The Genealogist

Paul’s Weekly Ponderings

The exciting news this week is about The 1911 UK Census. You may (or there again may not!) remember that I set up a site for a Petition to get the 1911 UK Census released early some months ago.

Well………… I am not claiming that it is entirely down to the signatures we got but I heard the news that the information from the 1911 Census will now be available from January 2007 rather than the original date of January 2012. The aim is to have a fully searchable copy on the Internet by January 2009!

I must admit it’s given me a bit of a buzz! This for me is absolutely what we are about in terms of Marketing on The Internet - really adding value to the niches in which we operate.

If you are one of my subscribers then you will be aware that the last two weeks have been something of a challenge! This all resulted from a major outage by one of our hosting companies which lasted for some time and saw lots of data lost by them. It impacted about 50% of my business with some of our most significant sites going offline and the domain names being inaccessible to amend the DNS for!

So as you can imagine the last few weeks have seen quite a few long days getting things back up and running and I am pleased to say that of this morning almost every major site is now back on line and fully functional. It has also seen the creation of a number of new sites and the redeployment of other sites.

The good news for Genealogists is that our sites at The Amateur Genealogist, Free Genealogy Search Engine, Catholic Genealogy and Genealogy Articles are all now back online!

What have I learnt from the last few weeks? Well in summary here’s my top pieces of advice. Always make sure that you have your hosting spread around a number of major hosts so that you can always shift things around in the event of a problem; ensure that you back up your sites and any databases on a regular basis; ensure that your hosts also back up data on a regular basis. If you are serious about hosting then you need to look at getting a Reseller Account and one of the best that I hav come across is Hostgator who I have found to be excellent.

Finally in terms of my recommendations and this is a big one! Never ever, under any circumstances buy your domain names from your hosts! That way lies complete disaster if your host goes down and you then cannot access your account. If you cannot access your account with your host then you cannot amend the DNS an point your sites to an alternative host.

Now before all that happened I had been well on with my planning for 2007 and thought that I knew what we were going to do! However, the coincidence of the problems with one of our hosts and also reading an excellent report from Niche Mania’s BigMike called “Google Hiccup” set me thinking! If you haven’t taken a look at Niche Mania then you really want to - it’s one of the very few memberhips that I ever recommend for anyone interested in making money online.

The areas we will focus on in terms of our primary niches will remain as originally planned. However, our approach to those niches and the value we will be adding is going to be much mroe focussed.

One of the things that we are currently very focussed on is evolving the highly successful GenMates community and you can read more about that at GenMates Changes - this is a set of changes which is in response to the fedback from our members. I think this is going to be really exciting!

The other two major developments which have suffered a bit of a set back are my Internet Marketing Coaching Site and my Self Improvement Coaching Site - however with a few more days work on these they will be ready to go early in the new year! You can sign up for the heavy discount on the Internet Marketing one by going to Internet Business Creators!

Have a good week and if you are one of my subscribers watch out for a very useful Christmas Gift!

GenMates Weekly News

My weekly update is a little earlier than usual this week as my partner is due to have an operation on their knee very early next Monday. As you can imagine we will be a little busy getting ready this weekend!

GenMates and Social Networking

Our Social Networking site for Genealogists continue to attract massive publicity with yet another interview being featured in the press. As a result membership continues to grow at a tremedous rate and we are seeing over 600 unique visitors per day! If you haven’t checked out GenMates yet then we look forward to seeing you there soon!

Talking of Social Networking we have a number of new sites planned for the coming year which I think you will find of interest - so as they say “watch this space” for more news!

Blogging

As you may be aware I have a number of very successful Niche Blogs and various subscribers have asked me recently if I have any information on how to Blog. If you go to Blogging for All you can find free report covering some of the basics of blogging. If you are interested in looking at how to Earn Money From Blogging you just need to click on that link to look at a very interesting package that will really help you. Finally if you have mastered making money from blogs but are interested in really increasing your readership then you need to take a look at Increasing Your Blog Readership.

Did You See The News?

If you are in the UK then you cannot fail to have seen the news items on Obesity which is an increasing problem both here and in the US. Childhood Obesity in particular appears to be increasing massivly and is a real cause for concern for any parent. Given the issues that this is clearly causing we wanted to make our very popular Childhood Obesity ebook available to as many people as possible so have massively reduced the price for a limited time. Just click on Childhood Obesity and you can see what is covered and the advice it gives in dealing with the problem. I hope the limited time price reduction will help anyone who needs help with this problem the opportunity to grab a copy.

1911 Census Petition

Again we have been getting massive publicity for the 1911 Census Petition and in a short time we have well over a 1,000 signatures!

Our Genealogy and Scrapbooking Audio Articles are currently being developed as well as the informative Scrapbooking Blog! Add to that the Squidoo Lens that we have created at Scrapbooking Ideas and you can see that we are continuing to develop a while range of sites that meet your needs! if you have any ideas for new sites or additions that you would like to see then just drop me a line or leave a comment here!

See you again soon!

Weekly Ponderings

Hope that your week has been good and that you are enjoying the weekend?

It’s been another busy week for us and several of our sites have been featured in National Magazines in the UK!

Our Get The 1911 Census Online Petition has been fetaured in Your Family Tree and we have seen lots more signatures added, if you haven’t signed it already then do op along and join our Campaign!

In addition GenMates - The Genealogy MySpace has been featured in a half page spread in Family History Monthly and we have already seen a flood of new members. GenMates is absolutely our members site and unlike other Genealogy Sites our members create the content!

We are also looking to develop our resources for Genealogists and others with a new site which will have Audio Articles on it! So in addition to reading the articles you will also be able to listen to the articles at your leisure. Initial feedback from those we have asked to try the concept has been very positive and we may well look at offering the audio articles for sale at a reasonable price so that people can listen to them on the move! So get your iPods ready! The first articles will cover Genealogy and Scrapbooking. In the meantime you can also check out our existing Genealogy Articles site.

Squidoo

You may have read my comments elsewhere about Squidoo which I think is a fascinating site. It fits in so neatly with my passion for providing information to people which empowers them to make real changes in their lives. If you haven’t already taken a look at my Squidoo Lenses here are a few:

Genealogy and Family History
Hobbies For You
The Blogging Guide
Make Money From Blogging
Family, Home and Garden
How to be a Success in Niche Marketing

I also have a collaborative project going on at the moment with a number of experts in their fields which I will be talking about shortly! If you haven’t started your own lens yet then you can do so here: Squidoo and have the potential to earn an extra $5!

Finally for today! I don’t know about you but I like to be able to read reviews of things that I am considering buying and that’s one of the reasons I have gotten involved with Clickbank Reviews - you can tak a look and let me know what you think!

Have a great week!