Search for: (obviously, you’ll want to substitute “your topic” with whatever word or phrase fits your niche)

your topic + forum
your topic + message board
your topic + chat
your topic + community
your topic + network
your topic + blog
your topic + expert

The last two (your topic + blog and your topic + expert) are good ways to find the leaders of your niche, so that you can possibly interact with them on a one-on-one basis.

Whether you choose a couple of forums, or several expert blogs as your starting points, you’ll want to join in on the conversations. Make intelligent, well-thought out comments. Participate often. Defer to the old-timers for the time being, but begin to establish yourself as a knowledgeable peer. DON’T spam the boards or blogs with your advertising. Simply join the conversation, and let your signature or comment URL do the advertising for you. Be respectful and friendly, and if for some reason, one community ends up not being right for you, find another.

By joining in the conversation, you are acquiring contacts that you can leverage later, as well as simply letting others know that an intelligent, knowledgeable person has a site they might be interested in. Again, you don’t have to shove that information in anyone’s face. Just by participating, they will know.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2007. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: commenting, contacts, conversations, favorite search engine, networking, niche communities, search engine, search terms, social networks
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Chris Hartwell, of New Orleans Internet Marketing, said:

I tell everybody I know, if you’re interested in anything, start a website on it. Let me help you with it. Just put something out there, and sooner or later, if you work on it a little bit, it will make some money for you.

He then goes on to say:

The fact is, advertisers need relevant space to advertise.

He is absolutely correct. Even if you aren’t exactly sure what you are doing, or what you should be doing, get it started. You can work out the kinks later, but the sooner you have a presence on the net, the sooner it will be a presence that has monetary value.

Buy a domain name, purchase hosting, install WordPress, and establish yourself as an Internet Entity. * You can dress it up with a nicely designed theme, and worry about content and monetization later. But the sooner you have an actual site, the sooner it can begin the aging process. (Hint: In general, the older a site is, the more value it has).

One last thing: After you’ve created your site, you’ll need at least one link to it, so that the search engines can discover it. Once the search engines discover it, they mark that discovery date as the “birthdate” of your site. If you create your site today, but the search engines don’t know about it for a couple of years, they won’t show it as being a nice, 2-year-old aged site. The quickest way to get links is to submit your brand new blog to blog directories. We can discuss those in detail later, but for now, if you just run a search on your favorite search engine for the phrase “blog directory”, you should find plenty to submit to.

So, as Nike would say, Just Do It!

*

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2007. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: actual site, aged site, Chris Hartwell, favorite search engine, Internet Entity, Internet Marketing, Internet Presence ASAP This morning, Internet travels, Nike, search engine, search engines
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.