I feel this site is long overdue for a post which I haven’t done for far too long due to being overly tied up with niche site admin.

My latest task has been producing professional looking videos without spending huge amounts of money which I’m glad to say have come together very well indeed the last few days.

Anyway, the purpose of this blog post today is to discuss a new mentoring program being launched today by Gary Simpson and Garry Parkes whom I have known personally for around 2 years.

The main reason I want to share this is that anything with these guys names on them will be from the top drawer – period.  Also I don’t want to sound negative but it’s a fact that around 98% of people who set out to build an online business fail.

And I shouldn’t need to tell you that they fail mainly because there is a huge amount of information, mis-information and high pressure selling going on to dress up offers with clever copywriting to give the impression what they are offering is going to answer all your questions – I know, I’ve been there – up-sells, down-sells, side-sells, hype and all you might get is a piece of junk software that’s been re hashed from something already out there.

This type of behaviour often leaves an unsavoury taste and people do get put off.

I can also tell you that from personal experience – if you want to succeed online, you have to approach the whole thing with a plan, a model and a series of steps to then pull the whole thing together – which can be difficult if you are learning the skills at the same time.

So setting up an online business is no different to any other, apart from the fact that you can achieve most of it with a laptop and a webhosting account and automate many of the functions.

One thing that has helped me in the past and will no doubt help me in the future is having a good mentor – it doesn’t matter what level you are at in the game, many of the so called big names have mentors – the difference is that they are normally lower in ratio and pay a lot of money for the privilege.

If you accept that fact that mentoring forms a huge part in the success of online marketing what better mentor could you have than the two Garys?  They are both seasoned professionals and having seen a summary of what they are offering, I can tell you its top drawer and they have everything covered.

What they teach can be applied to any niche and the tools, advice and support is all there for you – they are both the sort of guys that would stay up all night to help overcome an issue.

Gary Simpson is a stickler for doing things right – he will rant at the fools like he often does on his blog and he will help you avoid the pitfalls, he will move mountains to help you and he does what he promises.  The question is whether people listen to and act upon what he says.

My Proposal To You

Anyway, I think I’ve said enough about these guys – check them out yourself,  Google them, here is what I am proposing:

If If you are at a stage that you feel you need a good mentor mentor and you sign up for Internet Business CodeX through my affiliate link (and of course providing you stick with it and don’t ask for a refund) here is what I will do for you.

I will put my head on the block and optimize an offer of your choosing for SEO purposes so it is picked up by the search engines and achieves high rankings.

1.  For any offer you produce (as long as its legal, legit, not misleading and not adult (porn) content) I will identify 3 keywords that you can rank for with a reasonable number of Google searches and not too high competition.

2.  We will look at your offer page and insert these keywords into the images, headers and text to ensure that the page is correctly SEO optimized.

3.  I will then produce an original Spun article, an original spun Press Release and a Video based on a Powerpoint Presentation with a professional voice narration and background music.

4.  All this content will then be submitted to Article Directories, Press Release sites, You Tube, Bookmarking Sites, Forums and multiple Web20 properties and will be linked together in a kind of Link Wheel type web in order to help you achieve maximum rankings for your offer so you make money.

I can tell you that to produce what I am offering is worth almost as much as the mentoring course itself so if you are the person who needs the helping hand and are willing to put in the work to make things happen then I think that this is a no brainer.

BTW heres the link to the offer

Internet Business Code X

I don’t think you’ll get a better offer than this today – this isn’t some hashed up garbage, or the offer of a load of worthless out of date ebooks – this is a REAL proposition that will deliver REAL results.

If you have any questions, feel free to send me an email or skype message (daviesp856) or leave a comment below.

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Basically the exercise I had in mind was nothing fancy, find some keywords, evaluate the competition, find some matching offers and build a site to promote the offer.

A number of people joined me on this and some went through the process with a few emails and PDFs from myself giving guidance.    We have our own Skype Group to share ideas and a little forum to answer questions – this is something I would like to build up over time but the priority for now is to get my own sites sorted out.

The problem with the Christmas Challenge was that because of the learning curve involved, the fact that I work full time with a young family and Christmas was coming up, I don’t think we gave ourselves long enough to get the whole thing put together.  Its one thing getting the site up and running, I can do that in a few hours, anyone that runs sites will know that adding content is time consuming, going through the SERPs can take months.

Sure there are way of driving traffic to a new site but for it to get indexed and progress naturaly does in reality take a few months.

With modern CPanels you can setup a wordpress site in a few minutes, optimize it in a couple of hours then you have all the exciting things like the  content that needs to be produced.  All this before you even start thinking about Off Page SEO, Backlinking, Social Media, Directory submissions, Press Releases, Video….. the list is endless.

What Have I Learned?

I have set up some 50 niche sites from scratch since I decided to go down the Niche Marketing Route in October.

The biggest thing I have learned is that its an awful lot of work and perhaps I should have tackled each site one at a time rather than trying to do so many in such a short period.

Unfortunately thats me all over, I want everything done now working and up and running – not the most patient guy in the world.

This is a game where there are so many pieces to the puzzle that getting one job done is probably wise before moving onto the next one.

What I will say is that it is simple once you are clear on where you should prioritize your efforts – by its still Not Easy.

Whats Does This Experience Tell Me?

The biggest thing thats been re inforced for me is that any project you undertake is no different to any other project, be it in the work place or building a house.

You must plan ahead and have control points for each task and you must keep track of your progress.  I find that simply recording what I have achieved each day gives me a lot to reflect on so I can remond myself where I have come.

Now I have an UBER huge spreadsheet that I use to record everything I have done, including the written down plans.  Its a pain in the butt, at least I can keep track of where I’m at and measure progress.

The reason for Internet Marketing tooling is that it is there to save you time and effort, this is why we have the IM Niche.

The trouble with the IM Niche for me (Ive said this before) is that it is flooded with too many of the same people selling the same stuff not to mention there are too many products with bold claims that are in some cases clones of things already out there, or do not work like they used to.

Basically all I am trying to do is build sites, build the offers and make the whole thing look professional.  After all, any niche site you build is a shop window that you want your customers to have a good look around and perhaps purchase something.

Ingredients Of A Niche Site

For me, key ingredients of an offer are a combination of the process of keyword research, content creation, site buillding and SEO optimization.    They are basically a mixture of tasks carried out by me supported at some stages with software and services.

Anything I have linked to (unless stated) are products I have purchased and can recommend.

The Key Steps for me to make this thing work are the following:

Keyword Research – Use the Google Adwords Keywords tool, Traffic Travis and Micro Niche Finder.  Another great product option could be Market Samurai.  Follow this link for a thorough Market Samurai Review from Alex Whalley, this guy really knows his stuff.

Content Creation – There are plenty of people in the Warrior Forum that will write decent original articles for $3-$5 a shot, otherwise test a few people out on Fiverr.com and when you find someone that does the business, hang on to them.

Video Creation – Videos can be created for as little as $5 each from Fiverr.com and can be distributed by Tube Mogul (once you sign up to all the accounts) for free.  You will have to demonstrate to Tube Mogul your video content before they will unlock many of your accounts.  Another good source is You Tube, there is software which you can help you rank your videos which in turn if linked to your site correctly will generate decent traffic.  Tube Toolbox is a market leader in this regard, its an automated You Tube Friend adder that wont get you banned if used correctly – though I must confess I havent started using it yet.

Video Hosting Software Not used this much yet but its all set up ready to go.  Easy Video Player is the one for this.  You host your videos on Amazon and add in any links or Social Media buttons you want into the video – a true revelation!

Graphics – I have found a person that does header graphics for $5 each or in return for me doing some work in return.

Backlinking – I wont go into this too much, but once a site has been around for over a month you need to find a way of building backlinks to your sites.  Hint, hint – there are some good offers on the Warrior Forum.

Indexing Your Backlinks – Its one thing having loads of backlinks, another getting the Google bots to crawl them.  This is where Backlink Energizer comes in.  Its basically a wordpress plugin that creates a control panel for your Backlinks and sends them to a hub of Web 20 sites that attract the bots and get your links crawled.  Quite frankly Ive never seen anything like this and its highly recommended – I have 10 site clusters at the moment that are working similar to Link Wheels and I think its a must have.

Press Releases – There is a service that does Press Releases Subashseo that will send a Press Release to 28 sites for $7

WordPress Theme – I am ok at WordPress but have never been to much good with coding, I have finally found a theme I am now content with called Flexsqueeze.  Here is an example of a site I have recently built with this theme though not complete yet – buykaspersuits.  The guy that runs it offers a great level of support through his forum and the things you can do with this theme are quite amazing.  The Flex theme itself is free but Flexsqueeze takes the thing to a whole new level.

Masking Links - I dont think this is such an issue outside IM Land, where everyone knows what an affiliate link is and how to by pass it but I thought it would be good practice to have some sort of control over your affiliate links.  One feature i like is that you can send traffic straight to the sales process with some payment processors rather than to what might be yet another dreary sales page.  Of course it depends on the offer and your site – if you are pre selling the sales page may be appropriate, if on the other had your article has done enough to ‘sell’ then why not send to the sales processing page.  Samurai Stealth Cloaker or Ninja Link Cloaker are the two that stood out for me.

Directory Submissions – There are several directories which I havent really tackled yet but the one that should be done is DMOZ.

Social Media – I believe that every Niche site should have an associated Twitter, Facebook and Digg Account Linked to it in addition to a Facebook fan page.  This is itself is a lot of work and expense which I will do later but their management has to be either outsourced or assisted with software.  Watch this space, I’ll cover this later.

Site Management – I like the fact that you can post to and manage several sites through a single interface, this makes ramping up numbers without breaking your back too much work.  I found Auto Blog Samurai great for this although I wasn’t so keen on the customary upsells, downsells, sidesells etc.  I also wasn’t too keen on the fact that they advocate publishing other peoples content onto auto blog – after all theres a thing called the Google Sandbox that will de list these sort of low quality sites with duplicate content.  What I saw was the posssiblity of if you can get original articles produced of drip feeding them into multiple sites.

Finding Offers – There are many places out there which you can apply to become an affiliate.  Obviously we in the IM Niche are familiar with Clickbank, Paydotcom, etc but what about the likes of Amazon, Plimus, Linkshare, Commission junction who can link you into thousands of vendors?  I found that with Amazon you can build a tailored shop which you can then link back to your own site which is cool.  Here is a good example Kasper Store so you can see what I mean.

Not only that, although Amazon pays a low percentage if you can drive traffic to them they have a high conversion rate and you will get paid for anything they purchase on a site even if is a totally different product to the link that sent them there in the first place.  So If I send someone there from my Toy Story site and they buy a lawn mower, I get a percentage of the sale for the lawn mower, how cool is that?

Summary

Not everything I have described above are mandatory, they are just my own take on what has to be done to achieve the pillars of a Niche Site – The Site, The Content, The Offer and The SEO.

When you add up total costs they can be quite eye watering so if funds are an issue I would start off with the minimum basic site and build you inventory up step by step.  Perhaps build a site, flip it and use those funds to buy sofware etc.  The market is flooded with offers but the crucial thing is to spend on things that will help you, not because another marketer has told you ‘there are only 10 copies left’.

Another point to note is that you dont see results straight off, they do take time hence the importance of keeping track and recording what you have done, so you can go back in a number of weeks and check results.

Backlinks are a must as is the need to have a variety of them, so links from Blogs, Forums, Video Sites, Social Media Sites and Press Release Sites are what I think are the 5 components that should form the bulk of your backlinking strategy.

The whole thing is a relatively simple process but the tools and services needed can really make the whole thing quite expensive and time consuming.  You either pay someone to do some of the work for you or you purchase software and services to help you along.

When I get time I will evaluate each product I purchase and use on the IM Product Review site but for now Ive got tonnes to do.

If anyone has any questions or would like more information on any of these products by all means PM me through the blog, on skype (daviesp856) or email peter at interactive-blogger.com and I’ll be more than happy to answer any questions you may have.

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Indeed, we visited our local garden centre yesterday and they already have their Christmas Grotto up and running and its not even December!

Santa train, moving Elves you name it, its there.  In fact, I know the guy who runs it and I think he started setting up the whole thing back in August.

Now what has this got to do with this blog post?

Most people reading this article are either active or aspiring marketers.  I know by many of the emails and comments I get some have their own websites, others are trying to get themselves off the ground, others are struggling with traffic etc.

Entrepreneurs by nature are always looking out for the next opportunity.  After all there are opportunities everywhere.  We just don’t always spot them or even worse, many of us do and don’t do anything about it.

Given that we are coming into the silly season, opportunities will now be in their plenty for a wide range of consumer products for the big day.

After all, we know many people by nature visit their shop on the high street, see a toy they like, note down some information about it and go home and type a search into eBay or Google to source it cheaper.

Given that this is a habit of an ever increasing number of people, why not take advantage of it? Anyone who knows a little about the Internet will know most of the tools we need are easily at our disposal and easy to source if and use if you know where to look.

For example we have Google Trends and Google Insights which will tell you what people are looking for.

Then you have Keyword Research, arguably the most important part once you have identified the product and likely market.

There are paid applications like Micro Niche Finder – free resources like Google Ad Words, generally the cost of a search word will indicate the demand for that term.

What Are We Going To Market?

That’s the beauty, to do this you don’t need any product of your own to sell, all that is needed is to build a site based around a single product, and given that Amazon is one the biggest and most trusted online retailers why not find a product match for search terms there?

So the task here is to match something people are likely to buy for Christmas with keywords that don’t have too much competition but is something that people will want.

It shouldn’t take too much imagination to come up with something appropriate.

What Am I Proposing?

The proposal is for a number of people (max 20) to join me in a challenge to find a product that people will want for Christmas, come up with a list of keywords and build a site based around those keywords.

It could either be a single page website, or even better a WordPress blog with a landing page, so you can churn out articles to increase your sites visibility.

I have a number of recourses at my disposal, as well as my own knowledge and experience, I can offer:

• To host any sites if you don’t have your own (subject to the content being appropriate and no adult content)
• Host any videos that you produce on my Amazon S3 account with Video Marketing Software
• Provide support and advice in helping setup and administer WordPress blogs
• Give you access to my Niche Marketing Forum which is quickly filling up with a great content (that will form the hub of this activity).
• And most importantly, provide an environment for action takers to spur each other on and see this through.

There is no hidden agenda here, I am not trying to lead anyone into a paid continuity program or sales pitch, none of that.  This could well turn out to be a lot of fun with some great rewards at the end of it.

The proposal you see here is what you get, period.

How Will This Challenge Be Measured?

The aim is to get your site ranked and generate regular traffic to that site.  The only stipulations are that the whole thing is done ethically and honestly with no misleading or offensive content and no PPC ads.

Participants will be encouraged to share their own ideas and methods here so everyone benefits from this.

The final standings will be published on this Blog after the Christmas rush, I intend to publish screenshots of Google Analytics traffic stats and obviously sales stats produced by each to measure progress and results.

Whats In It For Me?

WIIFM is the most popular radio station in the world.  Everyone needs to know that they will get something out of this.

The best answer I can give to this is that anyone with any online experience will know that task completion and getting things done online are very difficult, especially when you are in learning mode.

So your chances of success by making sure you are doing the right thing and having people to turn to for help and ideas will be greatly increased by doing this as a group.

Collaborative Groups of people normally bring different things to the table when they work in this way, after all many Internet Marketers make their living by selling other peoples products – they call it JV Partnerships.

So you will be getting the benefit of tons of knowledge that I already have and if you need it, support and guidance and of any tools that you may need but may not have or be able to afford, not to mention the trigger one needs sometimes to inspire themselves to get things done.

Costs?

This is a collaborative challenge and it should benefit me as much as you so the only costs you are likely to incur are anything you decide to spend on your marketing efforts, so NOTHING from me.

Who Could Do This?

This challenge could be undertaken by anybody with some basic online skills.  It just requires a little bit of application, dedication and commitment.

It this is you first time doing something like this, then you may find this some learning curve, but what you will take away from this as a learning experience should set you up for a long time.

After all, how many marketers are there online that are active in dozens or hundreds of niches?  You can bet your bottom dollar that few of them know other than anything sketchy about their topics, but they know how to do extensive keyword research, build sites, drive traffic to those sites and convert some of that traffic to sales.

Call To Action

This proposal is probably better than many formal paid coaching programs we see on the Internet these days as it is for a real case study and the application of something as you learn and apply it – this is something you are going to come up with yourself but you will have the guidance needed to make it work.

You have probably spent hours and hours reading and researching, put when it comes to pushing those levers and getting something done, it hasn’t happened, right?

You will probably know that the biggest success stories online are the major action takers – Dean Holland, Matt Wolfe, Josh Bartlett are people that have come into the fore only in the last couple of years.

They didn’t get there by accident, they are all major ACTION TAKERS, They not only get things done, but create the offerings that people have a need for and spend time doing the things that matter.

So this is similar, you find the NEED, create a site that meets that NEED and put that site in front of the right audience.

Anyone who is interested in this proposal and willing to give this a real go, turning yourself into an ACTION TAKER instead of a BYSTANDER, please leave a comment below, skype me (daviesp856) or email (peter at interactive-blogger dot com).

Introduce yourself with some details of your experience (if I dont already know you) and support requirements and we can go from there.

As you may appreciate, this is not a paid coaching program, more a collaborative working group.  As this is something I have just thought about doing, and at the time of writing this Blog post have not shared this with anyone I have no idea of the likely take up or support effort required from myself.

For that reason I will limit the participation of this challenge to the first 20 people who contact me.

Once the comments are closed off on this blog post, this will mean that the spots have been taken.

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Assuming that you have a website and hosting account already, this process is drop dead simple.

I have been up to my eye balls installing and configuring niche sites lately – its not too difficult when you get into the swing of it but adding the bells and whistles sure takes a lot of time (hence why I haven’t been able to mail you much recently).

I have just shot this video having struggled with getting Camtasia to work properly (more down to my own skill deficiency than the application).

This video is unpolished a shot completely by a video producing amateur (so don’t laugh) but should give you the pointers you need to complete the installation.

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Many have asked questions about how to ramp up traffic to your blogs, it seems that this is a common issue, with plenty of noise and different opinions floating around. If you run a blog, a few simple adjustments described in this article should help.

Up until around 6 weeks ago I must confess that whilst I knew the basics of keyword research and back linking, even ramping up traffic to sites I never appreciated just how many gaps there were and still are in my own SEO knowledge.

Despite this, I have consistently managed to get top rankings in Google based on keywords in article title headings without consciously giving the reasons why too much thought apart from the fact that it is a WordPress Blog which by nature ranks well in search engines.

So the question has to be asked – Why do search engines like WordPress Blogs so much?

I’m sure there are more technical reasons like WordPress Blogs may be well optimized for SEO, but the simple non technical reason is that the bots which trawl the web looking for original content are far more likely to get dynamic real time up to date information from Blogs which are consistently updated with new articles, unlike a static website which perhaps stays the same for years on end.

The next question for me is – Whenever I post a new article on this Blog, how on earth do my articles based on keywords in the title find themselves near the top of Google after only 15 minutes?

The simple answer is that WordPress Blogs are optimized to send a ping to the ‘bots’ everytime a new article is published.

The ‘bots’ then index your content and submits to search engines, before they sort and spit anything out that may be duplicate or insuffiient in other ways. This will perhaps explain why articles are often at the top of Google shortly after being published only to drop into oblivion a short while later on.

How many times have you done a search in Google, Bing Or Yahoo and noticed duplicate articles on the front page?

The next part I have looked at is getting some extra reward from Web 2.0 Social Media properties for creating a Blog post without too much extra effort.

After all, we all should be striving to get that extra bang for our buck, shouldn’t we?

From the beginning I have always used Twitter and FB plugins in order that anything posted automatically gets sent to these social media outlets for a bigger audience and obvious backlink juice but what about the news and bookmarking sites out there.

Many SEO experts say that Web 2.0 Social Media links don’t carry the same weight they used to a couple of years ago – I believe that there is some truth in this because web masters have outsourced back linking and bookmarking to such an extent that it was probably abused so the level of trust in this method isn’t what it was.

So before you could simply blast articles to directories, bookmark your pages all over the place, like throwing mud at a wall and some of it would stick.

I believe there is still value in Social Media, take Digg (Page Rank 8, Alexa Rank 120), and DELICIOUS (Page Rank 7 Alexa Rank 254) – these are site statistics you cannot argue with so it is more of a case of how Social News and Media is used to determine whether you get any benefit.

It is possible to enter your Blog’s RSS feed into your Digg account so that everytime you produce an article you can automatically contribute to this Social News Site.

Digg can also be Integrated with your Twitter and FB accounts thus giving the news sent to these mediums some extra authority.

So here is my Blog article producing strategy

1. Remove the ‘Ping’ from WordPress so when a Blog post is created none of the search engines are notified.
2. Build RSS feeds for each blog and enter them into Digg
3. Post an article on my Blog so Digg is updated automatically
4. Manually bookmark your DIGG submissions with a bookmarking tool such as DELICIOUS
5. Ping the Bookmark once with Pingomatic to notify the search engines of the new content.

Whats the Method In This Madness?

I have removed the ping from my own Blog so it doesn’t notify the search engines so wont get ranked.

I firmly believe that if your site advertises its own content, this content will not have the same authority as if its content was ‘discovered’ by a third party site with a much higher authority.  The ping will therefore notify the ‘bots’ of the article which will then get tracked back through the back links to the original article on your own site.

This method required 2 extra steps (Bookmarking and Pinging) but as well as getting automatic back links will get your site indexed from another source thus giving it more staying power in the search engines.

Why Do It This Way?

If you ping a fresh article from your Blog then do it a second time from elsewhere, any subsequent pings will be ignored so the original one takes precedent.  So leaving your blog in its standard configuration will thus make any subsequent pings from 3rd party sites a waste of time and effort.

To Close

I don’t have any proof or metrics to back up what I have described but the automatic linking from higher PR sites with a little extra work when creating content should go a long way to bringing in more traffic to your site and improving its ranking.

If anyone agrees or disagrees or has anything to add, feel free to leave a comment below

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Time is therefore a commodity that should be used wisely, indeed many of the best marketers and website owners pay to outsource most of their tasks that need to be done thus allowing them to concentrate on their core business.

After all, if you are trying to make money you make money by running something not building it.

On the other hand many people will not want to invest large funds in outsourcing parts of their projects when the concept has not necessarily been proven.

I stumbled across a site recently completely by accident and nearly fell off my chair!

http://www.fiverr.com

I could not believe the huge range of services being offered for $5 – anything from writing small speeches to sending letters to your children from Santa.

Think about this – in any industrialized country, what can you really get for the equivalent of $5? A cup of coffee? A sandwich?

From an Internet Marketers perspective there are people on there that can help you with everything from article marketing, to web design, to back link building. The list of services in endless.

I think the reason why this site works so well is because of its simplicity. If you want to use one of the services provided you simply click the buy button and can pay by pay pal or credit card and then you have 48 hours to make any changes to the work after it’s delivered.

As a service provider your account will be credited with $4, 48 hours after you deliver the project. The beauty of this system is that even if the work is not up to scratch you don’t have a lot to lose.

As in any business, the first point to accept is that you cant do everything yourself, I outsource headers and graphics for example – I simply don’t have the time for those sorts of tasks.

People that you choose to surround yourself with will have a Huge bearing on how successful you become. The trick is to find the best people that can provide you with the best value for your business and if this comes in the form of someone who will deliver something for $5 that is great, but I would still bear in mind the old maxim that you get what you pay for in life.

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It seems the Google Keyword Tool has recently become unavailable from Google so now you are left with the Adwords Tool.

Keyword research is the first vital building block of Niche Marketing, so this is an area which deserves a lot of attention as is SEO optimization which will have a big impact of how your site is likely to perform against other players in the search engines.

This is not an article on Pay Per Click advertising as this is not an area I am too familiar with, nevertheless this post may still be useful to PPC advertisers as many of the same principles apply.

The Adwords Tool gives you an extensive range of information with which you can shape your Ad Campaigns, whether setting up an Ad Words campaign or choosing a niche and associated keywords with which to build your niche site.

This tool gives a wide range of data

Keyword Tool – specific keywords with alternatives, features included are

Competition: displayed in a graphical format of a sliding scale, which is useful but its difficult in my mind to quantify what that graph means in numbers.

Global Monthly Searches

Local Monthly Searches

Local Search Trends

Traffic Estimator – Once You have settled on a specific keyword – for example a long tail keyword with a reasonable amount of traffic with preferably less competition then you can move on to the the Traffic Estimator

In this you can narrow down to country and language which will give you an estimated number of clicks and an Estimated Cost Per Click and number of daily clicks. This feature is particularly applicable to events that are perhaps religious based like Christmas in the western world – with each event there will be an inevitable amount of demand for certain products or services.

Placement Tool

The final part of this jigsaw is giving you the sites that certain keywords are placed on. This is a place you can do some serious homework by looking at sites which contain the ads you are interested in, looking at their Alexa Ranking and their content.

Ad Words Tool Summary

Overall, I think that this tool is very useful for obtaining basic information which most people would probably be satisfied with.

Other Options for Carrying Out Research

Depending on the specific Niche you are in, I would suggest that if is a highly competitive niche this data alone may not be enough.

You might want to look closer at competing sites and get valuable information like how they are set up.

That being the case I would look at some third party software such as Traffic Travis.

If for example you wanted to search for keywords across the 3 main search search engines (not just Google) with a keyword sorter this software enables you to sort keywords into focused Ad groups for your specific sub niches or Ad Campaigns.

- For example, you might want to look at top sites for specific keywords and see what their back links are

- Or you might want to analyze the top sites that have certain keyword phrases and find out what directories their sites are linked into, the types and quality of back links they have or the specific SEO friendly elements they have in their sites.

Armed with information it should be obvious to conclude where to concentrate your own efforts in order to improve your own site rankings.

You could also evaluate your own site with this tool which will give you specific pointers of elements that could be changed, such as headers, tags, links etc.

I value this software as it covers all the above in one user friendly interface with associated video tutorials making it clear to use to even someone like myself with a short attention span.

Overall this is for me a great integrated package of being able to simply work out keywords and associated competition including how they are set up, and it comes as a Free or Paid package depending on the level of functionality you want.

If anyone else is using Traffic Travis, leave a comment below and let me know what you think and how you have applied it to your own campaigns.

Till next week

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The first part of this process is finding the niche and the specific areas of that niche that haven’t been exploited

For example the weight loss or dieting niche has millions of websites promoting their products

If you were to build website or blog with a view to promoting this type of product in using these general key words you would find yourself up against companies that spend huge amounts of money on SEO work

So you finding your Niche and a sub area within that niche that has a decent number of searches but not too much competition thus giving your website a chance to rank can literally be the tipping point between failure or success.

Here are some basic tips that cover the kind of approach I am using to find the areas within specific niches.

Begin with a topic you have some interest and knowledge in.

Ideally it would also be something people are purchasing, your passion will be reflected in any Blog posts you produce down the line giving you the credibility needed to urge people to buy products you recommend.

Use some tools to find out what people are searching for and buying right now

Google Trends

Go to Google trends which will give you an idea what people are searching for right now and if you can find a product or service that matches what they are looking for, you can do very well if it is marketed correctly.

Google trends will give you a list of “hot topics” and “hot searches” so you can get really up to date information on what people are searching for right now online.

This tool will help you track information on competing websites and track information as to what their traffic information over different demographics. This can be really useful for looking at different niche opportunities and tweaking any ad words or face book ads campaigns to be more efficient.

There is also a really interesting “hot trends” section here where you can look at the top 100 fastest rising searches on Google Today. This will give you an idea as to what there is a “rising interest” in on the net and again you can capitalize on the opportunities provided.

You could also look at Opera Winfrey’s website and take a look at what books she is reading and recommending at the moment. This can give you a really valuable clue into what people are reading and are interested in on the back of her recommendations.

Amazon

A search over the top one hundred best sellers in Amazon will also give you an idea as to what is hot and popular at the moment. Look out for products that have more reviews as if enough people care to write a review about it, it could have something special.

Clickbank

I would also have a look at Clickbank at sites in the areas of wealth creation, health and relationships that are always to doing well.

I would then check out the Alexia rankings on the site you wish to promote and generally anything less than 300,000 means they are getting decent exposure.

Also look for high Gravity Scores which are an indication of how much something sells

Summary

When you are researching a niche one of the key things to remember is to drill down into sub niches that are beneath the main topic you want to work with.

The more specific you are in your niche, the more likely you are to be really targeting what the customer wants and what they want to solve their problem.

With the use of some imagination though and looking at the Google keyword tool research results you could look at people who want to lose weight in different areas of their bodies like the face or their legs or even different types of weight loss products that maybe haven’t been exploited to much.

Hopefully this short blog post has explained the principles of what to do in Niche research and enforced the point that it really starts at the keyword level targeting specific areas within the niche that haven’t been over saturated.

Next week I will describe in more detail the process by which one should brainstorm the niche and target appropriate keywords which aren’t too competitive so as to avoid promoting niches with competitive keywords.

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Its a commonly known fact that in business in general the rate of attrition is far higher than the rate of success in any business with obvious variations depending on the sector of industry

- Not to mention national and economic factors of course.

Back to the world on Online Marketing the level of attrition is quoted by many to be as high as 95%

- Typically people discover that it is possible to make money online and because of the low entry price point anything to do with making money naturally attracts a lot of people.

In my case it attracted me for several reasons so I came up with a list of Pros and Cons

The pros being

• The low price point at which you can start to build an online business, for example a domain name costs $10 per year, reliable hosting can be as low as $6 per month and an email Autoresponder costs $19 per month

– where else can you start a business with these sort of metrics?

• It was an opportunity to develop something at my own pace in my own time given my family and other business/work commitments.

• The fact that this type of business has none of the human prejudices based on race, gender or where you come from – the fact I was it as a true level playing field was a great consideration as far as I could see

• There are no geographic boundaries for this type of business so I should be able to make a living whilst living where I want to live

– not many people can say this, they are normally limited to the opportunities within their own localities.

• There is a degree of automation with an online business, you can automate almost anything (even those idiots who cant be bothered to make proper comments on Blogs can automate their Blog commenting nowadays)

– so assuming you have your processes set up correctly and the perceived social proof and online ‘authority’ business will come to you whilst you are sleeping; its a great feeling waking up in the morning seeing your Pay Pal account full of transactions.

• I also like the degree of joint co operation between online marketers, the way ‘rivals’ market each others products jointly, meaning you can build a sound business by using the leverage you have with other marketers…

…This is in stark contrast to say a row of shops selling the same thing, like two fast food outlets next to each other, you wont see them jointly helping each other.

With every Pro comes the negative part, some of which I include

• This arena (the IM Niche in particular) is a haven for BS merchants who use well written Ad copy for products that have been recycled or promise the earth and turn out to be nothing more than a fad or something you could find out yourself with a little research

• The people who fantasize on building large subscriber lists by swapping several times a day and end up with a large list of email addresses, most of whom ignore your messages, effectively all they are doing are abusing their subscribers and acting like the Viagra merchants and the fake blog commenters.

• The people who use deception to get people to sign up or buy things thus sacrificing the reputation of themselves and their industry for the sake of a few bucks (you know the ones Subject Line: “Notification Of Payment Received” or “There Are Only 10 Copies Left”

• The work you sometimes have to put in to to get questionable results – but you can say that about anything.

All in all from my perspective, despite my points above the positives far outweigh the negatives not least because I do see a moderate reward for what I do in the form of product sales, affiliate income and some advertising revenue

They are all small modest streams but when you add them together they look quite credible over a month – so this is something that I believe is scalable so intend to build on and stick with.

So Lets Compare The Types Of People We Come Across Online

Firstly The Types Of Opportunity Seeker

I believe that there are broadly two types of people that seek opportunities online;

opportunity seekers

and potential business owners

The first is the opportunity seeker who has seen an advert on a banner ad or an email that it is possible to make money online by signing up for a hyped up product or program, they know nothing about marketing or websites beyond switching their laptop on and opening and reading emails.

Their attitude is that of being led by the hand and taking the first thing they are given or sold without a thought of the steps needed to create a sustainable business and the credibility one needs to build for themselves.

Then you have the serious entrepreneur who realizes that they want an online business and are looking to find a place in the market whereby they can provide a service or product that solves a problem and makes peoples lives better.

These are the people who are used to the concept of business being a provider of goods and/or services and have put together a credible plan detailing the main steps and stages needed to get their project off the ground and their product in front of the customer.

Typically this type of person will realise that any business – especially in the initial learning phase will take a lot of time and effort to overcome the hurdles that will stand in their way.

For example they might have never heard of WordPress, or even know what a Blog is – and SEO, you just set up a website and customers will come wont they?

So What Are The Types Of Behaviour?

First of all I believe that as in everything in life, not all people are cut out be entrepreneurs or business owners, this applies as much online as it does anywhere else.

My past experience of business tells me that you have to be willing to go that extra mile to stand any chance of success, you need to manage every aspect from customer service, cash flow, business development, keep a sharp eye on external market and economic factors, the list never ends

– and if you get something wrong along the way or external factors you fail to mitigate for go against you, it can still go wrong and you pay a heavy price.

If you speak to the Gurus – Most will tell you a story of having failed at some point along the way but persisted and moved foward

– I have have my fair share of kicks in business (offline), which I wont go into here – believe is those who can pick themselves up and analyze why they have failed and learn from that in order to move forward and those who kick the whole thing into touch at the first setback.

After all everything that happens has a reason – if you experience failure or something goes wrong I believe you should always take a rain check and ask yourself why.

Correspondingly, if something works well for you, you need to ask yourself why and whether the answer means that your businesses is sitting on sound foundations or do you need to add some aspects to it in order to make it more fail proof.

The opportunity seeker will follow a lead and treat what they are told as Gospel believing that if they follow a simple guide it will make them rich – what they don’t take into account are the skill sets they may require; time to implement and the market they are facing in evaluating whether opportunity X is right for them.

Do they ask the question – if I am doing this, how many other people are doing the same thing?

Or what is my potential customer base?

Or how will I get these processes into place?

Or fundamentally – Do I have the Time?

Or even more importantly – What do I need to learn to achieve X or can I get someone to do it for me?

How To Spot the Difference Between Both Sets Of Behaviour

Lets Start Off With The Entrepreneur

An entrepreneur worth their salt will have an idea of what they are trying to achieve or even notice a gap in the market and have a vision for a solution.

They may also be looking at opportunities and ideas from others in their line of business and may even add the occasional strategy or system if they think it fits as a supplement to their core activities.

So whether it’s building their list or a series of profitable websites they have some kind of vision as to how they want to see things shape long term.

They are not tossed and turned on the waves of the latest fad that the gurus are pitching online.

Another characteristic is that they would also invest time putting into place processes so that they can track results for what they have done so as to give them an idea whether they need to put more effort into a certain aspect or put it to one side.

This person will have a much better chance of success because their fundamental habits are as coherent action takers who follow a plan and are able to track their progress over time.

Typically, when the business owner starts the day he or she has a list of things that need be done that day, written out at the end of the day before.

This keeps him or her on track and enables them to focus on proper business building as a priority each day.

Once they hit a roadblock, they have a clear idea how they are going to pass that hurdle because their plans are clearly defined and they know where they are going.

Now Lets Look At The Opportunity Seeker

Contrast this with the behavior of the opportunity seeker who may spend all day surfing websites, looking at emails and opting into lists thinking something big is going to happen today – they live on hope.

We all read emails and offers because I for one I like to see what other people are doing, and what innovations there are out there – but I don’t do this as a primary task.

My primary tasks when I log in are checking traffic stats, list opt ins, sales stats, answering customer emails etc to determine what results the actions I have taken in the past few days have produced and to keep others happy.

If one is looking for opportunities without a vision of where you are trying to go all you are doing is developing someone else’s business – This type of behaviour will never lead to success.

Another fundamental difference in attitude here is in the knowledge of the online business owner that success online as in anywhere is life will depend upon persistence and following through on plans…

…Its one thing having a plan, quite another seeing it through.

The trouble with opportunity seeking all the time is that even if a particular plan is flawed it wont be possible to find out if one is constantly seeking new directions before putting something into place…

So one method must be tried and tested until you can make a concious decsion as to whether it’s worthwhile or not.

Other Considerations

As in all business environments, just because you have a plan and take action does not in itself guarantee success – I can vouch for this.

What a plan does do though is help you identify flaws in your approach and ask the difficult questions like “Is there a demand for this?” or “Is my Sales Copy Ok?” or even “Am I pitching to the right audience” so you can quickly put things right.

Also when you fall off the core task of what you are supposed to be doing with all the external noise (like me sending you an email asking you to read my Blog posts) you are able to come back to your plan and pick up where you left off.

Other issues (I can speak from personal experience) is that some people attempt too many things at once and hop from one method to another without really mastering any method completely…

… we know that online there are so many things to master, PPC, Banner Ads, Article Writing, email marketing

The list is endless so perhaps you need a small number of strategies and a basic offering which you can get working now before moving on and adding bits to it

I am sure you have heard the phrase

“Don’t get it right, get it working”

…So a credible plan will therefore contain a list of things that are achievable by you (and help you identify where you need to seek help or to outsource)

– For example I have no idea (or interest) in creating graphics or banners, there are plenty of people online who will do that for me for a small amount of money – so I am happy to leave that task to others and get on with the things I am good at and enjoy.

Another tip is to concentrate on producing the types of material that best match your skills, in my case I prefer the written to word to video or audio, other people are totally at home in front of the camera and can talk all day but may not be so good when it comes to writing good content.

If you do something you are not good at;  for example it might be producing sales letters it will never look as convincing as something produced by a professional Copywriter, so its important to realise that everybody has their strengths and weaknesses.

Summary

I hope this article clearly identifies the difference between the two sets of people – those who are willing to give something a go and are taking action and succeeding (maybe with some failures along the way) and those who think that magically something is just going to turn up and fill up their Pay Pal accounts (if anyone finds one of these – please let me know cos I’ve never found one ).

I am not advocating that everyone stops reading their emails and looking for opportunities, because you never know what might come up that could be of use – theres a huge amount of information and free stuff out there, you just need to get your shopping head on and carefully select whats worth having and whats not.

I go with the view of when I see something that looks good come into my Inbox – I ask “Is this of use to me?” And even more importantly “If I buy this will I have time to time to implement it, without it stalling my own progress?”

I purchase small products on a regular basis, if its something I can use I will do and if I can sell it because its worth having I’ll do that as well.

The key message I am trying to get across is that anyone who wants to put themselves in the ‘business owner’ bracket really do need to have their core entities in place, be it core knowledge or infrastructure and use the ‘opportunities’ as supplements which will improve their core business

…because I cannot think of a single out of the box product that would make you a decent return without you doing tons of work unless you have some core foundations of your own business or levels of knowledge in place in the first instance.

Make Sense?

So the question from me is –

Do you view yourself as an Opportunity Seeker, a Business Owner or a Potential Business Owner?

Or a bit of both?

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The whole idea of a Blog is that its a place to share your thoughts with the world and other people occasionally comment on your content thus create a kind of online community of people with the same interests.

The Wikipedia definition of a blog is illustrated below:

“A blog (a blend of the term web log)[1] is a type of website or part of a website. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video”

It is a commonly known fact that commenting on other Blogs helps you become part of an online community thus making you visible to other Bloggers, Marketers and of course giving you valuable back link juice to your own site if you have one.

Blog Commenting Practices

There are some practices however that I find extremely annoying, I would put them into 3 broad categories:

• People who jump from blog to blog with the same comment that has been copied and pasted with no thoughts given to the post – its obvious that all they are trying to do is improve their own SEO and nothing else, if this is you DON’T DO IT – It is insulting and will do you and your credibility damage going forward.
• People who comment on Blogs with links straight to a sales pages or affiliate link – people trying to ‘pimp their stuff’ – you wouldn’t walk into a shop trying to sell your own stuff in front of the owners would you?
• Automated commenting tools fired at Blogs all over the Web, hoping for back links to their sites and corresponding SEO benefits, I’m sure you have seen them. In my mind this is the same as these SPAM email systems that harvest millions of email addresses and fire them all over the web.

So as a rule I believe all comments should be genuine and adding to conversations – as you would do with a group of friends in a Bar if you like.

If someone in a Bar was telling a story to a group of people and you pushed into the group with the sole intention of trying to sell something you wouldn’t be too well thought of would you?

So now we have established the basic principles of Blog commenting we should look at a few ways to gain decent exposure to the right areas in order to attract attention.

A fellow Blogger has covered Blog commenting very well, his criteria is a lot more rigid than mine

I don’t have too much of a problem with the odd typo or grammatical error as long as the person commenting has some sort of sincerity, you can see the blog post I’m talking about here

http://wassupblog.com/teaching-people-the-proper-way-to-comment/

Your ultimate aim is to become a recognized authority in your subject so you create a set of fans, people who will comment on your Blogs and keep coming back.

Obviously we all want ‘Link Juice’ but the aim should always be to add to conversations as a primary focus in my mind – I think that the Link Juice should be seen as a bonus.

Improving Your Standing In The Blogging World

As a blogger an aspiration for all is that people read their material.

There are millions of Blogs out there covering probably 1000s of topics so a starting point for me would be to find other Blogs that cover similar sorts of topics.

For example I get SPAMMED by Weight loss sites on a regular basis – it is clear to me that they are not interested in proper Internet Marketing, just pimping their stuff with SPAM commenting tools.

Thankfully I have the AKISMET plugin installed which picks up the vast majority of them so it doesn’t involve too much work apart from going through them occasionally and picking out the genuine ones which have been wrongly filtered. If this is a problem that affects you then this product is free for private users and educational sites (that make less than $500 per month)

So if you want to get yourself immersed in the online blog community and you have a blog, what should you be doing?

For a start I would make sure I produce a new blog post at defined intervals, some do daily, some frequently every couple of days (I publish once per month) – as long as there is some sort of pattern.

To ensure your blog is search engine friendly I would use a Firefox add in called Wordtracker – this is a little window that opens up on your screen and gives you Keyword statistics whilst you are writing your article.

I would also have the simple google sitemap plugin installed so it pings the major search engines with your site map every time you publish a new article. This will get your site indexed quickly.

One thing to note is that by default WordPress Blogs are set to ‘no follow’ unless they have a ‘Do Follow’ plugin installed so Blogs that have this setting will not help your rankings in the eyes of Google.

I wouldn’t get too hung up on this though, I believe your aim should be to ensure to leave good comments to catch the attention of other marketers as opposed to worrying too much about SEO.

So what is the best way to find Blogs to comment on? The following are a few things to consider if you are trying this strategy at the moment.

Basic Search

If you do a Google search in your niche you will see a “more” section just underneath the “discussions” area on the left hand column on the main Google Search Page, and if you use the drop down menu here you can find Blogs that you can comment on that have more recent activity on them.

Simply scroll down to the “any time” section further down and you will have an opportunity to find Blogs that have been updated in the last 24 hours.

Do Follow Sites

If you are aiming to comment only on Do Follow Blogs as you want the link juice type in ‘Do Follow Diver’ into Google.

This You will find the do follow diver site and will be able to search for Blogs in your niche with do follow settings using the keyword search section at the top of the site.

One of the tricks with blog commenting on popular Blogs is to be able to get on the top on the comments area by being one on the first people to comment.

Comment Luv

Another good option is Comment Luv a WordPress plugin This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve a selection of their last blog posts, tweets or digg submissions which they can choose one from to include at the bottom of their comment when they click submit.

It has been found to increase comments and the community spirit for the thousands of Blogs that have installed it. With a simple install you will immediately start to find new and interesting blog posts, tweets and Diggs from your own blog and community.

Alexia Ranked Sites

Alexa has a ranking system which indicated how popular websites are. This is one good method of finding Blogs or sites relevant to what you are doing. There is even an Alexa WordPress plugin which you can put on your own Blog (which you will see on mine in the right hand column) and also a Firefox add on which gives you real time stats of each site you navigate to.

Summary

I hope this article illustrated the fact that the basic principles of good genuine commenting carried out in a timely manner on relevant Blogs is probably the main key to getting noticed.

It does take a lot of time to seek out Blogs and provide good comments so a suggestion might be to put aside a set amount of time say on a weekly basis for that type of activity.

If you have any other ideas or opinions let me know in the comments box below

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