Saying that it has been quite a while since I updated this blog would be a huge understatement considering that my last post is in 2010. I haven’t disappeared or lost interest in internet marketing. I just took a break from blogging and focused on other things in my life. The landscape has changed quite a bit since I last posted. From my perspective, it is still a great time to be an online marketer.
Niche marketing has always caught my attention as a good way of getting traffic from organic searches. As you have probably noticed, buying traffic from various sources has become increasingly expensive due to more competition. So diversifying your traffic sources is always a good thing. I have been playing with niche marketing again lately and have a few experiments running. One micro-site (less than 10 pages) that I started was indexed and ranked in Google within about a week. The main keyword I was targeting was on page 2 the first week and went to the first page after about 3 weeks. So yes, good SEO methodology still works.
The most important part of this whole process of selecting a niche is doing the research. Product research and keyword research is critical for estimating whether or not it is worth investing your time and energy into building the website. I followed a strategy that is well documented and it seems to work well. Along the way, I’m also including my own tweaks.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Having been frustrated with the Facebook platform, I have been looking at alternative traffic sources. The Plenty of Fish advertising platform has caught my attention recently and I have been running tests on it for the past week or so. I like the variety of targeting options that are available although the reporting interface is a bit clunky. 
Last night I set up a campaign on Traffic Vance and did not notice that I had a typo in my landing page URL. I woke up this morning and found out that I had maxed out my budget of $25! Fortunately I had set a low budget cap for the initial test. Always, always set a small cap when you first launch your test. That way, if anything goes awry at least you have a safety net. Usually TV will catch “page not found” errors but this occasion shows that it doesn’t always happen. How I found out was that I had actually set up two creatives, one for pop-up and the other for text links. When I logged in, I saw the rejected creative for the text link and decided to check the other one too.
