The Beta News

I recently joined the 30 Day Challenge, where you learn to find a niche and make a few bucks from it. I’m no blogging expert, so I thought it couldn’t hurt to learn something new. Internet Marketing is the keyword in the challenge.

I went through all the Pre-season stuff, where they tell the newbies about StumbleUpon, delicious, twitter, facebok and Firefox and Firefox extensions, such as SEO for Firefox and Session Manager. Nothing new to learn there. Ed Dale, who made most of the introduction stuff, did teach me one thing, Bloglines. Until now I’ve been content with iGoogle, but now I see why Bloglines is so popular. I’ve decided to give Bloglines a shot and I’ll make it my homepage. Let’s see how it goes.

Anyway the challenge started August 1, so you can still make it. All you have to do is register and find a team on the forum. I’m still looking for a team, somehow I missed the email (curse the company and private spam filter) that it had started, so I just got in today.

Until now I’ve learned a few things already. I found out how to find a niche, or well at least find where I can find a niche, if you know what I mean. eBay has eBay Pulse, you can see the most searched words on eBay in the various categories, another tip is Technorati, Google Groups, Google Trends (formerly known as Zeitgeist) and Yahoo Answers, because obviously people want answers to the same questions.

I’ve analysed a couple of markets, and I think I’ve found a couple of niches, that could prove rather interesting. As you might know I’ve already started one blog – FIFA 2008 News, which has over 2000 visitors every day and its only a month old! That inspired me to start another blog, Football Manager 2008 News (yes, very original I know, wait until you see the theme on them).

The third lesson will be released within the next couple of hours, hopefully I’ll have a team by then.

The whole Blogline-thingy inspired me. I’d love to know which feed reader you use. Are you a Blogliner like I am (well at the moment) or are you an iGoogle or Google Reader kinda type? Perhaps you use a program instead? Or do you prefere Live bookmarks in Firefox or Flock? Or perhaps the feed option in Internet Explorer 7 combined with Windows Vista’s Sidebar? Or something entirely different?

Please share your experiences with feed readers, I’m apparently a bit behind there and I was just getting used to the cute graphics in the header on iGoogle.