Quest for Quiescence

Last week, after freeing up some time, I was able to focus on my Shoemoney Extreme Internet Marketing course. I’ve learned about niche selection (selecting a topic or target market) and affiliate marketing (promoting products or services of a partner in exchange for a commission). The best thing about this course are the action plans you are provided with that promote taking action on the information you learn. The following are just two examples of specific tasks that I have been working based on Shoemoney’s action plans.

1. Niche Selection – I performed some research for selecting a Niche and narrowed my choices down to a couple. Electronic gadgets and repair, and movies. These are topics that I am passionate about and believe I could spend a lot of time researching and writing about without losing interest. These are pretty broad niches so I will need to work at focusing on more targeted and specific niches that I will stand a chance at competing for online. The Shoemoney course will help me do this over the next couple of weeks
2. Affiliate Marketing – One of the affiliate marketing tasks I was working on last week was to sign up for three affiliate networks that would be able to hook me up with products and/or services to promote. I was able to sign up for two accounts. One with Clickbank and the other with Paydotcom. Both of these networks offer mostly electronic products such as e-books and membership sites. The commissions are relatively high from these networks (50%-75%) but there doesn’t seem to be much that relates to the niches I’ve selected above. I have been trying to find additional affiliate networks that could hook me up with physical products that actually relate to my chosen niches. The problem is that these networks expect you to have a website related to the product up an running in order to qualify as a network member. Since I don’t have a related website yet I can’t sign up with these networks. I might need to target networks I want to sign up with and just start creating an online presence in the niche so I can go back and sign up with the network later.

I’ve been spending some time thinking about how to select a more specific niche in which I will be able to find related products and services to promote. Ideally these products and services would operate through affiliate networks that I am qualified to work with. This is proving to be a little tricky but in the next couple of days I plan to have a product or two selected that I can begin (or at least work towards) promoting.

I’ve actually had some uninterrupted focus time to think about these things. You see, this weekend was Thanksgiving here in Canada. We spent a couple days with my wife’s family at my brother in laws acreage. Then, on Monday night we hosted a Thanksgiving dinner for my family. All in all it was a good weekend, lots of turkey and fun was had by all. But one particularly good thing was that with all the driving and relaxation time I had this weekend, I was able to concentrate on these things with out the normal distractions such as kids and the internet (to name a couple).

Lessons Learned

I’m learning that it sometimes makes sense to take a step back from actively working on projects. This weekend, by avoiding distractions and thinking  big picture, it’s really allowed some of the concepts I’ve been reading about to percolate into my brain. Another thing I’m learning is how easy it is to become plagued with inaction. Even now, as I work on these Shoemoney  action plans, I keep finding myself wanting to do more and more research on every step. The key is to continue to take action every day. One thing that seems to be working for me is that I force my self to do something every day. I’ll allow myself to research options for a given task as long as I make a decision and execute within a day. This way I’m always progressing and don’t get stalled for weeks or months at a time. Later this week I’ll touch base and let you know what progress I’ve made through out the week.