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Site Build It! Day 4

The Site Build It! process is a 10 day process. Days 1 through 3 have you exploring and identifying niches, finally coming out of day 3 with a niche that looks like it has good traffic and low competition. If you remember from my post, Site Build It! First Impressions, using SBI!’s tools I’d identified a higher traffic keyword for my niche than I’d originally found.

Day 4 is all about deciding if the traffic can be converted into income or not.

Adsense, of course, is one of the monetization models they look at in some detail since it’s appropriate to most sites. Following the guide, I found that my niche has just about the minimum they recommend for relying on Adsense as a primary means of monetization (ten keywords at the $1 a click range with decent search volume).

Relying on a single source of income for a site is generally a bad idea, though, so I also plan to offer some affiliate links to related products. Combining Adsense with affiliate links can sometimes lead to inappropriate Adsense ads, such as ads about the product you’re linking to (you want the sale, you don’t want them to get sidetracked onto the ad for the product).

SBI! has another tool that makes it very easy to build a list of excluded ads you can put into your Adsense account. Their Search It! tool has a wide variety of options. If you choose Monetization in the left hand drop down, Preview Google Adsense Ads in the right drop down, then type a search phrase in the left hand text box and click Search It!, you’ll get a page showing the current Adsense ads for that keyword. You can build up a list of ads to filter by clicking the Filter link below each ad.

So using Search It!, I can easily filter out competing ads while still allowing ads that don’t directly compete with my affiliate links.

The SBI! process looks at a full range of monetization options, and for each one includes case studies from sites that have successfully used that particular monetization option. They have a couple dozen monetization options in their planning worksheet, and a private forum for members to use for brainstorming other ways to monetize specific niches.

At the end of Day 4, I’ve identified Adsense and affiliate marketing as the primary ways to monetize my niche, and made some notes about collecting the content I write for the niche into an ebook to sell on the site as well. Given the niche, dropshipping physical products is also a strong possibility. The niche also works well for a site newsletter, once I think I can generate enough extra content for it. I’ve also identified Google Base as a terrific place to submit content to for extra traffic, given the niche.

One key message of Day 4 is to make every visitor to your site earn for you in some way. Not all of them will click on ads or join your newsletter or buy something, but offer enough monetization options, worked naturally into the site, and many of them will choose at least one of those options.

Another key message is that while you have to know you can monetize your site effectively, you don’t want to do that right away. Creating quality content is the first step…don’t waste time monetizing until you have enough quality content attracting traffic to make it worth your time. This is especially true for someone like me who has a limited amount of time to work on a site each week. Content must be the first priority in the beginning! Their general guideline is to monetize only when you have 30+ pages of original content on your site, and are getting around 30 visitors a day.

Other niche sites I’ve created have been mostly neglected sites, created with as little effort as possible to see if any traffic would arrive and stick. The SBI! process guides you through identifying a great candidate for a site you can invest time and effort into creating original content for, and be confident the effort won’t be wasted.

And to give SBI! the full test, I’ve created one of my neglected niche sites on this same niche. It took me a couple of hours, and I’ll submit it to directories in the coming months to get traffic started to it. The neglected niche site has a head start, but the SBI! site will have quality content and the full power of SBI!’s tools behind it. We’ll see which one does better.

Day 5 is all about figuring out the unique spin the site will have and choosing a domain name. I’ll post again once I’ve finished that step.

Click here for more info about SBI!.

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The Demise of My First Ad, and more Swypefile

I’ve removed the DealDotCom widget from the sidebar.

As I’d mentioned before, it was an experiment to see how an affiliate like ad would do on the blog. The results, after two weeks, are in…it did horribly. The widget generated only about 5 click throughs the entire time, and at least one of those was me, testing the widget. And no sales.

Sure, given enough time it would have generated some sales, but I wasn’t particularly comfortable putting the widget in the sidebar in the first place. To overcome that discomfort, it would have had to generate regular sales, which is didn’t.

So the blog is back to being an ad free zone.

Swypefile, on the other hand, has been a success. I’ve put half a dozen of my posts on the site, and Sunday it generated about $3 in Adsense revenue for me. Since the site officially launches only today, that’s pretty good. As traffic to the site increases, the revenue should go up (provided I keep submitting posts).

If you write in the Internet Marketing arena, I highly recommend heading over to swypefile and putting some of your own posts on the site. You’ll get paid a bit for promoting your own blog. If you don’t write in the Internet Marketing arena, but read Internet Marketing blogs, you can also put posts from other blogs onto swypefile and earn from the Adsense on those pages.

Click here to get your free swypefile account.

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Put Your Blog Posts On Swypefile and Earn

Why are product launches always on Monday?

I ran across this today, and it’s a bit time sensitive, so I’m breaking my normal “no weekend posts” rule to let you know about it now. Swypefile is, basically, a place to get extra exposure for your blog posts, if you are in the Internet Marketing arena.

Write a great post about how to cloak affiliate links, but can’t get many people to read it? Post it on swypefile. It’s like Digg and numerous other sites out there, in that other members can vote for articles, and the most voted for ones rise to the top of the front page. It’s just for Internet Marketers, so you know that your desired target audience is reading the article.

And, they do a 50% ad sharing using Google Adsense. Put your Adsense ID into your profile, and you’ll get half of the impressions for the ads on your article pages. Write a really popular article, and it could earn you a little extra money. Or, you don’t even have to submit your own articles. Say you find a great article on another blog that hasn’t been submitted yet…if you’re the one to submit it, you’re the one who gets the Adsense impressions.

You also get some ad sharing from the impressions your referrals to swypefile get.

This is the time to join and submit some of your best posts (or someone else’s best posts) to be well positioned for the launch Monday. And if you can also get a few referrals at the same time, all the better.

Click here to go to swypefile.

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How To Create A Database In CPanel

In my How To Make Your Own Website For Free series, I’d written a post for users of JustFree.com about creating a database and its associated user.

But I realized while reading a thread at the Bloggeries blog forum that I hadn’t really helped the majority of people who are not using JustFree.com. So here’s a tutorial on creating a database using CPanel, which should hit the majority of people out there.

The database is where an application, such as WordPress, stores data. Most CPanel installations have one click installs for common applications that create the database for you, but they don’t have one click installs for every application you might want to use.

Getting Started

Once you’re logged into your hosting account, you’ll find a screen that looks similar to this one. If you use something other than CPanel, you’ll still have similar options available.

Main CPanel Screen

Click on the icon for MySQL databases, and you’ll see something like this:

MySQL Admin Screen

This single screen contains three different actions we’ll have to take. We’ll want to do them in the reverse order that they’re presented, so we’ll start by creating a user who will be able to access this database. I recommend creating a unique user for each database.

Creating The User

Go to the section of the screen that looks like this:

Add User Screen

Enter a user name and password and click the button next to the edit field. A user will be created with a name that is a combination of your CPanel user name and the name you entered. So if you entered “john”, and your CPanel user name is “jack”, the full name of the user is something like “jack_john”.

You will not need to remember this password for long, so make it fairly complex. And then before you click the button, copy and paste the password into Notepad to remember it. Also add to Notepad the full name of the user, which you’ll need when you setup your script.

Creating The Database

Now we’ll go to the section of the screen that looks like this:

Add Database Screen

Enter the name you want your database to use, and click the button. Keep it short, since generally the name will be truncated to 8 characters or so. The name of the database is also combined with your CPanel user name to create the full name of the database.

So if a CPanel user named “jack” created a database called “links”, the full database name might be “jack_links”.

Granting The User Permissions On The Database

Now we’ll go to the section of the screen that looks like this:

Set Permissions Screen

In the user drop down box, choose the user that you just created. In the db drop down box, choose the database you just created. Make sure the All check box is checked, then click Add User to DB.

This allows the user you created to actually work with the database you created.

Also, note that the names of the user and the database in the drop down box should be the full names. Note those for later use if you haven’t already.

Connecting To Your Script

So you’re doing all this because you have a script you want to use that requires a database. I can’t give much specific direction because I don’t know which script you’re using, but the basics are the same.

You will either edit a configuration file before you upload the script to your web host, or you will enter the information through a web interface after you have uploaded the script. Which way depends on the installation instructions for your script.

If you’re editing a configuration file, you’ll have spots where you need to put the database host, the database name, the database user, and the user’s password.

The database host should be localhost, unless you know that you have a good reason to have it be something different. The database name and database user should be the full versions of those names. The user’s password should be whatever you typed in when you created the user (copy and paste this from Notepad, don’t trust your memory).

This should get your script running and connected to the database. There might very well be more that you need to do after that to fully configure the script, but that’ll be script specific.

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Link Directory Submitter Review

I’ve been promoting Directory Maximizer for directory submission for some time now. I use it myself, and count at least a portion of the blog’s PR4 to the links from directories I’ve gotten from them. And while PR itself isn’t particularly valuable to a blog that doesn’t sell advertising, it does represent a large number of backlinks that provide SEO benefit.

I just bought Directory Submitter, though. Why?

Directory Maximizer is very inexpensive, at about $0.14 for each submission. It’s actually a bit less than that, because every time you pay them anything they give you a small rebate that can only be used to pay for other submissions. For a person who has a single site that needs directory submissions, that’s not bad.

I submit multiple sites to directories quite a bit, though, and the cost adds up. Directory Submitter is a one time payment, so after a certain number of submissions I’ll effectively be making the submissions for free.

The program has over 2,700 directories it knows about, and you can add your own, too. Sorting their initial list by PR shows Dmoz at the top, followed by a handful of PR7 and PR8 directories, a bunch of PR6 directories, a whole lot of PR5 directories, on down to PR0 directories.

Each website you want to promote via directory links is added via a profile in the program. Each profile can have multiple link titles, descriptions, and keywords that are used in a rotating fashion. Having some variety in your site’s descriptions can help avoid search engine penalties, so this is a nice feature. I was able to easily copy and paste this information from my Directory Maximizer account.

A bit more annoying is needing to go through and mark all the directories that you’ve already submitted a site to as used in the program. It’s far more convenient if you start using the program from the start on a site, so you don’t need to do this. But it’s a one-time chore and after that you keep track of new submissions from within the program.

If you use directories that require reciprocal links, Directory Submitter comes with a script you can upload to your website that allows the program to automatically configure the reciprocal links, saving your from an administrative chore. I can’t say how well this works, since I don’t use those sorts of directories, preferring one-way links.

Directory Submitter is not an automatic submission program. Rather, it will prefill all the fields on a submission form for you with the appropriate information from your site’s profile, rotating descriptions and titles as directed. You then choose the most appropriate category for that directory, click the Submit button, and move on to the next directory. What used to be a time consuming chore to do yourself turns into a fairly quick thing to churn out dozens of submissions.

I still recommend spacing your submissions for a single site out, so that you’re gradually accumulating links in a manner that search engines find natural. Dumping a link for a site out to all 2,700 directories as quickly as possible isn’t going to do your site much good in search engine results. You’ll end up with a great PR, but it’s search engine results positioning that drives traffic, and search engines look for continued growth in backlinks over time to maintain your position.

The program also came with some free bonuses, including an article submitter, article generator, and an article directory script. I haven’t had a chance yet to play with those, but will report back if they look like they’re worth using.

Click here for more information about Directory Submitter.

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Second Life And Making Money Online

I’m pretty late to this party, but I’ve just started checking out Second Life.

I’m looking into it for possible use in an academic setting, providing students with a platform for creating educational and business related games, and possible for creating an online presence for our college.

Technically, Second Life isn’t anything more than a lot of other online multiplayer games have already done. But from the start, they’ve focused on player created content and the economy.

The result is that many people make more money on Second Life than in their real jobs. An artist friend of mine is planning on opening a shop to sell her artwork. Digitally created media seems to do quite well in the game.

The current in the game is Linden Dollars, L$. There’s a very real exchange rate for converting to and from L$. When I just checked, for one U.S. dollar, you can get 186 L$. You use L$ in the game for purchasing other player made content, for buying land of your own to open a shop on, or whatever.

Big name companies have gotten into the act, too. An entire island can be purchased for $1,675, with a $295 monthly fee. Perfect for someone like IBM to hold online meetings.

Second Life is free to sign up and play, but you start out with no L$. You get that primarily by buying it at the current exchange rate.

Anyone have any great successes marketing in Second Life?

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Yuwie October Earnings

October earnings for Yuwie are available.

My September earnings at Yuwie were $2.15. October earnings are $3.11. The amount of the increase was far lower than the August to September increase (from $0.66 to $2.15).

This is due to a drastic drop in the amount made per page view, from $0.46 to $0.35. Personally, I blame the addition of annoying pop-ups and interstitial ads. The Yuwie admins have apparently not learned from the lessons of other online sites that use advertising, that tastefully done advertising is far more effective than in-your-face ads.

My overall page views went from 77,705 in September to 126,301 in October. Here’s the chart for October:

Yuwie October Earnings

With any luck, the admins will wake up and realize that pushing more and more ads out to the members isn’t going to increase value to the advertisers, and go back to a quality feeling site, rather than the spammy sort of feel you get on Yuwie these days.

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Nichebot Prices to Increase

I received an email from NicheBot today about an upcoming price increase.

Apparently, on December 12th, they’ll be raising prices, “60 – 100%”. At the current rate of $9.97 a month, that would put the new rates anywhere from $15 to $20 a month. While I can hardly blame them for raising prices, it’s kind of a shame.

I’ve recommended NicheBot for bargain keyword research since I found the site, on the basis that you simply cannot find a more affordable professional keyword research tool anywhere that compares at the $9.97 price level. There are keyword tools that provide more, but they’re at the $25 – $50 price range.

Bumping the price of NicheBot up to $15 to $20 a month makes it less of a clear winner for entry level Internet marketers. It’d be nice if, after the price increase, they continued to offer a $9.97 version of the tool, but with fewer monthly search credits than the current one. That way, an entry level Internet marketer could still do enough professional keyword research to get started, until they were making enough money to upgrade to a higher level or a different tool.

The good news is that if you are already a member of NicheBot by December 10th, 2007, you lock in your pricing for life. The increased price will be only for new members who join after the 10th, or for existing members who quit and then rejoin after the 10th.

Will I still recommend NicheBot after the 10th? I’ll have to wait to see exactly what the new pricing structure is, and what you get for it, but I doubt it. I’ve recommended it so far because it’s such a bargain that an Internet marketer who is not making enough yet to cover the fee can still get enough value from the tool to make it worth having. After the price increase it likely won’t be such a bargain anymore.

As always, you get a two week trial for $1, if you want to give the tool a try.

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Site Build It! First Impressions

Site Build It! is a web hosting offering that features a graphical way of building web sites.

At least, that’s what I thought when I first came across SBI. I ran across an ad for it, looked through the sales pages, bookmarked one, and moved on.

Months later, I came across a very nice set of niche keywords…good traffic, low competition, etc, and decided to create a site for the keywords. I wanted this niche site to be more than just a neglected niche site, because the keyword potential for it is quite good. I wanted to create some real content and value for visitors.

SBI makes a lot of claims about what they can do for you, so I thought I’d combine efforts and use it for the new niche site, and get a series of review posts out of the deal.

I’ve created a new category for all the SBI related posts, because as I get more and more into it, I realize that SBI doesn’t fit neatly into any of my existing categories. Or rather, it functions in multiple categories at the same time.

Calling Site Build It! a web host is misleading. SBI is a process for creating profitable online web sites. SBI provides all the tools you need to do this, including keyword research, autoresponders, ad tracking, etc.

You can click here to see a nice summary listing of SBI’s features. Scroll down to where it says “Click here to compare SBI! to Yahoo! and 1&1.com”, and click the link to show the table.

Initially, the price of SBI put me off. It works out to about $25 a month. Since I’m currently paying $5 a month for web hosting, and don’t really need a graphical website creator, it seemed like I would be wasting $20 a month. That’s one of the reasons it took me a few months to come back to SBI.

I did finally come back, and take a closer look at the features in the comparison chart. Here’s what I currently pay now for various services:

o) Hosting, $5 a month
o) Ad tracking/autoresponders, $18 a month
o) Nichebot keyword research, $10 a month
o) Domain name, $0.75 a month

For a grand total of $33.75 a month. SBI’s $25 a month with those features included suddenly started looking better.

You can’t pay for SBI month by month, but must pay year by year. This is fairly normal, to get the best web hosting prices you’ve always had to pay on a yearly basis, or more. At SBI, the yearly interval ensures that you’re committed to spending the time to build your business, which is where SBI really shines.

Once I signed up, I received an email that contains some links to training videos. I was tempted to skip them, since I’ve created websites before, but figured I’d go through the whole process to be able to review it.

And that’s just what SBI is, a process.

What you get in the training videos and related material is a step by step process that walks you through identifying a profitable niche, designing the site, creating the site, promoting the site, and finding ways to monetize the site.

So far I’ve only gone through the process of identifying a profitable niche. The SBI keyword tools pull data from the professional Wordtracker database, and combine that information with data SBI’s own web spider calculates.

I already had a keyword picked out, but for the fun of it I did the keyword research. Turns out there was a much higher traffic keyword than the one I’d picked out that had a similar lack of websites supplying useful information (Supply is one of the factors that SBI calculates for you).

So my original site idea will still work, but I’ll end up targeting higher traffic keywords.

The next step in the process is to design the structure of the site by determining which keyword the home page will target, which keywords the second tier pages will target, and which keywords the third tier pages will target.

Once I’ve gone through that process, I’ll post again to let you know how it went.

Oh, and note that SBI has not asked me to choose a domain name yet…most web hosts start their services after you’ve done your research and picked a niche. SBI starts from the very beginning, and guides you to a good domain name after you’ve picked the niche and designed the structure of the site.

So far, I’ve been blown away by SBI. I’ve been creating websites for years at traditional web hosts, where you get a CPanel interface and not much else. By comparison, SBI, where you get training material that walks you through the process of creating an online business, is very nice.

SBI does target themselves to non-techies, and the training material is well suited to that level. Their goal is to allow any small business owner to put their business online, or any individual to create a profitable niche site, regardless of their previous online experience.

Click here to read more about Site Build It! or watch some videos about it.

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New ShareThis Button

I’ve added a new social networking button from ShareThis.

It’ll appear at the bottom of posts and allow submitting posts to Digg and all the rest, as well as emailing posts. I’ll be running it in parallel with the FeedBurner social links for a while, to see what gets used more.

Why ShareThis?

One of my students recently graduated, and is working for the company. He was in today telling me about the service, so I figured I’d give it a try. I haven’t used it enough to know if there’s a big advantage over the other social bookmarking aggregators or not.

What do you think? Do you like the widget it pops up more than the FeedBurner links, or vice versa?