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. ;)

Next Phase Starting!

I've been busy writing content, but haven't posted it yet to the new site. After last night's call with Jeremy and his assistant, the next phase begins.

The site template is finished and should be arriving in my email today. Then I'll upload it and begin adding my content and customizing the site.

So in addition to  continuing to create content, I guess you can call it Tweeking Time. ;)

I'm very excited to move into this phase.

I also have a personal interest in the nice (of course), and am hoping to make a personal purchase within the next month, so all the research is very fun to do.

Progress when there's time off the day job!

With Monday afternoon and all day Tuesday off the day job, I got some good work done on the niche content. Then total wipe out on Wednesday between the day job and family errands.

The content writing is going, though. Also as I get more and more expert in the niche, things fall into place better.

Now how to get more time off the day job...

Content Creation for Niche Marketing

That's where I am, but, ahem, have to do a lot of holiday preparation at home and had the day job eating up the rest of my time lately. So early next week I'll be organizing full steam on all my content for the site launch.

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.

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.