Don’t brand yourself with some cutesy name, be yourself. That is the easiest person to be. If I see one more internet guru god who just keeps sending me affiliate links, I think I’m going to toss my cookies. They’re not a guru of anything they just follow everyone trying to make a buck off me.

If you really want to stand out in your niche, be yourself and not something your not. If you can’t put every page in first position on google then don’t brand yourself that way. The expertise that you do have is bound to have a group who would be more than happy to follow and learn from you. They’ll say who and what you are.

So let’s get to branding. You do have yourname.com right. You don’t, well then you need to stop right now and go register that baby before someone else does. I’ll wait.

That heading recently bit me good.

I’ve been using computers since 1985 and have been on the net since 1999. Lately I’ve been building websites to sell on ebay. I had built one in particular, a tinyurl clone, and just never got around to putting it on ebay. Recently I was reading tweets on twitter and kept seeing tinyurl.com redirects and got me thinking about the site I had built. So I thought I would go check on it. Now I have never promoted this website, didn’t do anything with it actually. In fact, the ad box at the bottom still had the text telling you edit ad.php and now I wish I had.

Went into the admin area and boy was I surprised to see that I had 16 pages of 50 to a page listing of redirects. My site was being used in spite of me. Now these weren’t 1 and 2 hit redirects, some had 3 digits and there were even ones with 4 digit hits, more than 1,000 hits. So I decided to check my cpanel stats and boy was I ever shocked. In October 2008 the site had over 1 Million hits with 32,000 unique visitors and over 1,000 unique visitors a day. I don’t know what happened in October but I sure wish I had had it monetized then.

I’m still averaging over 80 unique visitors a day and I now have it monetized. The point I am making is don’t turn your back or you might miss something. God only knows what I missed by not monetizing the site earlier. Currently when using the site everyone sees an ad that stays at the bottom of the screen when they click the link. I am preparing to launch tub.bz as a free to join site for internet marketers without the ads. It will also have an elite membership with a dashboard to view statistics on your links as well as the ability to edit and delete them. I will be posting the progress here.

Learn a lesson from me and stay on top of your marketing or you could be losing instead of gaining. I really love the internet, it not only supplies me with the biggest source of information in the world but the levelest playing field when it comes to making money. Whether you are IBM or just a guy living in a 22,000 square foot former furniture store building in Shamokin PA (lovingly referred to as the Mansion in Shamokin) you have the same opporutnities.

So get out there and build your websites, monetize them, keep an eye on whats happening and make some money on the net.

Martin Blakley
www.martinblakley.com