A few days ago I posted my very first Niche Site Duel update.  For those of you that missed that one,  I’m participating in the Niche Site Duel along with Pat Flynn at the Smart Passive Income Blog and Tyrone TyroneShum.com from . The point of the duel is to try and create a profitable niche website in plain view of our readers so that you can see the different techniques that are used.

You’ll recall that Pat is taking an organic SEO approach where he is trying to convert visitors to sales directly from copy. At least that is my short version of his approach.  Tyrone, on the other hand, is taking an organic SEO approach where he is trying to capture leads to a list and will convert them later with copy. They have both agreed not to buy traffic.  I am not buying traffic either, and I’m taking an approach more like Pat

In my case I’m outsourcing everything I possibly can.

In the last article I described all of the procedures that I went through to select a niche, find an affiliate offer, and get a website up and running. I used a quick and dirty approach. I didn’t spend a lot of time doing keyword research and I used as much rewritten PLR as possible so I could get the site up and running as quickly as I could. I strongly prefer using Pat’s method of careful thought and original content (Pat is THE man), but the point of this approach is to see what can be accomplished with outsourcing and a minimum amount of personal effort.

Now that the website is up and running my next task is to think about finishing out the build of the site so that I can turn my attention to task three, which will involve promoting the site.

Four Phases Of Niche Site Creation

It’s worth mentioning here that when I create a niche site I think of it in four phases. Phase number one, which we’ve already completed, is identifying the niche, the domain, the keywords that I plan to target, affiliate offers and so forth. Basically, I’m getting a niche strategy defined in my mind. In Phase two, I create the site and a bunch of info structure around the site, and that’s what I’ll describe in this post.

In Phase three I do kick off promotions for the site where I use various techniques to get up and running from a traffic perspective. We’ll be talking about that in the next post. Phase four is simply an ongoing phase that involves ongoing and continuous promotion of the site until the site is either running itself or I decide that the site is not going to be profitable and it’s not worth further effort.

The Phase Two Plan

So, for phase two of setting up this site I’ll take on several tasks, all of which will be completely outsourced. Task number one is identification of ten keywords that I want to use on the site and in the promotion of the site. I usually start with five keywords that I want the site to rank for and five keywords that I want to use in article marketing. The criteria for the five keywords that I promote on the site are simple. They need to be keywords that I want people to find in the search engine that I believe will convert to sales.

Now, we’ve already talked about the fact that “learn guitar basics” is the primary keyword for the site. It’s in the URL and it’s the main keyword that I want to try and work for. We’ve talked about the fact that I want to rank for “Guitar Tricks review” because Guitar Tricks is the main affiliate promotion that I want to go after. I’ll look for a couple of other keywords that are related to “guitar basics” and “Guitar Tricks” until I get a set of five.  Five simple keyword phrases.  Then I’ll create five pages where people can land.  Bottom line is that I want five pages to rank in the search engines -- one each for my five keyword terms.

Some Early Success

As I mentioned on twitter, we are already ranking for our primary keyword phrase.  Now, understand that this is quite likely to change over time, and our site may even disappear for a while.  I never worry when that happens, because in my experience, the site always comes back.  But at the moment, we are ranked 17th on Google for the main site keyword "learn guitar basics" (without quotes).

I'll bet you are wondering what the keywords are.  I used to get so sick of people that would never reveal what they were actually doing.  Well, here they are.  This is a screenshot from my "site spreadsheet" for the learn guitar basics site (I call it the LGB site).  I use the sheet to control some automation, and to communicate with virtual assistants.

Now, “learn guitar basics” of course will be the home page, but the other four pages (based on kw02 - kw05) will be stand alone pages on the site that are designed specifically to collect search engine traffic for those other four keyword terms. I’ll outsource the creation of all five of those articles. I’ll also find five keywords that I think are related to guitar enthusiasts that are looking to buy a subscription at Guitar Tricks that are low competition long tail keywords. By this I mean I’m looking for keywords that I think I can win easily, because I’m going to use them for article marketing.   My quick and dirty selection of article marketing keywords are shown in kw06-kw10.  I am not to worried about these -- because I can always add more articles later.  That writing is outsourced as well.

Niche Work Details

So, to be clear -- What’s I’ll do this week is outsource the creation of five articles against keywords that are relatively low traffic and therefore low competition and I’ll try to get my articles published in Ezine Articles and ranking for those terms. The reason we go after low competition articles in this case is because a lot of times article sites like EzineArticles.com are plenty powerful enough to go straight to the top for those long tail keywords that you find at the bottom of the keyword list produced by tools like Micro Niche Finder and Market Samurai.

I’ll also start building out the site with eBay and Amazon store pages that I think might be relevant. For example, I know people look for used guitars online and I know people buy guitar stuff from Amazon, so I’ll have my VA look around Amazon and create some pages on the website to fill out the content. Now, this simply has the effect of making the website more multidimensional. I’ve got content, I’ve got affiliate offers, and I’ve got Amazon and eBay pages that add additional content to the website and just make it a more rich experience for the user.

Hear me now:  If you want to be successful in internet business, you need to do things (and build sites) that make the internet a better place.   That is the best advice I can give you, and it is a phrase that I stole from Nicole Dean.  If you are not adding value for your visitors, you cannot be successful in the long term.

In order to add those pages I’ll use a popular plugin known as PHPbay. There’s also a related plugin called PHPzon. PHPbay is used for eBay stores and I’ve talked a lot about it on MasonWorld.com over the last couple years. PHPzon is the same thing, but targeted at Amazon. In both of these cases stores are automatically added to the site using keywords that you choose, they’re dynamically updated, and the URLs that are created for those store pages inside your site are masked in such a way that it makes it harder for Google to tell that they’re just Amazon and eBay store pages.

As a side note, we do this URL cloaking because there was a time when Google took an aggressive stance against what they called thin affiliate sites that were basically just redressing Amazon pages and putting them on your domain. We don’t want to leave Google with the impression that we’re just a think affiliate site even if we really are just a thin affiliate site.

Many Niche Site Tasks Remain

Other site building tasks will include the creation of a Twitter ID specific to the guitar niche, hopefully something that involves some of the keywords that we’re targeting, like “guitar basics,” creation of article marketing accounts on the various article marketing directories that we intend to promote to under pseudonyms that are appropriate for our niche. We’ll also set up specific email addresses for the site, like support@learn guitar basics dot net, and help@ learn guitar basics dot net, so we can use those on the site for the contact and about pages and so forth.

Finally, we’ll have the virtual assistant add privacy and disclosure pages and all those other kind of pages as well. Once all this is done I’ll have a working site with an autoresponder set up so I can capture leads, an affiliate offer up and running so that I can make sales, and lots of content so that I can get indexed in the search engine. I’ll also have an online store powered by eBay and Amazon where I can see if I can get some traffic converted to affiliate commissions that way.

One note on eBay and Amazon, if I am getting traffic and sales from eBay and Amazon I may not be satisfied with commissions that I end up with, that’s something that you just have to test and see. If I’m not satisfied with those commissions, but I have the traffic and sales, I can always convert those eBay and Amazon offers over to other offers at a later time. So, that’s not something to worry about upfront from my perspective.

That’s it for this update on the Niche Site Duel. My virtual assistants will be working on those tasks throughout the week and next week some time I’ll by updating up with Niche Site Update #3 where I’ll describe my kick off promotion strategies that I use, which include article marketing, link building, and some other nifty easily outsourced tricks that I think you’ll really enjoy. Until then I hope you have a very profitable week.

Best Regards,
Mark Mason

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Hello and welcome to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. I’m your host Mark Mason and this is episode 11. Thanks for coming onboard with us for this 11th episode. I want to thank Zachary, my awesome three year old, for that introduction. You give your three year old the podcasting and slice and dice with Audacity and you get a really fantastic podcast introduction. Thanks for that, Zachary, I really appreciate that.

Of course, this is night internet marketing, so Zachary is in bed, but I’m going to go ahead and continue on with a show without him. I’ve got four great things for you today. Thing number one is a new segment I’ll be introducing called Internet Marketing Motivator. It’s going to be a regular feature on the podcast where we talk about an issue of motivation as it relates to your internet business.

Secondly, today I’ll be taking the time to give a shout out to all the great people who have been leaving us fantastic reviews on iTunes. The third and the fourth thing today are related, I’ll be talking a little bit about how you don’t have to sell things to people who want to make money online to make money online, and I’m going to give you a great example of that as the fourth thing.

I’ve got an interview with Pat Flynn. Pat is a good friend of mine and webmaster over at the Smart Passive Income Blog. Even though he talks about making money online on his blog that’s not how he got started. We’re going to talk about his other internet businesses today right here on the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

I wanted to start off today by thanking all of you that have taken the time to go over to iTunes and leave a review for the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. Boy, the reviews have been fantastic and it really helps me out because the reviews are part of the system that Apple uses when deciding how to rank the podcasts. It helps people find the podcast by ranking it more highly in the search results and so forth, so I really appreciate those reviews.

If you’ve got a minute to go on over to iTunes and leave a review you can do that at MasonWorld.com/itunes and that will take you over to where you need to go. It’s a little tricky, you’ve actually got to be in the iTunes app. iTunes is a free download and if you don’t use that MP3 player I think it’s pretty cool, you might like it. You can get that Apple.com/iTunes.

Since these reviews are so valuable to me I thought what I do now and in future episodes is I’d try to call out some people who left reviews on iTunes and give a shout out, maybe call out their URL and so forth. So, if you’ve left a review for me on iTunes or if you do decide to leave a review for me on iTunes be sure and drop me a ticket at MasonWorld.com/support and let me know that you left me a review on iTunes, leave your name and your URL in that ticket, I’ll go over and take a look at the review and give you a shout out right here on the podcast, maybe send a little traffic your way just as my way to say thank you for leaving me that review in iTunes, I really do appreciate it.

We’ve had a couple of great reviews in iTunes, and one of the very first guys that left me a review in iTunes was my buddy Josh Spaulding over at EthicalIM.com and he’s had some really nice things to say about the podcast. You can check out his review over at iTunes, again that’s MasonWorld.com/itunes, and while you’re at it go check out Josh’s blog. I think you’ll like it a lot over at EthicalIM.com.

The second thing I wanted to cover tonight is a standing segment that we’re going to be adding and we’re calling it Internet Marketing Motivator. The reason that I wanted to add this segment is because I know that to be successful in online business it fundamentally takes two things.

I’ve been at this several years now and it’s pretty obvious to me that the first thing that you need to have in order to be successful in online business is enough knowledge about online business in order to be competent and successful. If you’re not competent you don’t know what you’re doing you’re not going to be successful and that’s obvious.

Most information marketers out there on the internet that are in the internet marketing niche are trying to attack that very problem. There’s tons of ebooks and audio and podcasts like this where people are trying to teach you about internet marketing. So, that’s thing one and obviously there’s a glut of information out there about internet marketing.

The second thing that you need, I think, is a proper mindset in order to be successful with internet marketing. You’ve got to have the proper motivation to see it through. Most of the people that I’ve seen fail at internet marketing failed because they quit too soon and because they lacked the proper motivation to really get things done to be successful. So, that’s something I want to address in each and every episode of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.
Now, the first thing we’re going to talk about, the very first motivational tip that I have for you with regard to your internet business is simply that you need to set goals. I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say, “Mark, I know this. Everyone tells me that you need to set goals and they tell me that you need to write them down and so forth.”

Well, there’s a couple of things that I want to tell you about your internet marketing goals that I think will really help you. The first thing I want to tell you is your goals need to be reasonable, it’s very important. I told you just a second ago that most people I know that have failed in internet business failed because they quit too soon. The corollary to that is one of the reasons that they quit too soon is because they were expecting results too quickly.

So many of the headlines that people read out there talk about how you can make 27,000 dollars next week using this magic formula or you can be making money with this technique in a week or you can be killing it with Adwords in 47 minutes or whatever it is. The truth of the matter is building a real internet business that adds value to customers and creates value for you in the form of profit takes awhile.

So, you need to have goals that recognize the fact that it’s not going to happen overnight. Now, it’s certainly possible that you will put up a web page and become rich overnight and I hope that happens for you, that sounds fantastic. But, the reality is that it’s going to take you some time and some work and so your goals need to reflect that. So, my first recommendation is that you have realistic goals.

The second recommendation is, of course, not only that you write these goals down, but I’m going to make the very simple recommendation that you put them on a sticky note in front of your monitor. Internet marketing is one of those funny things where almost every time you’re working on it you’re in front of your computer and if you’ve got your goals in front of you and you feel that need to go check Twitter or your email for the 700th time or your Clickbank stats for the 800th time that day or your Adsense revenue stats for the 900th time that day, if you see that little PostIt note sitting there saying that, for example, you have a goal that you wanted to make three sales of your information product this month then you know that you can look at that and it will help you stay focused.

So, my second tip for you is to get that goal written down or those goals written down and put them on your monitor. Then my third tip for you regarding goals is make sure that you have some short term goals, some medium term goals, and some long term goals. Your long term goal may be that you want to make 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 dollars a month from your internet business so that you can quit your job. That’s a fantastic goal, especially if you know really what you want your business to be like and if you know why you’ve set that goal those can be fantastic goals.

But, you really need some intermediate goals. You might need to have a goal, for example, to get your first blog up, or you might need to have a shorter term goal that has to do with making 100 dollars a month online or 1,000 dollars a month online before you get to that 10,000 dollar a month goal. So, it’s really important to have short term, medium term, and long range goals.

The problem with only having a long range goal is that sometimes it can seem so far away that it can actually become a demotivator for you in your business, so you want to make sure that you have something that you’re striving for really to get done this week. Those are the best sort of near term goals. What’s your goal for this week? So that you can stay motivated and focused in your business.

So, those are my three tips regarding goals. I hope that’s helpful to you in your business and you can look forward to internet marketing specific motivational tips every week here on the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

For the last piece of the podcast today, episode 11, I wanted to address a topic that comes up periodically so you can know where I am on it and that’s this topic of whether or not it’s possible to actually make money online without resorting to the business of teaching people how to make money online.

In fact, internet marketing marketing to other marketers can be a little bit of a sleazy business. If you look online you see a lot of sales letters that are targeting people that are looking to improve their life situation, looking to make a little extra money and they’re making unfair or unfounded or unreasonable promises about how this person can solve all their life problems by just buying this ebook or whatever.

That’s fine and some of those are perfectly legitimate products, but it could lead you to ask the question, “Hey, is it really possible to make money online without selling people make money online stuff?” That’s a lot of times what you see. The answer is absolutely yes.

I think the two best business models for this are business models that we’ve discussed previously in the podcast. One business model is the business model that I like to talk about a lot and that we’ll focusing this podcast on in future episodes and that’s the business model of affiliate marketing where you provide valuable content or other kinds of helpful information to people in order to help them select a good product that’s right for them. That’s the kind of affiliate marketing that I like to do, there are certainly other kinds of affiliate marketing.

The other way you can make money online that’s an excellent business model is take some expertise that you have and package it up into an information product, either an ebook or a series of videos or an audio, and sell that product online. While you may see a lot of those in your daily internet travels that are related to internet marketing, you can make an absolute killing doing this sort of thing outside of the internet marketing niche and a lot of legitimate marketers do exactly that.

In fact, one guy that I’m very impressed with I have on the podcast today. Let me tell you a little bit about my relationship with Pat Flynn. Pat is the webmaster over at the Smart Passive Income Blog, SmartPassiveIncome.com. He’s also launched a brand new podcast that competes with this podcast actually called The Smart Passive Income Podcast. It’s an outstanding podcast, there’s plenty of room on your iPod for both of us, I recommend that you go over to iTunes and give that a listen. It’s fantastic. In fact, in episode two of that podcast you’ll find an interview with yours truly, Pat and I exchanged podcast interviews.

What you’re about to hear is an interview with Pat where he’s going to explain how he got started in internet marketing. Now, unlike a lot of people he didn’t get started in internet marketing trying to teach people how to make money online, he got started in internet marketing by selling a wildly successful information product.

He’s going to talk all about that and subsequently he started a second business, not including the SmartPassiveIncome.com brand, but he started a second business selling iPhone applications. So, there’s two great examples of ways that you can make money on the internet without having to resort to teaching people how to make money online. I think it’s a really important point.

A lot of times people will come into internet marketing and expect that they should be working on teaching people how to make money online, after all that’s the example that they have in front of them. They’ve bought a lot of ebooks and they’ve purchased all these things and they think, “Well, I’m going to create my own ebook.”
You can certainly do that, I’ve done it, that’s what this podcast is all about, that’s what the MasonWorld.com blog is about, but I will say that you may find that the competition in non-internet marketing niches is considerably less. It’s hard for me to make a recommendation to people not to pursue internet marketing, after all I’m in the internet marketing niche in addition to my other niches, so it would be disingenuous for me to tell you that you shouldn’t be in internet marketing.

Certainly it would have been crazy for me to recommend to Pat Flynn that he stay out of internet marketing, because he’s had some crazy success with the Smart Passive Income blog, he’s doing really well over there. So, I’m not recommending that you not pursue internet marketing as a niche in your internet marketing business, just understand that I think there might be a lot better opportunities for you out there depending on what kinds of things that you’re interested in.

That gets us into the interview with Pat Flynn. Let me tell you, I’ve known Pat since he lost his day job. Pat will explain in the interview how he was caught up in this kind of crazy economy thing as an architect and came out with his first information product as part of his activities in the Internet Business Mastery Academy, that’s where I met Pat. I hope you enjoy this interview. Pat is awesome, the interview is great. Without further ado we’ll get into it….

I’ve been following Pat almost since the beginning of his internet marketing career. We hooked up early in his internet marketing life on the Internet Business Mastery website. I saw him build an amazingly successful information product business right before my eyes inside the Internet Business Mastery Academy.

He then went from that to launching a successful internet marketing blog, something that is incredibly difficult to do with so many people in such a crowded niche. Then turned right around and launched a successful iPhone apps business. This has just been a hat trick, really amazing to me.
Pat, I’m really excited to have you on the podcast. How are you doing this evening?

Pat Flynn: I’m doing excellent. Thank you so much for having me on the show. I’ve been listening to your podcast and it’s just really cool to actually be on the show now, so thank you.

Mark Mason: Well, you are joining quite a distinguished list of guests that I’ve been able to coax to come on the show, so I really appreciate having you here. How are things in San Diego?

Pat Flynn: Things are good. Actually, today was a pretty crazy day. It was lie 97 degrees, so it was really hot.

Mark Mason: That sounds like Texas.

Pat Flynn: It felt like Texas, but then in the evening it started to rain, so I don’t know what’s going on.

Mark Mason: I’m glad you didn’t wash away. I saw a tweet from you that you thought maybe you were in Australia or New Zealand based on the weather.
Pat Flynn: Yes. Melbourne, Australia, one of my favorite places, just four seasons in a single day basically.

Mark Mason: There you go. So, it’s really great to have you here. One of the things that I’ve been talking about on the podcast, as you know, is trying to build people up to this idea of how you can make money on the internet, how you can build a business.

One of the questions that I get from time to time is… Is it really possible to make money on the internet some other way besides teaching people how to make money on the internet? I always laugh about that, because the businesses that I really admire on the internet are businesses that don’t have anything to do with internet marketing.

One of the best examples I could think of and one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show is your green architecture business, the place that you very first got started. I was wondering if you could just start off the interview just by giving us a little brief history about how all that happened and how that’s an example of how people who have some domain knowledge can make money with information products on the internet?

Pat Flynn: Sure, no problem. What’s funny is a lot of people ask me that same question. “Can I make money by not telling people how to make money?” I always tell them my story because it’s exactly that.

From the beginning, I went to school for architecture at the University of California Berkley, loved architecture. I graduated and got a great 9:00 to 5:00 job, I loved what I was doing. I was traveling around the U.S. meeting with high end clients, designing Hilton Hotels in Vegas and whatnot. I was just loving life.

I could see my whole life planned out, 401k, retire at 65 and enjoy life then. Then all of a sudden the whole economy thing happened and one by one everyone in our office was getting laid off and eventually it was my turn.

That was a pretty dramatic moment in my life and it was nearly impossible to get another job in the architecture field just because no one was building, there was no credit available for builders or anything like that. So, I looked for a solution.

I thought about going into another field or something related to architecture like engineering. But, I had been listening to a podcast, The Internet Business Mastery podcast, and those guys, Sterling and Jay, inspired me so much. I really always wanted to do internet business, I heard success stories and these guys just inspired me.
I was like, “That’s so awesome.” I was kind of living vicariously through what they were doing and the guests that they had on the show. My only experience doing something online at the time was a blog I created for myself.

So, what I did, this was before I got laid off, I was taking this test called The LEED exam, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, and I created this blog to keep track of my notes for me. I knew how blogs worked, content management systems, and it was really easy for me to study on the computer. When I was traveling I could just go to any computer or take my laptop and study instead of carrying around a whole notepad.

Also, I must confess that my handwriting is like chicken scratch, so that’s why I created this blog. I passed the test, all my notes were on there still, and when I just for fun checked the analytics, the website visitor statistics, thousands of people were visiting my site from around the world. I freaked out.

I freaked out at the beginning, because I was like, “Whoa. This is like an invasion of my privacy.” I didn’t know how the internet worked with keywords and Google and stuff like that, but apparently I had been writing content that was related to keywords that people were searching for related to this exam.

So, they found me, they were using my notes. I later enabled comments and people were commenting and asking questions and I would help them out. I just became this authority, this head figure in this niche, the LEED green building exam niche.

I wasn’t an expert, I didn’t think I was an expert, I still had to look up stuff all the time to give people the correct answer. But, I knew more than they did and because of that I think they trusted me. That really helped as I started to build my website and actually take it a step further.

This was after I actually passed the exam, I took it a step further and made sure that all the content on there was perfect for people who were studying for the test, because I knew exactly how hard it was. I knew the lack of resources that were available for the test at the time, so I wanted to be that resource and help people out.
That’s exactly what I did. Right before I got laid off I was helping tons and tons of people pass the exam for totally free and I never planned on making money from this website at all. Until I got laid off, then I was like, “I guess I’ll do something online. All these people I’ve heard about are making money online.”

“Let’s see if I can do anything with this blog I have. I know I have traffic and I heard that if you have traffic you can do things with it to make money.” So, naturally the first thing I did was put Adsense on my blog, a little link text and little banner ads. I think the first month after that I had made 35 to 40 dollars.

I was blown away, 40 dollars for doing nothing basically. All I did was put some code on my website and let it run and I had 40 dollars in my pocket. That just seemed amazing to me. Unfortunately, at that time that wasn’t even enough to fill a tank of gas. I was in Irvine, California at the time.

Mark Mason: Right, especially not in California.

Pat Flynn: During summer it was like five dollars a gallon. So, from there I did more research. I asked a ton of questions from different gurus, I joined Internet Business Mastery Academy, just trying to figure out everything that I could do to make more money online, because I knew it was possible, I had 40 dollars and I wanted it to be more.

So, what I did from there was I sold private advertising on my website, little 125x125 pixel ads on my sidebar of my blog. My first deal was for 50 dollars for the first month. That was amazing too. So, I had the 50 dollars from this one company for one ad and 40 dollars coming in from Adsense, so I had almost 100 dollars. That was pretty amazing to me as well.

Then from there I added more private advertising, but still it wasn’t enough for me to sustain a living. I was getting married in just a few months and I had to figure out something to do. So, what I did was I gave myself an ultimatum.

I said, “Pat, you have three months to actually make this into a sustainable business. If you don’t then you’re going to go look for another job.”

Mark Mason: Three whole months? Wow.

Pat Flynn: Three whole months, I didn’t know if that was too long or too short, I just gave myself a time and wanted to make sure I got it done in that time.
So, from there I had read about people creating their own products and I learned about ebooks and how to write them. I created a study guide for the LEED exam, totally elecrtronic, I wrote it in Microsoft Word and it was just a PDF.

That took about a month and a half, so I was half way through the time and I was really scared. I didn’t know what to expect. I would have been happy to sell one copy. Well, the first month I launched that ebook on my website, my existing blog, I made 8,000 dollars in the first month.

That was more money than I’d ever seen in two or three months of work at my normal job, way more than that. That just blew my mind. I knew it was possible, so I took it a step further and I created an audio guide to go along with it.

Again, these are just tips and tricks from internet marketing friends that told me, “You should do this. Check out this guy who did this.” So, I’m just following people’s examples. I created an audio guide to go along with the ebook, so I had two products, an ebook and an audio guide.

I sold them together for a discount price. After I launched the audio guide, that month I think I made 20,000 dollars and I peeked in March of 2009 with making 30,000 dollars in one single month just from one product, one study guide. 30,000 dollars, I couldn’t believe it, I pinched myself.

I still pinch myself because I can’t believe it happened. But, now that I’m into internet marketing and in business I know exactly why that happened and that’s why I created the Smart Passive Income blog, because I want to show people that it is possible to make money online without having to tell people how to make money online.
I’m sure most of your listeners have never heard of the LEED exam before, it’s such a small tiny little niche in the corner of the world, but just selling an ebook for it gave me half my salary working as an architect in one month.

Mark Mason: I work at a company in my day job that has a LEED certified building and I had never heard of LEED before, so there you go. It’s a pretty obscure niche to be making 30,000 dollars in one month.

That’s just an amazing story and I remember it like it was yesterday, because I was there. All of this was happening inside the Academy essentially. It’s just shocking.

Pat Flynn: Lots of credit goes to the Academy. They helped me out a lot, you helped me out, and Sterling and Jay and everyone else in there. There’s a lot of people in the Academy too who also make a good living not talking about making money online.

Mark Mason: Yes.

Pat Flynn: Shawn Newnann I think he has a site where he teaches people how to speak Indonesian. There’s a guy who has a site that teaches people how to play the guitar and they’re making a killing too.

Mark Mason: Yes. With great products that help people at a fair price. They do this thing that my friend Nicole Dean always says, they make the internet a better place and they help other people profitably. That’s another way I like to say that.

Pat Flynn: I love that.

Mark Mason: That’s such a great thing. But, you didn’t stop there. The Smart Passive Income blog is one of the top blogs that I recommend people go read. I recommend all my listeners go over there, sign up for your list and download your excellent resource on ebook creation.
That’s very good, by the way. I haven’t had a chance to mention that to you. That’s outstanding.

Pat Flynn: I appreciate that. I just wanted to tell people exactly how I created the ebook that had generated all that income, so I laid it out on the line right there.

Mark Mason: If there are people listening to this that want to know how to do that, that resource is just outstanding to get a real perspective on exactly what it takes.
You didn’t stop there, right? You’ve now launched this other business where you’re creating sometimes it’s like five or six iPhone applications in a month. Is that right?

Pat Flynn: Yes, that’s right. I don’t do it myself, I don’t program, I don’t even know where to start with programming iPhone apps. In case you’re wondering how it all works, my buddy and I just come up with ideas and we outsource them to people who are good at creating iPhone apps.

My business partner knows how to program, but we don’t choose to do it, because there’s people out there who are experts in iPhone programming only and we outsource our ideas to multiple programmers at the same time to act like there are four or five of us that are working on it at the same time.

We can get a lot more done in a shorter amount of time, the quality of the products are much better than we could ever do, and we’re doing maybe four or five iPhone apps a month and that market has just taken off. We’re doing pretty good with it, so it’s a lot of fun.

Mark Mason: It’s amazing. Did I see that you have a breathalyzer application?

Pat Flynn: Yes. That one just came out. For those of you who don’t know, my iPhone app company is LOLer Apps, which stands for Laugh Out Louder Apps, and they’re all gag apps. I’m sure you’ve heard of iFart by Joel Comm.

Mark Mason: Yes, by Joel Comm, right.

Pat Flynn: That thing made on Christmas Day I think it was 2008 he earned over 25,000 dollars in a single day.

Mark Mason: A dollar at a time, right?

Pat Flynn: A dollar at a time. He has other apps and there’s other people. I think there’s an app called Doodle Jump right now that was done by two independent developers. They just cleared the 3.5 million dollar mark.

Mark Mason: Yes. The Words with Friends guys are from here in Dallas.

Pat Flynn: Really?

Mark Mason: Yes, they live right here in Dallas. I haven’t met them, but they live in one of the suburbs here in Dallas.

Pat Flynn: I’ve got to talk to those guys.

Mark Mason: Absolutely. I’ll try to set it up for you.

Pat Flynn: I was going to say because my wife got kind of mad at me because I played that game for too long.

Mark Mason: So, that’s just been another successful thing for you. Do you do anything special to promote an iPhone app?

Pat Flynn: A few things. We run what’s called AdMob Ads, it’s kind of like Adsense for iPhone.

Mark Mason: I see.

Pat Flynn: You can do both ends of it. You can create ads to click over to new applications or you can put code into your existing application for ads to automatically generate and show there and you get paid per click.

So, we have a number of free apps that have AdMob Ads running, kind of like Adsense. Whenever we come out with a new app usually with a paid app we’ll pay for advertising, which is equivalent to doing Adwords.

Mark Mason: Right.

Pat Flynn: So, we do that. We do a little bit of article marketing and going out to different review blogs.

What’s been really helpful is we’ve noticed with a lot of other iPhone app developers, especially ones who have multiple iPhone apps, on each of their applications they have a “more apps” button, so people can click on the “more apps” button and see the other apps that are available. That’s been helping out tremendously.

Mark Mason: Right. I’ve seen that and I buy those other apps, because I’m already invested in what I know is a good app, so I’m expecting that those same developers are also going to deliver something of a similar quality on their other apps.
Pat Flynn: Exactly.

Mark Mason: So, that works really well. That’s really smart. Well, that’s amazing. I hope everyone who is listening to this is convinced that it is possible to make money on the internet without teaching people how to make money on the internet. It’s important that that point is clear.

For people that are starting out on the internet, a lot of my listeners are trying to get started, they have a 9:00 to 5:00 job, they’re trying to get things going or they’ve lost their job and they’re trying to get things going, so what I ask every guest is…

Can you tell me the three things that you wish you had known when you started or the three pieces of advice that you would give someone who is starting out about internet business? Three things that somebody really needs to know, either technical things or technique things or mindset things or whatever you think is important.
If you could only pick three things what would they be?

Pat Flynn: Sure, that’s an excellent question. I might have to take that question for my own podcast.

Mark Mason: And you’re welcome to do that. As long as I get 100 dollars on every download you can use it.

Pat Flynn: Okay, for sure. Three things. The first thing I really wish I knew was that it was really possible to create a successful business online. I think not believing in it slowed me down at first.

Although it may seem like things happened pretty rapidly for me, I do know that I could have done things a lot earlier. Maybe before I even got laid off I could have started my internet business, I didn’t have to wait for that to happen in order for me to do it.

Not believing in it slowed me down. You have your doubts and you’re scared and because of that you don’t take the action that’s required for you to see the results. It’s huge. You have to take leaps of faith almost.

Although you can do research and try and make sure that you’re taking the right steps, you’re eventually going to have to take a leap and you’re going to have to take bold actions in order to make things happen. Just stepping out of your comfort zone, that’s a huge thing.

Tim Ferris in 4 Hour Workweek, I remember specifically this one exercise that he has. After each chapter he has different exercises to help you with the mindset of being a successful entrepreneur.

One of the things he suggests you should do is to go to a crowded area like a mall or just in the middle of a sidewalk somewhere on a busy street and just lay down and look up and just not worry about what everyone else is thinking, because it’s training you to step out of your comfort zone and do things that you might not normally do.

That’s kind of what it takes in order to be successful online. You’ve just got to do it. My best teacher for everything I know, although I talk about Internet Business Mastery and I learned so much from them and from you and everyone else, all my mentors online, my best teacher is experience and just doing things. I can’t stress that enough.

Mark Mason: Yes. You miss every shot that you don’t take. Right.

Pat Flynn: Exactly. It’s like in golf when you stroke a putt and you don’t even reach the hole. Well, you didn’t even give yourself a chance to sink it.

Mark Mason: That’s right. So, your advice to everyone listening is to rush out to their local shopping mall and lay down?

Pat Flynn: Yes. Well, no. Just understand that you’re going to have to things that you might not be comfortable with. You’re going to have to take risks. You won’t see the rewards until you take action.

Mark Mason: Okay. Very good. So, thing number one is take action, accept the risk, don’t worry about failure. What’s thing number two?

Pat Flynn: Number two is all of my success has come from helping others first. Before when I was trying to make money off of Adsense and stuff those ads didn’t really do much for the reader of my blog. I was trying to make money for myself, just getting people to click on the site.

What really skyrocketed my income was providing a product, the ebook or the audio guide that I created, that was really helpful. Because that was really helpful and people appreciated that they were happy to pay for it, happy to recommend it to their friends and their coworkers.

I say this all the time. Karma online totally exists. I don’t know if it’s just like a spiritual thing or if it’s actually technical and Butterfly Effect type of stuff, but it really exists. If you help people, like you were saying the Nicole Dean quote from earlier.

Mark Mason: Right.

Pat Flynn: That was just an amazing quote that sums it all up. Making the internet a better place profitably. That’s the other thing is just understanding that your first priority should be helping others and as a side effect you will make money doing that.

Mark Mason: Yes. The quote that I shared with you before, but that I learned actually when I was selling knives door to door, which is a story we’ll have to get into on another podcast.

Pat Flynn: It’s not Cutco is it?

Mark Mason: Actually, yes.

Pat Flynn: Okay, yes, we can talk about that later.

Mark Mason: We’ll have to. I did some sales training with Zig Ziglar and what Zig says is that you can get everything that you want in life by helping other people get what they want.
Pat Flynn: Absolutely.

Mark Mason: I really believe that. That’s what I do in my day job and it’s what I do on MasonWorld.com and I know it’s what you do on Smart Passive Income, because that blog rocks.

Pat Flynn: Thanks.

Mark Mason: People should pause this recording and go over to your website and check it out. It’s just really fantastic.
So, I got thing two. Thing two is help other people first. I like it. What’s thing three?

Pat Flynn: Number three is, and this was hard for me because I’m a control freak, I like to make sure that things are happening and that I’m doing them the right way, the way that they should be done or the way that I want them to be done, but the truth is you don’t have to do everything on your own.

Actually, you shouldn’t do everything on your own. We’re good at certain things and we’re not good at certain things. For those things that we’re not good at we should definitely find those people to fill those gaps, people who are good at those things that we’re not good at to take care of it for us.

They’ll be happy they’re doing things they want to do and then you’ll be happy because you’re not doing things and you can spend time doing what you enjoy or doing what you’re good at. In other words, I don’t want to blatantly say “outsource it,” but that’s kind of what it is.

It’s understanding what your strengths are and focusing on your strengths and not focusing on things that you shouldn’t be focusing on. For instance, when I first started that blog to help me pass the exam I didn’t know anything about WordPress or hosting or anything like that. It took me a month to set it up the way I wanted to. Literally, a month.

Mark Mason: I understand. I know exactly what you’re talking about.

Pat Flynn: I really wish I just knew that there were people online who did this thing for a living who could do it in five minutes and I would pay them 10 dollars or whatever, or however much they’re charging.

On the flip side of that, I’m glad that I went through all that hardships and learning everything because now I understand how some of those things work. Although I would never take on those things as primary jobs I understand how they work.

So, if there’s something that needs a little bit of tweaking that needs to be done on my website, for example, I understand how to do that. I’m not totally lost. Even when I created SmartPassiveIncome.com, which was my follow up website to GreenExamAcademy.com, I knew the process of how to create the blog, but I just outsourced it, I paid someone to build it for me.

I think that helped out a lot, because I have a custom template that a lot of people like and it’s unique and I think that’s been helping with pushing the traffic and new subscribers and getting people excited about the website.

Mark Mason: Yes, your website is beautiful. Again, people should pause this recording and go check it out.

What you just said resonates with something I heard you say earlier with your iPhone apps business. Your partner is a programmer, he doesn’t program, but he can speak intelligently to programmers that you’re hiring and that’s really important.

Pat Flynn: Yes.

Mark Mason: So, I love that. I love those three tips, they’re excellent. I’ll give you the best example, I think, of that. You came out with, as you often do, one of these amazing in depth tutorials about Facebook Fan Page landing pages.

I read that and I understood what I wanted, but I didn’t really want to learn FBML, which is Facebook’s markup language. I looked at it for five minutes and I thought, “I’ve got something else to do.”

I sent the URL for your page to my developer and I said, “Go read Pat’s post and then make me one of those, please, and send me the bill.” I got something that was very nice.

Pat Flynn: I remember your landing page, it is quite nice.

Mark Mason: I had nothing to do with it other than being smart enough to send my developer to your website. To be honest with you, besides expressing what I want I can’t add value to the landing page design process. No amount of me messing around with Photoshop is going to get a good result.

I just don’t have that skill, so that’s just wasting everybody’s time for me to work on graphics and positioning some sign up box. That’s not what I do.
So, that’s great advice. People need to do that and they need to do it sooner rather than later. I know it’s very hard. The reason that resonates so much with me is because I tell people exactly the same thing.

They need to start small, but start outsourcing the stuff either that they don’t like to do because it’s sucking out their life force or that they’re not good at.

Pat Flynn: Right, exactly.

Mark Mason: This has been absolutely fantastic.
Pat Flynn: Mark, we’ve got to do it again sometime.

Mark Mason: I really appreciate you being here, I’d love to do it again. Let’s talk a little bit about how people can get a hold of you. The internet is a big place and there a few things that I recommend to my readers that directly compete, if you want to use that word, with what I do here, but it doesn’t bug me because, as we talked about before, I just want to help people.

Reading your blog will help people, so tell me a little bit about how people can find you on the internet.

Pat Flynn: Sure. When I’m not at a mall laying down face up you can find me on my blog at SmartPassiveIncome.com, that’s the hub, that’s where everything happens. I talk about everything that I do online, even my income reports down to the penny exactly where it all comes from.

If you just want to say “hi” or “hello” probably the best way to find me is on my Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/smartpassiveincome and we have a growing I guess you could say fan base there, I don’t know what they call them anymore.

There’s a great community there. If you even have a question there’s a lot of people there who will answer before I do. So, come say “hi” on Facebook if you have time.

Mark Mason: Very good. I really appreciate your time. I really encourage people if they have any interest at all to go to your website and download your ebook on ebooks, it’s really a fantastic read. Great job.

Pat Flynn: Thank you.

Mark Mason: Okay, sir, thank you very much. I wish you all the best and I will be in touch.

Pat Flynn: All right. Let’s do this again soon.

Mark Mason: Thanks. Bye.

That wraps it up for this episode 11 of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. We’ll be back in a couple of weeks with another episode where we have another interview with a guy that’s killing it online without selling stuff that teaches people how to make money online. Until then, we’ll see you soon. Thanks.

My name is Mark Mason from MasonWorld.com, I hope you have an absolutely fantastic day. Thanks.
If you really liked this podcast there’s two great things you need to do. Thing number one, go on over to MasonWorld.com and sign up for the Mason World Internet Marketing Newsletter. I send out all kinds of information to that newsletter that goes along really great with the podcast and you’ll learn about new podcast episodes there.

The second thing you need to do is go to iTunes and Apple.com/itunes and find the Mason World Internet Marketing Podcast and leave us a positive review. We love that and it helps us tremendously rank in the iTunes media library. So, go on over to iTunes and give us a great review and two thumbs up. Thanks!

If you follow me on Twitter you’re probably aware that I am participating alongside Pat and Tyrone in the Niche Duel that’s being documented over at the Smart Passive Income Blog.

Now, my participation in this contest is a little bit different than Pat and Tyrone. Pat always does an amazing job of documenting everything that he does and goes into an enormous amount of detail. This niche duel is no different for Pat, he’s already done an excellent job of documenting his keyword research and progress that he’s made on his site.

In my case, I’m not able to dedicate that much time to this project, but I do think it’s incredibly valuable. So, I’ve decided to dictate some notes about my progress and have them transcribed by my awesome transcriptionist, that way you can get some information about how I’m approaching the niche site duel, but I won’t have to spend a ton of time documenting it on my blog.

My Approach to the Niche Site Duel

So, because of the fact that I’m trying to minimize the amount of time that I’m spending on the Niche Site Duel, I’ve decided to take the approach of outsourcing every possible element of the competition. And I’ve decided that the best way to document a lot of my progress is by microblogging the event over on my Facebook Fan Page. So, be sure and check the Facebook Fan Page for day to day updates, and I’ll try to post my progress on the blog every week or two so you can get a sense of how things are going in the big picture.

My first job was niche selection. When I select a niche I try to do three things. Number one, I try to find a niche that I actually think will generate some revenue and be profitable. In this case I chose the very popular guitar niche, specifically the learn to play guitar niche. I’ve noticed for some time that there are several successful products in the marketplace, both on Clickbank and elsewhere, regarding learning to play guitar, so I knew this would be an opportunity for me to play around in that niche.

Number Two, I try to pick something that I’m actually interested in. As a busy internet marketer I know that I have a higher probability of actually accomplishing tasks related to the creation of the niche site if I care about the contents. This is not a requirement in general for niche marketers, but for me personally I’ve found that I have a lot higher success rate if I pick things that I’m actually interested in.

Number three, for this particular project I wanted to make sure I chose a niche where there was a wide availability of materials for me to work with, this includes affiliate offers, blog themes, private label right materials, and other things that I would need for a completely outsourced project.

So, for my limited time commitment to this project I’ve decided to select something was easily outsourced, had a wide variety of materials available, looked like it could be profitable, and interested me enough that I could guarantee that I would participate in the project.

Keyword Research for Learn Guitar

Once I had looked around a little bit in the guitar niche and found out that there was a ton of material out there available for affiliate marketers I popped open my favorite fast keyword research tool, Micro Niche Finder. Notice that I’m making the distinction between fast keyword research and deep keyword research.
For deep keyword research once I’ve found a target keyword I prefer Market Samurai, but for fast keyword research where I’m searching across hundreds of keywords looking for a particular keyword to target I strongly prefer Micro Niche Finder. I think the user interface is a lot better for wide area searches.

So, when I put learn guitar into Micro Niche Finder the very first thing I did was ask Micro Niche Finder to find me all of the keywords that had an available dot net,, dot org, or dot com exact match domain. Now, the learn guitar niche is very crowded, so the number of domains available that exactly matched keywords returned by Micro Niche Finder was a relatively small number.

Once I had gotten a list of exact match domains I simply ordered them in decreasing order of search volume. I’m looking for a keyword that I think learn guitar prospects would be using that has a high search volume and low competition. So, starting with the keywords with highest search volume I started analyzing the competition. To make a long story short, Micro Niche Finder suggested to me that learn guitar basics was a decent keyword and it showed me that learn guitar basics dot net was available.

So, I immediately grabbed learn guitar basics dot net and continued my keyword research. In continuing the keyword research I wanted to find some additional keywords that I could target on the website that were also related to learning the guitar. I won’t go into detail about that here, except to say that for these keywords exact matches to domains are not a requirement.

So, I simply went back to Micro Niche Finder, removed the requirement for domains being available and started looking for high volume keywords with low competition. Again, the niche is very crowded, so the number of these keywords is not large. In fact, this looks like this is going to be a very challenging project from a keyword standpoint, but that’s okay, I’m up for the challenge.

Niche Site Traffic Strategy

Now I know that I’m going to be building a blog about learn guitar, and specifically the blog is going to be called Learn Guitar Basics dot net, and I know that my goal is to match offers with buyers. In fact, that’s always the goal of affiliate marketing to find some buyers and match them up to offers on the internet.

In this case I’ve found my buyers. They’re people that are typing in the phrase learn guitar basics. These are new people, maybe they just got a guitar, maybe they’re about to buy a guitar, who are wanting to learn how to play. So, the offer that I want to match them with, obviously, is an offer for online guitar lessons.
I looked around the internet and I found an outstanding affiliate program from a place called Guitar Tricks. Looking at the Guitar Tricks website made me want to sign up for their product, it really looks fantastic. As a guitar player myself I knew immediately that this affiliate offer was a good one because I found myself wanting to take out my own credit card and sign up for the affiliate offer.

As a matter of fact, one really good approach for promoting this offer would be for me to do exactly that and to blog about it. The problem is that approach is not really compatible with the amount of time that I have to spend on this project, so I’m not sure I’ll be able to do that. In any case, I’ve saved that as a note for myself in case I decide to really spend some real effort on this site.

Identifying the affiliate offer at GuitarTricks.com means that I need to consider a couple of additional keywords to target on the website. People who are considering signing up for a membership at GuitarTricks.com might type in at least two guitar tricks related keywords, and those are obviously guitar tricks review and maybe guitar tricks coupon. Additional ones that are sometimes present in the internet marketing niche are guitar tricks bonus and other kinds of things like that, but for normal people who are buying things online review and coupon are the two most sought after keywords.

Now, here’s an important lesson for you. Those keywords do not appear in the Google Adwords Tool. Micro Niche Finder and Market Samurai do not recognize guitar tricks review and guitar tricks coupon as keywords that people are searching. Why is that? The reason is that those tools are based on the Adwords database and it simply means that no one is bidding on those keywords.

However, if you go to Google and type the word guitar tricks into the search box and then hit the space bar several suggestions will pop down. Those suggestions are based on the actual search data that Google is collecting. They’re not based on the Adwords data, they’re based on the search data, and if you look at that list is presented to you when you out in the words guitar tricks, you’ll find guitar tricks coupon and guitar tricks review. That tells me that I need to target those keywords on my site.

Additionally, if you look at that list you’ll find that there are quite a few people that are trying to steal the Guitar Tricks system, because you see things like guitar tricks torrent. That makes me a little sad and reminds that whenever you have electronic products in the marketplace you need to protect the download.

Creating the Niche Website

Again, my goal in this website is to outsource everything that I possibly can. I’ve done my own keyword research, but it’s been a quick and dirty effort using Micro Niche Finder for less than an hour. If you want a really good tutorial about how the keyword research should be done, you should hop on over to Pat’s blog and look at his video about how he used Market Samurai to do keyword research for his Security Guard website. In my case however, I’ve picked quick and dirty keywords and now I need a quick and dirty website.

So, my next task was to put the search term guitar plr into Google. This returned for me a list of PLR products that are available in the guitar space. I knew I wanted three things. One, I’m looking for PLR that I can use for an autoresponder on the website. It will be very important to collect leads on this website and follow up with those leads and try to drive them to the affiliate offer. Number two, I’m looking for a blog theme and sometimes blog themes are available as PLR. Number three, I’m looking for content for the website. Again, this is an outsource project, I’m going to have some original material written, but really I want to consider PLR as the source for blog site content.

A note about PLR. I think PLR is absolutely excellent for autoresponders because there’s no search engine implications to using PLR. As long as the PLR is high quality and is in your voice and is valuable to your readers, I don’t see any problem in using it in an autoresponder. I don’t normally recommend the use of PLR for website content unless it’s completely rewritten. I’m not a big believer in the duplicate content penalty that’s often talked about by Google, but I do think you owe it to your readers to generate decent content on your own. If you do use PLR on your website, make sure it’s excellent quality and that the PLR you use is rewritten to avoid any issues with similar content outranking you for your search terms.

Having said all that, in this case I’m in a huge hurry, so I need to use PLR because I’ve committed to outsourcing as much of this as possible and moving as quickly as possible. So, lucky for me I found a complete and totally awesome guitar website theme complete with PLR content that I could buy with one click of the mouse. It cost 27 dollars and I bought it, it’s up and running at Learn Guitar Basics dot net.

Outsourcing Tasks for the Duel

Once I bought the PLR mentioned above I was able to outsource a series of tasks. The first task I outsourced was taking some of the PLR that I purchased and breaking it up into content for an autoresponder that was appropriate for beginning guitarists. The virtual assistant was able to split up the content, edit it, place a call to action to the affiliate offer at the bottom of every email, and load that content into an autoresponder over at Aweber.

Task two, I asked another one of my virtual assistants to take the PLR website and get it up and running on the domain that I had purchased. I also asked the VA to modify the site header so that it matched the domain name, to edit the footer, to take out references to the PLR and so forth and make the site somewhat visually unique.

Task three, affiliate offers. I asked the VA that works on my websites to integrate creatives from the Guitar Tricks affiliate site into the website. This meant that the virtual assistant needed to change the banner in the header, as well as place a video creative in the sidebar of the website.

Task four, I also asked the virtual assistant to integrate the autoresponder into the website so there would be a signup form in the sidebar. The sidebar will say something like, “For free beginning guitar lessons delivered straight to your inbox leave us your email and we’ll rush you your first lesson,” or something like that.

Task five, I asked my writer to go into the website and edit every PLR article on the site to change the title, very important for changing PLR, the permalink, also very important for PLR, and the text, less important but still important for using PLR on your website. This will help guarantee that my content is more unique, which can help in my search engine rankings.

To be honest with you, I’m not very worried about the impact of PLR on the search engine because I’m not trying to rank the PLR pages. I’ll be trying to rank the home page and some other pages targeted at guitar tricks related keywords, that content will be completely original and unique and will be easier to rank than the PLR content.

Task six, I asked my writer to write 10 articles around keywords that I had found in Micro Niche Finder. Among these included content for the home page around the keyword learn guitar basics and content for the affiliate offer landing pages for guitar tricks review and guitar tricks coupon.

Current Status and Next Steps

Right now I’m waiting for all those outsourced tasks to be completed. Once those tasks are completed I’ll move to some additional site set up tasks that need to be addressed. I’ll need a Twitter ID for this project, I’ll need email addresses and other set up items, I want to add an eBay and Amazon store into this blog, and so forth. We’ll talk about all of these tasks and more in a future blog post.

Once the site has been set up to my satisfaction (in about a week) I’ll need to start promoting it. For promotion I intend to use article marketing and other backlink building techniques that we’ll talk about in subsequent posts.

That’s it for now. I hope you’ve enjoyed this update, sorry it’s a little bit long winded but that’s one of the downsides to dictating posts rather than editing them. Please let me know if you have any comments, I’d be happy to answer them below. Have a great day!

Best Regards,
Mark Mason

I hear this all the time when people are talking about old-school static HTML sites versus newer WordPress sites.  They say it loud and proud as if it were a law of nature like gravity or something.

Google Loves WordPress!

The truth is (as far as I know) that there is no real data that says Google prefers static WordPress versus HTML (or vice-versa). There is no reason that they should care -- and I don't think that they do.

People say "Google loves WordPress" because they see WordPress because they see WordPress sites doing well in Google. The question is this: is this correlation, or causation? In other words, are these sites doing well because of WordPress, or for some other reason.

If two sites were COMPLETELY identical, Goggle would not care if a site was WordPress or Static HTML. In fact, if they were truly completely identical, Google could not tell easily which was which.

I don't think Google loves WordPress.

Why WordPress Sites Perform Well

Rather, I think Google loves what most WordPress installations do automatically (and most static HTML sites do NOT do at all).

If you install WordPress with a decent theme and use a few popular plugins, you get some killer stuff that is not present on many plain-jane HTML sites:

• Ping-O-Matic to announce new content
• Blog pinging to encourage back-linking
• User-generated content (comments)
• An RSS feed (promotes traffic)
• Auto SEO optimized titles and URLs (in most cases)
• Good automatic intra-site linking (in most cases)
• et cetera

This is why "Google loves WordPress". It is not because there is some unfair bias in Google or some magic in WordPress itself. All of the above things are possible with an HTML site, but people usually do not do them.

So, while it looks like Google loves WordPress, what they really love are well constructed sites. Constructing site well is something that WordPress does automatically.

Build good site, follow the webmaster guidelines, and you too will live a long healthy and happy web life.

photo credit: AlbertaAndMe

Boy, that is a mouth full.

As an affiliate marketer, one of the things that you need to be able to do is write good pre-sales copy with great SEO properties.  This is hard to do sometimes, but it can make or break your affiliate campaigns when you are counting on search engine traffic.  It's so important (and so misunderstood -- especially by beginners), I felt like we should talk about it here.

I was discussing this with my friend Karon Thackston, and she could not agree more.  Now make no mistake, Karon is a famous SEO copywriter.    If you know anything about Karon, you understand that she's been writing high-ranking and converting copy for clients including Gorton's Seafood and the American Boating Association for over 25 years.    I talked Karon into offering a free hour-long teleclass on SEO copywriting exclusively for you (people on my list).

Free SEO Copywriting Teleseminar

Teleclass: The Simple SEO Copywriting Framework
Signup Link: Just click here! Format:  Audio (via teleconference bridge)
Date:   August 26, 2010
Time: 2:00pm Eastern Time   Length:  Approx. 1 hour

What you'll learn:  In this one-hour teleclass, Karon Thackston presents a simple framework for writing SEO copy including:

• Which keyphrases to use
• How to use them without ruining the flow of your copy
• Precisely where to place keyphrases for maximum impact with Google and other engines
• Which popular advice is a useless, outdated myth you should avoid
• How to organize/outline each page for SEO copy so you don't miss a thing
• And more!

In the mean time, I wanted to share with you the following tips from Karon.  You'll get a lot more stuff like this on the call.

Thanks,
Mark

7 Don'ts for SEO Copywriting

By Karon Thackston © 2010, All Rights Reserved

There is no shortage of don'ts when it comes to SEO copywriting.  It seems this niche got off to a rough start many years ago when early comers somehow misconstrued the core principles of the trade.  Allow me to elaborate on how not to write SEO copy.

1. Don't shove as many keyphrases into the copy as humanly possible.  It's not about the sheer volume of search terms you include.  Yes, Google and other engines should be able to follow what the page is about.  Yes, engines are looking to match a searcher's query with search engine optimized content on your web pages, but which pages land at the top is decided through a series of calculations far more complex than any simple ratio.  When you overload copy with keyphrases you sacrifice quality and user experience.

2.  Don't lose site of balance.  If SEO copywriting isn't about the percentage of keywords within the copy, then what is it about?  Balance.  You have two audiences with SEO copywriting: the search engines and your site visitors.  But surprisingly, the balance doesn't come with serving both masters well.  The balance comes in how much you cater to the engines.  You see, your site visitors always come first.  However, if you write with too little focus on the engines, you won't see good rankings.  If you put too much focus on the engines, you'll start to lose your target audience.  Balance… always balance.

3.  Don't let someone else choose the keywords.  If keyword research isn't a service you offer, an SEO firm, keyword specialist or some other professional that your client hires will have to conduct the research.  Don't just accept keyphrases these folks toss your way.  Ask to see the entire list with recommendations as to which terms would be best strategically.  Then you, as the professional writer, can decide which will also work best within the copy.

4.  Don't sacrifice flow for numbers.  This is a follow-up to number three and is a major issue with bad SEO copywriting.  SEOs or clients sometimes insist on using hacked-up search phrases that simply don't work in a normal sentence. An example?  "Candies samples free."  Many copywriters will just grin and bear it, sacrificing quality and flow for the sake of competitive values or other numbers.  The result is often some obnoxious sentence like, "If you're looking for candies samples free, you've come to the right place!"  Forcing a phrase into the copy at all costs never turns out well.

5.  Don't use keyphrases that don't apply to the page.  If you operate a site about wedding receptions, don't try to force a search term about wedding dresses into the copy just because it pulls a lot of traffic.  (A) Unless you sell, alter or design wedding dresses, it won't be applicable.  (B) Even if you manage to get the page ranked well for the phrase [wedding dresses], once the visitor clicks to your site and realizes you have nothing to do with wedding dresses, they will leave. It's a waste of time and effort and it creates a poor user experience.

6.  Don't use misspellings and correct spellings on the same page.  I fully understand that the misspellings of keyphrases can be valuable search terms.  However, to mix correct spellings and misspellings within the same page of copy looks like you've got a bunch of typos in the content. It's just not professional.  Some writers will go for the old, "We rent limousines (sometimes spelled limosenes) for the most affordable prices in town."  I don't care for that approach. It's just not natural.  Would you ever see brochure or newspaper copy that reads that way?  I think not.

7.  Don't use keyphrases the exact same way every time.  This is how we end up with horrible SEO copy that sounds like a 4th grader wrote it.  (See #4.)  There are lots of ways to use keywords in copy, not just one.  In order to sound natural, you have to get creative with your keyphrase use.  One way is to break up phrases using punctuation.  Since search engines don't pay attention to basic punctuation marks, you can easily write something using the search term [real estate Hawaii] that reads like this: "Currently there is an impressive selection of available real estate.  Hawaii listings can be…"  See?  "Real estate" is at the end of the first sentence and "Hawaii" is at the beginning of the second sentence. The engines ignore the period so there's no problem.

And Here Are Three More Bonus Mistakes To Avoid

8. Don't use all types of search phrases for every situation.  There are many ways in which this "don't" applies.  One quick example is that of an ecommerce site.  It wouldn't be advisable to use specific, long-tail keyphrases on the home page of your site.  They are much too specific in most cases and are better suited for individual product pages.  Broader terms are typically best for an ecommerce home page.  If you don't understand the best applications for the various types of keywords, you're likely to have lackluster results.

9. Don't neglect ALT tags/image attributes.  These tags are the ones associated with images on your pages and they carry a good deal of weight especially if the image is used as a link.  The ALT text counts the same as anchor text in a text-based link.  Depending on a few different factors, ALT text may be a good place for those misspellings mentioned in #6.

10. Don't forget the chain of protocol.  There's a method to the SEO copywriting madness.  The idea is not to get as many different keyphrases onto a page as possible.  Just the opposite, in fact.  Rather than having 12 different search terms used only one time each, you need to use two to four keyphrases (depending on the length of your copy) per page.  The title, META tags, ALT tags, other coding elements and on-page copy need to support each other as far as keyphrase use goes.  Your goal is to let the engines know that you have original, relevant content about a narrow topic.

Unless you have an exceptional number of back links built up, just mentioning [dark chocolate], [chocolate strawberries], [chocolate chip cookies], [chocolate cake], [chocolate desserts], [organic chocolate] and [chocolate cheesecake] once each on a web page isn't likely to do a lot of good.  Instead, pick two or three terms which are closely related and use them several times each along with mentioning them in your tags.

When you avoid making common mistakes, you'll find your SEO copywriting flows much better, is more natural-sounding and ranks higher, too.

Did you get a lot out of this article? Then you'll want to join Karon as my guest during a FREE SEO copywriting teleclass August 26, 2010 at 2:00pm Eastern time. This call - exclusively for MasonWorld readers - will give you a simple framework for writing great SEO copy.  Register today at http://www.copywritingcourse.com/mason-registration.html.