Catch Up

The Timeline up to Now

Here is a brief timeline of my Niche activities up to this point. I will try to better in the future keeping this updated. There is a funny story about why I wasnt putting anything here... maybe I'll tell it someday... hahaha

2012.12.18 - I was laid off from my main job as a non-profit executive director. In my second job, I am a part-time college professor.

2012.12.25 - I celebrated Christmas, and put the thought of layoffs and whatnot out of my mind.

2013.01.01 - Happy New Year

2013.01.15 - Now that my wife has gone back to work, I have become looking for a job, and have straightened out issues with my unemployment and compensation package. In contemplating this issue, it occurs to me that my real problem is a lack of diversity in my revenue streams. I had two major income sources, that is, my two jobs. In addition, I have one or two passive income sources, both of which are related to interest income, and neither of which can provide enough money to live on.

2013.01.17 - In searching the web for income ideas... preferably passive, I come upon Pat Flynn's site, Smart Passive Income. Although, in reality, his income is hardly passive, I begin researching and learning about niche site marketing, which I had never heard of. In fact, I had Ad Blocker installed on Firefox for so many years, that I didnt realize how pervasive ads had become on the internet, or how willing people were to click them!

2013.01.18 - Began research to discover a niche for myself. I set a deadline of the first week in February to have a domain and to start building a site.

2013.01.20 - Bought goparalegaltraining.com after doing some research. In reality, I saw Flynn's security guard training site, and based my idea on that, without doing alot of good keyword research.

2013.01.30 - Installed Wordpress and began creating my paralegal training site. I used the keyword research I had done to come up with ten questions I that people ask when searching for paralegal training issues, and created pages to answer each of those. The content for those pages came from internet research - since I literally know nothing about paralegal studies.

2013.02.04 - Wrote and posted the main article for my paralegal training website. Around 1,000 words, basically outlining the content of the pages I am going to create. I also messed around with the theme alot.  I ended up with the Zee theme that I liked, and it was free. I decided everything has to be free!!

2013.02.10 - I have filled in about half of the content I am planning, which includes about 12 pages of material, plus one page for each state. I am halfway through creating the 12 pages, not the 50 state pages!! Havent even started on those.

2013.02.13 - After watching every possible video on Market Samurai and Long Tail Pro, I have decided that I just have to put some money in this, if I am going to suceed. I am flying blind! The problem is that I use a laptop that cannot run windows for more than a few minutes without going bluescreen. So, as a result, I use Linux exclusively. Funny... both MS and LTP will work on a Linux machine, because both run on Adobe Air... but Adobe just stopped support for Air for Linux... so, although it may work now, there may be a problem in the future.

2013.02.17 - Purchased Long Tail Pro. Hope it is worth it! 

2013.02.18 - An actual Google search visitor showed up at my paralegal site! He (or she... who knows... searched for "is it hard to become army paralegal". Since I had a military paralegal page, that page was showing up in the search results, so I hit Long Tail Pro and saw that I was not ranked at all for my main keyword, "paralegal training", but for "military paralegal" I was on page 2. And, for the even longer keyword, "is it hard to become army paralegal", I was ranked #3. This caused a shift in my strategy.

Keyword Shift

I had originally targeted "become a paralegal" as my keyword. LTP reveals that the competition for this in the top 10 on Goog is very high. I adjust my target to "become a paralegal" and "military paralegal". I hope this helps. I am not sure if a midstream keyword shift is a good idea, but clearly, "paralegal training" was never going to rank. Most of the top ten were .edu sites!


2013.02.20 - I have broken down and purchased a theme for the sites. In prototyping ads for my sites, I realized that maintaining the ads, and placing them exactly where I want them is going to be a nightmare! Between the theme, LTP and the domain, I am in for just under $80. So... I have to make $80 to show a profit! :-(

And... just to make it more complicated... I happen to own a second domain, which has been mine for close to two years. I bought it for a project at work... however, that project got crushed in the jaws of city politics, and in the end, I was left owning the site. I kept paying for it... $60/year or so, because I thought it might be useful someday... however, now that I no longer work there, it is unlikely that the domain will ever be useful to me. I suppose I could try to sell it, but instead, I think I'll use it for a second income site. Call it, recycling.

2013.02.22 - In order to focus on bootstrapping site 2, I need to scale back on site 1. In my list of pages to create, I have 3 articles left to write (I am doing all of the writing) and decorate with pictures. I have done just two states. I have decided to do just one more article for the paralegal page, and to stop production on the state pages. I will write the last article (for now) and see if I can learn about backlinking. If I cant get the page to start rising in Google, I will have to reconsider the project. I know it has only been a month, and that I am beginning to rank for long tails... but I need to see more movement before I put more energy into it. Perhaps backlinking will help. If it starts to climb, I'll start work on it again.

Meanwhile, I am converting my second site, historicrosenberg.org, to a new topic. I am currently doing research to see what that topic will be. Before last April, you got a boost in the rankings if your domain name matched your keyword (which is why I chose "go paralegal training" for my paralegal site.) But now, Google no longer cares if the keyword and the domain match. As a result, I can use historic rosenberg for anything I want!

There... that catches us up! I'll start posting these as they happen from this point on (I hope).