I’ve been working on other projects and shamefully ignoring this blog. I guess because I’ve named it eBay Diaries, I tend to overlook it when there’s so little going on at eBay, at least where my business is involved.

Sales are slow, probably understandable with the economy in the shape it is, although there have been spurts of business. I thought the ebooks about making money online might become more popular, but not so. I just took a quick look at completed listings using the “make money” search term, and there weren’t very many sales.

I confess that I’ve not been paying much attention to my eBay biz. As I mentioned last time, I’ve decided it’s a very good idea to try to develop other sources of income. So, I’m working at building small niche sites, adsense and Clickbank sites, with the hope that they’ll generate regular revenue streams, even though they may be small revenue streams. The key is to have a lot of sites, so I’m working at getting a lot of articles. I’m actually finally being forced to look at and organize the gajillion or so article packs I’ve accumulated, as well as all the private label rights books.

I am so far staying away from the internet marketing niche, so that eliminates a ton of the stuff I’ve accumulated, but I have found some useful information in my collections, especially for the natural healing site, and I’m finding that I have lots and lots of the same packs. I’m rewriting some and tossing a whole lot more.

Since my last post I’ve also had some small success with Kindle listings. I’ve only made a few dollars, but then I only have a few listings. I am rereading my Kindle Profits book; I do think Kindle is a good place to put some priority. Amazon is pushing the newest Kindle, and the owners are buying books. I am paying attention to getting the index done right; I’ve seen a few negative comments about messed up or non-existent indexes or tables of content. It takes a bit more effort, but this is a do-it-once and you’re done kind of deal, so worth it.

I’m going back to my article packs and sorting. It’s tedious but has to be done. As I mentioned above, there’s a lot of junk. But then when I get to a point of thinking all I have is junk, I find a jewel. So it goes.

Be well and just keep plugging away.

You’ve listened to me nag before about diversifying your business, but I wanted to let you know about this new program from Andrew Hanson, a well-known, very successful online marketer.

It’s the coolest new tool, and it’s called FirePow (see the new banner?), and I think it’s an amazing product. Well, it’s actually more than a product; it’s several tools and a community of folks all working to build massive blog networks.

We all know that niche marketing is the way to generate ongoing streams of income. Find a niche that’s underserved, give them good information and products, and you’ll make money. Find another niche, do the same thing, and again and again, and you’ll build a very nice income.

That’s the basic idea of FirePow, and it provides all the tools you need to be able to get your information on the web and indexed quickly. I’m just blown away with it.

Here’s just a bit of what this incredible system does:

1. Builds you a blog from scratch with just a few clicks of the mouse. You tell it how you want the blog to look, the keywords you’re looking to target, what plugins you want to use, and a few other goodies, and it spits the blog out for you. That’s no FTP, no database creation, no messing around with code – just a few clicks and you’re away.

2. It helps you promote your site – in multiple ways in fact. It has in house features that help you post content to article directories for promotion, to social bookmarking services for promotion, to RSS Feed Directories for promotion, and even has it’s own niche blog network of high PR sites from which you can get relevant backlinks!

3. It lets you manage all of your blogs from a central control panel! That means when you have 5 blogs running, you can easily see from ONE screen which blogs need new posts, which blogs are ranking where in the search engines, and you can make changes to any of the sites from one spot.

You do still need to do some work; I’m not going to tell you that by clicking a few places this system is going to set you up for life. Doing the niche research, putting your own spin on the information, etc., are all still necessary. It’s just that FirePow takes you through the techy stuff, freeing your time for the money-making stuff.

I got the great program included with another coaching program that unfortunately is now closed. However, Firepow is very much available, and you can get it at a discounted price for a time (I honestly don’t know when the price will change, but Firepow has been on the market for awhile). Click here or on the banner to the right of your screen. However, if you decide to buy, click to leave the screen first. You’ll get one of those virtual assistants offering a discount.

If you have any interest at all in niche marketing (and you should), be sure to at least look at the sales page. I’m just sorry I didn’t get into this program months ago!

I finished my first reading of Blogging To The Bank 3.0 and can recommend it to anyone who’s thought about getting into blogging for cash. This isn’t a wildly excited two-thumbs up product, but it does give a good grounding to get you on your way.

This system is all about selling affiliate products through your blog, something the author has been doing with good result for a number of years. He explains the hows and whys of research quite plainly, and it’s enough to get you started.

This third version in the Blogging To The Bank series was updated to include more information about generating traffic from social networking. As you probably know, that aspect of online marketing seems to change every hour or so, with new networks and new strategies. In that, I think he’s done a good job in explaining the concepts and pointing you in the right direction.

Benwell recommends using Google’s Blogger rather than Wordpress blogs and shows how to get everything set up clearly, with a number of screen shots, and including the steps you need to take to make the blog search engine friendly. He talks about putting ads on your site, how to find them, and how to get them placed. There are tips for search engine optimisation, and he spends a lot of time on getting traffic with traditional methods, as well as Web 2.0 tactics.

This is a good place to start if you’re just getting into money blogging, but there are a few things in the book for folks who have some knowledge or who have started their own blog empire. I have some new SEO things to do and a few new ideas about generating traffic to put to use.

I also picked up some nice bonuses: more reports, some blog templates, and a couple of tools that I think will be useful.

The book is priced at $37 on the sales page, but as I write this you can get $10 off that. You have to try to click away from the site, so that one of those “wait, don’t go” boxes pop up, where you’ll be offered the discount.

The $27 is reasonable, I think, for all that is included. It got me thinking about another avenue of income for that all important diversity I’ve talked about before, and I’m certain that if I use the plan, I’ll more than make up the cost of the book with new income. You should at least take a look.

View the sales page and see the bonuses here.

Be well.