Your Complete Libraby of Resources for Making Money Online

More than 100 hours of free training related to Internet marketing strategies, advice and business development were added into Ken McArthur's membership site 'TheImpactFactor.com yesterday. All these materials and training series are free. You can get instant access to these information and learn what you need to know to make money on the Internet by going to TheImpactFactor.

Topics you'll learn include:

• How to Optimize Your Website for Search Engine
• How to Write Effective Web Copy that Can Increase Your Profits
• How to Make Money Online by Blogging
• How to Make Money Online from Affiliate Programs
• How to Build Your list
• How to Create a Profitable products
• How to Use Multi-Media to Increase Your Sales
• And much more.....

All these topics are presented by experienced Internet marketers.

eBay New Changes Benefited Your eBay Selling

eBay has announced a major changes on the selling policies and rules. The areas that affected by this changes are fees, eBay PowerSeller rewards and standards.

Here's a rundown:

Lower Listing Fee
This is a good news to eBay sellers as lower listing fee mean lower up-front cost to sell stuff on eBay. Effective February 20, 2008, the insertion fee (listing fee) for Auction-style, Fixed Price listings and Store Inventory listings will be reduced according to the fee chart in eBay basic fee page.

$1 Minimum Starting Price for Store Inventory and Fixed Price listings
This will affect those who sell info products like ebooks, reports, etc where they usually start their price under $1 in Fixed Price listings.

No More Gallery Feature Fee
eBay no longer charges you for adding picture to your listing. This is a pretty smart change of eBay to encourage sellers to upload product picture which will help in attracting more bids and achieving higher final sale price. It is good for the profit of both eBay and the sellers.

New PowerSeller Standards
Starting July, a score of 4.5 or more Detailed Seller Rating is needed to maintain PowerSeller status on eBay.

New PowerSeller Rewards
PowerSellers who have record of excellent customer service will be rewarded with discount on final value fee of 5 - 15%, expanded Paypal protection, extended unpaid items protection and greater search visibility for their auctions.

New Feeback System
eBay designs it own Feedback System to increase buyers confidence in eBay sellers by providing a true and accurate record of previous buyers experiences. Here are some changes made toward achieving this goal:

• Seller can only be able to leave positive Feedback to buyer.
• Positive feedback from repeat buyer will count toward a seller’s overall Feedback Score.
• Feedback left by members older than 12-months will not be counted towards your Feedback percentage.
• If a buyer doesn't respond to the Unpaid Item (UPI) process eBay will remove the negative or neutral Feedback they have left for that transaction.
• eBay will remove all the negative and neutral Feedback left by members who have been suspended.

Full details of these new eBay changes can be access here.

You may want to know more about how these changes can affect your eBay business. There will be an eBay Seller Webinar at 10:00 a.m. this Friday, February 1 you can attend to understand more about the benefits of these changes.

Money Making Opportunities (23nd Update)

As usual, I will update here if I found some new money making opportunities. Here are two I have learned about lately.

Digital Journal - Report news and get paid
Digital Journal is one of the most active online news sites. News are reported by their citizen journalists. You may sign up to become a citizen journalist of Digital Journal and get paid for contributing news to the site. Digital Journal rewards citizen journalists by sharing ad revenue with them. The more you can contribute, the bigger your ad revenue share. Your earning is also determine by the rank (popularity) of your posted news. Payment will be sent to you via Paypal at the beginning of the month once your account exceeded $10 earning.

Find out how to join Digital Journal here.

Creamaid.com - Earn money by submitting blog posts
On Creamaid.com main page, there is a conversation section consisting of a long list of conversations or topics. You can choose one conversion or more in the list, write a post relevant to your chosen conversion on your blog and then submit it to Creamaid. When your post is selected, you will recieve a royalty payment and the link to your blog post will be syndicated through Creamaid website, giving you free blog promotion.

Your blog post is very likely to be accepted as long as you keep it relevant, unique, true and not offensive.

Make Money from Every Visitor to Your Site

Now you are free from blending your contextual ads with your content to get it clicked by your visitors. Pay Per Play ads will open a new vista for blogger's or website owners. This will definitely boost the income of publishers with the 5 seconds audio ads concept.

What is Pay Per Play ads

Pay Per Play (PPP) is an online media channel that plays 5 second audio advertisements on website's that place the PPP code on their web pages. It’s a bit like Google Adsense except that it’s a 5 second audio ad. You place a small piece of PPP code in your page, the 5 second audio message (Ad) will played once the page is completely loaded.

How does it Works

When you place PPP code on your site, PPP audio ads play as soon as a visitor arrives on the site. There will be no action required by the visitor, unlike Adsense the visitor should click on the ads to get you paid.

The audio ad is only 5 seconds in length and the visitor will only hear one 5 seconds advertisement per visit to any specific webpage of that site. The visitor will only hear one audio ad for every 3 minutes they visit if they have already heard an audio ad on another page of the same website.

What are the benefits?

The Pay Per Play membership is absolutely Free!. As of 12/29/2007 the Pay Per Play network has grown to over 6 million website's. One of the main benefit of using 5 seconds audio ads is that you never send visitors away from your site. For each 5 second automatic playing of the advertisement, the website owner gets paid!. This let you earn more money from your visitors. PPP audio ads will be relevant to your webpage contents.

Pay Per Play audio ads affiliate program offers a generous commission system that is paid on a weekly basis.

Pay Per Play audio ads is due to officially launch on February 1st, 2008. Now is the time to tell everyone you know about the free PPP opportunity. Join Pay Per Play now before its too late.

This Wednesday Teleseminar: Learn How to Generate Massive Affiliate Income

This coming Wednesday at 9 PM ET, Anik Singal from Affiliate Classroom will be doing a special teleseminar with someone who has made over one million of affiliate sales.

The call is with Armand Morin. Armand is a top Internet marketer, you may have heard his business success story. But do you know that he is also an affiliate in over 110 niches and earned $1.2 Million in 2007 just as an affiliate?

In the teleseminar, Anik is going to specifically talk to Armand about the exact strategy he uses to go after so many niches. And the things you can expect to learn from listening the conversation between them are the system that Armand used to generate massive affiliate sales, PPC advertising strategies and affiliate sales conversion tips.

It is a free teleseminar, to register simpy go to:

http://www.internetmarketingexplained.com/anik

Also, Anik will be giving away some cool prizes on the call such as free copy of PPC Classroom and 'The Affiliate Manager' training course.

Keep Your Web Copy Short and Sweet to Attract Web Visitors

As a webmaster, you are looking to keep visitors coming to your website and also get them to return often. Besides web promotion and Internet marketing, your web copy (text and content inside your website) will play an important role in attracting new and returned visitors to your website. There are several points you need to think about when writing web copy.

Keep your copy short and simple
What you need to know and remember is that unless a visitor has been sent to a particular web page on a site, more often than not, they will only read 1 or 2 sentences of the text. So the longer your text is, the less likely they will want to read it. So if you can, do not add any long copy to any pages where visitors are not expecting it to be.

Also use as many simple words as possible for your copy. It is important that your visitors are able to understand what has been written on their first reading. They do not want to have to spend time thinking about what you have written.

In most cases, you should be able to convey one key idea effectively in just one or two lines of writing. By writing any more then that, you are likely to ruin the chance of the first idea you are providing to get through to them.

So by anticipating that your visitors will be willing to learn more about something, then they will look for the page that has more copy on it. So provide them with a link to another page of your site where they can get hold of the information that they need.

What if you do need to write long copy?
If you do need to include some longer copy, then organize it. Even if your visitors are expecting to find a page heavy with text, they may not actually be willing to read it. So in order to help them, divide any distinct ideas you have into separate paragraphs. Provide them with useful headings, sub headings and bulleted lists. This is a great way of introducing key ideas to them deliberately.

It is best to assume that not all the visitors to your site will read longer pieces in their entirety. So write copy that they will be able to skim through and lets them read the parts that they are only interested in.

Although longer copy does not need as direct as short copy is, it should still be easy to read. You will find that those visitors to your site who have difficulty understanding what has been written, will stop reading it.

Make your copy lively
Keep your copywriting clear and write vividly. You should be aiming to write in a light, unassuming tone of voice. If what you have written is boring or overbearing, this will in turn affect the reader, and what you are trying to convey will not get through to them.

So use a consistent voice throughout your copy. By doing this, visitors will more quickly recognize it and so become familiar with it. The more familiar a site or subject is to them, the more effective it will be.

Set up Your First Online Business Fast in AffiliateCashSecrets.com to Make Money on the Net

Is your online business on hold because of obstacles like not being able to get your website up online?

I understand that even creating a simple email follow-up system can be a pain in the butt.

Are you tired of the problems and obstacles?

Derrick Vandyke has just set up a new program 'The 30-Day Challenge' at Affiliatecashsecrets.com which will guide you through every step of setting up an online business that will make you a nice income every month. It's clear, simple, and won't cost you a fortune to start a online business with Derrick's step-by-step instructions.

Here's how you can get in to this new program:

1. Go to the site at AffiliateCashSecrets.com.

2. Sign up to take 'the 30-Day Challenge'.

3. Sign in to your member's area and click "Start Here" to read Day 1 of your 30-day training course.

You'll know what you have to do and what tools you need to get your first profitable business up on the Internet.

Free Marketing for Your Product: Recruit an Army of Affiliates

If you have done good online research on a niche and developed a new product that will meet a need or solve a problem of a group of people, then probably your product will be selling well on the Internet. But to successfully sell your product, you first need to get it into the public eye which will require Internet marketing knowledge, talent and experience. If you lack of that, don't worry you can get some support free on the net.

There are many professional or experienced Internet marketing experts ready to help you out and to promote your product to thousands of targeted prospects. They will work on commission basis, giving them an added incentive to market your product as efficient as possible.

We are talking about affiliate marketing, of course. The affiliate marketing method, in its most basic form consists of a merchant or seller (in this case you), affiliates (the sales force, who will market the merchant product on to earn sales commission), and the customers or buyers (located and referred by the affiliates).

What you need to recruit a team of affiliates?

One of the good ways is to create a merchant’s account at Clickbank or other affiliate programs network sites. Alternatively, You may set your own affiliate program without joining a affiliate network, but Clickbank and other like sites work well for many sellers. You’ll pay a one-time fee, and in return, you can list your product, along with a sales page and a “thank you page.” Once approved, your affiliate program will be created and anyone can join your program to market your product.

There are a few ways to make your affiliate program work.

You need to have a professional written sales page, a good product and offer an attractive commission.

You may think about offering 50% or more sale commission per sale to your affiliates. This may sound harsh to you, but it is the high commission ratio that will motivates them to market your product on the net.

Your affiliate payments management will depend on the system provided by your affiliate network. Some can be set automatically to pay your affiliates who make sales for you. Others will require you to manually manage your affiliate payouts. Make sure you are familiar to your affiliates payment system and send payment to your affiliate accurately on time.

Why not I market my product without recruiting affiliates?

Sure, you don't share any profit that way, but you could be selling more and more of your products by recruiting a group of experience affiliates who are willing to promote your product on the Internet in different effective ways.

If you have a product and want to have a massive promotion for it, think about starting an affiliate program. The commissioned affiliates can provide you a steady stream of potential customers to you.

Xeal's UpComing Webinar Focuses on Improving Website Revenue

Tony D. Baker from xeal.com has run a few Webinars about improving conversion and online sales last year. If you have missed them all, here's a opportunity to join another webinar with Tony D. Baker to be happened on 31st Jan 2008:

Xeal.com webinar sign up link

Like the previous Xeal's webinar, Tony will review sites live on the upcoming webinar and show you the ways to increase website conversion, leads and sales with a simple 25-point checklist. You will pick up ideas, tricks and techniques to improve your website revenue watching Tony review other sites. This is just first half of the webinar.

For the second part, you'll discover their comprehensive strategy for Internet Marketing Success and learn how to save cost in pay per click advertising.

How to Choose the Right Internet Marketing Methods for Your Online Business

When you are running a website to market your Internet business and make money online, choosing the best Internet marketing methods is crucial for your online business, which will give you the greatest reward in traffic and revenue compared to the amount of work put in and the time and money invested. This is called getting a good ROI (return on investment) from your Internet marketing campaigns or effort.

There are many common methods of Internet marketing, and most can be applied to market a wide variety of websites, blogs and e-businesses. Below are a few of the general forms of Internet marketing:

1. Email Marketing – build a opt-in subscribers list through a website, newsletters or e-zine. Then send offers, promotions, coupons, etc to the opt-in subscribers.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – it involved on-page and off-page optimization which include changing your website keywords and structure; and building relevant inbound links.

3. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – search engine advertising like Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing, etc.

4. Viral Marketing – video / file-sharing, tell-a-friend, spreading free e-books, report and other downloadable things.

5. Affiliate Marketing – having others market your products or services free, share a percentage of sales with those who made sales for you.

6. Online Advertising – banner ads, text link ads, sponsorships, etc.

7. Online PR – Write and submit press releases to news sites, blogging, etc.

8. Article Marketing - write interesting articles related to your website, products or business, and then distribute them to article directories and submission sites.

To finding and select the Internet marketing tactics that work best for your website or online business, you need to create an Internet marketing plan, including a budget.

When creating an Internet marketing plan, list all possible Internet marketing methods and techniques that fit your budget and have the potential to reach your target prospects. Once you've completed a master list of potential Internet marketing methods, test each of them to discover which methods work and which ones aren’t working for your website. Testing each potential Internet marketing techniques and tactics will take some time and money. But it is worth doing it because you will discover the effective marketing methods for your business that will provide consistent traffic and revenue.

You will be able to narrow down the best marketing options once you have done testing, and create your final list of Internet marketing methods and tactics for your website or online business that:

- Will reach your target market.
- Will be able to influence the target market.
- Has been applied in this niche targeting a similar market successfully before.
- Will not exceed your budget for Internet marketing campaigns.
- Provide consistent traffic and revenue for your website.

Free Resources Helpful to Make Money Online - 24 Jan 2008

These resources contain new tips and techniques, I thought you might be interested.

SEO Interview with Jonathan Leger
Jonathan Leger, an SEO expert was interviewed by Keith Baxter last week. In the interview, Keith ask about SEO topics such as Google, links, site structure, social bookmarking and other related topics. The Interview has been recorded and you can access it and listen to Jonathan's SEO tips now by clicking the above link.

Make Money Blogging - E-Course
This is a free e-course prepared by Dave Isaacs and Aaron Leighton that teach you how to start a orinary blog, marketing the blog to gain exposure and make money from the blog traffic you gain. When you sign up this e-course, you also receive a report useful for your blog marketing.

Traffic Building E-Course
Are you running out of taffic generating ideas? If yes, you may think about signing up Tellman Knudson's three part, step-by-step course. Tellman will show you his powerful methods of driving traffic to website that can boost your sales and profit.

My First Wordpress Blog Launched

After about 20 hours of hard learning and work, I finally completed the setting up process for my Wordpress blog and published it on the Internet. The URL of my new blog is:

http://www.home-business-info-online.com

This new blog is about home business. I will post everything related to home business in this blog. So if you are interested to start a home business or find some ways to make money at home. You can check out this new blog often, you might find some info and content helpful for your home business start-up and growth.

My goal is to achieve financial freedom through blog marketing and SEO. My existing blog, Money Maker Info has made a living for me but still a long way to reach financial freedom. So, I will use this new blog to help me make more money online in order to achieve financial freedom faster. Right now I just added two money making programs into this new blog, which are Google AdSense and a banner ad from CJ affiliate network. I will be adding a few more money makers into it once I get a good amount of daily traffic.

Installing and setting a Wordpress blog up isn't easy as I thought. I did read a few free Wordpress tutorial I found from Google search engine. There are helpful but unfortunately they don't cover everything. I know that it is not possible to cover everything in one article or one video tutorial. These people are kind enough to provide free Wordpress tutorial, I understand I cannot expect them to tell me specifically from A to Z.

Anyway, If you too are now learning how to set up a Wordpress blog now, you may try this link.

One good thing about Wordpress is that you can optimize your blog in almost any way you like by modifying the code of your Wordpress theme. If you know not much about editing your theme, you still manage to optimize your blog to the way you like by installing different types of Wordpress plugins. Here's is a link to a list of plugins (or at least a few of the plugins in the list) that most bloggers need for their blogs:

A Guide to the Wordpress Plugins Used on Our Blog

To me, it is fun to install plugins because my blog's look will change exactly according to my preference after activated my plugins. There are so many useful plugins available free on the Internet, but for now I only installed 3 plugins. I will be using more plugins in future.

The 3 plugins I currently use are:

All in One SEO Pack - This plugin has been suggested by many well known bloggers. I tested it on my blog, it is really good for blog on-page search engine optimization. It provides most of the things you need for on-page SEO. You can add title tag, write a long meta description for on your home page. And also you can have a unique title tag and meta description for each of your pages. However, All in One SEO doesn’t work on all Wordpress theme.

Akismet - This plugin was included in Wordpress 2.3.2. It helps reduce spam comments. You'll need a WordPress.com API key to use it.

Mighty AdSense - It lets you insert your AdSense ads within your post entries and increase your AdSense CTR.

I will be testing different features of Wordpress in the coming weeks and will post it here again when I find something good about Wordpress.

How to Get Double Indexing on Google

How to get two pages indexed on the serp's.

Have you ever wondered why Google will list 2 pages for some sites on the serp index and not others?

Here is an example...

(Click to Enlarge)



This is quite simple to do and it should be done as you will see more traffic if you get two pages listed rather than one - if nothing else it makes your site stand out in the serp's.

To do this you need only write two separate posts on the same keyword and then simply link the second post to the first using the keyword in the link's anchor text.

I did this with my two recent posts regarding TNX.net entitled

tnx.net - caution alert

and then

tnx.net - part two

Besides the increase in traffic it also bumps one of your competitors off the page.

Try it - it's easy to do.

For those following my tnx.net campaign I received a visit from the owner this morning but he didn't leave a message. Oh well, I got his attention though.



And that's it - a short one today folks!

Griz

oops - an important update for Amit...




The following is a screenshot regarding some questions asked in the comments below - This is how to link your Post Title back to your homepage on Blogger.



and this is how it looks in Preview mode...



Another screenshot regarding another question in the comments below.

This is the related keywords and CPC info for the term Plasma TV.

Click all screenshots to enlarge.



If I was to target this niche I might go after some of the related terms that have a much better CPC than Plasma TV. The list below shows these keywords and the CPC. These don't get as many searches as Plasma TV but pay much better.



Totally Unrelated Note...

For those of you who frequent Blogging Zoom and Vic's Blog Blogger Unleashed you will have to be patient as both sites have been hacked and are currently down. Vic and Court are busy getting it fixed but wanted the word passed in case folks were wondering what was up.

Friday Morning Update: Vic has Blogger Unleashed back online and hopes to have Blogging Zoom up later today.

Saturday Update

Blogging Zoom is now up and sporting a new doo.

TNX.net - Part Two

TNX.NET Review

In one of my previous posts about Niche Marketing I revealed a little tactic I use to rank on page one of the serps by being negative. A serp troll if you will. I like to do this with programs that are dominated by affiliates pushing their links. This is a simple way to get traffic.

The first page of the search listings for the keyword tnx.net contains 10 affiliate sites all pushing this program. How many searchers will read all 10 sites? Not many - usually only the first couple of sites will get any traffic at all. When you search for information on a topic are you only interested in the opinion of the people who are pushing the program? No, what you really want to find is an opposite opinion so you can gauge a product from both sides. Is someone selling a product going to be as honest about it as someone who isn't selling it?

If 1 site in ten has a negative review then it will draw the majority of the traffic looking for information on the product. I posted yesterdays "negative" review and waited for the Google bot. It wasn't long after that I checked the serp's for "tnx.net" and this is what I found...

Ranked 4 on Google.com



Ranked 3 on Google.co.uk



Ranked 3 on Google.co.au



If this program becomes popular I have just created another stream of traffic for this blog much like I did with Roadmap to Riches and Project Payday. While I won't make any sales with it I will get a few Adsense clicks and it all adds up. The owner of tnx.net may be sharp enough to entice me to change my stance as well... (was that subtle enough?)

One of the things I am wrestling with is the fact that I have developed a reader base on this blog. It's obvious that this blog was set up as an adsense/affiliate sales site but in spite of it's looks people started reading it - who knew. The above example shows you how much money I could be making if I said "to hell with my readers" and started producing affiliate sales posts. I have built up my PR and keyword authority to the point that I know I would outrank just about everyone for any and all affiliate programs I chose to pimp. Make no mistake this would be lucrative as I am drawing a lot of search engine traffic - yesterday I set a new record - 1210 Google visitors and all searching for "make money online" keywords. Who are these people? They aren't savvy Internet marketers - they are total newcomers to the game. Who else would use a search term like "How to Make Money"?

Since I don't want to piss my readers off I will stick with the Adsense for now and concentrate on obtaining advertising revenue. This niche is so goofy that it boggles my mind sometimes. In Niche Markets I get tons of advertisers beating down my door the moment I rank high on Google. In this "make money online/blogging" niche it appears the advertisers don't understand the power of search traffic. They should be swarming all over me to get a piece of those 1000 noobs dropping in. Instead they want to advertise on blogs that have big RSS feed number and a low Alexa rank. This is idiotic as those numbers simply mean a blog gets lots of "Internet marketers" stopping in to read something and then they move on - they don't spend money - the noobs do! If you can't beat them then join them I guess.

To this end I have been using entrecard - not because I think it's a good program but because it brings in Alexa toolbar users and more readers (a few but not much). This has had the effect of increasing my RSS count and lowering my Alexa ranking. This is all bullshit but that's how the game is played in this niche - sad but true. If you are an advertiser I suggest you place a few ads on the top serp sites and see how this compares with your ads on the A-list sites. You might be surprised at the difference in conversions. Most of you don't even realize that the top serp sites aren't the A-listers.

I am rambling today as I want to catch up on a few questions that need answering.

I will paraphrase my readers questions to save time.

I get asked this a lot;

Of all the "make money online" sites available who do you recommend?

This isn't conclusive as there may be a few gems out there that I am not familiar with but my list of sites that are "truly helpful" is pretty short.

Vic at Blogger Unleashed

Court at Courtney Tuttle's Internet Marketing School

Garry Conn at Garry Conn's Blog Tips

Josh Spaulding at Internet Marketing with Josh Spaulding

As I said this isn't conclusive so if you know of anybody who has their sh*t together then please let me know. I don't know Garry or Josh but Garry is much like Vic, another black hatter who cuts through the crap and talks from experience. Josh is much like Court - a clean and ethical professional. Most people who blab about making money online are parrots and these are the four people they are parroting. (I am referring to the people pretending to know it all - there are plenty of good sites that share what they are learning but are honest enough to let their readers know where they get their info - the know it all's act like they have experience which they don't and it shines through to those that do.)

Moving on...

There is a really nice woman who has vaulted up the A-list this year by the name of Caroline Middlebrook and most of you are probably familiar with her. If you want to learn how to be an A-lister then she is a good role model. She is a very good writer and has a wonderful personality. Qualities that have made her fairly well known in a short period of time. She is not an experienced marketer and I don't think she will be upset with me saying that - she is willing to learn though and I think she has a great future online. To that end I want to post an email she has been sending out to a few of us marketers;

Hi Griz,

My name is Caroline Middlebrook and I'm writing to you to ask for a favour. I have recently released a free ebook which is called "How to Develop Money-Making Niche Sites with WordPress" and I am trying to promote it. If you think it would be useful to your readers I would be really grateful if you could mention it on your blog.

Here is the download link:

How to Develop Money-Making Niche Sites with WordPress

Many thanks,

Caroline Middlebrook

I get a lot of requests like this but they are usually rudely worded and the people asking make it obvious that they aren't familiar with my site - a word to the wise, if you are asking someone for a favor don't start your email with "Dear makemoneyonline.blogspot.com" - it's not hard to find out my name - sheesh!

Anyway Caroline asked quite nicely and since I like her I would love to help her out. I do have one concern with her book though - it is more of a "wordpress primer" than a guide for "money making niches". Frank at OpTempo did a good review of her ebook and I hope she understands that I don't want to mislead my readers. Her book is quite good but the title is a bit misleading.

More moving on...

The Sandbox

Let me start by saying that no one knows the ins and outs of Google's mysterious Sandbox - it doesn't exist and yet it does. I can only give you my two cents based on my experience with building blogs.

If you start a new blog on any popular subject you will likely get sandboxed - you will get indexed, stick around on the serp's for a few days and then poof! - your blog will disappear from the index. This is the sandbox. If you continue to post and show that you are not a spam site Google will release you back into the index. This can take a month or it can take 6 months.

Is there anything that you can do to avoid it?

To a degree yes but as much as what I am going to tell you helps there are times I still get sandboxed. There are forces at work here that only Darth Vader understands.

Monetizing your Blog

The best way to avoid it is to not monetize your blog. A new site with monetization all over it screams "spam". If a site is not monetized it's likely legit - why else would someone start a blog and not monetize it unless they truly just wanted to impart their knowledge to the masses. Google loves fresh unique content and has no reason to sandbox a site that isn't monetized. The exception to this is starting a blog aimed at the taboo niches like "law", "online drugs", "loans", "adult" and the rest of the spammers favorite targets. With or without monetization these type of blogs are sandboxed.

How long do you have to wait before you can monetize the site?

This answer sucks but "It depends". I have found that waiting until you develop keyword authority is the best route. The faster you develop it the faster you can monetize and this depends on how many keyword anchored backlinks you can produce over a reasonable amount of time - say a month or two - and how much original content you can produce over the same period. I didn't say how fast you could produce the backlinks as this is a mistake. You have to appear natural and getting 100 links the first week to a new blog is not natural and this will get you sent to the sandbox as quickly as monetizing your blog will. Take your time and build up your backlinks slowly but efficiently - get proper anchor text for your main keywords - not just one keyword but several different variations of it. Again this is how a natural site would grow. If every backlink uses the same term - sandbox. Be smart.

How do you know when you have enough keyword authority?

You know when you start writing new posts optimized for your keywords and they are immediately indexed and you see a movement up the serps from one post to the next. I am not talking about PR - I mean keyword authority. You can have a PR0 and rank well on the serp's if all your backlinks tell Google that you are an authority for your keywords.

To understand this use this blog as an example. In the recent PR update I lost a point - I went from a PR5 blog to a PR4 and yet most of you know I just climbed onto page 1 of the serp's for "Make Money Online". I lost PR but gained serp rankings - this is because of my keyword authority.

Once you see that you have authority then you can introduce monetization on your site and usually this will keep you out of the sandbox - not always but most of the time.

Adding Outbound Links to Your Blog.

Just like monetization, if you start a new blog and pack a bunch of links on it to other sites you will get sandboxed. Think about this - why would you put links on a new site? You want to send backlinks to other sites and usually to your own. This is why spammers create thousands of sites - they use them to send links (keyword authority - not PR) to their anchor sites or money sites. The moment you add links to a brand new blog you are seen as a likely spam site - don't do it. Wait until you can monetize the site.

The best way to avoid the "box" is to take your time writing lots of original keyword rich posts and work on your backlinks - be patient, always think about how a natural site would grow and mimic it. You aren't going to have a lot of traffic in the beginning anyway so not monetizing isn't costing you anything. Be patient and be smart.

Where did my Post Go?

On a side note I have noticed a lot of people commenting about their posts being ranked well one day on the serp's and then suddenly vanishing the next day. This refers to established non-sandboxed sites.

This is completely natural and this is why. When you write a new post on any given topic Google jumps on it because it's fresh. Fresh content is prized by Google - it keeps their index up to date on all the latest news. If you don't have enough keyword authority to take you to the first (and sometimes the second) page of the serp's you will get listed on page 3 or higher for a few days and then drop down to page 90 as other newer fresh content replaces you. You will bounce around the back pages for a while until you build up your authority. More relevant posts on the topic will help your authority just like proper backlinks do.

If you make the first page (and sometimes the second) then you are an authority and will likely stay there until some prick like me decides to bump you out by any and all means at my disposal. Don't get complacent when you reach page 1 - always add backlinks in order to keep others from overtaking you. A couple of sites on page 1 of "make money online" got complacent and are now wondering who the ass with the cheesy blogspot blog is that just passed them by. There is never a finish line folks - it keeps moving away from you as you try and catch it.

I was going to yak about Adsense and Social Traffic today but I want to optimize an entire post around the topic so it can wait until next time.

A final comment. My email is as good as broke so please ask your questions in the comments. I have noticed that my emails are from all the beginners who find my blog through the serp's and that my comments are usually from friends and experienced bloggers. I suspect that beginners are too intimidated to ask "stupid" questions in public and choose to email me instead. Please do not be intimidated as there is no question too "stupid" to ask. Everyone of us started out as a beginner and we all had to learn the same way - by asking questions. I can guarantee that none of us will ever ridicule you for asking questions - ever. I am here to help and so are my readers who I have come to know as caring and decent bloggers. If you use the comments to ask your questions they will get answered - if you send me an email I don't know when I will get to it. Fair enough? Don't be shy as you will make a lot of friends using the comments - I have.

Till next time,

Griz

Money Making Opportunities (22nd Update)

I usually post two opportunities in every update, but this time I will post an extra one.

Get paid to submit photos
Fotolia is another worldwide stock photos marketplace where you can register for a free account to upload your photos or images and sell them for a profit. You can choose to sell photos as royalty-free or with an exclusive buyout license. Either way, you will earn money. There are numerous benefits becoming a seller of Fotolia. Some of them are free marketing to increase your sales, low earning payout, Fotolia affiliate opportunity and so on. More details can be found here.

Professional bloggers needed in Performancing
Performancing.com is now searching for an experience Internet marketer to write about blogging, SEO, social Media, monetization, etc on a daily basis. The blogger who get hired will be paid $1,000 per month, but the position has a few strict requirements. To read the full details of this position, please go to Performancing.com - Blogger Jobs.

Get paid to write in NicheBlast
When you sign up to become a writer of NicheBlast, you will be able to view the articles requested by NicheBlast. You choose and write the articles that interest you. NicheBlast will approve your articles and publish them on different sites within the network of NicheBlast. Then you will share a large percentage of the revenue generated by the sites that publish your articles.

How to Make Money Online by Selling Domain Names - Part 1

Many webmasters have found that it is quite profitable to sell domain names. If a domain name has built in with a line of traffic, it will be much profitable. Some domain names have generated thousands of dollars to webmasters. A few good domain names have even went as high as a million or more dollars, making the webmaster an instant millionaire. You too can start selling domain names and profit from your domain names business. Here’s a few basic steps you can follow to begin:

Step 1 – Do keyword research
First, you will need to do some keyword research to find a keyword that is highly searched but not used very often by other websites. A good keyword analyzer tool can do this for you. Word Tracker and Keyword Analyzer are two of the good tools you can use to research keywords but there is a cost involved for using them. If you don’t want to pay for a keyword analyzer tool. You may use the free ones to conduct keyword research. But the free ones only tell you how many times the keyword has been searched for the last month, they don’t let you know how much competition there is with a potential keyword like the paid keyword tools did. I would suggest you use paid keyword tools because they provide in-depth detail on the keywords you are researching. If money is an issue, you may find a keyword analyzer that offers a free trial, like Word Tracker does. You can always upgrade to the paid version once you use it to profit from selling a domain name.

Step 2 – Get a domain name
Once you have chosen your keyword, you need to buy a domain name and a good web hosting package. You might think you don’t need hosting since you are just going to sell the domain, but in order to sell it for big money, you need to create a website for your domain name and do some web promotion work to build in consistent traffic for your domain. Traffic is what sells a domain name for the higher dollar amounts. To be profitable your domain name needs a good flow of traffic.

Anyway, try to find a hosting package that will include both a web hosting service and a domain name. Because you don’t need to worry about transferring anything later.

When choosing the domain name, make sure your keyword is included. If your keyword has been registered by other as domain name, try adding a series of numbers or other letters with your keyword. If you wanted the keyword for your domain name to be “dogs” but it has been taken, you could try getting “dogs101” or “A1dogs”. Alternatively, you may try looking for a relevant keyword that isn't taken as a domain name. Either way, keep finding until you get an easy-to-remember yet keyword-rich domain name that still has a .com extension.

How to Make Money Online by Selling Domain Names - Part 2

Step 3 – Create a website
Now, you have your domain name and are ready to move on to the next step which is creating a website. It doesn’t have to be the biggest website ever built, as a matter of fact, it could be just 5 to 10 page site. Write several keyword rich articles and create a simple site using a program like Microsoft Word. Just be sure you save them as a .html file.

Go ahead and sign up for Adsense or add a few affiliates to the page so that it looks like a resourceful website for your visitors. Any sales made or AdSense revenue generated from your site will be an added bonus.

Step 4 - Drive traffic to your website and grow your backlinks
Once you have uploaded your website, focusing on traffic is next. You can start out with purchased visitors as long as they are coming from quality websites like Google search engine, content blogs and etc; and not a form of incentive traffic (like paid emails) or a bot. After getting paid traffic for a while, you should start building backlinks / inbound links for your site. There are many free places you can post your url to get backlinks pointing to your site like directories, forums, and online classified ads. You can also write a few good articles related to your website’s topic and post them on article directories to get free quality backlinks and traffic. Furthermore, social marketing can also be used to generate traffic and build links.

Keep growing inbound links until you have a regular flow of traffic to your site. If you can get sufficient visitors, you will get an Alexa rating. If the rating is pleasing, look for a domain name appraisal to see how much roughly you can sell your domain name. This will give you a good idea of how much you can expect to make from selling the domain name. If the numbers aren’t as high as you like, don’t worry there will still be someone willing to give you a higher dollar amount because of the traffic you have built up already.

Step 5 – Sell your domain name
When you are satisfied with your website and the amount of traffic it receives, it’s time to put it on the domain name market for sale. You may want to sell it with your website on it, although it is not necessary. Once you have sold your domain name, you will simply transfer it over to the buyer’s account. Most of the time it is free to push a domain name from one account to another as long as the both of you have accounts with the domain name registrar.

When you have seen a profit from selling domain names, you can reinvest your earnings into another domain name, and possibly try getting an expired domain name this time that already has a nice flow of traffic to save you some time. This can be done over and over to create a nice income from selling domain names.

TNX.NET - Caution Alert

Beware of Paid Link Programs!

tnx.net - A Review

I received an email from Vistic Vladmir who purports to have a new service for buying text links called tnx.net.

Read the email,

Dear makemoneyforbeginners.blogspot.com owner,

I am interested in advertising on your BLOG. We have created a revolutional system (www.tnx.net) that fully automates the process of selling/buying links for the owners of various websites/blogs and SEO companies and it's getting popular fast. We would like to buy a review from your website about our service. We are ready to pay via paypal.


We'll give you information about our service, so you could read about it and write your own review. You will be able to test the service and also use your referral link in the review. Please tell us the price of the review and your paypal email.

my contact information:
Vistac Vladimir
www.tnx.net
ICQ 839708
vishtak@gmail.com


Waiting for your reply.

Thank you.

I emailed him back with one question - "Does your service use No-follow on the links?"

I haven't heard back.

From what I have seen this is yet another PPP type system that is intended to pass pagerank from high PR blogs to those willing to pay them for a review. I didn't get an answer back but obviously the only way this works is with do-follow. If you didn't learn the first time around with PayPerPost, if you participate in one of these programs Google will strip you of your pagerank - and rightly so.

Vistic, if I am in error please feel free to email me back with your answer.

I noticed Bruce at DayJobNuker wrote a post about this yesterday so it's likely to start showing up everywhere soon and I wanted to caution everybody to stay clear if it's another paid links program and it certainly appears to be. It appears Bruce was unable to find out if no-follow was used either.

The good news Vistic is that you got my review for free.

Not all reviews are as bad as this TNX.Net review. The link will take you to a review I have done for RevResponse which is a useful program for making a little money generating leads and will pay you $50 just for mentioning the program. (July 2008 Only for the $50)

Griz

Itarang.com - Free Money Making Website

If you want to make money online with Google AdSense and bypass all the website design and setting up processes, the free services provided by Itarang.com may interest you.

Itarang.com is giving out SEO friendly websites specifically designed for making money through Google AdSense and eBay affiliate program. When you get a website from Itarang.com, it will have the following features:

• Auto Updating Content
• XML Google sitemap built in
• Can be customize and personalize according to your preferences.
• Add, change and delete content

To get started, you'll need a domain name and web hosting. Itarang.com has made a special deal where you'll get a free domain name and 1st month's hosting fee off in hostgator.com (Monthly hostgator.com hosting fee is $6.95).

And to make things work, you must put in hard work on promoting your website to get traffic and generate AdSense revenue. The site has also prepared a series of step-by-step training materials to help you succeed.

How to Use Google to Find a Profitable Niche Market

Google is the biggest search engine you may have used when searching for information on the Internet. But have you ever used Google for more than just finding information you need? If not, then you are missing out on some very good tools provided that can make searching the Internet not only more effective, but also fun.

One of the best places to begin is by finding out which products are popular today. On Google’s homepage, click ‘more’ located in left-hand corner. Click ‘products’ and you will see a list of products. You can begin your search for niche markets here. Compare what’s on your list to see if there are any categories that match. If not, don’t give up; hold on to your list as you can use these topics in other searches. Begin by clicking on topics that interest you. These topics may also be easier to create products for later on because you have an interest in them.

Keep in mind that for now, you are simply browsing the Internet looking for popular items that people are searching for. Listed below are other tools to use when searching for niche markets.

Google Directory
When you want to narrow down a topic, the Google directory is a good place to begin. To get to the directory, go to http://www.google.com/dirhp. You will be given a list of popular categories to search that will help you narrow down your topic. Pull out your list and begin your search. Each category has sub-categories to search. Eventually, you will reach a page that contains a list of websites where you can find additional information. If there are few websites listed, this is a good indication that you have found a profitable niche because the niches needs are not being met.

Google Sets
If you are having difficulty narrowing down your topic or you want to generate more categories from a larger topic, use Google sets. This is a tool that allows you to create a set of like items that you can search from. Visit http://labs.google.com/sets to use this tool.

This is a good tool to use when brainstorming for niche markets as well. After a set has been created, you can search through websites that contain the information.

Google Zeitgeist
This tool is used to help you generate niche ideas or to see how popular the topics on your list are. You can search in the US or around the world if you choose. While this is tool will only give you an idea of how popular a trend is becoming, it is handy when beginning your research.

Google Trends
If you have a few topics that have gained exposure in the past few months, you will want to check out their popularity to see if it will continue to be popular a few weeks or months from now. Google trends is a tool that can give you a better idea of how many people have been searching for a topic over a certain amount of time. You can track the progress of any topic you like to see if the trend will continue of if it will die down. Trends on the downside are usually not worth pursuing.

Visit Google Labs, http://labs.google.com/, to see more search options and tools that are available. While some of the tools are experiments at the moment, you will find some that are very useful in your search for profitable niche markets.

Niche Marketing

How to Find Profitable Niches

In my last post I gave you a number of links to check out in order to show you how niche markets can be set up as well as the types of topics you can use. In truth you can find a niche for just about everything but finding a niche that can make money is the hard part. I approach niche marketing in reverse - I look for something that I can sell and then create the niche around it.

I have four primary revenue streams online. Adsense, Affiliate Sales, Advertising and Lead Generation. Before I decide on a niche I make sure that there is at least one revenue stream that will work with the niche. Preferably two. In most cases a site set up for Adsense will also work well with affiliate sales. Advertising and capturing leads also work fairly well together. As a rule I don't usually have more than two revenue streams on a site as it tends to disperse traffic rather than channel it. I will explain this further as we go.

My process for finding niches and how to monetize them always starts with Adsense.

Adsense niches are the easiest to find. This requires little more than Google and a couple of keyword tools like SEO and Keyword Elite. Every time I Google a term I pay attention to the paid sponsors listed in the right hand column. If I see a full page or more of advertisers then I run a keyword list and see how many searches are performed each month for the main keyword and the long tails. Next I check out the CPC that the advertisers are paying. If the numbers look promising then I use SEO Elite to check out the competition listed on page 1 of the serp's - the pagerank and the backlinks each site has. This tells me how much work is involved in overtaking them.

This may surprise you but most niches don't have a lot of strong competition - usually only two or three of the sites have any knowledge of SEO. If you have read my blog then you should be able to spot an optimized site from an un-optimized site. I don't have to read more than the URL, Blog Title and Post Title to tell and you shouldn't either.

If I find a keyword that can be optimized for Adsense and lacks strong competition re: Search Engine Optimization, I then go back to the sponsored advertisers listed on Google's right hand column. Are they affiliate advertisers? Are they corporate advertisers? Are they brick and mortar companies offering a service? Are they selling a product they produce? While Adsense is a nice little money maker it pales in comparison to what you can earn with affiliate sales or even the right kind of advertising.

Ideally you want to dominate a niche that involves corporate advertising as this is where the big money is. I learned this quite by accident.

An Example.

My Best niche is in the Fishing industry. I started the site as a simple Adsense earner as there are hoards of searches and tons of advertisers selling everything from fishing trips to fly rods. The niche also allowed me to incorporate affiliate sales as there is no shortage of fishing related books and products available. More money is spent on Golf and Fishing each year than any other sport. The long and short of this story is that as I climbed the serp's my Adsense revenue grew nicely but my affiliate sales really sucked. I made a new friend recently online, Mike who is in the Golf niche and he mentioned that the niche sucked because 60 year old men don't buy anything online. I laughed because I found out the same thing goes for fishing.

Had the Adsense not been working I would have abandoned the site. I changed direction and stopped writing affiliate sales articles and started writing Adsense articles. Lots and lots of really loooooooooong articles with every fishing related term I could think of. This got me indexed for all sorts of keywords and weird phrases which, in turn brought in more visitors who clicked my Ads in order to escape.

I have mentioned writing long articles before. This isn't a good idea if you are writing for readers but it is a killer strategy with Adsense. Two things always happen - your search traffic increases and you find new profitable keywords that you would never have thought of. A new keyword is a "Niche" btw. This is how I find most of my niches. It's how I have found all my profitable ones.

I am mentioning this because I know some of you won't create the kind of niches that Vic and Court have been discussing on their sites. Some of you probably don't have the time or interest in creating niche blogs. You already have a site that you have invested time in and have an interest in the subject matter. It's always easier to write about something you are interested in. This tactic is for you but you have to decide whether you want readers or money.

One of the byproducts of my long fishing articles was a surge in traffic for various terms that, while related to each other, weren't exactly related to the fishing niche directly. These indirect keywords were featured in their own posts and after gathering a few choice links they began bringing in more traffic than my fishing terms. I had stumbled upon a side niche that I would never have thought of on my own. As it turned out these readers weren't 60 year old men - they were wives and kids of the 60 year olds and they belonged to the category of people who do spend money online. Although I had ceased writing affiliate articles, my affiliate links were still on my sidebar and suddenly sales trickled in. Now I am not going to give away my niche but keep in mind that people will buy gifts for 60 year old men who like to fish. I had been targeting the wrong people when I started the site. In the end I took over the top four spots on the serp's for my keywords and this drew the attention of several corporate marketing types who had been unable to rank well with their own websites - the very people who produced the products that I outranked them for. Love it when that happens. If you can't beat me then join me and I now run very profitable ads sponsored by the top four corporate entities in the field.

I dropped the affiliate links in order to channel my traffic towards the advertisers - with what they pay I want to make sure that they get their money's worth and this can't be done if your traffic is dispersed by way of too many options. I still keep Adsense on the site and it makes a full time income on it's own. I am still writing huge posts and collecting new keywords to target. The niche is so vast that there is almost no limit to how much search traffic I can generate.

Now, I have brought this up so that those of you who have been blogging aimlessly (I mean that only in terms of not being optimized for anything that people search for) can start optimizing your existing blogs for terms that will draw traffic. It's never too late to do this and if you already have an aged site with a little PR this will be easier than starting over with a new blog.

This is how you create a multi-niche site. I now have 5 of these types of sites - all started out focused on a large general niche and then morphed into numerous side niches, some directly related and some not really related at all.

This blog is one of them. I started a campaign on here to target the term "Payday Loans". This niche is not related to the "make money online" niche and yet I have successfully added it to this blog. At the moment I rank on page 3 for payday loans but more than that I have keyword authority for hundreds of payday loan long tail terms. I am currently getting 40-50 visitors a day for these terms and the adsense CPC for this niche is in the $1.20 - $3.00 range - much higher than the CPC on my "make money" pages. While hard to nail down I estimate an additional Adsense earnings of about $5-$10 a day from this - all from writing 5 articles on the subject. This in spite of the fact that I am not ranking very well for the main keywords yet - but I will and my Adsense earnings will only keep growing.

A Word about Long Tail Keywords

The "make money online" niche has a limited number of long tails. By this I mean there are less than 200 variations of keywords people use to find this site. How many ways can you think of to ask Google to find you sites that help people make money online? In truth only about 15-20 keyword phrases are used in any meaningful amount. I rank on page 1 for almost all of them and traffic amounts to about 800 visitors a day if I combine all the terms used to find my blog. There is some room to grow but not much - it will probably top out at about 1200 or so visitors a day. Now compare this to Payday Loans. I keep track of long tail terms in all my niches. I paste them in notebook and note all the terms that are used more frequently than others - these are the terms I target with optimized backlinks in order to climb the serps. I quit counting the long tails for payday loans when they topped 300 different queries. I don't know how many ways you can ask Google about payday loans but every day I see a few new ones. The term "make money online" had a measly 15,000 searches last month and less than 30,000 searches if all the long tails are combined. See Below.

The Top Searches for "Make Money Online" last Month. (Click to Enlarge)



Compare that to people searching for Payday Loans and related long tails below.

The Top Searches for "Payday Loans" last Month. (Click to Enlarge)



How a Niche Evolves

I came across the Payday Loans niche because I had optimized a few pages for the term "Project Payday". I had chosen this program because it had a lot of searches at the time and I was looking for ways to monetize this blog. Turns out that Google considers the term Payday Loans to be related to "Project Payday" - it isn't but Google ranked my Project Payday pages high on the serp's for people searching for payday loan long tails. I noticed traffic showing up using payday loan queries and morphed my site in that direction - all because of writing posts on a topic that had nothing to do with payday loans other than the word "Payday". This is exactly the same way I came across the un-related niche on my fishing site. Below you will see the top keywords for the term "Project Payday".


Project Payday Search Queries



Another product I had targeted was "Roadmap to Riches" which sent me traffic for various "related terms" like "Make Money" and plain old "Money" - terms I hadn't been targeting with my "make money online" campaign. Both terms get more traffic than "make money online" and I added them to my list of targeted backlinks. I'm 15 in the serp's for "Make Money" and this has added another 18,000 potential visitors to my site. I will be adding more terms like "Business Opportunities" and others in future and this is how I grow a multi-niche site sideways. By continually adding targeted keywords you can build a huge amount of traffic to a blog that started out as a single keyword niche. This works best for blogs that have a general keyword niche like "Fishing" or "Plumbing" or "make money online". It doesn't work well with narrowly defined niches like "Croc Shoes".

Roadmap to Riches Search Queries



How effective is this. Look below and see what my visitors are searching for when they land on this blog.

Searches used to find this blog during the past hour.





This is what the traffic looks like all day long. This isn't you - my readers - this is all organic traffic provided by mostly Google. It keeps coming everyday - whether I post or not and it makes me money.

Monetization Techniques.

Both the Project Payday and Roadmap to Riches posts were written as negative reviews of the products. So how do you make money if you don't have an affiliate link? I'll tell you. If all the pages on page 1 of the serp's are affiliate sites then you can get to page 1 fast by writing an article that doesn't have an affiliate link. I have talked about this before but simply put Google will strive to give the person searching for information the most options available on the topic. A negative review is considered just as important as a positive review - shouldn't people be given both sides of a story?

This is how to rank high - so how do you profit from this? The plan was to force the owners of the programs to pay me off. What? I'm not a saint. I'm on here to make money. By turning people off of buying these products I had hoped the owners would have enough business sense to approach me and make me an offer in order to change my stance and funnel my traffic to them. Keep in mind that I didn't have any readers back then - just search traffic and ethically speaking I couldn't care less if I made money off of search traffic that I didn't know. This is one of the reasons it is hard to make money and have social traffic. I would never screw my readers so I have had to shelve a very profitable revenue stream on this blog - affiliate sales.

So did my plan work? Partly. Project Payday quit trying to sell a worthless ebook full of links for $35.00. Instead they offered their updated system free of charge if people would fill out an offer instead. (This involves IFW's - another subject I won't go into today.) They are paid by the companies making the offers for each person who takes out a trial membership in some product. Project Payday in turn set up a pay per lead program to attract leads. I changed my stance and now I am one of their best lead generators. They pay me $3.00 for every person I send to their site that fills out a free trial. This is a form of Lead Generation and has netted me about $1400 over the past three months. Not bad for writing a couple of articles.



The Roadmap to Riches plan didn't work - the owner of the program was apparently to dense to figure out how to do business online and the program never took off like it could have if he had got my help - oh well. It's all about experimentation. This tactic has worked quite often in my other niches and as unethical as it may seem - it's business and you may as well know some of the tricks of the trade if you are pursuing a career online. Your choice if you want to try this - just showing you some options, after all I'm the kind of person you will be competing with.

Ok I have rambled all over the place in attempting to show you how I find niches. This can't be helped as it isn't just a simple matter of picking a highly searched term and optimizing for it. You have to work in monetization factors right from the start and you have to know if there is room to grow the niche laterally in order to keep expanding. This is the opposite of most niche marketers who focus on a narrow subject and rinse and repeat from one keyword to the next. Both systems work but since Vic and others are showing how to do local niches I thought I might show a different angle to niche marketing. For those of you with sites already established you can try and morph into new terrain without starting over. I recommend both single niche and multi niche blogs as each offers their own unique forms of monetization and you want to spread your revenue streams around as much as possible.

I will be continuing the topic of niches in future posts but next up I want to discuss some of my recent findings in regards to Adsense and Social Traffic. My findings may surprise a few people - it surprised me.

Till then,

Cheers.

Griz

Latest Video Content Important to the Success of Your Online Money Making Venture

Lately there have been a number of quality video trainings and content released by the big name experts in the Internet marketing industry. First, it's the video training in the Going Natural 2.0 Series I have mentioned in this blog last week. The video were published by Andy Jenkin from Stompernet. It is professional and provide numerous social marketing strategies. You should watch them if you want to double or triple your traffic and website income using social marketing.

Stompernet.net - Social Marketing Video

Just after a few days Andy published his latest video, Frank Kern has come out a list building video. Frank is the guy that has brought in millions dollar into his bank account by building a list and promoting products to his list. So I'm sure that you'll learn something useful for improving your online business profit from watching this list building video.

MassControlSite.com - List Building Video

And Yesteday, John Reese released a video also. He encourages people to make money online by marketing Internet marketing products and exposes a lot of good info on how you can make money in the Internet marketing niches. You may watch John's video here.

MY Google Rankings Drop Gradually

This blog, MoneyMakerInfo.blogspot.com uses to rank #1 for a numbers of my primary keyword phrases in Google below:

• Make Money Online
• Making Money Online
• Make Money
• Making Money
  
• How to Make Money
• Earn Money Online
• Money Maker
• How to Earn Money Online

But, for the past 3 months I have experienced several times my Google rankings drop. The keyword phrases 'earn money online' was first taken down from no.1 to no.2 and it never go back to no.1.

And then the same happened to my other keyword phrases 'make money online' as well. It fell from no.1 to no.2 also. The drop didn't affect my traffic level since I still no.1 for this keyword phrases in Google other countries such Google.ca, Google.in, Google.com.au and etc.

My Google rankings didn't stop here. Today when I check my Google positions, I found that my Google rankings in a few of other keywords went down also. The keywords phrases are 'how to make money' and 'money maker'. Both rankings went down from #1 to #2. Besides that my top positions in Google other countries have got busted too. What a bad day I have.

But fortunately, my traffic level isn't seriously affected. The Google traffic I get today is only a few percent lower than usual and my daily earning from this blog is just slightly lesser than usual.

I have no idea what's the reason causes this drop. May be Google has done another ranking algorithm update causing my blog down or may be it is a little penalization from Google to me for climbing too high. Whatever reason is it, I'm optimistic with my Google positions. I guess this is just another Google ranking fluctuation that happen to many site and blog also. I think I will get back my no.1 rankings when another Google ranking fluctuation occurs.

Finding Niche Markets

I'm not sure if I could find a bigger topic if I tried - Niche Marketing could fill several books and those of you who know me are in danger because I have been known to write some epic posts in my time. I will spare you today though as I want to lay some groundwork first.

Before I start I want to narrow the field somewhat and point you towards a few projects that you can follow along with or better yet join in. Vic's money making blog "Blogger Unleashed" is a busy place lately and among other things (like raising money to help a blogger in need) Vic has been explaining the advantages of creating local niches. Read his article and then hop over to Monika's new local niche blog Yeppoon Chronicle to see how you can do this yourself. Neena is also giving this a go in Westport-Kids. Both sites are great examples of how you can target your local communities.

In a similar vein you can follow along with Court's Internet Marketing tutorial which combines keyword targeting and local niches in creating his Colorado Lasik Surgery Guide.

If that's not enough links for you then I have a few more. Justin over at "Blendworx" is currently walking his readers through a niche experiment for "Butt Implants" (Seriously) and if you want step by step instructions for creating a niche I suggest you check him out.

My final link goes out to Elliot at "Blog Explosion dot Net" who is assisting Vic with a Local Niche Site Support Group that all are welcome to join. It's a place you can all get help and just as importantly make friends - networking with others always pays big dividends.

I will take you through my methods for finding niches in the next post. I want those of you who are interested to read through the blogs listed above first in order to get a feel for what is entailed as well as an understanding of just how broad a subject this is.

Some Asides...

For Pablo at The Tao of Blog who along with Divinyl's music review blog have been discussing what to do about all the scrapers who steal your blog content and post it as their own. If any of you are encountering this problem then do the following; add a link back to your site in the first paragraph of each post you write. The first line of this post above has the term "Niche Marketing" linked back to this blog. Most people who scrape content from others use an auto program that steals your RSS feed snippets - usually just the first paragraph so make sure the link is in the first paragraph. Scrapers don't as a rule read what they have scraped and by adding your link they will post your content on their site and unknowingly give you 1) The credit you deserve. 2) Link juice in the form of PR from the scraper site. In this way you can use the scrapers to your advantage - a backlink is a backlink even from a thief.


This question has come up frequently...

Hi Grizz,

I have been reading you and Court and I am confused over smart pricing. Court says if you have low CTR then you are smart priced and will get low clicks which will lower revenue on all your Adsense sites. I noticed that you said in the comments on Vic's post Page Rank vs Traffic that smart pricing happens if you have poor conversions. I'm not sure I understand this and you seem to say that low CTR is not a factor in smart pricing. Can you clarify smart pricing for me? Thank you so much for helping us noobs.

Sincerely,

Erin K.

This is confusing a lot of people so I will give it another go. First go and read my comment on Vic's blog using the link above. (It's long of course.)

Court has tried to simplify smart pricing in such a way that while not technically correct it is a common guideline for running Adsense on your site. I don't blame him for choosing the low CTR method as it is pretty accurate in most cases and works as a general rule. Technically speaking however, you can have low CTR and not be smart priced but this is a tricky subject to explain.

Smart pricing is based on conversions. Have you ever checked your Adsense and noticed that you have 2 clicks and a payout of $.30. An hour later you check again and still only have 2 clicks but now the payout is $.50. What gives? It is not uncommon to see your CPC (cost per click) change during the course of the day while your number of clicks don't change at all. Adsense is on a delay system and calculations are continualy being made behind the scenes. One of the calculations involves conversions and I can't say I know exactly how Google works this out but to understand the process I wrap my head around it this way;

Google charges the Advertiser a higher per click rate when the site his/her ad is on is a high conversion site and a lower rate when the ad is on a low conversion site. If I run an ad for "Making Money Online" and it appears on a blog like this one then I will pay top price per click. This blog gets highly targeted search engine traffic for terms like "make money online". Because my traffic is looking for this type of information then they are more likely to convert into sales for the advertiser.

Conversely if I run the same ad and it appears on let's say Divinyl's music blog - it could if there was a "Make Money Online with Music Reviews" type of post - then I will be charged a lower amount per click. This is because Divinyl doesn't get targeted traffic for this term and her visitors will be less likely to convert into sales for me.

Now how Google works this all out is beyond me but it isn't important. The easiest way to ensure that you don't get smart priced is by writing highly targeted posts. I have explained this in detail numerous times but by using your main keyword in your post title and then as your first header you can pick the ads that Google sends you. The post title is the biggest determinant in how Google selects ads for your page. Make sure the rest of the post is relevant to your title. This will ensure that all the ads are relevant. If you get a variety of ads on your page then you are poorly targeted and likely smart priced. If all your ads are related to each other and relevant to your post then you are not smart priced. Public service ads and blog ads are usually a bad sign - Google has either blacklisted you (the PSA ads) or the bot can't define what your page is about. (The post is poorly optimized.)

Rather than rely on low CTR you are probably better off using CPC as a gauge. I have a lot of very low CTR sites but my clicks still pay me $1.00 or more. I may only get one click in a hundred impressions but the click converts well for the advertiser. Conversely I have had sites that get 200% CTR (this is possible when one person clicks several ads) and yet I only get $.01 payouts - usually a sign of smart pricing but not always as some ads just don't have a lot of competition and the advertiser can buy the minimum.

It helps to use a tool like Keyword Elite (or open an Adwords account and use Google's tool) when trying to determine your CPC. Keyword Elite will give me a rough idea of what advertisers are paying for various terms. I know that anyone targeting "Make Money Online" will pay Google between $2.56 and $3.20 for one of the top 3 spots on the right hand column in the search listings. This means that they will pay $.60-$1.25 in the content listings which appear on websites. (You get about half this amount) As long as my CPC falls within this range on this blog (and it does) I know I am getting top dollar per click. If I suddenly get $.10 clicks on this blog then I know something is amiss and likely it's smart pricing.

This is complicated and quite frankly there is no way to know for sure if you are being smart priced so it is common for people to just assume that a low CTR means you are smart priced. In General this is a safe assumption but combine it with your CPC. If you are getting high per click payouts - $.30 or more - then don't worry about your CTR - you aren't smart priced. The exception to this would be that you know an ad like "plumbers" should be paying $5 - $10 per click and you are only getting $.30 clicks.

A word to the wise - know your niches. I never worry about smart pricing as I know what all my keywords should be getting as far as CPC goes and I write relevant highly targeted posts to get the ads I am after. On the few occasions that I have been smart priced (see I Just Doubled my Income)I knew it immediately as my whole network started showing low payouts. I quickly backtracked to the last new site created and removed the ads and within a week I was back to normal.

Ok, I have a lot more questions sent that need answering but that's enough for today. More next post.

Update Oct 2008 - If you need help tracking down backlinks (good keyword anchored backlinks) then check out several resources I am providing on my other blog Make Money Online with Grizzly. In particular you should look at the Niche Support, Link Resources and Friendz of Griz pages. You can also read this article Finding Links for those Niche Blogs These resources are free and I encourage all my readers to join in.

A favor if you would...

It looks like 1 year and 26 days later my site is finally lodged on page 1 of Google for the term "Make Money Online". I have been there for a while in most data centers except the US center (Google.com) and the UK center (Google.uk). It looks like I am in 10th spot on the US center but since I don't live in the USA I was wondering if some of my American and UK readers could do a search and let me know if I am indeed on page one in their region. This was my whole purpose in starting this free blogspot experiment and I want to know if I can finally crack open the Champaign.

Thanks for the help and just leave me a comment if you would be so kind.

Cheers,

Griz