When I started this blog, my intention was to create a business that I can run from anywhere in the world. Although I am not quite there yet, I have made a lot of headway. Recently though, I have been facinated by social media and the Facebook and Twitter phenomina I find that I have been spending more of my time trying to understand this avenue and less to my real estate ventures.

To that end, I have decided to change the focus of this blog away from real estate and more towards internet marketing and social media.  I see more potential here to meet my goals.

I will still post about real estate issues, just not as frequently (as if I post frequently at all). I am also hoping that because of my strong interest in the medium, it will dicipline me to post more content. We’ll see.

So here is the gameplan for 2009:

1) Posting the series I had planned on how I got my first rental property.

2) Posting my progress on what I am doing to get my second property.

3) Posting some cool stuff on Internet Marketing, including stuff I am learning from my membership in The Immediate Edge and 30 Day Challenge Plus.

4) Posting other things I find in my journey, including articles on Freelancing and Entrepreneurship, 4HWW, and Life Hacks.

Although I will probably not post every day, I will try to post more frequently.

Originally, they offered this deal only to 30 Day Challenge members, but for a limited time they are offering a 14 day trial for $1 to everyone interested. If you are serious about Internet Marketing, and want to know the cutting edge tools and techniques to improve your search engine ranking and increase your sales, then go to the Immediate Edge site and sign up.

Pretty cool…huh? Great way to create some buzz…

The the basic lesson of the  Challenge is to pick a niche and look for micro niches that are viable, that have a market of willing and able consumers. You will need to test the market by creating a blog or Hubpage that targets the micro niche. This testing is crucial, because it ensures that you can separate the good prospects from the losers without investing a dime.

I am going to share one technique that I use to keep track of the multiple identities that I have on the various blogs I create to test my markets.

First a little about GMail. Let’s say you have  the following GMail address: Bob@gmail.com. You can use the “+” to differentiate email sources. For example, you can give your family the following email address: “Bob+family@gmail.com” and friends “Bob+friends@gmail.com”; in both cases, the email will show up in your GMail account. GMail ignores everything after the “+”.

Now, a little about niches. I am going to use the example market of “people who play tennis”; these are the people I am trying to reach. Let’s say I have tested all the keywords, and came up with the following viable keyword phrases: my mega-niche phrase is “Tennis Racquet”; my niche phrase is “head tennis racuquet”; my micro-niche phrase is “head liquid metal tennis racquet”.  So I will create my blog with someone like BlogSpot with the title “Liquid Metal Tennis Racquet” which will be at the address “liquidmetaltennisracquet.blogspot.com”. When I create this particular blog it will ask for my email address.

Here is where my trick comes in.

I will create the following GMail address – “CrazyAbout@gmail.com”  (not my real address). When I create my blog, I will use my email address, and append my mega niche – in this case “CrazyAbout+TennisRackets@gMail.com”. I also make sure when I post relevant comments on other blogs, I use this email address and associate it with my blog in order to get valuable links. I do this for each of my niches. So I don’t have to keep creating different email accounts.  You can then create a filter in GMail to either forward it to another account, or to label it so you can display it by label.

So far this has worked pretty well for me and it helps keep me organized. I hope you find this tip helpful. If you have any other tips, send me a comment I will share it here.

In other news, my rental property is now on the market.  I have been getting nibbles, but no big bites yet. I have to get a tenant into the house before December so I can refinance it. I have a balloon payment due then and the pressure is on.

My general strategy is to get multiple streams of income coming in to initally supplement my salary, but to eventually have it replace my salary. So, with my rental, my Internet Marketing activity, and soon, my freelance Web Design work (and content writing), I hope to generate enough revenue to go independent.

Stay tuned…

I have seen some really interesting resources, and I will continue to post them here. I have gone back on my list of resources and found that it is huge. I tend to just clip sites that seem interesting and put them all in an email that I then send to myself. I looked back on the emails and there were hundreds of links to review! Yes, some sites kept coming up with great info, but a lot of these were the sites I already had on my blog roll (although there are some new ones that I will add later).

The best advice I can think of is to do what I do and use sites that employ user recommendations to find subjects in which you are interested. Go to sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, or Stumbleupon, to search for topics like “Freelance” or “4HWW”, and you will find quality sites that have been vetted by others. This is the direction that online search engines taking – instead of blindly finding every site relating to a subject, good or bad.

While I have pretty much finished work on my rental property, I have not really made any effort to market it or get a tenant into it. I don’t know what is holding me back. Probably fear. I have heard horror stories of tenants from hell and I am afraid that when I do get someone in, the nightmares will begin. Still I faced my fears when I bought the house in the first place, and I still want to try being a landlord to see if it is right for me. I guess I just have to face this fear and ride out whatever adversity that comes my way.

As I mentioned in my last post, the Thirty Day Challenge is back, and I am going to participate in that as well. In July, it will be a year since I first started my effort to leave my current job and become a freelancer. I have learned a lot in that time, but it is a humbling experience, and it is a lot harder than I thought it would be. Life has a funny way of coming in and interfering with your plans. Still, I have not given up and I will continue to try different things until I find the solution that feel right for my goals.

As for my next post, you will get it when it is worthy of publishing… )

Pre-season training starts June 1st. Training consists of daily podcasts (audio and video), online live events, pdf handouts, tools, and exercises to get you to take action. You learn about finding a niche and developing it into a product that will generate revenue. When you sign up, you can also look at last years training to get a feel for what is involved. There is also a really active forum and you are encourages to form teams.

I was somewhat skeptical when started it last year (solo), but I ended up with some success; I didn’t make a sale, but my site was #10 on google search for a couple of days in my niche. This was done with minimal effort; I was more curious about the process. This year I am going to try it with a team and see if my results are better.

Ed Dale and Dan Raine run the Challenge and are affiliated with Stompernet and the Immediate Edge which are on the cutting edge of internet marketing and seo training. A lot of what they teach come directly from this association.

This is a great way to get started in internet marketing.