Nichefinder's Journal

The other day, I posted my experiences with Matt Levenhagen's Campaign Blasts course. I have more than a dozen of guides on how to use Google AdWords. So far, this has been one of the bests guides I've read . Most of the guides out there are actually rehashed content. The authors probably went to the Google AdWords learning center and ripped a bunch of content off of it. So what's so different about the Campaign Blasts affiliate training course? Compared to what I've read, the material is pretty original. Matt is a Google AdWords Professional and he's launched hundreds and hundreds of campaigns. So he pretty much spills his knowledge out into this course.

I just posted a review on the super hyped Affiliate Project X. Who would want to get this ebook? It's centered around on Clickbank affiliates and has some wonderful AdWords tips. Whether you decide to check out my review or not, the ebook is great. It's not some rehashed Clickbank or AdWords ebook. If you're looking to improve your sales conversions (which means $$$ in your pocket), make sure you take a look at the review 1st and decide for yourself.

After reviewing a Wordpress Translation plugin, I decided to give it a try on my site. You could translate your site into Japanese, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, or whatever language that Google translator can handle. There are some theories about the plugin causing a duplicate content penalty. So use it at your own risk.

Sometimes learning without any visual example could be tough. The "visual" part is what makes us go to school, or go to a seminar to learn. Some people could easily learn by reading a book, while others may learn easily through a podcast, or audio book. If you're wanting to learn - the visual way, here's some internet marketing videos that won't put a dent in your bank account. It's a huge bargain for over 22 hours of videos. It's almost like going to a 3 day seminar. There's plenty of things to learn from. Whether you're just a beginner - trying to find ways to make a websites and make your graphics look awesome...or you're an advanced person learning to auto-populate your websites with rss feeds - these videos will provide you with the knowledge to build your business. Check out this page to find out more information on these internet marketing videos .

I recently started using PLR articles. They've been working out pretty well and saved me a bunch of time. I've subscribed to 2 sources, Content and More by James Jackson, and Keyword Avalanche by Scot Standke, Jim Morris, and the latest member, Tim Gorman. I prefer Keyword Avalanche more than Content and More. Although Content and More has over 700 articles a month for $19.99, they aren't fresh. I've found a few sites that have massively published all of the articles that Content and More offered. Since this site has had those article indexed for quite some time, I realized that they were just resell PLR articles. Update 8/15/06: I recently received an email from James about Contentandmore.com; His first month was filled with a bunch of old articles so that he could offer a lot during his initial promotion. All future monthly articles will be brand new. The latest package does prove that they are fresh. Keyword Avalanche offers fresh PLR articles, keyword l

I recently started using Keyword Elite for my search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. Before using it, I compared Chris Lee’s Keyword Analyzer to Keyword Elite. Although both of them are great software for SEO and PPC keyword research, Keyword Elite had most of the features that I needed. Out of Keyword Elite’s 5 modules (or projects as Brad Callen calls them), there were 2 that reeled me into using this product. The first one was being able to quickly pull in a massive list of keywords. The second one was being able to spy on my pay-per-click competition. Find out more in this Keyword Elite Review

It's been a few weeks since I posted my last article. I've been keeping track of my ranking on Google and things are looking better. For the keyword phrase "keyword results analyzer," I'm now listed at number 6, which isn't too bad with 1.4 million competitors (non-exact match). Using the keyword phrase turnkey business idea (which is the domain keyword phrase for my other site EZturnkeybusinessidea.com), I'm listed at number #1 out of 3.4 million competitors . I'm also #1 & 2 on MSN.com In case you didn't notice, I'm using this Blogger blog lately for ranting:) If you're looking for a turnkey business idea or internet marketing resources, please take a look at this site EZturnkeybusinessidea.com.

A few weeks ago, I was checking out the ranking for the phrase "keyword results analyzer". I was pretty surprised that my keyword results analyzer article from my EZturnkey site was number 4. I was also surprised that BJ's review was number 1. I thought this was really strange since the author of Keyword Results Analyzer , Dr. Andy, is one of my favorite SEO experts. How could he not be number 1? Well that was a few weeks ago. Now, Dr. Andy is at number 1 and 2. BJ is number 3. I'm number 9...but not with the site that I mentioned. #9 is actually an article from this blogger site. Now, my EZturnkey site review is no longer to be seen in the top 25? What was the difference? I'm not sure if it was a change in Google's algorithm, but the only change I made was the title tag. I guess I'll go back to my original strategy and put the primary keyword in the title first to see if this will change my ranking.

"Curiousity Just Killed The Cat" After prowling online for ways to add features to my blogs, I ran into tons of Wordpress plugins. For those of you new to my site, I've been a user of Pivot for some time now. Pivot has been great. I don't have any complaints about it. In fact, I find it much easier to use than Wordpress . It has tons of features that you can use to build successful content sites or blogs...without the need for MySQL or other scalable database. So what happened? Looking through Google, there was tons of blog plugins-for Wordpress. While there's tons of useful plugins for Pivot, being so curious, I felt the need to try out Wordpress :) It took a good full day to understand Wordpress and how to customize it. A week later, I still feel as if it's lacking compared to Pivot. In Pivot, I really liked the ability to easily create multiple blogs for the same domain. In Wordpress, I don't think there's a feature...unless you hack aroun

Recent study shows that only 4-5 people out of a 1000 click on internet ads That's pretty disturbing to those starting out on net marketing. That's less than half a percent. To make things tougher, you have to convert that tiny percentage into sales. When you design your website, I'm sure you'd like to create a site that's visually appealling. While doing so, you don't want to skip the things that make you money. Making content sites is a long and tedious job. I'm sure there's a lot of niche marketers out there that focus tons of time on writing up content, some SEO, and copywriting. How much time are you focussing on APO -- Advertisement Positioning Optimization? After reading a recent advertisment research article , I realized that I had to make tons of changes to my content sites. The bright side is that I'm using server side includes (SSI) in my static site templates, and configurable templates in my blogs. So all of pages can be changed in

If you've listed your email address on your website, I'm sure you've been bombarded with SPAM. Tons of email addresses are taken from websites manually, or through computer programs called SPAMbots. They rip email addresses for the sole purpose of spamming. One of the best ways to avoid these SPAM programs from taking advantage of your email address is to use a contact form. Using a server side form will hide your email address from site visitors, as well as SPAMbots. If you're not sure how to set up a form, you can also encrypt your email address. A site that I use is Email Riddler from Dynamic Drive . It will encrypt your email so that it is hidden from the SPAMbots. All you have to do is enter your email address, link text, and an optional subject line, click on the button and a javascript is automatically generated for you. Just copy it and paste it into your website where your email or contact us code would usually go.

Using Niche Analysis To Set Up Your Ads Whether you're using Yahoo Search Marketing, Adwords, or other Pay Per Click methods to bring traffic to you're site, you should integrate some niche keyword analysis into it. If you want to make it easier for you, find keywords without much competition. Go to Google and search for your main keyword. How many sponsored ads are there? If there are ads on less than 3 search pages, you've got a niche that isn't too competitive in the pay-per-click realm. I started my 1st niche site on something that I was pretty passionate about. I didn't do any marketing analysis at all. I listened to a lot business guru's that said, "focus on your passion!" What if millions of others are marketing the same passion as you? Well, working on my passion had more than 25 search pages of sponsored ads. It might of had more than 1000, but I got tired looking. If marketing your passion is too costly, why not look for less costly o

A Really Important SEO Update The strategies listed in my SEO guide may temporarily help you in MSN or Yahoo. However, using these techniques may get your pages filtered out in Google. Google really doesn't like people increasing their rankings through optimization...or in their eyes-manipulation. This is the drawback of SEO--keeping up with all the search engine filtering algorithms. If you're trying to optimize your site for Google, don't follow anything shown in the quick guide. Just write your pages naturally and with uniqueness. Write articles on various topics related to your keywords. Don't use the same keywords in your title, anchors, meta tags, etc. This will easily get your site flagged. Develop your articles around solutions, not around specific keywords. Use your keywords for brainstorming. If you really need traffic (now), start using pay-per-click and word of mout...hemmm, I guess on the internet I should say viral techniques:) Here's a shor

There's quite a few marketers out there talking about niche sites like they are a piece of real estate. They're right! There's a wide variety of niche sites you can make, but the most favorable types and domains will be filled eventually. For example, let's take a look at the 'internet marketing' niche. Internet marketing is a wide category. Within it, you have autoresponders, courses, domains, hosting, ebay,...you get the idea. Within hosting, you can break it down to server types, bandwidth limits, personal ones, and business ones to name a few. Each category is a niche. You can break down a niche more and more, but then you decrease your market size. What happens over time with a niche? Niches eventually get filled. The internet marketing niche is pretty lucrative and competitive. You might be able to get into it right now, but you'll have to be highly unique and brilliant(setting yourself apart from the rest of the competition) or spend more time o

Shorten Your URL's and Stop Losing Sales Due to Lousy 3rd Party URL Redirects and Affiliate Link Theft! Take Control By Using Your Own Free URL Redirect Service Have you ever used a 3rd party-free URL redirect service? Most of the recent ones are referred to as: link cloaker's, link redirectors, link encryptor's, link forwarders, link shrinkers, tinyURL's, compactURL's, short URLs...etc. Why use a free URL redirection service? Here were some of my initial reasons: *Prevent link theft *Eliminate cut off hyperlinks in emails *Make the links look cleaner by removing tons of variables from the link If you don't know what I'm talking about, you can promote a merchant through a affiliate relationship. They would offer you a link like: http://www.qsdfy.com/if=24kl3k&productid=32423434&sd-121kjsklssld Isn't that one long ugly URL? Or maybe you've seen a webpage that you want to send to a friend. You copy and paste the web address into an email.

Have you done any marketing analysis? Before you pick a niche, make sure it's a profitable one first. Every now and then, I'll come up with some great ideas. The niche might seem like a winner 3 o'clock in the morning, but until you do some analysis on your niche, don't get too hyped up for nothing. The other day, I was talking to a friend that has a business selling wine tanks. He just started it up less than 6 months ago and thought there was a highly profitable market for them. He's a wine maker himself and knows a lot of wine makers as well. Also, wine tanks are big ticket items. He sells premium tanks starting at a few thousand dollars. His actual profit is close to $500 for every tank sold. So, for a quick and dirty way to find out how much he could possibly make from selling wine tanks, let's take a look at Nichebot . I clicked on the Wordtracker option on the top menu and typed in "wine tanks". The top result was "polyethylene wi

Here's a few links that have been really useful when looking for a domain name: Instant Domain Search Nameboy I usually just go to my domain name registrar and find a name by trial and error. After using both of these links above, they have saved me a lot of time. Instant Domain Search is the latest tool that I've been using. It dynamically searches for available names as you type the name. It will then provide you with a list of places to register your domain. Nameboy is pretty useful for looking up related domain names, or ones that rhyme with the primary and secondary names that you've typed in. Give them a try

I have to say congrats to super affiliate Kieron Donoghue. After reading his posts on Sitepoint , I realized that I should be focussing on pay-per-click (PPC) more than natural search. It's an idea that I first started to really impliment after reading Rosalind Gardner's book , but I was still pumping out a lot of content for natural search. I've been probably doing 80% SEO and 20% PPC. After reading his posts, I've decided to pump up my PPC ads. Here's a few quotes from Kieron: "Above is a picture taken of 1 of the 5 pages from my business bank statement that relates to late December 2005, early January 2006. Obviously I've used Photoshop to key out some banking reference codes. I've only posted a picture of 1 page instead of all 5 as I don't want to disclose exactly how much I earn in a month. (BTW the currency of my bank statement is £UK Pounds Sterling). As you can see the rough total on that 1 page alone is roughly £82,000 which works out a

Yesterday, I ended up downgrading my Opera browser to the latest stable version (from the beta). I didn't think I would have any problems. When I upgraded, all of my cookies and saved passwords were retained. When I downgraded, I lost all of them. For close to a year, I've been relying on the built in password manager. After this experience, I'll never rely on the built in pw managers again. If you're into affiliate marketing, I'm sure you have tons of accounts. Besides CJ, Linkshare, and Clickbank, there's a bunch of companies that manage their own programs. So with that, they all have different passwords. Having to log onto each one is a major drag. I think it's nearly impossible to remember tons of passwords. I've tried to keep my keywords consistent over the last several years, but didn't have much luck. Companies had various requirements. Some would required only letters and numbers up to 6 characters, some more, some less, some requi

I finally got my automatic responder (AKA autoresponder) for my sites a few weeks ago. I've seen numerous reviews from online marketers. I ended up reviewing 3 companies, and they happen to be the most popular ones in the industry. Usage:Autoresponders are used to automatically reply to requests (ie. newsletters subscriptions, forums messages, etc.) It took me a while to buy into the whole idea. In the past, I set up a simple PHP or cgi script in my websites, and sent the responses directly to my email. That was fine when I only had a few dozen subscribers. It later became a hassle as more people came on board. Another problem I faced was SPAM filters. The free email accounts like Yahoo and Hotmail sent my email directly to the bulk mail. I thought that I would be doomed forever. Another issue I faced was using scripted Autoresponders on a Windows web server(IIS). My hosting service did not allow SMTP (outgoing mail) access. I could understand that, especially with the hig

Last week, I finally finished up Rosalind Gardner's book. At last...here's the " Super Affiliate Handbook Review :" For those of you not familiar with Rosalind, she's an ex-air traffic controller that jumped ship and created a website that earns over $435,000/yr selling other peoples stuff. Several months back, I was contemplating if I should purchase James Martell's book or Rosalind's . I searched the web and somebody mentioned that Rosalind's was more of an inspirational or motivational book, instead of instructional. That kind of turned me off. I've read and experienced so much hype from businesses online and offline, I just wanted pure info that I could use. So after reading several more reviews, I ended up getting James book. After buying James book, the lesson I learned from this was: make sure you're looking at current reviews. If I would have noticed all of the news on search engine algorithm changes, I would have come to a diffe

"Search Engine Optimization" Important Update 3/10/06: Please read the "Old SEO" article. ***** In this section, I'll go over advanced site design strategies to help your traffic grow through the search engines. This is known as "search engine optimization." It's not as easy as it you to be. People use to stuff their pages with tons of keywords. Search engines would notice, and you would get plenty of traffic. Now, this is seen as web spam, and your site would get penalized. When making a page, ask yourself this question: "Would I be open to tell Google, Yahoo, or MSN about how I designed this page?" If you're using super sneaky tactics, you might be setting your site up for failure. So here's some basic SEO * Add a primary keyword in your title * Add a primary keyword in your headers. Use the html tag H1 for main titles, and H2 for subtitles. Don't just use bigger fonts. * Italicize or make relevant text bold. * Include

I think it makes sense to test out affiliate marketing first before offering your own product or service online. Now if you have a cutting edge product, then by all means, market it first. My reasoning for using affiliate marketing first is that it requires barely any business effort. You don't have to get a business license. You don't have to carry inventory. You don't have to worry about employees (if you wish). It allows you to work anywhere in the world. It allows you to work on your own time schedule. You also don't have to worry much about customer service. From my past experiences, this is a big plus. So once you try out affiliate market, then you have a good idea of how you could market your own product. Think about it as a way to easily gain experience. Imagine if you started a company. You got a sales permit, or some other license. You did some research and product development. You hired a programmer or a company to make the product. You get a pate

The first thing you want to do is create a plan for your website. Build Up Your Knowledge! Okay, so you've already done some research and picked out a good niche. So how are you going to create a site you know nothing about? The low cost approach is doing the research yourself. You don't have to go back to school for this. Check out online encyclopedias and related sites. Go to your local library and check out a few books on the niche. Make sure that the information you pick is valid and acceptable. Whether you're reviewing websites or books, look at online reviews to see how others perceive the info. If you've picked out a book that has a lot of bad reviews, what do you think people would say about a website based off of that book? Think about this whole process as an extended book report. Instead of talking about 1 book, you're combining all of the knowledge you've learned and reporting on it. Keyword Selection -- The Planning Stage After using Wordtra

If you've chosen your domain name, you'll also need a place to store your information. This server space is what a web host is. What you'll want to do is find a cheap web hosting package . When I say "cheap," I don't mean low quality. There are so many places to get web hosting, that searching for an affordable one could be tough. Most of the big named companies offer tons of web hosting packages, but unfortunately are pretty expensive. I'm pretty surprised that Yahoo is still offering their starter package close to $12/mo, with a $25 startup fee. I guess it's the name that sells. Over the last decade, I've tried out several hosting companies. For over the past 2 years, I've chosen a service where I have 10 websites set up on. If you want to set up one website, you pay $1/mo. If you want to have 10 websites, it's $2.95/mo. They have a startup fee, but it's pretty small compared to the monthly savings. Before selecting the package

What is a domain name? Simply, it's your web address. You'll have to do some domain name research before choosing one. You can't just pick any web address. You have to pick one that's available, and most important, related to your niche. You'll see many sites that don't have an address related to their niche. If you want to strongly focus on making a brand name (ie. like Google), you could pick a domain name that is totally different from your niche. So why do I recommend choosing a relevant domain name? Search engines will rank domain a little bit higher if you include your primary site keyword in the domain name. I don't want to go overboard on this. If you're working on a site on plasma widescreen televisions, I wouldn't create a web address like: www.plasma-televisions-for-sale.com; Although this is keyword rich, you don't want to make it look like web spam (which can lower your rankings). Simply include 1 or 2 keywords into the title

In this guide, you'll discover how you can start up a business online for less than $50. Whether you want to start up a small one or large one is up to you! Using the technology of computers and the internet, you can even run a massive worldwide business without having any employees or inventory if you wanted to. ...so let's get started In the past, brochure-like websites were the main style of business websites. As time went on, these websites seemed like a standard template. Visitors would visit these business websites and find barely any value. Today, content is king. In order to create a profitable content based site, you need to create value. When people search around the internet, the main thing they search for is information. ..and to make the experience more enhanced, people are looking for "relevant" information that contains value. If you're in a competitive business, what are you offering of value? Why would a person go to your website and choose

I remember when I first started making websites. I had a site on how to get DVD's cheap, a video/audio site, a movie information site, and a website on an actress I idolized at the time. I spent hours making these sites for fun. It's kind of crazy to see that some of my past competitors that continued publishing their sites are now making over 6 figures. I didn't think that I could make money off of those sites at the time. It was all a hobby. I still see many fan sites that have tons of content, but don't generate any money at all. People spend tons of hours publishing free videos and podcasts on their websites. This might seem pretty cool, but I don't think it's cool if somebody is capitalizing on your ideas and making a fortune on them. If somebody is making money on great ideas and information, why can't it be you? Now, don't get me wrong. Their were tons of sites back then that made money, but looked like garbage. They had flashing banner

While thinking about an ebook to market, I ran across a website saying that I could actually make my own program with a program creator. I thought it was a lot of B.S., but after looking at some examples, I understood what it was all about. One of the great examples was a sales letter creator. Just type in a headline, sub-headline, and the benefits of your product or service. After clicking a button, it would spit out a great sales letter. Using this product in this way is great. I just didn't like the fact that the software insinuated that it could be used to make software (like any kind). I had to hunt around Google to figure out what it was about. It was a simple software program, with simple libraries, that could create basic logic programs. Although I thought I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out what it was about, it was a great brain stimulator. I hunted around for more software creators. I checked out download.com and sourceforge.net . I ended up stumbling

On January 9th, Rosalind Gardner finally picked out a winning card from her stash of cards. For those of you that aren't familiar with the contest, the prizes were Rosalind's Super Affiliate Handbook and the late Corey Rudl's highly acclaimed Internet Marketing Course . In order to enter the contest, anybody could send Rosalind a Christmas card or birthday card. I ended up sending a card early in December and on January 9th, I recieved a NetProfitsToday link via RSS. I was pretty excited to find out that I was the winner of the two internet marketing courses. That was on January 9th. Today, it's January the 24th. What took me so long to post this message? I've been so busy building websites. Since the beginning of the year, I've created 3 new websites with a total of over 70 pages of content so far. It's been hectic trying to do this, take care of my family with a wife and 2 kids, brush up my knowledge with some great ebooks, and handle my regular job.

For those of you that read my last post, you know I'm diversifying my publishing methods. There are information sites that I don't run subscription lists on. But I do have other sites where I want people to subscribe to a mini-course or newsletter. I read a post on some blog (don't recall) that the trend is for people to get get information on their own time , instead of newsletters via email; I'll still continue with my autoresponders and mailing lists, but I'll be adding RSS feeds to some of my new sites. I've realized the easiest way to do this is by using blogs. So, I had to sacrifice something to get an added benefit. So, back to Pivot . For those of you not familiar with this software, it's a PHP blog that is flatfile based (it uses a text database). I didn't want to add up my costs by getting MySQL added. So I ended up doing some hacking with Pivot. I changed things around so Pivot is more of a CMS than a blog. There was a feature to tur

Wow, it's the beginning of 2006! After reading all of the SEO books in my collection last year, it's amazing how things change. On my past sites, I've used the same strategy. After all of the news from the last pubcon came out, it seems like SEO for Google has come to a halt. With all of their algorithms fighting spam, their SE has become anti-SEO. So the rules have changed. I guess that's the internet for you. For the last few weeks, I've been thinking about what I should do with my future sites. Should I put my focus on just MSN and Yahoo? I soon realized that Google has been a big trendsetter in SE development, so it's just a matter of time that these other SE's catch on. So in order to deal with this change, this year I'm going to use multi-strategy SEO. With 1/3 of my sites, I'll continue to make them as I did. The next third I have come up with my own SEO rules. Their somewhat leaner that before. To give you a clue, I'll be usin