I have been working hard lately.

Studied lots of audios and videos, read through guides and manuals and even took action on some stuff :-)

I am happy my Adsense blogs ( with quality content of course ) are gaining traction and their income is sustaining my membership to ThemeZoom, SEO2020 and some others.

So now I can concentrate on building a business.

But first I will take my family out on a vacation. Three weeks in Italy: sun, plenty of good food and wine, but no computer or internet ...

I will be surprised to see what has happened in internet marketing while I am gone. I am sure I will be full of fresh energy and motivation to immerse myself in this world again.

Enjoy the summer and leave a small piece of the market for me ...

I took the advise form Russell and went to Jerry West's web marketing site to take the Motivation Factor Index Survey.

The quiz is designed to show you your strengths and weaknesses, so you can focus on your strengths while UNDERSTANDING your weaknesses.

My personal strongest Motivation Factors:

Fact Finder

Hands On Approach

Natural Teacher

Jerry gives an elaborate explanation on the advantage and possible shortcoming for all of these factors and I recognised quite a lot of myself in his tips:

... thirsty for information, you may get into analysis paralysis ...

... forming solutions in their heads. Yet, they struggle with implementation ...

... endless quest for perfection or procrastinate ...


But I had a good look at things and try to act upon his tips:

I started a business journal and am more aware of my time management. I write down my plans, follow through and focus on achievement. I need to get things done!

If you haven't taken the quiz yourself, go and do it!

As ThemeZoom is about to become a closed community of professionals I have to admit I am getting a bit nervous.

My introduction to internet marketing only started in August last year when I discovered Ed Dale's Thirty Day Challenge. I had never been aware of all the business that is going on here on the web.

My background in computer engineering (from the days of MSDOS 1.1) had led me to building small websites as a hobby, mostly for friends.

When my girlfriend opened a fashion store I started a blog about that project (www.wieiskaat.be) and later created a 'brochure site' for the store (www.kaat.biz), experimenting with HTML and CSS. I recently found out it is not rendering well in IE7, darn it.

After those 30 days I had learned a lot about web 2.0, got the basics of keywords and long tails and figured I would start using Google Adwords for the store. This has been very interesting and gave us quite a competive advantage for a startup, since these techniques are not widespread in Belgium.

My early experiments with affiliate marketing and Adsense were not very succesful. I soon found out that chasing the money is not the way to go. After developing a niche site with very good content and working on quality backlinks I managed to get steady traffic and an increasing income. I also bought a small site and increased its profit by cleaning up the SEO part.

Somehow I stumbled upon ThemeZoom one day and realised that the future is in LSI and siloed websites. Chasing underachieving long tails won't last...

Going through the University2020 course and struggling through most of the ThemeZoom materials I realized the depth of the ideas and my scientific mind is hungry for more.

I am slowly planning to shorten my carreer as an airline pilot and spend more time with my family. It would be great working from home while spending time on my favorite hobby, computers and the internet.

So why am I getting nervous? Getting a quality education on all things internet and marketing does not come cheap, especially as I have fallen into the trap of information addiction a few times.

A unique tool like ThemeZoom might be out of my reach soon if I don't grow fast enough and turn my expensive hobby into a real business. My local market is probably a great opportunity lying wide open in front of me ...

This post is more like a commitment I have to make for myself. A promise that I will tackle my projects one by one, plan them well and TAKE ACTION. Because I need to increase my income soon before the ThemeZoom price goes up ... (please have mercy on us Russell )

I must admit I have been a bit of an opportunity addict. I was always looking for the latest and greatest information on Internet Markting and Business and I have never really followed through on any one good idea. As any junkie I needed my daily dose of emails and audios and videos to feed my brain. Damn these marketing guys are good!

Well I am the proud owner of one little blog that over the last five months has  been gaining traffic up to an average of 100 visitors a day and delivers over $100 a month in Adsense. This with only 15 pages of highly researched content  :-)

Nothing really to impress anyone here, I know. So it is high time to stop dabbling and build a real business.

I must say I have enjoyed all the courses I took at University2020 and I have learned a lot from all the audios and videos about ThemeZoom produced by Russell. I have a background in engineering and love numbers and research. That's why I waste too much time at it instead of putting it to practical use I suppose.

I cannot tell you how often I have listened to these audios but I have come to the point where I sometimes know in advance what the next line will be in the conversation with Dan Crowter, Mr. X or John Keel. Not healthy ... but I think I am starting to get the idea behind silos and themes. Now I just have to open my mouth and swallow that market whole!

I have been reading the 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch. Well actually I listened to the audiobook in my car during one of my weekly long drives to work. So I study my Google Analytics and see which pages are worth a little extra attention to keep them ranking high.

I also just listened to "Eat That Frog" by Brian Tracy. That got me started writing this post. Well in fact I made some decisions first. And made a HubPage and did some social posting. I did try to be disciplined and keep the fun stuff for last! Brian would be proud of me.

But enough rambling for now. Tomorrow I have a plan to follow. Hope to have some results to share soon :-)

I have set up a WordPress blog for my new health site. It is not really a blog, I only use pages. I am using the Semiologic Pro theme since it has plenty of interesting plugins.

My silos are selected and most of the original articles are regrouped. The content hasn't been changed yet. But I think it's not very good. It will need some better long tails and expert verbiage. And the silos need more articles too.

I have used the Redirection plugin to keep the value of the old backlinks and have changed the underscores in dashes 'cause Google prefers these. I suppose it will take a while before Google replaces all these pages in the SERPS.

Not sure yet if I should disclose the site already. It's not a great market niche but smarter people could still out compete me :-)

I have been watching the sites for sale on SitePoint.com for the last couple of weeks.

I noticed a small 15 page site in the health sector with all original content and a few backlinks from Ezinearticles.com. It is indexed in Google and has some traffic (a few visits per day)

Now the plan is to use ThemeZoom to study this market (niche?) and restructure the site in silos and articles.

I found some redundancy in the content so I took a few pages out and will use them for backlinks (Squidoo or another web 2.0 property).

I am curious if I can get the traffic up after a month or two. For $150 it's a nice experiment and I get some practice with the new tools ...

there was nothing on my blog.

Since I've just signed up I have no idea yet how all of this is supposed to be used. I will be sharing my plans soon though.

I am learning from Charles and Russell and soon from all of you. I hope to contribute some bits too, once i get settled in.

Stany