I've Been Inspired - Fresh Start

Well, I've been hanging around Digital Point for a little over a week now. I've already learned a lot, heard a lot of good and not so good advice, and generally developed an entirely new outlook on what I've been wanting to do for several years now...

So, I have some tired old sites that have been sitting around doing nothing for me for ages, but they have content and value (which I see now). Duh. I guess because I got into the Internet game so early I remember a time when simply building something would create a stir and everyone would link to everything just out of a sense of community. Time for me to wake up and get with the times!

1. I need to work on getting my existing sites to rank in the engines for something, heck, anything related would be better than now. Really, I think it is safe to say that I haven't done much keyword analysis or optimization at all.
   
   
2. I need to stop waiting for the world to suddenly decide to link to me for no reason at all when obviously nobody even knows that my moldy old sites exist.
   
   
3. I need to start getting some links to my sites, perhaps by placing them strategically into some of the various directories that are always being promoted on this site, for example, as well as other link building strategies.
   
   
4. I've got to stop pushing the adsense advertising away and out of view, simply because I prefer it that way myself and make sure that the readers that I do have can actually see it and click on it.

I have a small set of domain names, some of them catchy and pretty good, and one or two that I need to get some hosting for. I've gotten some new ideas, perhaps an unserved niche or two even, than I can work on once I've gotten some of the above out of the way.

While I won't say what my niches are, by way of trying to be helpful to others that are as dense as me, just do some searches for things that you are interested in. If you are lucky you'll see some results pages that are very basic and not clouded with commercial results and adwords listings. Then, with the topic you are interested in, that isn't heavily exploited, can you develop content that is easily targeted to a well known and heavily in demand market segment? Just because you are building a site that should be found with certain keywords, doesn't mean that those are the only keywords that will be targeted on your site.

Top priority will continue to go to the directory project in my sig, but until it starts to get bigger it won't be taking up much of my time anyway.

So, trying to share some of what I've learned so far is my way of saying thanks to the DP community.