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I will come back later to post my thoughts for a New Year.

In the meantime, I have turned off comments b/c the spam has been so out of control.

Well, it’s the weekend and hopefully I can get caught up on some work on my sites. I have actually been outsourcing all of my articles and yet I still haven’t had time to get them posted. As soon as I get caught up on posting articles I will post an update of where I am at. After that I plan to just focus on one site for awhile as I have been spreading myself too thin.

In the meantime I need to try and stay awake! It was a bad week for just being sleepy and I don’t feel like I slept well last night, so maye this weekend won’t be so fruitful. Plus I have all the normal household duties to do and some shopping. It’s so hard not to spend most of my time at work just dreaming about quitting…

I have been busy working on my sites. Will make an update soon.

I feel like my progress has slowed but I am looking forward to some time off during the holidays to get some stuff done.

So I had a major setback in my niche building. Basically I decided to ditch a niche. It was the niche that I had the most hopes for because I expected the advertising payouts to be better and had potential for more creative linkbacks.

But as I did more research for writing articles I realized that it was a service I did not feel comfortable selling, not even through adsense. So I am dropping that site completely and moving on. Unfortunately, I have spent the majority of my time the last few weeks on that particular site and will never get those many hours back. Live and learn.

So that leaves me with just 3 niches at the moment, one of which may be too competitive. Found that out after setting up the site but I’ll give it go anyway. I’m feeling a little discouraged but all I can do is plow forward and see what happens.

I have decided to revise my strategy a bit. I am going to build each of my niche sites up with just 10 articles, then do some promotion, then let it sit and see how it performs. Perhaps the experts can know which niches will be profitable and worth the effort, but I do not. I think there is a lot of luck involved so I would rather build a few different small sites and then concentrate on the ones that show the most potential.

I have a few new niche domains picked out, but I’m not overly crazy about them. I would like to find niches that are actually of interest to me that I feel I could comfortably write upon without too much research, but it turns out I am pretty boring. Actually, the things I like just can’t be monetized well (like history) or are sorta broad categories (like parenting) so I will keep looking.

Now that I am one niche down, I currently have one niche with 10 articles either posted or scheduled to post. I am going to start some article market and Web2.0 building for that site soon. Another niche has about 7 articles posted or on deck, so I just need 3 more and then I’ll start marketing that site after I finish with the first. The last site only has 2 articles, but 4 in the works. I’m not going to put too much effort into that on until I make some progress with the marketing of the first two.

All of the sites have been indexed for a couple of weeks but traffic is VERY minimal. I do have some social bookmarks started on the one niche, but that one is also the highly competitive niche. I have been outsourcing all of the content now, which is a big help, but draining funds quickly.

Otherwise, I have been spending some time understanding article marketing and social bookmarking. Those two methods are not too difficult to understand, but I want to do things optimally. There is a lot of conflicting information out there so it can be difficult to navigate your way through.

That’s all for now.

Just checking in quickly. I have been working on the computer non-stop as usual but don’t feel like I have accomplished much. I need to start writing lists and goals to keep on track.

I did get my niche costs and keywords organized. I have someone writing content and that makes things much easier. I’m not paying much though so I am worried that won’t last long. I was worried about putting out money for content and not getting a return on my investment, but I figured I could likely sell any site and recoup most of my costs. Outsourcing the writing leaves me time to concentrate on marketing.

I’ve spent too much time on forums getting ideas the past few days. The Warrior Forum can be addicting. While that time spent is valuable for learning, I really should be working on content,especially for article marketing which I hope to start soon. Again, I need to write out a plan and not let myself move forward until I can check off essential tasks.

I have about 5 new niches picked out and I may go ahead and buy the domains and then just let them sit. It is difficult to find good domains available - that is where you really get a feel for how many people are working on niche sites. Although, it is funny, because many times a domain I want is taken, but if I type in the url it doesn’t exist. So there are clearly many people buying up domains but not doing anything with them.

I did get one Squidoo page up on one of my niches. I need to do some more work on it, but at least it is a start. None of my niche sites are getting much traffic, but the pages are getting indexed. I think submitting the sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools helped with that.

Okay, soon I need to post some stats on my progress since the primary purpose of this site is to serve as a diary of my niche building progress. I’ll add that to my list whenever I get one.

Finally, the niche that was not indexed is now indexed.

I also loaded my 4 niches into Google Webmaster Tools and submitted sitemaps for 3 of them.

I am still struggling with writing content. Thinking of hiring a ghostwriter to get me over the hump but I am cheap. If I knew I would get the money back out I would go for it, but obviously that isn’t guaranteed.

Plus, I have some new niche ideas and some other ideas and there just isn’t enough time in the day.

That’s all I have time for today.