The internet is full of advice. Some of it is fantastic, it makes you leap of your chair and start making plans to change the world. Some of it makes you sit back and think, to re-evaluate your current strategies and consider a different outlook. Some of it is just not very good.

There is a lot of talk on blogs, and especially those that are concerned with internet marketing about finding a niche and attracting traffic. The theory goes that you find a topic, or just a set of keywords that people are searching for, put up a long sales page site or 10 article blog, then slap adsense on the page to monetise it. I am sure that everyone reading this blog has seen the advice before. I am sure that this strategy would have worked great for the first 10,000 people that tried it. That is, until all of the good keywords were used up, and competition for them became tighter and tighter. This of course leads to an escalation in the amount of resources that people spend (Pay per click dollars, advertising, time) in order to get traffic to their “niche” site. Before you know it the profitable little niche that you found has been done to death by all of the “me too’s” and want to be’s. The model isn’t sustainable. It’s no way to build a business that has any long term future, or turn into a saleable asset.

To really get a niche and have a sustainable blog or online business you need to find a niche that no-one can copy easily, one that has a barrier of entry a bit higher then all the rest.

Here is another perspective : Do you think Darren at problogger, or Yaro at Entreprenuers Journey had a plan when they started? I don’t think so. Go back and read the archives for those sites, as recently as 18 months ago and see how different they are from the entities that you see today. In terms of presentation, topics, site direction, comments, overall theme they are quite different from now. The only consistency I can see is the strong personality of the great guys that run those sites. They both are confident enough in themselves to let the blog evolve to meet the different selection pressures of the internet at the time, what people are after, what other bloggers are doing.

What you need to do is write about things from your perspective, different things, new things. Start something fresh. You need to EVOLVE a niche, start of writing about what you love, and see what people react to, what they want more of, what they can’t stand. Listen to your comments, link to those that are like you, and also those which stimulate opinion, counter-opinion and genuine new thought about the areas that you are talking about.

By doing this you will create a whole new genre of blog, one that with time and effort people will be attracted too because of it’s differences, not it’s similarities to other blogs.

I have made this article part of my revolYOUtion series because the same principles can be applied to your life. Evolve the life you want, one gradual step a time. Look at your long term goals, and inch towards them day by day. Some days you may make a drastic leap forward, other days all you might do is write one email that has something to do with you end goal. But just keep progressing forward, changing your strategy to suit the time, place and situation that you find yourself in at the moment. Look for the niche in life, the place where you get value and reward for being you.

I really get turned away from posting comments on other blogs that have “you must log in to comment” at the bottom of the post. Why put up a barrier for people interacting to you and your work? If you are getting a lot of spam or trolling, just install a plug-in to deal with it, like akismet. But with millions of other blogs out there, the last thing you want to do is make it just that bit harder for people to connect and communicate with you.

Some of these “must log in to comment” people are probably doing it for another, more tactical reason. They don’t want people to be able to put a link back to their own blog inside the blog comment. To get around this they make everyone that wants to comment a “user” of the site. An interesting tactic, but one that really goes against the ideas of Web 2.0
The other thing is, that if you have a blogger based blog, please allow comments from users, rather then just blogger registered users.

Turning readers away is also about trying to engage them at all times. So I put this out to my (quite modest it is to be said) readership.

Is there anything, based on what I have written, that you want me to research / write about?

Is there a problem that you are currently having that I can help with?

The best thing about online marketing is the amount of freely available statistics and reporting about a campaign if you know where to look. It’s always good to study what others are doing in a constructive way, looking at data from a number of different sources before you adopt a strategy.

I think that bloggers can add value to this information , while avoiding the practice of just reciting the facts in another form. By analysis of the data and looking for common trends, we can start to develop some real intelligence about these campaigns, and develop more effective sales tools and monetization strategies in the future.

Getting paid reviews for your e-product can be a great way to get traffic to your sales page. If you feel like you have a product that is revolutionary and makes a big difference to the way that people will conduct business online, then getting the message out fast,hard and with as much reach as possible will work to your advantage. I think that Alvin Phang had a bit of a different experience in getting his Atomic Blogging program reviewed recently on John Chow.com. He paid the standard $400 for a John Chow review, for which he hoped to get traffic to the sales page for atomic blogging (which shows all of the standard sales page hype, coloured font and testimonials by the truckload) and convert them in sales.

The PDF report of the Atomic Blogging program on John Chow is here http://www.gathersuccess.com/downloads/GatherSuccesscom-JohnChowReview.pdf

And here is my analysis of the data.

What did his $400 get him :

Qualitatively : A not very favorable review which points out the weaknesses of the system.
Total number of clicks : 349
Total number of sales : zero! = (
Return of Investment: -$400
Cost per click: US$1.14

Lesson to be learned : If your product is mostly for newbies, and does not offers something new, why give it to an expert to publicly pick holes in it, at your expense! Don’t have an inflated view of what their product is worth, and truthfully measure the value it provides to the consumer.

Recommendation : I would think that it would be wiser to spend $400 to buy up some banner space on forums where people are looking to get into blogging. The whole tone of John Chow is wrong for this type of product I would think. He is a No BS type of guy, so demonstrate some real value and you might do OK.