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 ...