A completely FREE guide to developing small niche sites using the WordPress platform. Learn how to setup and administer your site, super-easy monetization strategies and a lot more.
In September 2007 I quit my day job in order to follow my dreams of becoming an Internet entrepreneur.
This blog is my record of that journey. My aim is to learn how to make a living online and transfer that knowledge
to others through this blog.
It’s been a while since I last updated my WordPress ebook but I’ve had additional feedback since then so it was time for another version. Most of the new material involves the use of the Blogroll for managing links. I may also have added another couple of affiliate links ;-)
Also, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Linda from http://www.ecoversource.com/ who very kindly designed a lovely new cover for me. Click on it to download the new revision 1.4:
It’s the End of the Month
Gosh where the h*** did February go? I feel like I haven’t done very much work in February but I certainly made some money! Full details will be revealed in tomorrows stats post so look out for that.
Also, if you’d like to take out an ad on my blog for the month of March I have several 125×125 sidebar spots available. They cost $100 each but if you contact me before the end of the weekend (UK time) you can have the ad for $90.
Google AdSense has to be one of the easiest way to get started making money online. It takes just minutes to setup an account and monetize a website. We know there is real money to be made - have a look at this famous image of ShoeMoney with his $132k AdSense check! However the sad fact is that the vast majority of people who sign up for AdSense never even make enough to reach the minimum payout!
The AdSense Coaching Program
As I mentioned in yesterday’s podcast, a brand new coaching program called AdSense Profit Tips launches today. This is a 12 month coaching program and is structured in a similar fashion to Yaro Starak’s Blog Mastermind. Lessons are delivered weekly and each lesson builds upon the last in a step-by-step fashion. To help keep you focused on results, each lesson has action steps for you to follow to ensure your success. Furthermore, most of the lessons have additional bonus materials such as video tutorials and PDF reports.
The program is provided by Codrut Turcanu and you may recognise his name from his previous coaching program, the $300 Affiliate Challenge. This launched a few months back and unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to work through it as I was going through a rough patch in my personal life at the time. However, I did watch most of the video tutorials and I really liked Codrut’s teaching style - he is very direct. There is no waffle and he shows you *exactly* what to do at every step.
What You Will Learn
Now you could just go read the sales page but let me condense things down a little bit for you! I have a bit of insider information as I’ve been chatting to Codrut about the course for a while now. Here are some of the highlights:
How you can get started and make money on day 1
Avoiding the most common AdSense mistakes
How to put your AdSense business on auto-pilot
Many ways for boosting your click through rate (CTR)
How to gain an advantage over 95% of your competitors
Viral traffic building techniques (that work for any site)
AdSense works by matching its ads with the content on your page. Different ads cost more to the advertiser and thus pay more to you therefore choice of niche is of utmost importance if you really want to maximise your earnings with AdSense. Codrut helps you out here by starting you off with 50 profitable niches to give you some ideas.
Codrut likes to make sure that anybody can follow along with his teachings so another thing that he does is provide templates for you to fill in whenever he is covering technical material so you won’t need to know any HTML or other techy stuff.
Codrut has also produced a comprehensive FAQ page which I found quite interesting.
How Much Does This Cost?
There are three levels of access with the basic one starting at $49.95 per month. I’ve copied the table from the sales page that shows each level and what is provided with each one:
Benefits
Platinum
Gold
Silver
Full Access to the entire 52-Week Training Program
AdSense Related Product Discounts
Limited E-mail Support (One E-mail Question Per Week)
There is of course an affiliate program and this pays out 30% commissions. I would have preferred 50% but there you go :-) Note that the affiliate program is open to customers only. One of the nice things about promoting this kind of program is that it pays out recurring commissions for every month that a buyer stays in the program - just like Blog Mastermind.
In January I made $140 from Blog Mastermind when I hadn’t promoted it that month (it closed to new members in December) - I had totally forgotten that the commissions are recurring. Membership sites / courses are definitely worth promoting as an affiliate.
My Niche Site Project
As well as being great for affiliates, membership sites or structured courses are great for customers too because they take you through a process step-by-step showing you exactly what to do along the way. I get distracted so easily that I love the structure that comes from these things. I’m now a member of 4! Here is how I intend to use my AdSense Profit Tips membership:
One of the new projects that I am going to start will be a niche site project. AdSense can be applied to just about any site but I have never felt that it would be a good fit for this blog so I’d like to create at least one niche site that is primarily monetized with AdSense.
As well as Codrut’s AdSense coaching program, I have also joined one from Dr Mani called Fast Niche Profits, which as I suspected is now closed to new members. So my plan is to use Dr Mani’s information to help me build some good niche sites and Codrut’s information to help me make the most of the monetization aspect. I’ll be launching the project in a week or two once I’ve got started with the material in both programs.
It’s time for another podcast! At the weekend I moved house and now have somewhere permanent to live so life should become a little more settled for me now. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I want to do with my work time and how I want to focus on building assets and spend less time on unimportant tasks.
In this podcast I talk a little more about how easy it is to waste time and I discuss all of the projects that I have coming up in my foreseeable future.
Click the play button to begin streaming the audio (9 minutes)
Or click the link below to download the MP3 file: (8.5Mb)
Oh near the end of the Podcast I get a date wrong - I say that tomorrow is the 28th but now I realise that it’s actually the 27th tomorrow, doh! Couldn’t be bothered to record it all again!
… and it’s not one of those dreaded long-form sales letters, and yes it IS in the Internet Marketing niche! Sometimes I feel like a broken record when I continually bash the typical sales letters used by most online marketers but today I found an example of a sales page that I thought was really effective and not at all sleazy so I wanted to share it with you.
The Product is BANS
BANS stands for Build a Niche Store and I’m somewhat embarrassed to say that although I had heard of it before, I didn’t really know what it was and in particular, I had no idea that it had anything to do with eBay.
This morning I decided to get to work on the next stage of my eBook project which involves creating an eBay auction for it but because I have this desire to get everything right first time, I started out reading up on eBay selling in general. I soon noticed that eBay had changed a lot since I used it last and that there is a lot more to it these days so I decided to look for an ebook or something that would teach me more about it.
I fired up the ClickBank marketplace and had a look. One of the first things I saw was BANS and wondered what on earth that had to do with eBay. Anyway this post isn’t about BANS, it’s about the sales page.
Dissecting the Sales Page
The first thing I noticed is that I found myself reading the whole page and its only once I got to the bottom that I noticed that I’d read it all with interest and that’s what inspired me to write this post. I’ll highlight exactly what I think is good about this sales pitch:
It Gets To The Point
If you go to the sales page for BANS you’ll see that is starts out by telling you exactly what the product is on the very first sentence. I don’t know how many sales letters I’ve seen that waffle on and on about how great their product is and rave about the oodles of money you’ll make but forget to mention what their product actually teaches you.
As you continue down the page it unfolds the method in more detail showing a very clear 5-step method which is ideal for somebody like me who wants to know exactly what the product does but without the usual hype.
It’s Attractive!
Most sales letters are pig ugly! Some are better than others but many of them use really awful colour schemes and fonts that are simply hard to read. This is a proper web page that is easy on the eye, makes excellent use of graphics to enhance the copy and lays out the text in clear sections.
There’s No False Promises
What irritates me about a lot of products in the IM niche is that they make really overblown promises about how much money can be made using their product and then right at the bottom of the page in a 6 point font will be a tiny little link called ‘Earnings Disclaimer’ in which they take back everything the sales letter said and tell you that in actual fact they can’t promise that you’ll earn any money at all!
This sales page doesn’t even talk about how much money you can make. Instead it focuses on telling you exactly what the product does and leaves it to you to do the number crunching. I really like this approach as it doesn’t patronise.
It Doesn’t Over Sell
At the bottom of the page is a nice big graphic asking you to purchase but it is kept simple. The makers of this product don’t feel the need to fill up a further three screens of copy trying to shove silly bonuses down your throat.
The only criticism that I have here is that the cost of the product ($97) is not shown on this page - you have to click the purchase button to find out what it is. I much prefer to just see the cost up front.
All the Information You Need is There
One of the main arguments in favor of the long-form sales letter is that it needs to be long in order to answer every possible question that the potential buyer may have. Now I do agree that the information should be made available but I don’t see why it needs to be on a single page.
The BANS website has a nice row of clear buttons at the top with loads more information for those who want it. These include:
More information about how money is made with BANS
An in-depth look at the features of the product
A showcase of existing stores that have been built with BANS
Reviews, both in the form of customer testimonials and web reviews
Frequently Asked Questions
A support section
Am I Buying BANS?
Short answer: no.
I’m really intreagued by the product but at this time its not for me. I have two ideas for things I want to do with eBay - one is to promote my eBook by creating a 1c auction for it and the other is to sell another product that I produced a few years ago. I’m going to create a project for this soon as I can think of lots of aspects of eBay selling that I want to investigate - more than I could cover in a single blog post.
Also, to use BANS effectively you need to develop the store as you would any other website. You can’t just build it and then do nothing or you won’t get any traffic. Really, BANS is a way of building a site based around an alternative monetization model to say AdSense. Getting traffic to the site will be a similar process for a BANS site or any other niche type site and that of course takes significant time and effort.
AdSense Coaching Program Launching Wednesday
This is probably a good time to mention that on Wednesday there is a rather cool AdSense coaching program being launched that I will be joining. I don’t know all the details of the course yet but my hope is to use it to help me sucessfully monetize a niche site that I’ll be building using WordPress.
In a recent post I talked about building assets for your Internet business and mentioned that I’d had very little success with niche sites so far as far as actually earning money from them goes. This is something I really want to change. AdSense and the eBay Affiliate program don’t really mix so I wouldn’t want to try building a BANS store at the same time as trying to monetize with AdSense which is why I’m not planning on buying BANS any time soon.
I’m really keen on learning more about AdSense because it can be used to monetize just about any website so its something that should be of interest to anybody. Seriously I think one of the easiest ways to get started making money online is to setup with a small niche site or a blog, and slap some AdSense ads on it. They always say the first dollar is the hardest and that was certainly true for me. Using AdSense makes it a little easier to get that first dollar.
More details will be coming on Wednesday and make sure you look out for it because there is a strong possibility of an early bird discount for those who join on the first day.
I’ve had a funny week - at first I thought I was going to have virtually the whole week to work solidly but it didn’t pan out that way and didn’t get much done at all so I’ve fallen a little behind with my blog reading again but I’ve found a new cool links for you today:
The Bloggers Guide to SEO - Once you’ve download and read Josh Spaulding’s excellent free ebook on SEO, check out this guide by Aaron Wall (the king of SEO) which is a cut down version of his ebook directed purely at bloggers.
If Long Sales Pages Work, Why Do You Hate Them So Much? - Ahhh long, form sales letters - oh how I love to bash them! Yaro Starak is somebody who I admire within the IM world but he does like to use these long sales letters and explains why in this post.
The StumbleUpon Graveyard - an interesting and technical post from Tim Nash of the Venture Skills blog that explains some little quirks within the StumbleUpon system that can cause a page not to be registered properly and thus not generate traffic. Make sure you don’t make the mistakes explained in here.
Email Marketing: Don’t Spam, Know Your Audience - As I prepare to start developing a Newsletter for this blog, I find myself reading more about email marketing to make sure I get it right and don’t end up hating myself. Some good advice here from one of my readers, Ian Denny.
How to Really Make Money with Domain Names - I found two good posts in my comments this week. This one comes from Shane from AskShane.org. I’ve never had much success making money with domain names (something I dabbed with a few years back) and in this post Shane explains the proper way to do it.
