Today is my daughters 1st birthday. I am taking her to the San Diego Zoo and taking her directly to the petting zoo. I want her to get a feel, literally, for the animals. It’s her day today and I want to make it special. Although she may never remember this day, she can still have a really good day. She is/was the best thing that happened to me, aside from my wife.

In trying to make ends meet in this crappy economy, I have started to really pursue blogging in an effort to increase my income, as well as do more niche marketing. I already do niche marketing in several hot niche markets, but I also run several dating sites that do rather well for me.

The thing that Blogging had taught me about running these other sites is word choice, phrasing and meaning of what I am writing. I am still working on sentence structure and punctuation.  It’s been a long time since I was in English class. I have been studying things like copy writing, sales techniques and formulating a phrase that will emotionally grab someone and hopefully get them to purchase a product.

I have sat here in reflection of what I am writing, where I have been, where I am going and how far I have come in my life. I’ve come a very long way, done many incredible things and am surviving and living with a life threatening illness.  I am a miracle in some peoples eyes, but sometimes a loser in my own. I have learned to focus,  to have follow through and complete the task at hand. I have also learned patience, but still need to work on that.

The one thing I have learned, through blogging, is there are no get rich quick schemes, it takes time, effort and hard work. I have learned to stop and smell the roses. I think the most important thing I have learned through blogging is to appreciate what I already have, and not focus on what I don’t have. Life is good, and it is getting better. I can’t say enough about how having an attitude of gratitude has helped me to really get the most out of life.

That’s it kids, have an attitude of gratitude and the universe will be yours and it will give.

Have a great day,

Larry C.

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Old Dog

I’ve been in the business of making money on the internet for about 10 years now. I started in the dating site niche back in 1997 back when the internet was still young and growing. I wasn’t making any money at the time, but I was running a dating site specific for people with a certain medical condition. I would receive emails with an ad and then I would post it by hand myself and people would then be accessible for dating.

At this stage of the game I didn’t know much about SEO, or traffic or html for that matter but I was doing it. I was also the first and only dating site for this genre of people, so I obviously stood out in the searches. I continued to be a stand out and then I noticed something, there were other dating sites in my niche but they were charging money. I got a little angry, then got over being angry and started to charge money too. This is when I started my marketing career on the internet.

“New” Old Trick

In my years of being in this niche I have had a very nice steady flow of income from this dating site even though there are bigger and better corporate entities around. I come up on the 1st page of Google, within the first 5 results for most if not all of the search terms for my specific niche. So how is it that, even though I am still pretty much the oldest site in this niche; I am not making more money than I am currently?

I decided to go to Compete.com and look up my traffic stats as opposed to that of my competition.  I typed in my URL and I had about 250-ish uniques, per month. Ok, not bad I guess considering a lot of traffic is repeat people coming back to check their mail, profiles and see what new profiles are on the site, Ok so it’s a little low but it’s not bad. Right? I then punched in the URL for my competition and my jaw hit the floor. My competition was getting 250, 000 uniques per month, 100,000 times more than I was getting.

The Secret

It hit me square upside the head, Traffic. I didn’t have the traffic. I had gotten so desensitized to the Basics of Traffic, that I forgot to continue with the basics. I hear it all the time, everyday, all day long about “generate traffic”, “marketing”, “more traffic…”, and so on that I had gotten completely desensitized to the fact that I still needed to generate traffic coming to my site.

Even though I am still in the top search engine results, I was not getting the traffic I needed or wanted to make more money. The secret to making money in ANY niche, market or blog, is TRAFFIC. If you have none, you have no money. Period. Sure people search the net for things, but they don’t always search for everything. So what I needed to do was return to the basics of traffic generation.

Forum posting, comment posting, link directories, link trades and talking anywhere and everywhere about my site. I needed to do this so people know it exists and see it, instead of having to go hunt for it. In effect I needed to get it to the point that whenever someone turned around, my URL was in their face. How did I find where to put my URL? I’ll tell you grasshopper.

And the truth shall set you  free…

If you go to Google and type in “link: domainurl.com” and hit enter. The domainurl.com is the URL of a competitors site that you might want to know where they have back links coming from. Once you know this, you can go to each of those results and see if there’s a place that you too can post your link and get some back link traffic and page rank. This is one of the EASIEST ways to find good places to put back links. Do this with several sites that you know of and you will have enough places to begin re-marketing your site. This is how I started to get my traffic to go up again, hopefully eventually as much as my competitor in the near future.

Have a great holiday weekend,

Larry

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