As many of you know I bought Niche Marketing on Crack. I thought it was a decent read for $12…not so much for $47. As an upsell of sorts for the product you could join the Crack Addicts Private Forum for $15. I did. Today I canceled. It was pretty lightweight. Good intentions all around but it just wasn’t that compelling. Sure I was in for like 3 weeks and it could improve, but I’m not willing to spend another $15 to find out.

In my efforts to learn new things about blogging and improve my niche site building, I downloaded the free ebook called Supper Blogging from LightMind Software. I thought the ebook had some pretty good ideas. Particularly where Blogger Blogs are concerned. Of course they are motivated in that they serve up a sofware package for building tons of Blogger Blogs, but it still made me think twice about further dismissal of using Blogger Blogs for VRE.

Anyway, they offered a one time offer deal (courtesy of Butterfly Marketing techniques. Yay!) for a combo package of Squeeze Blogs and LSI Cash ebooks. Well, these ebooks sounded great but after reading through them I discovered that for $47 I didn’t learn anything new. LSI has been covered in better detail for free at SEO20/20 and nichebot and Squeeze Blogs is something that you can get an understanding of just watching Aweber autoresponder training videos. I submitted a help desk ticket to get my money back. I really hate doing that with ebooks, but dangitt, the ebooks were just not that good. I reserve the right to be satisfied when it’s guaranteed. Price of doing business and all that.

For those that can, I suggest you start looking at using Kontera and Chitika. I’ve had Kontera on my blogs for the better part of a month and am quite pleased and surprised at how well it is doing. Chitika just keeps churning along with improved results each month. I think maybe web surfers are used to them, like them, and maybe are getting a little tired of those crappy Adsense blocks.

And finally. I used to build Niche Portal Builder sites. I had tons of those bad boys. Some did well and some did not. Those that languished I simply let the domain expire. For those that kept bringing in Adsense coin I kept around. I had these sites on both root domains and sub domains. They both worked equally well for me. We let me say that I am STILL making coin with these sites, each and every day. I kid you not. I get most of the traffic from MSN, but who cares? Traffic is traffic. For those that said these sites were dead, well, they’re not completely. No they don’t perform like they used to but they still make me money.

Just goes to show that you really have to watch the motivation of the guberus who drives the herd to other opportunities. Could it be that they want to make money? duh. I mean, no guru is going to profit if I am still making money with ‘05 portal sites. They want me to use their new tools and worry about duplicate content, RSS feeds and all this other stuff so we can presumably give Google its much needed real content. My portal sites are proof that crap still makes money on the web. Oh wait, we all knew that (wink, wink) because we post crap articles (many re-written with bots) to trick Google into thinking we are serving it quality content.