01/01: Internet Marketing Blog - 2008 In Review

We say goodbye to 2008 here at TCH with mixed feelings. On a personal level the past year has been filled with such extremes of highs and lows that in many ways I shall be glad to see the back of it, whilst at the same time feeling that it has been one of the most formative years of my life. I became a father for the first time but parenthood has hardly been realized in a conventional manner and my wife and I have spent the last seven months away from our island home, living on savings and the kindness of others. The huge upheaval in our personal lives has had a knock on effect on everything we do, including work here at the blog and all aspects of my internet ventures. Now that our micro preemie son, T.J. is growing stronger, we hope to return to Cayman in a few weeks. Before moving ahead into 2009, I thought a quick recap of the past year should be posted here.

I kicked off the year with a guest post about article marketing that gave some good insights into common mistakes made by authors. These all still hold true and I can testify to the fact that as an article directory owner the vast majority of articles submitted to me over the past twelve months have ended up on the cutting room floor. If you are thinking of running an article directory yourself, I would say a couple of things - it is very labor intensive if you are serious about maintaining a quality resource. It is not easy to get a directory off the ground, nor to maintain good rankings. Google reduced my own directory's page rank from 2 to zero some time ago and it has never recovered. Adsense income has been patchy, and probably not nearly enough to cover the work put in. Having said that, I intend to continue with the free article directory so if you have prose to submit, please do so.

In the Spring I kicked off with a rant about the state of a popular internet marketing forum and having read some recent posts elsewhere it seems I am not alone in my disillusionment. On a more positive note I released the free ebook  "The Absolute Beginner's Guide To Web Hosting" which has gone on to be a very successful little book and has helped a number of people with their first steps online. This has been very gratifying for me and has also helped me to introduce more customers and affiliates to my team at Kiosk.ws.

In April I announced a free ebook that has turned out to be its own minor success story this past year and I still recommend it very highly to everyone from raw beginner to more established marketers. The return on the Ultimate Supertip has been extremely good and if you have never made any money online before, it's a good way to start. You won't become a millionaire but for an injection of extra income and profits into the 1000's per cent it's hard to beat. You should at least read the book as it's entirely free to download.

In the same month I also released "Article Marketing Expert" another free ebook which has once again proved popular. It is already in need of an update but unfortunately until I return home I am unable to access the PDF for alteration. It will be done sometime in 2009.

During May, blissfully unaware of the events that were about to take over our lives so suddenly, I wrote at length about choosing an autoresponder service and dipped my toe into the world of micro blogging with Twitter.

After that, things became rather sporadic when Nikki, my wife, was airlifted to Miami in a critical condition having gone into very premature labor with our first child. Fortunately the medical professionals got her to hospital in time (just) to save both her and the baby, but for a husband standing on the sidelines it was a frightening and sobering time. Our son was delivered into this world on May 31 at around 10.30pm and weighed just one pound and four ounces. This of course was just the beginning, and after over seven months away from home, many of them spent in the NICU sitting beside an incubator, the help, kindness, prayers and skills of so many people, we hope to return to Cayman with "T.J." before the end of January. He is, for the record, a chubby little eleven pounds as I write this and doing remarkably well.

Despite all this work did carry on, albeit at a slower a pace and the later months in 2008 saw me working from the hospital thanks to their guest internet connection. The delayed launch of Viral Clickbank Footprints was lower profile than hoped but the free report has gone on to prove fairly popular and downloads continue to grow. the report is free and can be rebranded with your own links, making it an excellent viral Clickbank tool that will help you to make more money. I consider it another successful release that has paid good dividends for me and many others.

The year's end also saw the release of our RSS widgets and the hosting and marketing toolbar which we hope all visitors will find useful. Every download of the toolbar goes a little way to helping us with the costs of our enforced exile in the States so if you find it useful please do share it with as many people as you can.

Elsewhere from the blog, the CaymanHost web hosting directory has seen many changes including the implementation of a proper review and rating system for hosting companies where you can read and submit honest hosting reviews by customers. As a dofollow site, your reviews will earn you a little link love too. You will also find hosting coupons and offers, links to all the top forums, and many interesting articles on the world of web hosting as well as details on how to set up your own Wordpress blog for free and all the Wordpress plugins you will need to optimize your blog for traffic and rankings.

Furthermore, you can now buy advertising on the hosting directory at very reasonable rates and we have also introduced a hosting link exchange for other webmasters and bloggers involved in the world of domain names and hosting.

I also launched another blog by way of example dealing with the Cayman Islands, home sweet home. This is just in its experimental stage and I shall monitor things closely during 2009.

The year has been a tough one, and I hope that despite all the glitches you will continue to read and hopefully learn some new tricks during the course of 2009. I am pleased to say that The CaymanHost has staged a recovery in terms of Alexa and Google rankings and traffic hes returned to the levels before the slump midway throught the year.

For me, online earnings have been less than my intended goals, but the strongest performance has come from affiliate marketing, including Clickbank and my core business at Kiosk.ws Sales of my own products have been slower than hoped for too, but have contributed a reasonable amount to the bottom line. After all the upheaval, I have to be content with what has been achieved in a very difficult year.

All that remains is to wish you all a healthy, happy and prosperous New Year.

TCH