You know any time I find another ‘expert’ in the field of internet marketing the same information is repeated, find a niche, research your keywords, make a Squidoo lens, write some articles, create a blog, link them all together, write some more articles, create some more blogs, etc, etc.  But the thing the really frustrates me is the lack of any formal way of finding a niche.

I know the experts will say ‘find a niche in something you already love’ but sometimes the things you love just aren’t popular enough to bring in hundreds or thousands of dollars a year, so where do we look for this holy grail?

Well there are some options.  The first is an article database which might sound weird but people write articles to promote their blog, lens or other web property and drive that traffic to buy a product.  Have a look through the categories and see if any catch your eye.  Have a look around that category and see if any articles strike you as something that you enjoy.

Most article directories will have a count of how many times that article has been read since it was posted.  Divide the number of views by the number of days the post has been live.

Under 10 per day – might be a good niche to start off with but more research should be done first.

Under 20 per day – seems like a pretty popular topic, still could be a good niche for the beginner.

Under 40 per day – that’s starting to seem like a overcrowded niche, maybe good for established blog’s and Squidoo lenses.

Anything more then this and its probably not worth your time and effort, I mean who wants to be going up against 2 or 3 million other pages for a slice of the pie??  I think you get the point!

OK so the niche is in the ballpark of a starter so what next?

Well I’d check out SEO tools and the Google Keyword Tool and see what you, and they, can come up with for decent keywords. Remember you’re looking for good buyer focused keywords that have words like buy, purchase, best deal or something else relevant to your niche.  That’s not to say that you should forget about the niche if these keywords don’t exist but it shows there are buyers!

Next you need to use the Google intitle and inanchor search for your primary keywords.  If your not sure how to do this just search for Google intitle and Google inanchor and you’ll find all the information you need.

If using this method you find that there are under 50 other lenses that are optimised for your keywords get on them straight away!  Under 100 is still good but a little tougher so expect results to be a little slower.  Anything over 100 might be worth pursuing if its something you really love.

Oh and if article directories don’t work for you then checking out sites like Clickbank and finding a good product might be another good source of information.  Personally I’m focusing on the sports section for now as people in this field are usually pretty hungry for information!

Anyway I’ll write about your next steps in my next post.

Ta Ta for now!

Scott

So its been a long while since I posted last, in fact its been months, however I haven’t been sitting around watching TV but busy building Squidoo lenses and learning even more about internet marketing.

Last night and today I’ve been posting on Squidoo’s forum trying to help new users to Squidoo by critiquing their new lenses with my own opinions. I don’t pretend to be a master at Squidoo but I do try to give good honest advice to people that need it, however today was a little different!

After reading through the lens of one such request I posted my opinions and offered to help the poor guy who had English as a second language. After around 40 minutes later there was another post by a Squidoo-er who has around 350 posts to her name. Now I’ve never put anybody down and never get upset when somebody says something against me, however this person decided to ridicule me by mocking my advice saying that I couldn’t be trusted because some of the links in my forum signature were heading to a 404 page at tiny.cc.

I hadn’t noticed that a rogue space had appeared in the URL and was causing a problem and I thought I had tested them all before publishing so more fool me for losing some potential viewers, however I thought it was totally unprofessional for this person to ridicule me publicly on the forum like that!

Personally I would have sent the person a quick message letting them know that their links had a problem or just added a PS to the reply that mentioned that the person should check out their signature links, but I guess this person had some kind of problem with my advice so it was unavoidable!

I think from now on I’ll be cautious as to what I say and make sure this person isn’t on the forums when I’m posting, maybe then my comments will slip away without her noticing!!!

So its been a good while since I last wrote a post to this site mainly because I think my mind needed a break from it all!  Being new to internet marketing you can vary easily get sucked in to so many things at once that you really take your eye off the ball!

So I started a personal blog about my experiences today, actually at around 1am, after reading the blog of a guy who basically wrote down what he did for around 200 days.  Some of it was pretty much him saying how overwhelmed he was and how much he was paying out for this information, or that training, or whatever; but it really inspired me to write down what I’m spending all my time doing.

Anyway this is meant to be a really short post, just to confirm I’m still here and working hard.

3:10am and off to la la land.

Nite!

Scott

So I’ve been reading lots of blog posts and articles that are talking a lot about backlinks and how they are one of the biggest benefits to your blog since original content.  Original content is definitely still the number one thing you should make sure your site or blog has, but without backlinks nobody will ever read your content!  Backlinks are links from other sites to your own site, either the homepage or articles you have written, and are usually linked by one of the keywords of your site.

To explain this fully we need a simple example.   OK consider your own blog (if you have one) or this blog.  Say I visit a site such as courtneytuttle.com and after posting some comments on his articles he decides to link to this post I am writing now using the keyword ‘backlinks’ then search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, will follow that link from Courts site back to my site and give me a few extra ‘points’.

This in turn will push my site up the Google search rankings just a little higher.  The more quality backlinks my site gets the better my position in Google for the keywords that those links are using and the keywords that I use on my site frequently.  So you can see backlinks are very important, not just for blogs but for any site that wants to rank well for certain keywords.

One thing to remember with backlinks is that 100 low quality backlinks are not worth as much as five high quality backlinks.  That might sound so obvious, however I’m sure that some people that are new to internet marketing are not patient enough to want to wait for those five high quality back links and would rather get as many backlinks as they can no matter how good or bad they might seem.  I’m not saying that having some lower and some medium quality backlinks will hurt your site in any way, however don’t over saturate your site with too many otherwise you’ll definitely be doing more harm then good in the long run!

A good way to ensure that you get good backlinks is to check the pagerank of the pages that you can considering approaching for a backlink and ensuring that they are a minimum of pagerank 4.  Anything lower then this I’d consider medium and lower then 2 I’d consider low.  If your not sure how to check drop me a line and I’ll be happy to forward you some advice!

If you need more information on backlinks or any aspect of internet marketing, please don’t hesitate to leave a message in the comments section and I’ll get back to you, pinky promise!

Scott

I haven’t done much on my sites recently because I’ve had a really nasty cold and now I have a really bad cough to boot.  Last night I started doing some more keyword research to try and discover that ‘holy grail’ of keywords that might start making me some cash.  While I was doing this I started looking through ClickBank and a few other affiliate sites to get some ground ideas for keywords that I might start to ‘pursue’.

So anyway I found some sites that I felt I could promote which weren’t too out of my reach and started to think of keywords and niche website names.  While I did this I found plenty of SEO type sites that wanted to show me the 100% guaranteed way of putting my sites on automation and making $15,384 in just one month!  You know these kind of sites make me feel sick, yet people out there are still making niche sites around these products and selling them to more unsuspecting beginner internet marketers.  The number one product on ClickBank made extensive use of Google’s name in its product which is also pretty annoying as it lends credence to these types of products.

Now you could say, ‘How do you know that the product doesn’t work, maybe it does!’, well thats true enough I guess however I think there is now enough free information or nearly free information for internet marketers that we no longer need to buy these very fake products.  My rule of thumb is ‘if it looks too good to be true then it is!’.  Do not buy products that claim to make money on autopilot or that claim to make huge amounts (anything over $1000) in a day or two as they are bogus.  With extreme hard work, commitment and dedication you may start to make a thousand bucks a month or even a week but I would implore you not to get your hopes too high in this business as you’ll quickly become disappointed!

One other thing I would say is that you should stay away from signing up to too many ‘Guru’ sites.  They will send you product after product that ‘you must have to stay ahead of the competition’.  I am signed up to some of these and I have a chuckle at their offerings but I DO NOT buy anything.  Theres no harm in having a look, but I’ll guarantee that the site will look like 99% of the other get rich quick sites you’ve seen a million times before so please don’t fall for it!  You may even find a signup for some free information on these sites as well, but I recommend you stay away from these as well.  So who should you trust with your email address?  Well let your gut decide, if the site provides a wealth of good information for free or little cost then you’ve probably found a winner, otherwise steer clear!

Scott

Well I now have 12 lenses being featured on Squidoo and four that are work in progress, which I started last night incidentily from some quick research, that I hope to work on later today.  Its my daughters 3rd birthday today and she has lots to do so I’m thinking I might not get to do much until after 8 or 9 tonight!

Anyway I thought I would quickly talk about learning and doing.  Its great to learn as much as you can and there is a extremely large amount of information regarding internet marketing online these days, and a lot of it is ‘free’.  However its only free because its just enough to get you interested and pull you in, a bit like fishing!  With the right kind of ‘bait’ you can pull in just about any ‘fish’ you want!  At the moment I’ve read quite a bit and feel that I need to start doing more and reading what others are doing less.  Personally I think there is a time when you just need to do your own thing and not worry too much about how many webpages or PR4 or more you are going up against for a certain niche keyword!

In my mind the key at the moment is to get my sites out there and then worry about pagerank, because your site is NEVER going to rank just because you put it out there, you need to promote, promote promote and then you may start to climb the rankings!  Now when I say don’t worry about pagerank I mean don’t try to go up against 20 million other pages, but if you are going up against around 300-500k of pages then you’ll find that 90% of these barely rank for the topic, so really you’re only up against 1% of 300k which is only 3000 sites!  Of course thats on a broad search so its probably even less on a exact search.  Anyway I’ll talk about this again in my next post.

Have a good week!

So over the last couple of days I’ve been working on a couple of pages on Squidoo.  I love Squidoo (even though I haven’t made any money from it yet.. lol) as its just such a great community of people and they don’t pull any punches when it comes to reviewing your lens.

My only concern is that sometimes you just get people take a look at your post and not comment.  Now I wouldn’t care if you just said “its great” or “sorry needs more work” but something would be nice.  Even worse is people looking at your forum post and not even having the decency to look at your page for 30 seconds.

I can say honestly when I take a look at a forum post I take a look at their lens, no matter how brief and if I like it I’ll rate it as well.  With this in mind I created a lens about Star Trek Online, the MMO RPG game coming out hopefully next year, because it interested me and I’m excited for it to be released (or even better to get to Beta test it!).  I placed a critique me post of the Squid-U forum, however I’ve not had one comment and over a few views.  I’m going to post it again in the hope that I get some feedback or at least a click-through to my page but I won’t hold my breath.

Maybe there just aren’t enough Star Trek fans out there as I thought?  I’ll try posting some camouflage links in some other forums to see how it goes.  I’ve also written a post about the new PSP Go, Sony’s new hand-held system, which has had a few views now; however Squidoo reckons it is still work in progress even though its already got one 5 star rating?!?

I’ll let you know how it goes later!!

To see the PSP Go Lens Click Here!

To see the Star Trek Online Lens Click Here!

Squid-Boy

So I feel like I’m in research overload with the amount of ‘free’ information there seems to be on sites that talk about making money with Squidoo, blogs, and affiliate products!  There really is a thing as too much free information for your blog judging by all the blogs and lenses out there talking about it.  Today I found a blog that was talking about the ’slimey’ SEO marketeers that are using Squidoo as a launchpad for their sites to make money.  Now I don’t consider myself ’slimey’ or an internet guru in any respect, but I do feel that I am trying to provide important information to people who want to read it and if I make some money on the side then that also motivates me to write more Squidoo Lenses/Blogs that are informative and useful!

I’ve also found so many ways of doing your keyword research that I’m starting to think that there ISN’T a real way of researching except the way you want to research.  At the end of the day if you want to talk about ‘Sightings of Bigfoot‘ and sign up for the Clickbank product ‘How to find a Bigfoot in your backyard‘ then do it because there will always be somebody out there who is looking for that information.  It may not make you a million bucks, or even a thousand bucks, in fact it may only just cover the costs of your hosting plan, but at least you’re out there and if you make 50 blogs that are related to your first about Big foot then its more likely that you’ll get that little bit closer to your goal of making a living from IM.

Now I do agree that there are some SEO slime balls out there that are only in this for the money.  Personally I’d be happy if this IM lark makes me some money so I can spend it on my kids for Christmas presents!!!  Seeing as most sites I’ve read seem to say that to make any money in this business takes anywhere between four months and a year it looks like this Christmas will have to wait!!

Remember, too much information can be bad for your blog!

Have a good one!

Scott

So its been a few days now and I can honestly say this feels a lot like work.. lol!  Lets be fair though, I’ve read plenty of blogs and sites that claim that everything is ‘turnkey’ or ‘automated’ but I believe that to make decent money from this then you’ll need to work hard for at least the first week for EACH niche site that is created.  After that it should just be a question of going back about once a week to check on stats and maybe tweak some things to make your niche site more findable/profitable.

On that note I can also tell you I’ve made $0 right now.  I still have a lot of work to do on my sites, including promotion to sites like Digg, Facebook, StumbleUpon and Twitter, etc.  Once I’ve done that then I’ll sit back for a week or so before taking a look at the site to see how its doing.  The site that I’ve just finished working on for the moment is all about Halloween Decoration’s.  I figure this site will only be popular around this time of year (October) for obvious reasons.  I’ll let you know how that one goes in a future post!

Squid-Boy

So today is the first day of my Internet Marketeer career!  I’ve already created several Squidoo pages which I hope to link to several blogs which I’ve also created.  Its amazing that I’m now actually doing this and its not just a pipe dream anymore!

So the next thing after finishing this post is to continue reading PotPieGirls Six Step Niche Site System and implement her next steps for all my blogs, which will first mean writing content for 4 other blog sites once setting them up with the necessary themes and plug-ins!  I also need to create some content for one of my new Squidoo pages which will also link to one of the blog pages that I have to create… phew…

So I’m going to leave this post here as I don’t have much more to say about becoming an (in training) Internet Marketer!

Till next time!

Scott