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Be Careful When Picking A Niche

As an Internet Marketer, it’s tempting to pick niches solely based on supply and demand.

That’s how I picked the niche for my neglected niche site I’ve talked about before. Of course, I didn’t know as much then as I do now about what makes a good keyword pick for a niche, so the site doesn’t get as much traffic as I’d like. But it does get traffic, and does earn money.

I took the time to make a site that satisfies Google’s criteria by giving it a privacy policy, a contact form, the works.

The problem is that it’s a niche that makes sense to monetize through affiliate programs to grant writing services, such as Uncle Sam’s Money.

Think for a moment about the sort of people who are looking for information on getting money for free from the government. These are typically people in trouble, who desperately need help. They often represent organizations who need help quickly to remain afloat.

And these people all use the contact form to ask for help.

If I cared less about people, I could just ignore the emails or filter them into a trash folder. But if I were that sort of person I wouldn’t be writing an advertising free blog about making money online. So I answer the emails, trying to help them get answers to their questions. This always involves doing some web research to find a website that will really answer their question, since mine is a typical Made For Adsense site…it provides enough content to attract search engines and to justify affiliate links, but nothing original.

This is another reason that a quality niche site on a topic you love is a great idea. Whatever niche you pick is one where you’ll be able to truly help your visitors, because of your passion and your knowledge. Picking a niche solely on the basis of supply and demand and throwing up a typical MFA site is bound to disappoint a large percentage of your visitors.

So pick a niche based on where your passion truly is, and you’ll be able to help your visitors at the same time as you’re earning yourself a living.

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Have You Ever Wished Spammers Would Get Smarter?

I’ve had the odd thought lately, that I really wish spammers would start getting smarter about their marketing.

I have hundreds of spam comments hit this blog daily (27,500 or so since the blog was launched). They’re all the same technique. Do a search on specific keywords, leave a spam comment on posts with that keyword, and the comment is always just keywords with links. They’re probably using something like Trackback Submitter, or whatever the current version of it is called (and just using the name of the software in this post is nearly guaranteed to make it a target for spam comments).

I’d be embarrassed to run an advertising campaign that way.

I mean seriously, they have no idea how effective any particular post is. Granted, they’re trying for SEO benefit primarily, so they cannot use any link redirection to track traffic through the link. But that’s okay, because they don’t want traffic, they want higher positions in search engine results.

But if I were designing the software these people are using, I’d put in some monitoring portion that would track whether the comments were getting through, and if so how long they lasted before being deleted. After all, you don’t get SEO benefit from links that either don’t appear, or only last for a few days before being deleted.

That sort of feedback would allow spammers to focus their energies on the sites that provide them with benefit, and to leave my site alone.

So, yeah, sometimes I wish spammers would get just a bit smarter.

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Breaking Into The CPA Arena

CPA (cost per action) advertising is the way that sites like Treasure Trooper and Cash Crate make their money. They get paid when you perform whatever action they ask you to perform, and then they give you a part of what they made.

It’s been traditionally hard to break into the arena of making money through CPA advertising, because the ad networks that handle CPA ads want sites with high traffic. Typical blogs won’t get approved.

Up until now, that is.

The Multiple Stream Media Network is a relatively new CPA ad network, and so they’re more willing to take a chance on “low” traffic sites and blogs. I’ve recently been approved there on the basis of Online Opportunity’s traffic stats, which come to about 3,100 United States visitors a month (the region they’re primarily interested in).

CPA advertising is attractive, because you don’t need to get someone to actually buy anything, but rather simply fill out a form. The information required differs from ad to ad, but it’s often just filling out a name and email address. This pays anywhere from $1 to 3 per person, so can be decent money if you get the right sort of traffic.

Like any sort of advertising, test to see if your particular mix of traffic does best with CPA or CPC (such as Adsense ads).

If you have a site that’s a bit low for traffic for the established CPA networks, you might give Multiple Stream Media Network a try.

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SBI! Value Exchange

I’m into day 7 of the Site Build It! action guide, which covers building traffic.

I’m actually still in day 6, building content, too. In the later stages of the action guide, the days overlap a fair amount. In fact, I skipped ahead to day 8 to get my “Contact Me” page built recently, and then came back to days 6 and 7.

But what I wanted to cover in this post is the Value Exchange tool in day 7.

One of the prime techniques in day 7 is building quality inbound links. If you know enough SEO to be dangerous, you know that a link building campaign is a great way to boost your positioning in search engine results. If you know a little more SEO than that, you also know that quality in-context links are worth their weight in gold, when compared to general directory links. Directory links help, but they don’t give you the boost that even one really good in-context link does.

The Value Exchange tool helps you to locate sites that’ll give you those in-context links. It’s primarily a link exchange program, which have gotten a bad reputation, for good reason. The way that link exchanges are typically done among blogs is that one person will offer to blogroll another person’s blog, in exchange for them doing the same in return. This sort of generic site-wide link offers little SEO benefit, and might actually cause a site to be penalized if you do too many of them.

What Value Exchange does is it offers the opportunity to exchange quality in-context links with another site in your same niche. This is the sort of thing that happens naturally. I find a site in my niche that covers a topic really well, so I link to them for more detail in a post about that same topic. They have a post about at topic that I cover really well, so they link to me. Search engines don’t penalize this behavior, because it’s expected.

Value Exchange simply makes it easier to find those other sites in your niche, so that you can negotiate an exchange of quality in-context links.

At least, that’s all it does if you don’t own an SBI! site. If you do own an SBI! site, then Value Exchange has another level to it. The software analyzes the web logs for your site daily, and pulls out any referring sites and puts them into a list of inbound links. You can easily check out the site that’s linking to you and see what if the link is quality or not.

If you’ve made a link exchange arrangement with a site, Value Exchange will check the status of that link daily, and let you know if they remove their link (an unethical technique that some webmasters will use).

Value Exchange also calculates the Internet-wide oomph of your link campaign, as a number between 0 and 100. 0 means that you have no inbound links that are attracting traffic, and 100 means that you could not possibly be doing any better. They’ve arbitrarily chosen CNN.com as their basis for comparison, so CNN.com is a 100. CNN.com gets a lot of incoming links!

Part of what goes into this number is not just the number of incoming links, but the quality. Are the links used in context and with suitable anchor text that will help your site rank higher in search engines? Then the link counts for more. General directory links count for less, niche directory links count for more than general directory links, but less than in-context article links. You get the idea.

While the scale goes to 100, the most that a small niche site can really hope to achieve is from 50 to 60. When you get to 50, you know that you’ve positioned your site as well as you reasonably can with respect to inbound links. It’s time then to focus on other aspects of your site.

My current SBI! niche site is at 12, which is in the range that means the link building is having an effect on search engine placement, but a lot more work is needed. Which is reasonable, since I’ve just started link building.

The deeper I get into the Site Build It! action guide, the more impressed I am with the tools. They’re truly useful, and tailored to be useful in just the way you need them to be.

You can participate in Value Exchange without owning an SBI! site, but you won’t get the link monitoring benefit. It’ll still be a great way to find other sites in your niche for the purpose of exchanging quality in-context links.

Click here for the Value Exchange page.

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Practice, Practice, Practice!

In a previous post about How To Succeed In Internet Marketing I suggested that rather than reading about how to market online, you just try to market something, and learn from the results.

Practice is truly the only way to build the skills you’ll need to survive long-term in online marketing. But, for many people, trying something and failing seems like, well, failure. Even though that’s the only way to learn what doesn’t work, a lot of people don’t see the benefit in not succeeding. And they may not be able to waste a lot of money in efforts that don’t succeed (although, they typically manage to waste a lot of money in programs that promise success, but never deliver).

So, as part of my ongoing efforts to help as many people as possible learn the Internet Marketing skills they’ll need to succeed, I’ve started advertising exercises over at The Advisory Panel. The basic idea is that I pick a product, and members brainstorm unique angles for targeting that product, and websites for advertising those angles.

I then pay for all the advertising, and split half of any profits with the people who made the suggestions, and the people who referred them to The Advisory Panel. The other half of the profits go back into a pool for the next advertising exercise.

I’m pretty excited about this. It gives people who cannot afford paid advertising to test out ideas. Totally unreasonable ideas won’t get funded, but we’ll talk about why they probably wouldn’t work. Reasonable ideas get funded, and if they don’t show a profit we’ll analyze why not.

If you’re interested in gaining some real Internet Marketing experience with my money, come on over to The Advisory Panel and join in.

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Ucash.in Review

I’m not big into URL shortening services.

The URLs they shorten into are pretty ugly, and they often display the destination page in a frame that includes ads at the top or bottom. New Internet Marketers often use these services thinking that URL cloaking is important enough to put up with the disadvantages. Since you can do URL cloaking in far better ways for free, it doesn’t really make sense to use URL shortening services.

But if you want to use one, Ucash.in offers revenue sharing on the ads that display in the frame with your destination page. You can choose whether you want ads to display at the top of the frame, or whether you would prefer an intermediate page that’s an ad to display.

Here’s an example link that just brings you back to Online Opportunity.

For every 4,000 impressions your links give them on a top ad banner, you get $1. For every 2,000 intermediate page ads that display, you get $1. Clearly, to earn much money you would have to have a lot of impressions.

However, Ucash.in has taken the Yuwie approach to the whole deal, so you get 10 levels of referrals below you. And you earn a percentage of what those referrals earn. With a full 10 levels, that could amount to a substantial number of ad impressions as you have thousands of people using the URL shortening service.

While I still don’t think that URL shortening services are worth using, if you are going to use one, why not use one that earns you a little money? I’m sure that’s what a lot of new Internet Marketers will think, so this is a service they’ll likely continue to use even if they don’t make much money on it.

Click here for the Ucash.in site for more details.

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Online Opportunity Nears One Year Old!

Okay, so it’s still about two months out, but I’m getting excited.

When I first started this blog, I committed to a daily posting schedule because of the enormous benefits that gives with Google. Google indexes your content far more quickly when you post daily, it treats you a bit better in search engine results positioning, etc. At first I struggled with daily posting, then I finally cut back to daily posting only on weekdays, and found a stride.

At any given moment, I’ll either be a couple weeks ahead in posts, or I’ll be down to the wire. Today I’m down to the wire, since I’ve been putting a lot of time and energy into The Advisory Panel, and due to my editorial duties over at Bella Online’s Role Playing Games site. I’ll get ahead again sometime this week.

Over the course of the almost-a-year the blog has been going, I’ve seen blogging friends drop off the face of the Internet, and others prosper. It’s seemed like everyone who wants to make money online starts a make money online blog. A mistake, in my opinion, since there are niches out there that have larger audiences and are less well filled. I’ll try to address this in an upcoming course on writing niche web sites.

I’m in the process of transitioning the blog from a typical blog of the niche into one that’s more of a mentoring model. Those people who’ve emailed me with questions know that I love to help. That’s part of the purpose behind The Advisory Panel. My hope is that I can help others get their first profitable blog/site up and running, helping them to learn the skills they’ll need to put others up.

The Advisory Panel itself is my first launch of a private forum, and it’s going well. Members can get free keyword research help, can participate in advertising exercises (and earn part of the profits from advertising I fund as part of the exercise), and generally interact with a great bunch of people looking to make money online.

So what’s ahead for the next year?

You’ve got me! Back in April, I wouldn’t have predicted how the blog has evolved.

I do know that I’ll continue to produce free, quality email courses on various Internet Marketing topics. Skill building is so critical to new marketers that it cannot be stressed enough. I’ll continue to build the The Advisory Panel into the place to go to network with other Internet Marketers.

By this time next year, I fully expect to be able to talk about the success stories that will come out of the Advisory Panel, people who formed group projects and created successful online sites or products.

It’s been a great year, and I’m excited about what’s to come!

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Using URL Channels In Google Adsense

In Google’s Adsense, you can use channels to separate out the stats for different sources of ad clicks.

This is useful, for example, if you have two different niche sites and you want to know how much each makes. Without using different channels, the stats for each site would be lumped together.

Up until fairly recently, I’ve been using custom channels, where you’re given a bit of custom code to put in your web page. I understood how to use custom channels, and just stuck with them.

Another sort of channel you can use is a URL channel. With a URL channel, you put the standard Adsense code on multiple pages in a site, and then Adsense itself splits out any stats that come from the given URL. Useful if you have a lot of pages on a given site, and don’t care which page specifically gets the clicks.

But I still used custom channels, because you could do the same thing with them. Then I discovered a situation in which URL channels are the only possibility.

Sites like Hub Pages and Quassia are Adsense sharing sites. They allow you to input your Adsense id, and then they run ads using it so you get paid by Adsense directly.

But neither allows you to enter a custom channel id, so you cannot use custom channels to separate the stats for the sites. You can, however, enter URL channels for each and Adsense will separate out the stats for you.

Entering a URL channel is easy. You click on the link to add a new URL channel, and then enter the domain name of the site (e.g. quassia.com).

After that, the stats are properly separated automatically.

I hope this has been of use to anyone who, like me, wasn’t sure what URL channels were good for. While you can use either URL or custom channels for most things, in this particular situation URL channels are the only solution.

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The Advisory Panel’s First Weekend

A program launch is a curious thing.

You work like mad for weeks and months ahead of the fact, trying to get everything working just right. If you’re smart, you invite a few friends in to test it, only to discover that you’ll need to rework the entire site. You frantically do that, because you want to launch the program and be done with it. The site ends up 1,000% better because of this, and you finally launch, only a week late.

You’ve advertised it in what you feel are the right places, you’ve asked friends who have related blogs to blog about it.

Then it’s out of your hands. You just have to wait and see if it’ll fly, or flop. I’m happy to report that the Advisory Panel seems to be flying. We don’t have 1,000 members yet, but the group we do have is interacting and seems to be learning from each other. We have a wide variety of experience levels from a wide variety of niches.

I’ve thrown down the challenge for members to form a group project, for which I’ll provide free web hosting until it shows a profit large enough to switch to paid web hosting. I see the Advisory Panel as growing into an online business incubator, with members grouping together to launch projects and sites.

If you’re not a member yet, come on over and join in!

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Join The Advisory Panel And Get Rich!

Okay, maybe you won’t get rich overnight, but it’ll help.

The Advisory Panel is my creation, a supportive community of Internet Marketers. The intent is to create a space where you can network with other Internet Marketers of all ranges of experience.

Looking for a person to do some graphic design work for a sales web page you’re creating? Post at the Advisory Panel.

Looking for someone to rewrite your sales copy? Post at the Advisory Panel.

Have a great idea for a product, but need help working out the details. Post at the Advisory Panel.

Have a great product and want some JV partners to help you launch it? Post at the Advisory Panel.

Starting to see the potential? There’s such an atmosphere of competition between Internet Marketers that we sometimes forget we are all in the same boat, and by helping each other we can all build the skills and networks that we need to succeed. The gurus don’t do it all by themselves, and neither should you.

Now, of course, I don’t really expect anyone to join the Advisory Panel just based on me saying it’s a great place to network. You’ll discover that later, once you get there and start using it.

So I’m providing incentives.

Discounted web hosting

I do not have all the details on this worked out yet, as it’ll partly depend on how many people want to take advantage of it. Once you join the panel, post in the forum dedicated to the discount web hosting if you want it.

My tentative plan is to charge $20 for a year’s worth of web hosting plus a domain name. So for $20, you can have an entire year to try and profit from a small blog or niche site. And if you get to the point where your site is too big for the discount hosting, you should be making enough from it to upgrade to regular hosting.

Free Ebooks and Software

I’m making available my library of ebooks and software to all Advisory Panel members. Once you join you’ll be able to download to your heart’s content.

Note that I’m still in the process of weeding through my collection and identifying the ones I can legally give away as an incentive to join. So expect the library to grow over time.

Discounts On Your Favorite Products

With networking comes group buying power. As the Advisory Panel grows, I’ll be able to negotiate discounts on your favorite Internet Marketing related products. We’ll all get them for a lower price than we could individually.

Until the membership is large enough for me to negotiate discounts, I’ll refund part of your purchase price on my own as a discount anyway. Look in the benefits forum after you join for details on available discounts.

Sharing of Two-for-One Specials

Many services run two-for-one specials now and then throughout the year. Or maybe you get the second for half price. We often pass up these specials because we don’t think we need two of whatever it is.

Join with another Advisory Panel member who also wants the product, and you both pay half price. Another example of the power of cooperative networking.

A Free Support Forum For Your Group

Have a group of marketers and want to provide a support forum, but don’t want the hassle of setting it up on your own? I’ll give you a free forum at the Advisory Panel, make you moderator, and let you run it the way you like. You can make it private, or allow other Advisory Panel members to read, post, or whatever.

This benefit is only for people who have a specific group of people they want to provide support and networking for. As an example, if you sold an advertising service to Internet Marketers, you could get a support forum in the Advisory Panel for your customers. Your customers would also need to be members in order to get into the forum.

Networking, Networking, Networking

This is the real benefit for members. You simply cannot learn Internet Marketing as quickly in a vacuum as you can by interacting in a supportive environment with other people who are also at various stages in the learning curve.

So Join Already!

It’s free, and will always be free. I’ll email members about library updates, and when I’ve negotiated special deals, and that’s pretty much it. You won’t hear about the latest guru’s Internet Marketing launch from me (unless, of course, I’ve managed to secure a discount over and above what you can get elsewhere).

Click here to join. See you on the inside!

P.S. The first of the discounts in the Advisory Panel is for the Stealth Money Maker collection. If you already purchased it through my link, just join the panel and post a message in the appropriate forum, and I’ll see about your discount.