things related to you and thus under your influence. You also examine your Opportunities and Threats, things which are not related to you and thus beyond your influence.

"If you measure it, it can change" is one of Jeremy's sayings.

The SWOT worksheet is interesting, because sometimes when you see things in your own writing, they sink in better, hah. Like realizing that your audience is not reachable (Threat), or that you don't have experience in the niche (Weakness), or that the subject is something you're going to explore in any case (Strength), or that you are pretty sure you've spotted a new trend on the rise (Opportunity).

I'm caught up on the webinars (need to catch the tail end of the Q&A from last Thursday, as I really needed to get to sleep, but was there for the content), and made some good headway on the niche selection. I am still lacking some confidence on any one of the niches I'm thinking of. Hopefully a 1-on-1 call will help clarify that.

Niche Selection continued

I'm a bit behind.
The day job had a ton of work last week, three malignant cases in one week, plus research samples. I was beat by the end of the week.

The last webinar was posted and I'm watching it. Also working on the niche keyword traffic and competition evaluation.

My computer was at least 8 years old and getting so slow that every time it actually booted I considered it a minor miracle. So I took a calculated risk and purchased a new one for my business. Dual core, 4 GB RAM, and Windows 7 are the bits that I remember off hand.

Unfortunately, not everything is Windows 7 ready (this happened to me in 2002 when I purchased my XP machine, too), and one of the toolbars that Jeremy recommends for cometition evaluation is not yet ready for either IE or FF on the new Windows box (the Compete.com toolbar).

Then each of us is to schedule one-on-one time to speak with Jeremy. Since I'm running a bit behind, I will aim for later this week. I'm glad that working "in the cloud" is getting more common. It actually makes it easier for me to grab a bit of time on a list or a document when I'm away from home, too.

Working with a human, not a superbeing alien ;)

Jeremy is so much like the rest of us in terms of sometimes getting caught up in technical details and not always seeing into the future. ;) What a great thing! Imagine if you had partnered with a superbeing alien who never made mistakes and couldn't imagine getting stuck on a technical detail. That could be a nightmare for us mere mortals.

Our 3rd webinar was on Wednesday 13 Jan., and I just had to sleep (I'm in GMT +2 and it didn't start until 11 pm here). I logged in to the Adobe Connect site to make sure my system was set up, but then I really had to get sleep, since I had to get to my day job in the morning, grab a sample and travel to another town over an hour away to learn some new techniques and get help with analysing the sample. It just wasn't a night to try staying up until midnight and risk the lack of functionality the next day.

This was the first time on Adobe Connect for many of us. Evidently GoTo Meeting is a problem for chat on Mac clients. Since there are some Mac users among the partners, Jeremy decided to go with the across platform functionality of Adobe Connect.

However the new technical glitch is the recorded files. Evidently they're huge. So he's going to re-record them, and I missed the Q&A because I couldn't make the live webinar.  Not everything is possible all of the time. I successfully logged in and saw chat fine in Chrome (my current browser of choice, because it's a LOT faster than IE or FF, though I MISS MY GOOGLE TOOLBAR TERRIBLY IN IT).

Still in niche selection process. I'm excited to see the new worksheets up, because this will break down into tasks the process of niche selection. I've gone through a lot of these steps before in my own business, but I see that just putting things in spreadsheet format itself is also helpful for getting a clearer picture.

More after I complete some more tasks and see how things are going on the niche selection unit.

First Webinar on Niche Selection

Let me start this post by saying that Jeremy amazes me.

I recently read a free report by Brian Tracy on goal setting as part of my local dream team (mini Mastermind style group). I worked about half way through it and got stuck on the goal setting process. You see, my goals were not tangibles like increasing sales of my beret pattern or losing 20 lbs (both of which I would also like to achieve), but things like launching my children successfully, finding meaning and fulfillment in my job, and having a life long love relationship with God.

Try to figure out individual steps to those goals...

But my dream team colleagues gave me an extra nudge (isn't that what a dream team is for?) and made the suggestion of "measurable" tasks.  For instance for the goal regarding my relationship with God I am already using the techniques enumerated by C. Robert Cloninger and the products produced at www.anthropediafoundation.org/ . So I can set measurable goals such as doing one act of kindness a day, one act of hope a day, and doing one "Quieting the Mind" exercise a day.

Well, I listened to the recorded webinar (couldn't make it to the live one), and behold, Jeremy has broken out niche selection into measurable tasks. Great! "If if is measured, it can improve" is his motto. So there are a lot of measurements in this process to keep us all aware of what can be improved. I like it.

Okay off to start on my tasks. 

Task for today, sign up for the first training webinar

Friday starts the live training. I'm one of those who will miss the live session, so I'll have to rely on the recorded file later.

I really likes webinars. My favorites have been from MarketingExperiments.com. They do a very nice job. I've also attended non-marketing webinars, such as those for members of HeartMath.org, but those sometimes had technical glitches.

The 2010 Partnership webinars will be through GoToMeeting.com . Looking forward to it.


While the 2010 Partnership Application Page states that Jeremy will "Give you one of the niche ideas and business plans from my whiteboard, or help you refine and build your existing niche idea" , currently we are looking at spending time learning more about how to chose successful niches.  This fits with his previous products and projects in his true goal to succeed by helping others be successful. The Cap'n is aimin' to teach us to fish, not just hand us a fish to farm.