Niche Marketing Tools That Work for Me
During the early days of this blog I vowed to not promote anything to my readers that I don’t personally use myself and I have stuck with that for the most part.
Over the past 4 months or so I have been testing a number of different tools and a few have actually exceeded my expectations. I will write extensive reviews on each tools when I get time but for the time being I will share with you the tools that are in fact working for me.
NicheBOT v 2.0 - I have used a number of keyword tools including Wordtracker, Keyword Elite & Adwords Analyzer and they all had their pros and cons but none of them felt quiet right. I decided to give NicheBot a try back in November and am happy to report I am still a very happy member.  The price of $14 / month cannot be beaten. It allows you to access Word Tracker ($59 / month), Keyword Discovery (normally $50+/month), Overture (which sucks) and way more than I can post here tonight. It is the by far, the absolute best keyword tool I have used.
3WayLinks - I really debated on joining this one. Back when I was first learning about Niche Marketing I tried a automatic link builder (reciprocal links) and had no luck at all with it. After reading some decent reviews of it I decided to give it a try. I installed it on a brand new site (new domain, fresh unique content) in November and am blown away by the results. The site went from PR0 to PR3 in less than two months and is currently ranked in the top 10 for my 3 main keywords. I know that 3WayLinks is directly responsible for this because I they only other promotion tactic I used for this site was the submission of 2 articles to Ezine Articles. 3WayLinks also helped me improve the rankings of this blog, which by the way is now ranked #1 for “Niche Marketing Guide”.  This is most definitely my purchase of the year.
Mony Tree & Build A Niche Store - I grouped these two together because they serve the same purpose, building sites monetized via eBay. I have been a member of Mony Tree for about 2 months now and have owned BANS for about 5. I have had great experiences with both but I prefer Mony Tree due to simplicity. I also believe my Mony Tree sites gain ranking and traffic at a quicker pace then my BANS site. The main reason I prefer Mony Tree is because after completing the keyword research (which of course is critical) I can have a new site up in less than 15 minutes and a very nice custom, 100% unique header within 48 hours (for only $10). This allows me to spend less time worrying about how it looks and more time adding content and promoting. Of course I also install 3WayLinks on all of these sites as well and so far it all seems to work wonderfully together.
I also tried a handful of tools that didn’t really work well for me. These include HyperVRE, Extreme Google Pages Bomber (don’t ask) and I think that is about it.
Let me know if you have any specific questions about any of the above tools.
Regards,
Chris
Earnings Update
Toward the end of 2007 my AdSense earnings had plummeted to around $50-60 / month. I guess this is partly to be expected because I really worked on my old sites much at all. In November I started the 6 months to $100k income challenge (which I have discussed before) and I am now starting to see things pay off. My daily average is between $3-4 I should make $120 or so from Google this month. I know that is horrible, but traffic and earnings are increasing daily. This month I am at $67 from Google, $10 from Commission Junction (brand new site so I am thrilled about this) & $27 from Clickbank (bum marketing sale for work I did over a year ago).
Also, I finally feel that I have a firm grasp on what it takes to succeed with Internet Marketing and my increased focus on just doing one thing is allowing me to reach my goals faster. In January I put up 4 new sites, each with at least 10 pages of 100% unique content, each targeting high search volume keywords with fairly low competition. All 4 of the sites have the primary keyword in the domain name. From experience, this is a definite SEO advantage. I know there are many different views on this issue, but it works for me. Each of these sites is in the 3WayLinks network, which has completely exceeded my expectations (more about this when I get around to writing an official review of the service). I have also submitted at least 2 unique articles for each of these sites to Ezine articles and created a Squidoo lense for each site. Three out of the four sites are monetized via AdSense & eBay and the other is monetized with a CPA offer from Copeac and Adsense. Gone are the days where I put up new sites that are only monetized via AdSense.
For the sites I create around eBay items I use Mony-Tree which is absolutely awesome. I will continue to use Mony Tree for all eBay related sites. I am struggling on whether or not I should use Wordpress or html to create my other Niche sites. I know there are pros and cons of each but I just can’t decide which to use.
I recently revamped my Australian Shepherd Site, and as you can see I used wordpress for it. I also revamped my best performing site on Information on Homeschooling , which as you see uses straight HTML. In case you were curious about Mony Tree, here is one of my first sites created with it focusing on Cheap DJ Equipment.
That is all for now. Enjoy the long weekend!
Regards,
Chris
New Milestone - Keyword Ranking
I just realized something pretty cool tonight.
My blog is ranked #5 on Google for the term “Niche Marketing Blog”! I am very pleased with these results. Warrior Special Offers (WSO’s) have been created for less achievements than this 
Also, the traffic to my first $10/day site is picking up each day. I now average over 30 uniques per day and the ranking is increasing weekly.
I am extremely happy with my progress over these first 2 months of 2008. I am going to followup this post with my goals for 2008. I set them in early January, I just never got around to posting them here.
Regards,
Chris
Update & Free Stuff
Free stuff first. Jeremey Palmer, the author of the great eBook Quit Your Dayjob has released the 2007 version of his eBook for free. You can get it here. The download does require you to opt-in, but this ebook is worth it, especially if you’re new to affiliate marketing.
I use a variety of different tools to assist me with my SEO efforts. I recently found a free service called SEODigger that makes the task of determining where your site ranks for keywords an absolute breeze. The unique aspect of this site is that all you have to do is put in the domain name and it will tell you all the keywords you rank for. This is pretty slick because you’ll often find you’re ranking for some obscure keyword that you had no intention of ranking for. One of my sites is ranking for a strange, but related keyword and come to find out other variations of that keyword have quiet a few searches per day. So, I promptly put up a couple of new pages targeting these keywords.
Splork, from Lost Ball in High Weeds had a great post yesterday on Using Blogger Blogs to Help You Build Niche Sites.
Be sure and check it out. In the post he refers to the the blog How to Make Money Online with Grizzly, which is a great addition to my blogroll. Grizzly specializes in making money with free blogs.
I will post the update later, I need to run right now.
Chris
New Site Indexed & More..
The new site, referred to here, has been indexed by Google today (3rd day, 3 pages indexed). The crazy thing is I still have another niche site that is about 9 days old and it still isn’t indexed. I will never understand how random the indexing process seems.
I am happy this one indexed fast though and believe it or not I received some traffic from Google today for a longtail keyword. That is a good start if you ask me. My articles aren’t even up yet. According to the stats one of the visitors that came from Google stayed at the site for 29 minutes. That is also very encouraging. I also had two clicks on eBay auctions, with no registrations yet. Still, a good start.
In other news, I registered a new domain for my next niche site which is created in the same method as my first $10+ / day site (all using JD’s methods). The primary keyword for this new niche has 21,000 competing pages and is searched for 185 times per day. I have gathered 9 additional keyword all searched for over 50 times a day with less than 20,000 competing pages. In edition to these keywords, this niche 100’s of branded keywords (i.e. If the niche were guitars, Gibson Hummingbird). Therefore I should be able to continue to add new pages to this site and target an almost unlimited number of longtail keywords. All of these items are bought daily on eBay and have popped up on http://pulse.ebay.com on a daily basis. My prediction and my hope are that these two sites are going to push me over the $20/day mark.
Finally, I recently downloaded the free version of G Lock Fast Blog Finder and think it is pretty darn good for being free. For those of you who don’t know it finds blogs (that don’t use the no-follow tag) based the keyword you’re targeting and lists them by Page Rank. It saves all your keywords as projects and keeps track of when you posted comments. It also spell checks your comments for you and allows you to social bookmark the post. Pretty awesome.
~Chris
Created my First $10/day Site this Weekend
This weekend I bought a brand new domain for a site in a brand new niche (to me) and put up a site in about an hour (following JD’s plan, with some slight modifications). I so confident in the niche/keywords that I have every reason to believe it will become my first $10+/day site (about time!).Â
Lets look at the details (vague, but I need to protect the niche).
Primary Keyword
- The primary keyword has less than 12,000 compeiting pages in Google
- The primary keyword is searched for 1,000+ times per day via Wordtracker
- The primary keyword and the domain name are one and the same!
Secondary Keywords
- All have very low competition (less than 20,000 pages)
- Others searched for as much as 800 times per day
Monetization
- Primary monetization will be from the eBay affiliate program ($25 per registration, plus commissions from won auctions). The niche has 1,000’s of items listed on eBay with completed auctions, so we know these people are buying. Prices for the items in eBay range from $1 to $1,400.
- Google AdSense - 2 strategic placements
Other
- 10 Unique Articles currently being ghost written
- Extensive Social Marketing campaign
- Manual directory submission to 200 directories (PR 4 - PR8)
- 4 of the Unique articles are going to have two variations, which will be submitted to Ezine Articles and Article Dashboard.
Goals
- Indexed by 1/27/08 - Hopefully before, no telling really as it appears to happen randomly for my sites (14 hours to 2 weeks)
- Ranked #1 for the primary keyword by the end of February - This alone should generate 500+ unique visitors per day at a minimum
- Earning $5 - $10 / day by April
That is about it. I think that I have hit the jackpot with this niche/keyword combination and really think this one will be bigger than all my others (current best site is $3-4 per day).
I post updates for this site periodically. Wish me the best!
Regards,
Chris
Finding a Ghost Writer
Since starting JD’s 6 month challenge I have been trying to find a high quality ghost writer to write articles for me at a reasonable price. This task took me to eLance, to the Digital Point Forum, and to the Warrior forum. Since November I have utilized 3 different ghost writers and I received 3 entirely different experiences. The ghost writer I found on the Digital Point forum charged $4 for 400-500 word articles. Pretty cheap. I ordered 1 article to make sure the quality was up to my standards and I am glad I did… The article was terrible. To the authors credit, it did pass copyscape, but it appeared to be written by a 5th grader. I re-wrote it and submitted it to Ezine Articles to boost the marketing efforts of one of my sites. Lesson learned: You really do get what you pay for.
I came to the conclusion that I needed to bite the bullet and pay a little more to insure that my site has some “sticking power” and to actually provide quality content to the visitors of my sites (what a novel concept). Fortunately, my next experience with a ghost writer was an absolute joy. Thankfully, I discovered Annette Jensen from http://jensenwriting.com/ and from this point on she will be my ghost writer. She showed extreme professionalism, met the deadline and provided articles of even a higher quality that I would write myself… I could not be happier & by all means if you are looking for a quality, consistent ghost writer you should certainly go with Annette Jensen. She is worth every penny.
Chris
*The other writer was decent (not nearly as good as Annette), and missed my deadline by over a week.
PPC & CPA Offers
When I first started working in Internet Marketing I briefly dabbled in Pay Per Click via Google Adwords. I logged onto Clickbank, found a non-internet marketing product with a decent gravity, gathered a list of keywords and setup my first campaign. Believe it or not I ended up making about $40 from my first campaign and for one reason or another I stopped running the campaign (I was cash strapped at the time and didn’t have the funds to fund the campaign).
Anyway, the one thing the largest internet marketing blogs have in common is the income source of the authors. Almost everyone uses PPC & CPA (Cost Per Action) offers. Making $50,000+ per month from PPC and CPA offers is not uncommon. Now before I get into the gist of this post, it is important to note that niche marketing and implementing the tactics learned in JD’s $100K challenge will continue to remain my primary focus (currently have 4 niche sites up and am working on the next one). I spent too much time in 2007 going from one thing to another with no real focus. I am not going to let that happen this year.
With that said, I am eager to learn as much as I can learn about PPC & CPA offers in general. If these bloggers can profit as much as their profiting, there is no reason I can’t at least earn enough to pay my mortgage (which is one of my main short-term goals). The obvious beauty of PPC is that the income is pretty immediate and it doesn’t take months to ramp up as it does building Niche sites focusing on AdSense or Affiliate offers.
My first step in this process is to go ahead and register for a handful of CPA Affiliate companies. I have been told that they do not accept everyone and that the registration process can be long and cumbersome. Great. So, today I am going to register to the top 2 or 3 and cross my fingers.
Wish me luck.
Chris
Update on my Best Site
I have a content site that is about a year old and is consistently my best performing site. One of the keywords I am targeting has 130,000 competing pages and I am now ranked 10th! The site has about 10 content pages at this time and I rank in the top 30 for all of the keywords I am targeting, except 2.
As my rankings increase, my income from the site increases. That is precisely why I have decided to learn absolutely everything I can about Search Engine Optimization.
Chris
Chattanooga Internet Marketing
About a month ago I met another fellow Internet Marketer that lives in the Chattanooga, TN area. We have enjoyed sharing ideas and may work on a couple of projects together in the future.
I know there must be other people in the Chattanooga area that are involved in Internet Marketing. If you live in or around Chattanooga Contact Me if you’re interested in chatting.
