A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I like Nicole Dean's EasyPLR as a source for great quality PLR products.  Since that time, I have published several articles about how to use PLR, where to get blog content, and what the ethical considerations of PLR might be.

Lot's of you responded by trying out Nicole's products using my affiliate link (here).  If you are one of those people -- thanks for checking her stuff out.  As you know, I only recommend products that I use myself, and her PLR is great.

The Retroactive EasyPLR Bonus

OK -- so I know what you are thinking?  Who in the world gives a bonus after the fact.  Marketing 101 says that you use bonuses to get people to buy as part of the pitch.

I say, WHATEVER - I play by my own rules. 

The fact is that if you bought ANY PLR from Nicole using my link, I'd like to offer you a nifty eBook on how to use it.

The eBook is called PLR Cheater -- it is itself a high quality PLR eBook that I am planning on selling for either $27 or $17 (I have not decided yet).   You can check out the sales page for PLRCheater here.  Note that the page is not complete yet - you cannot buy the book there.

Anyway -- if you bought any PLR from Nicole through my link, just submit a ticket at my helpdesk and I will verify your purchase and send you a copy of the eBook with my compliments.  Just to be clear, you will be getting personal use rights to PLR Cheater, not PLR rights.

I figure that if you were kind enough to use my link, you deserve the bonus (even if you did not know about the bonus ahead of time).  Be sure to include proof of purchase with your ticket.

But Wait -- There's More (If You Act Now)

LOL -- I love cheezy marketing lines like "Act Now!"  Supplies are limited! (OK -- they are not limited.  It's an ebook.  How can supplies of an eBook ever be limited?)

Here where the Marketing 101 comes back in.  I want you to buy more!

I know that there will be some people out there that want to buy PLR from Nicole today and get the bonus.  If that is you, know that I will honor the bonus until further notice.  That is to say, if you buy PLR from EasyPLR in the future using my affiliate link, I will send you a copy of the eBook (just submit a ticket with your proof of purchase).

Bottom line - I want you to buy more PLR from Nicole if you need it.

And That Is Not All (Special Bonus)!

I know some of you will be buying PLR from Nicole with the intention of creating sites designed to make money from AdSense as described in the $5 Formula (and also in this video).

If that is you, and you buy $50 or more of PLR from Easy PLR using my affiliate link, I will send you a copy of my newly updated product -- Niche AdSense Themes for WordPress Version 3.   Note that this bonus is also retroactive.

Here is a snapshot of the latest version of Niche AdSense Themes for WordPress

So -- If you need some PLR check out Easy PLR today.

Thanks!

More About PLR Cheater

Here is what's inside PLR Cheater:

When Jack Dorsey (@jack) Evan Williams (@ev) and Biz Stone (@biz) started Twitter in 2006, I am quite sure that they had no idea what they had.  I never even heard of Twitter until 2008, so I sure had no idea what they had.

Twitter is a Micro-blogging platform, and unless you have been visiting Mars for the past year, you know that Twitter is all the rage lately.  As you know, writing on Twitter is called micro-blogging because you can enter up to 140 characters per message.

Who would have thought?  If you would have asked me about Twitter in 2006, I probably would have said "cool but useless."

How many other things like that am I missing?

I wonder this all the time.   If I missed Twitter, what else am I missing?

Well, how about QuickScrib.com?  My buddy Josh Spaulding is in the process of launching a new experimental project called QuickScrib.com.    Like Twitter, it's free to use, free to join and there is no affiliate program.   When first looked at it, I thought "cool but useless."

Yikes -- that is exactly what I said about Twitter.

Well that makes me wonder if QuickScrib.com might be the next coolest thing since Twitter.

Here is what Josh has to say about QuickScrib.com

QuickScrib is a Free tool that allows you to share text (stories, recipes, instructions etc.) with others without having to deal with email. You simply enter your text, click a button and you get a link to your own WebPage that you can share with anyone you want!

Share stories, recipes, instructions etc. quickly and easily on FaceBook and other social media sites.

Share with people who you aren't connected with online... just give them your link and you're done!

QuickScrib is also a way for you to share your story with the World! Publish your own WebPage for the World to see!

The possibilites are endless!

So, if Twitter is microblogging -- then QuickScrib.com mus be mini-blogging (a little bigger than a Twitter, but not as big as a real blog).

Just to make sure I am covered when Josh becomes as famous at the Twitter guys, here are ten reasons to check out QuickScrib.com

• It is totally and completely free (powered by AdSense)
• You can use it to take notes that you want to share
• You can use it to post anonymous content (check the TOS and be nice)
• You can use it to archive data (like recipes)
• You can send the resulting Scrib URL and content to Facebook
• You can send the resulting Scrib URL and content to Twitter
• You can claim that you were one of the first users
• You can use it to keep "private" notes
• You can teach you grandmother how to post stuff online
• You can write something about MasonWorld.com

Go check it out at QuickScrib.com -- like I said, it's free.  I personally have no idea if something like this will go viral or not, but it is a neat idea in any case.

This is the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, Episode 5.

You want to build a business that you can call your own, but you can’t imagine abandoning the security of your day job. You are confident that you can find a few hours a week to pursue your dreams of creating a business on the internet, but you don’t know where to start. You’re looking for a plan.

Congratulations! You just found one. You are listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, with your host Mark Mason, building internet businesses one night at a time.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. I’m your host Mark Mason. It’s great to be back on the microphone. I hope you’ve had a fantastic couple of weeks since I talked to you last. I hope they were very productive for you.

I know I’ve been incredibly productive over the last couple weeks. In fact, in some ways a little too productive. I tend to get too many tasks going all at the same time. I don’t know if you have that problem. That’s a huge problem for a lot of internet marketers.

I was talking to Lynn Terry about this over in her Elite forum the other day. Her theory, she had a post in that forum about this, is that you really need to focus on something, one thing extensively until that thing is finished to really get the maximum productivity. I’m really going to need to look at that a little more carefully.

I’ve really been enjoying Lynn’s forum. I spend a lot of time over there. I’ve been getting to know Lynn, she’s great. Some of you saw the video on my blog of Lynn opening up the Elvis bobble head that I sent her. That was kind of fun.

If you get a chance to check out Lynn, I recommend that you do that. You can check out the information about her Elite Membership Forum at MasonWorld.com/recommends/lynn. If you just want to kind of get a taste of what that’s like, you don’t need to pay any money at all. You can go over to her blog at ClickNewz.com and check it out.

There are links to the forum over there, and she’s got a free side to the forum too and that’s really excellent. I’ve been having fun over there with Lynn. She’s got lots of cool peeps that hang out with her over there in the Elite Forum, it’s really good stuff.

The other thing that I’ve been working on this week is a site with my nephew. We’re going to talk about that a little bit in the interview. My nephew and I have been working on an affiliate marketing site for the last couple of weeks. I’ve actually got him on the podcast today as the featured interview as a new internet marketer.

He’s going to tell us the three things that he learned from me this summer working on an affiliate site. He actually cleared over 100 dollars on that site in the month of August, which was only one month after we really started working on it. So, he’s pretty pleased with that.

We’re using the phpBay plugin to work through eBay to sell some comic books online. We’ll talk about all of that in the feature interview.

Before we get into that, let’s take a look at the feature segment and see what we’ve got going on today.

It’s time for the feature segment.

It’s time for the feature segment today, and we’re continuing our discussion about all the different possible internet business models. We’ve talked about affiliate marketing, last week we talked about eBay, we’ve talked about information marketing.

One thing I wanted to talk about today, because it’s timely, is the idea of creating residual recurring income through membership sites. In order to understand why membership sites are important, you really need to sort of understand the idea of a sales funnel. So, we’ll talk a little bit about sales funnels, and we’ll talk about membership sites.

This, again, points to one of the resources that I’ve provided you for this discussion, and that’s Jimmy Brown’s excellent report, which is called 10 Proven Ways to Make at Least 10,000 Dollars Every Month. In Jimmy Brown’s report, item three in that report is tap into the back end automatically.

Jimmy basically talks about the idea that most marketers really are concerning themselves with the creation of the sales funnel. If you’re not familiar with a sales funnel, I can sort of explain it to you like this. When you have an initial contact with a perspective client, you bring that person in to your range of influence and you essentially get their permission to receive your message.

Now, if you’re a person who’s being effected by TV marketing, sometimes you barely even have permission, you just happen to be watching the channel and you see a commercial and that’s sort of your first contact into the sales funnel for whoever is selling something to you on television. In the context of internet marketing, this sort of thing usually happens when you sign up to an email list.

You’re at the top of someone’s funnel, they’ve gotten your permission to market to you, basically. So, you’re at the top of their funnel. Then you might at some point buy an inexpensive product from them. That moves you a little further down the funnel.

You’ll find that a lot of internet marketers spend a lot of time creating more and more products at higher and higher price points to move you further and further down the funnel. You see, there’s a big difference between someone you’ve never talked to before, at the top of your funnel or just entering your funnel, and someone who’s bought two or three products from you over a period of time, who trusts you and understands the quality of your product.

So, that sales funnel should be architected to move you further and further towards purchasing higher and higher end products. That’s a classic marketing strategy. It’s not unique to internet marketing, but it’s used very well in internet marketing in a variety of product lines.

One sort of special version of that, that can replace the sales funnel to some extent, is the idea of continuity programs. One way to implement a continuity program is through a membership site. Now, a continuity program simply means, you can think of it as monthly billing.

Continuity programs have gotten a bad rap over the years, because of various problems, usually having to do with them being deployed in a sneaky manner. You’ll recall that Joel Comm had a problem where he had a continuity program attached to one of his Adsense books, I believe it was, and it wasn’t clearly indicated on the order form. A lot of people were upset with Joel, because he didn’t make it clear that in addition to buying the ebook for 9.95, you were also signing up for his 27 dollar continuity program.

Now, I happen to know Joel, Joel Comm is a really good guy. I really personally don’t think that was something that he did maliciously, but he upset a lot of people. So, continuity programs in general have gotten a bad rap.

Russell Brunson and others, particularly Jimmy Brown, have been talking about several ideas around continuity that make a lot more sense. One of the things that they talk about is micro-continuity through membership sites. Jimmy has an excellent course on this that he calls Membernaire. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes.

Membernaire is an opportunity to create what Russell Brunson calls a micro-continuity program. The way Jimmy does it is he creates courses that are finite duration. It’s one thing if you tell somebody that they’re going to need to pay 27 dollars, or 67 dollars a month for their rest of their lives.

But, what Jimmy says is, “Hey, we’re going to have a continuity program with a finite term. It’s going to be 6 months long, or a year long, it’s going to be 27 dollars a month.” You know the cost up front. It’s spread out over time.

Jimmy actually implements all of his stuff completely automatically, which is really neat. So, if you’re the product creator for a Jimmy Brown style membership site. Then what you can do is you can create these sites one time, market them, and then they run on autopilot all by themselves. It’s pretty interesting.

Now, there really are sort of three kinds of membership sites that Jimmy points out. Maybe four, I would say, Jimmy points out three. The first site that Jimmy points out, or sites that offer a service, if there’s something that you need over and over again rather than paying for it piecemeal you can create a membership site that offers that service over and over again or on a monthly basis. Web hosting is a really good example of that, that Jimmy offers.

There are other kinds of membership sites you can imagine. Help with homework would be an excellent example, or tutoring. Those kind of things you can offer in the form of a membership site. Related to that can be a site that offers lessons on a topic.

You could have 6 month, 12 month, or 3 month courses on how to get an online business up and running. That’s the example that Jimmy offers. How to start a restaurant, how to do home repairs, or how to do whatever it is that you know how to do.

That’s one of the exciting things about the idea of a membership site. If you’re an expert in something, and you can break it up into 48 or 50 or 100 easy lessons, then you can easily create a membership site that just drips those lessons out to your customers at a fixed rate. You just tell them up front, “You’re going to get one lesson a week, and here they come. As long as you keep paying, you keep getting lessons.”

The other kind of membership site that you hear about a lot is a site that offers a new product each month. So, each month you get a new PLR product or each month you get a new something that you need, new templates for a website, new content, new something, new cross stitch patterns, whatever it might be. People subscribe because they want that new fix of whatever it is that they need.

The other kind of membership that I think Jimmy didn’t mention, but he certainly knows all about this, because he does these sorts of things, are coaching programs. I think those are a special kind. They’re sort of like offering a service, but basically you’re paying to have some person on retainer to help you with whatever your problem. Usually those are implemented as a forum.

That’s just a few ideas that Jimmy covers in his book. He says, basically, you need to choose a niche, find out what they’re buying, and what they want, and then go build a membership site around that. I think that’s a really good idea.

The reason that I bring that up in this podcast is two fold. One is these are very, very important. In fact, I had a graphics guy tell me today that I was talking to by email, he’s over in Europe and is the guy who does most of my graphics for my sites, he told me there are four weeks out on graphics because of all these micro-continuity sites they’ve been doing based on Russell Brunson and Jimmy Brown’s sort of programs. So, they’re just swamped with work over all these membership sites that are being created. That’s one reason why I bring this up to you.

The second reason that I bring this up to you is if you’re interested at all in this, Jimmy is offering a webinar, and I’m going to give you the details on that at MasonWorld.com/jimmywebinar. That webinar is currently airing this Thursday. If you’re listening to this in a time shifted manner, go ahead and go to the link, it will give you the current next time for the webinar.

Basically, it’s an hour long tutorial from Jimmy on webinars. I’m going to see it for the first time tomorrow. I can tell you that I can recommend it without seeing it, because Jimmy is just a fantastic guy. If you don’t know Jimmy, it’s worth going over to the webinar just so you can get a sense of what he’s all about.

He’s really a fantastic marketer and somebody that I’ve really enjoyed getting to know over the last year or two. His stuff is top notch. He knows what he’s doing. He has personally created, I know for sure of two, but maybe it’s six of these sites, where he has over 1,000 members in each site. You go do the math. If you had 1,000 members in a membership site, each paying you 27 dollars a month. I think you might like that result.

That’s the main segment for today. I just wanted to tell you about that other income model, which is membership sites. The bottom line is if you know how to do something that people want to learn how to do, and you can figure out how to bust that up into courses, kind of like a Dummies Guide to Tennis, or a Dummies Guide to Fitness, or a Dummies Guide to whatever it is that you’re interested in, you can make that into a membership course.

You can recruit people into that course and have a recurring stream of income. You can set the whole thing up automatically, and Jimmy Brown is the guy to teach you how to do that. So, that’s another way you can make money online, and that’s well covered in the 10 Proven Ways to Make at Least 10,000 Dollars Every Month. That’s Jimmy Brown’s ebook, and that’s available at MasonWorld.com/10ways.

Thanks. That concludes the feature segment.

And now the feature interview.

Okay. Now it’s time for the standing interview segment that we’ve been having for the last couple of weeks. What I’ve been promising you is that I’d interview successful internet marketers and ask them the three most important things that they wished they had known about internet marketing when they first started.

This has been very exciting. But, recently I’ve been working with my nephew on his first website. He has an affiliate marketing site based around comic books, which is something that he is interested in. He’s a sophomore in high school, very intelligent young man, highly motivated, but didn’t really know anything about how money was made on the internet. Kind of like a lot of us when we first started.

So, I thought, “Wow. Here’s a guy who just learned how to make money on the internet.” He’s made his first 100 dollars, I think his site made 136 dollars in the month of August. He’s very excited about that. We’ve got big plans for the site, because we made that 136 dollars and we’re not even ranking on the first page of Google for our search term yet. So, we’re real excited.

I thought the interesting was 2 months ago he didn’t know anything about internet marketing. He’s done all the work himself. I’ve sort of led him through it, and helped him and coached him, but he’s done all the hard work, and he’s got a result to show for it.

So, I wanted to ask him what were the three things that he knows now that he didn’t know 2 months ago. The things that really stuck out for him. I got a very, very interesting answer from him and I wanted to share that with you.

Now, he’s a minor under the age of 18. Like I said, he’s a sophomore in high school. So, I’m not using his real name. we’re calling him Bob here for the purpose of this interview, which is really hilarious, because that’s not his name at all. So, you may hear us giggling a little bit in the interview about that.

The other thing I’ll tell you, I want to apologize in advance, this interview we did in my study. We had to move the microphone around, and I forgot to put the p-pop filer on. So, I’ve edited the interview to try and cut out the pops from articulating the letter P, which is the world’s most annoying sound.

I don’t quite have them all out of the interview, but I did the very best I could. I enjoyed the interview so much, I didn’t want to do another take. Here it is live, raw, and with the pops, my nephew Bob and our discussion about his internet marketing experience.

…

Mark Mason: Hey, this is Mark Mason. I’m actually in studio with my nephew today. A lot of you who have been following me over on Lynn Terry’s forum know that I built with my nephew a website about something that he was interested in, actually the website is about comic books. We built that website and in the first month were able to generate some revenue with eBay’s affiliate program. That was a very interesting process.

So, what I thought I would do is get some insights from my nephew, who is a sophomore in high school about what he’s learned from his experience making money online. I’ve been telling people, “If my nephew who is a sophomore in high school can make money online, you can make money online too.” I think that’s a pretty straight forward kind of way to think about things.

Now, I’ve agreed since my nephew is a minor under the age of 18, I’m not going to use his name. So, I’ve agreed to call him Bob for the purpose of this interview. Hi, Bob, how are you doing today?

Bob: Hi. Good. How are you?

Mark Mason: I’m doing great. Bob came over, he lives nearby. How long have we been working on this website together, Bob?

Bob: We’ve probably been working on it maybe since the beginning of last school year.

Mark Mason: Yeah, something like that. So, we worked on it for a couple of weeks, then we kind of dropped it, but then we hit it really hard this summer. Right?

Bob: Yes.

Mark Mason: So, my recollection was we didn’t make any money or really generate much of any content last year at all. We really started working on it about in July.

Bob: That’s right.

Mark Mason: We started making money on the website in August, right?

Bob: Yes.

Mark Mason: Okay, great. So, the website sat idle for awhile, and after about a month we started seeing a little revenue. That’s been really exciting. I guess it’s been exciting for me, has it been exciting for you?

Bob: Yes. It’s very exciting.

Mark Mason: Okay. So, you’re actually in a very prestigious position. I’ve been interviewing internet marketers from all over the world on this podcast and asking them the three things that they wish they had known when they started internet marketing.

I thought I’d turn things around today and ask you what are the three things that you’ve learned over the summer with your first experience in internet marketing that you just didn’t know before, that you’d want to tell someone about your internet marketing experience?

Can you think of one thing that just occurs to you just right off the top of your head, Bob? That’s not your real name, I know, but it’s kind of funny. Something that you learned over the summer, that you didn’t know before.

Bob: Yes. First, is how easy it is to get a website going. If you use a website like WordPress you just pick a theme you like, get it going, and put it up. It’s just easy to make one.

Mark Mason: That’s right. So, basically, what we did was we just simply found a theme that worked well with our topic of comic books. We actually found sort of a play on Superman theme, right?

Bob: Yes.

Mark Mason: We just used that on top of WordPress to create our little kind of ecommerce site. That worked out pretty well. It looked pretty cool?

Bob: It looks really cool, yes. A lot of neat features.

Mark Mason: I think, if I remember right, we asked a virtual assistant to make some small modifications to the site.

Bob: Yes.

Mark Mason: Right. So, we started with a theme that was pretty close to what we wanted, and we had a virtual assistant make some changes. Just a few dollars, literally a few hours work, someone offshore. It’s pretty much exactly the way you want it right now, right?

Bob: It’s perfect. Yes.

Mark Mason: Great. That’s the first thing. So, that point is a really good one. That is that basically anybody without a lot of technical savvy can have a website up and running very quickly by using WordPress. Is that pretty much what you’re saying?

Bob: Yes, sir.

Mark Mason: Okay, great. That’s thing one. That’s an excellent point. What’s your second thing that you kind of picked up this summer working on your WordPress website?

Bob: Probably number two is if you want to get your website going, something very important to use is keywords through Google. Pick out a keyword phrase, get backlinks to your website to get viewers to come to your site.

Mark Mason: Now, before this summer, did you have any idea, you’ve always used Google, right?

Bob: Yes.

Mark Mason: But, did you have any idea why pages came up on the first page of Google? Did you understand any of that before this summer?

Bob: I had no clue. I just thought it was random.

Mark Mason: So, we basically spent. I don’t know, about an hour? So, we got you started with the Easy SEO report from Josh Spaulding,that was really cool. Then we picked a keyword with some traffic. Where are we now with that keyword?

Bob: Just by using that one keyword we’re almost to the first page of Google. We’re kind of floating back and forth between page one and page two.

Mark Mason: So, we’re down kind of at the top of page two. We’ve got some tricks up our sleeve, maybe we’ll talk about that at the end of this, where we think that’s going to get us to page one.

Basically, pick a keyword that people are searching for and get backlinks to the website. That’s the offpage SEO part, getting the backlinks, but we also optimized the homepage for the keyword. Right? We’ve got it in there.

Bob: Yes, sir.

Mark Mason: Kind of in a natural amount of time. So, that’s just kind of common sense SEO, and you were able to pick that up pretty quickly, right?

Bob: Yes, sir, I was.

Mark Mason: Okay. So, the first thing that you learned this summer was that you can easily build a site with Wordpres.

The second thing that you learned is that once you build a site with WordPress, you can optimize it, both on the website and off the website, so that you’ll get listed in Google for a keyword that’s getting some traffic.

What’s a third thing that you learned this summer?

Bob: The third important thing I learned was if you can get traffic to your website, you can send them to other websites and earn commission off their views.

Mark Mason: Yes. We talked about that quite a bit this summer. That’s affiliate marketing. Of course, for our website, because we’re dealing with comic books, that’s just a perfect fit for eBay, right, because that’s where comic books are being sold.

Bob: Yes, sir.

Mark Mason: And you knew that already. You’d already been buying comic books on eBay. That’s in fact, how we got the idea.

Bob: Yes, I had.

Mark Mason: So, Bob is into comic books a little bit, and knew that there were transactions going on at eBay. All it took was for me to explain to you that you could build a website that drove traffic to eBay and get commissions, and we’re off to the races, right?

Bob: Yes.

Mark Mason: What we really want is to be on the first page of Google. So, why don’t you tell everybody what you have planned for, I guess we’re hoping to get the first draft of it done this weekend, you’re doing all the work. What do you have planned for this weekend?

Bob: We’re planning to write a press release to put out there to get our website on the first page.

Mark Mason: Yes. We’re following the Google First Page Formula, that’s the ebook that I’ve shared with Bob. He’s going to write a press release according to the Google First Page Formula, and we’re going to see if we can get the same results.

I’ve actually got a special link for that ebook, where I’ve got a discount available for the listeners in honor of Bob, since he’s going to be doing that this weekend. You can pick that ebook up for a 20 or 30 percent discount. I’ll be sure and put that link in the show notes. In fact, that will be at MasonWorld.com/press.

That’s great. Bob, I really appreciate you being on the show tonight. Tell me what you’re thinking about doing next. Are we going to build some more sites? How many more are we going to build or what are you thinking?

Bob: We’re just going to keep going until there’s nothing left to do. For all those people that are doing websites, don’t give up. It takes time, but it pays off.

Mark Mason: That’s excellent advice. I really appreciate it. Thanks for coming over. Have a great day.

Bob: Thank you very much.

Thanks for listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. For more information about this program, and to get the show notes, be sure to visit our website at MasonWorld.com/podcast. Follow @MasonWorld on Twitter.

Have you got a question or comment for Mark? Let us know by leaving us a voicemail on our digital recording line at 214-444-8655. We may use your message on a future episode of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

Did you like our podcast? Help us out by telling your friends and leaving your review on iTunes by going to MasonWorld.com/iTunes.

Finally, always remember that all business involves risk. Internet business is no exception. Your ability to make money with the concepts discussed in this program and on MasonWorld.com depends on many things, including your effort and capability. Since these factors according to individuals, we cannot guarantee your success or income level, and we are not responsible for any of your actions.

Thanks again for listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, building internet businesses one night at a time. Have a great day.

This is the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, Episode 4.

You want to build a business that you can call your own, but you can’t imagine abandoning the security of your day job. You are confident that you can find a few hours a week to pursue your dreams of creating a business on the internet, but you don’t know where to start. You’re looking for a plan.

Congratulations! You just found one. You are listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, with your host Mark Mason, building internet businesses one night at a time.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to episode 4 of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. Of course, I’m your host Mark Mason. It’s really great to be back on the mic. I’ve had a couple weeks of vacation with some light duty internet marketing activity, as well as some frenzied activity getting kids ready to go back to school.

It’s that time again in Texas, where we’re getting everybody ready to go back to school. That can be very exciting, because that generates a long list of things to go do. Everything from school clothes shopping to school supplies, physicals, band gear, and all of that. We’ve been pretty busy around the Mason World household the last couple of weeks.

I’ve also been busy, because I’ve been spending some time hanging out with guru affiliate marketer Lynn Terry in her private forum, she calls it the Elite forum. That’s really a fantastic investment that I’ve made. A small investment of money, and an investment of time over the last several weeks getting to know Lynn. I tell you, she is really fantastic. I had always heard great things about Lynn, and what level of integrity and customer focus she brings to her business.

Let me tell you, my time with her has exceeded all my expectations. She’s really fantastic. I encourage you to check her out over at MasonWorld.com/lynn, where I’ve a got a link over to her new Elite Membership forum over there. You can also find her on her blog at Clicknewz.com. I’ll provide both of those links in the show notes, you can check her out. She is really fantastic, and I really enjoyed spending time with her.

One of the best ways to learn about internet marketing is pick people and business models that you really believe in, follow them and watch what they do, ask them questions about what makes them successful and try to duplicate those results.

There’s absolutely no reason for you to reinvent anything in internet marketing. The best way to get started is to find somebody who you like what they’re doing, you believe in what they’re doing, and who will be honest with you and help you succeed.

Having said that, it’s time for the feature segment, where we’ll talk about our next internet monetization model. That’s making money on eBay.

It’s time for the feature segment.

In the feature segment today, we’ll be talking about our next internet business model. You’ll recall that we’ve already talked about affiliate marketing, which is when you essentially get paid for driving traffic to other people’s products, when that traffic converts to sales. Information marketing, where you can create information products, not too unlike this podcast, to be honest with you, and find ways to monetize those, usually by selling them as direct downloads.

Today we’re going to be talking about our third internet monetization method. That’s creating a business on eBay. Now, what we’ve been doing to kind of support this discussion that we’ve been having is following along in two publications.

One is the outstanding book by Yanik Silver, Moonlighting on the Internet. Yanik’s book can be found at MasonWorld.com/silver. We’ve also been following the great report from Jimmy Brown, I love Jimmy D. Brown, he’s really a great guy, his report is called 10 Proven Ways to Make at Least 10,000 a Month. That’s a 30 page free report that Jimmy offers, where he outlines 10 different things you can do to really crank up your internet income.

Those are both excellent texts for people who are getting started online, or trying to expand their online business. I recommend them both highly.

Today we’re going to be talking about eBay businesses and what you need to think about in terms of eBay. Now, most people when they think about eBay, think about going online and buying some used something, or some antique something that they go and buy and get a good deal. So, the two things that you usually have associated with eBay are used items, that’s what people think of when they think of eBay, or items that they can get for really cheap.

That’s kind of problematic if you want to start up a business on eBay, because you’re starting off in a situation where people who are looking for premium products, eBay may not necessarily the first thing that comes to your mind. Let me tell you, that is the wrong mindset to have if you’re an internet marketer.

The right thing to recognize about eBay, if you’re an internet marketer, is that there is a massive and enormous amount of traffic available to you on eBay. Millions of items are sold on eBay every year. It is a giant company that you can leverage to make money on the internet.

Before I go much further, let me tell you, I am not an eBay guru. I do not have a viable eBay business. Sure, I’ve sold stuff on eBay. In fact, I’ve got a couple of eBay auctions right now. But, that’s not my mainline business. I do understand, however, the fundamentals of marketing that are in play on eBay and I’m going to go over them for you a little bit.

The first one is there are a lot of people there. The fundamentals of internet marketing are find traffic, stand in front of it, and convert a certain percentage of that traffic into some monetized stream. So, you find people and you convert those people into something that translates into dollars. eBay meets the first criteria, which is lots of traffic.

Now, you might imagine sort of a fundamental eBay business, and you can setup sort of a traditional business on eBay by finding products and reselling them on eBay. The things that you usually hear about are people that go around to auctions and buy lots of items, and then warehouse them and sell them on eBay. Or people that setup things where they sell items on eBay, then they have them drop shipped so they’re not actually warehousing anything.

Both of those can be made to be viable internet businesses and that can work just fine. I am not super excited about those, because as I mentioned before, there’s a lot of price pressure on things that are for sale in eBay. I know people are making that work, and you can make it work too probably, but that’s not what gets me excited about eBay.

What gets me excited about eBay is the idea that Jimmy Brown mentions when he talks about eBay, and that is that you can use eBay as a lead generator. Now, if you go through the listings, as Jimmy points out, you’ll see a lot of people that seem to be losing money making sales on eBay. What I’ll tell you is that there are a lot of things that are called loss leaders sold on eBay.

It means that someone sells something, not so much really to make profit on the sale, but actually to get the customer. They know that once they get someone to buy something they’ve got a customer contact with a credit card in their hand, that’s actually willing to use it, and they can sell things to that person again. Essentially, they’re prequalifying the prospect and able to sell to them again. That’s the big thing that Jimmy points out is that you can use eBay as a lead generator.

You can also use eBay to get people into your direct sales funnel. If you’ve got multiple products, let’s say you’ve got a 1 dollar widget that you sell for 79 cents on eBay, and you know that people that buy 1 dollar widgets are going to need the 50 dollar widget cleaner. You can also get them directly in your sales funnel by selling your cheap product on eBay, and selling the more expensive back end to them later directly. Once you’ve got their contact information, of course, you’re able to contact them directly.

Those are sort of the business models that you should think about in terms of eBay. There’s the real eBay store, eBay auction, eBay selling physical products sort of eBay that you’ve thought about. But, then there’s this other thing, the marketing side of eBay where you can use eBay for lead generation or to get people into your funnel. Those are the two ways to think about eBay.

The important thing in eBay, just like in all good marketing, is the copy. That’s one of the things that’s really often ignored on eBay. When you go to write a listing on eBay, you really need to pay attention to your headline, you need to make sure your listing is personalized, you need to decide whether or not you’re going to specialize and feature it, and buy it now.

I’m not going to cover all those things, but there are a lot of marketing options, some of which are very sophisticated, that you can test and try to maximize your response on eBay. Particularly when you’re selling things over and over again. eBay is a great environment in which to split test, because there are so many different options, whether to use pictures or not, whether to use video or not, and so forth. That is a the main thing that you need to think about in eBay.

Don’t just do what all of these garage sale minded people are doing and throw up some sales copy in your auction. Actually approach it like a professional copywriter and think about what you’re writing. Hit people’s hot points, offer a unique selling proposition in your auction, offer risk reduction, make sure they know that there’s no risk for them to purchase through you. Use basic sales copy principles and you’ll be a lot more successful on eBay.

The last thing I want to mention about eBay is that you can combine what we talked about last week, that being affiliate marketing, with the things that you can do on eBay, because eBay has an affiliate program. A lot of people have made a lot of money putting up websites that actually don’t do anything but advertise products that are for sale on eBay.

You might be thinking, “That sounds like a lot of work, because something that’s for sale on eBay today won’t be there in 7 days.” That’s absolutely true. So, what these people do is they set up websites that read the eBay auctions, and when a visitor comes to their website it lists the current eBay auctions for very narrow subjects.

So, for example, maybe somebody might have a website selling coffee mugs, maybe antique coffee mugs that are for sale on eBay. They present themselves as an antique coffee mug site, with maybe some information and an antique coffee mug store. But, the links on the store really go to eBay auctions, so they’re able to sell these things that normally you wouldn’t be able to drop ship or otherwise find affiliate programs for on the internet.

You can check that out. My preferred source for the eBay affiliate program is Pepperjam. I’ll have a link to the Pepperjam Network in the show notes there for you so you can find that. That’s about it on eBay. Couple of business models there for you with eBay, a couple of things to think about when you’re listing your auctions, and finally affiliate marketing. You can mix all these things together. That about wraps it up for eBay today.

And now the feature interview.

I have a really special interview for you today. You know, I’ve been interviewing top internet marketers, asking them what are the three things they want to tell new internet marketers that will help them get started. What are the three things they wish they had known when they were getting started.

Today I have for you the guru of Firepow, the Niche Marketing on Crack author, Andrew Hansen. Andrew is an enormously successful marketer over at AndrewHansen.name. He’s a top choice of mine for integrity and paying attention to what people really need, rather than just be out to try and make a quick buck. His products are fantastic.

I’ve got him on the phone. Here’s what Andrew had to say.

Before we get started with Andrew, just one editorial note. I want to let you know that the recording of Andrew’s voice is a little echoed. It looks like we had a little equipment difficulty on my end. I did some work to clean it up, but it’s still not a fantastic audio recording. But, the information is so great, I didn’t want to re-record it with Andrew, because I didn’t want to miss that first pass raw nature of it. So, here it is in it’s entirety and I hope you enjoy it. Thanks.

Mark Mason: Outstanding. We’re on the phone now, and it’s Late Night Internet Marketing. That works for us, because it’s 1:00 in the morning. I am privileged to have on the phone Andrew Hansen. Andrew is famous for a number of outstanding products in the internet marketing space.

Of course, he is probably most famous for his viral ebook, Niche Marketing on Crack, one of the first internet marketing products that I ever purchased. He’s also got an outstanding free ebook that’s been making the rounds lately called Crap Cutter Marketing.

But, the flagship product of Andrew’s, and the one that I really love, is the Firepow product. That’s an outstanding product for affiliate and niche marketers. Maybe we’ll get to talk about that a little bit with Andrew today.

Andrew, how are you this morning at 1:00 AM in the morning?

Andrew Hansen: I’m really well. I think it’s closer to 2:00 AM now actually, where I am anyway. But, really well. Thank you for having me.

Mark Mason: Thank you very much for taking the call. It’s 2:00 in the morning on the east coast, 1:00 in the morning in Texas. This is the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, so I guess that’s appropriate.

Andrew Hansen: It’s all good. It’s fine by me.

Mark Mason: I have been interviewing outstanding internet marketers. I put you very high on that list. I’ve been reading your blog for a long time. I have been asking them the question, what would you tell a new internet marketer if you were going to tell them three things that they needed to know, or of you had it to do all over again, what are the three things that you would want to know?

But, before I ask you that question, Andrew, I’ve got to ask you another really important question that’s been on my mind for a long time. Can you handle one extra question?

Andrew Hansen: Yes, I think so.

Mark Mason: Your from Australia, right?

Andrew Hansen: Right.

Mark Mason: What in the heck is vegemite? Because in Texas we don’t know about vegemite. Can you just tell me what that is exactly?

Andrew Hansen: You don’t have vegemite?

Mark Mason: No. We don’t have vegemite and I don’t know what vegemite is.

Andrew Hansen: You don’t know what vegemite is?

Mark Mason: I’ve never seen it. I don’t know what it is and I figured now is my chance.

Andrew Hansen: Here you go. Are you ready? If I give you this description it will sound disgusting, but in fact it’s delicious. It is yeast extract. Now, how that is obtained, I have no idea. But, it’s like a black paste.

You can imagine like peanut butter, but black. So, it looks disgusting as well. But, it’s mega-salty. It’s a very sharp taste, sharp on your tongue, very salty. But, it’s a spread that you put on bread, toasts, and everything like that. It’s actually really tasty.

I didn’t know until I moved that it was really only in Australia and New Zealand, and a southern world thing. We haven’t had any since we left Australia, and we often regret that. So, that’s what vegemite is.

Mark Mason: Very good. Well, now I can rest easy. I appreciate that. So, you’re in Canada now, is that correct? And you can’t find it there?

Andrew Hansen: Canada, yes. Funny story, actually. My mum had sent me a birthday present earlier in the year, and she somehow had researched some things that we wouldn’t have had for a long time having been over here. She sent me in the mail these little vials of vegemite.

Mark Mason: That’s excellent. Very good. I’m glad to know that. You know, I’m a scuba diver, and I’ve wanted to dive The Great Barrier Reef, so now I can add vegemite and diving to that trip. That will be good.

Andrew Hansen: Just not at the same time. That might be weird.

Mark Mason: That’s true. So, the question for you, sir, is if you were talking to a new internet marketer, which I guess actually you do all the time, or if you had it to do all over again, what are the three things that you think somebody needs to know about internet marketing to be successful, or shorten the amount of time that it takes to be successful, or to avoid traps, or whatever. What are the three things you want to tell new people that are new to internet marketing?

Andrew Hansen: It’s actually a really difficult question, but it’s a good one, a very important. I don’t know whether I’ll have three things, or whether we’ll just kind of talk about a bunch of things in this time, but I can give you some of my thoughts.

The first thing that I think new people really need to know about is before they get into strategies and specific questions about you actually make the money, I think it’s important to just have an understanding of the industry that you’re getting into. I mean if you’re a new person starting out, and I’m sure you started out and I started out this way as well, you start looking into the different ways to make money online.

One of the first things that you realize is that there are so many of them. There’s as many ways to make money online as there is people trying to make money online, or at least people selling how to make money online.

So, that in itself poses, not a problem, but it’s like an initial barrier to people who are trying to get started, because one of the first things that you have to do is try to sift the enormous amount of information and try to find something that makes sense to you and something that seems like you can implement it.

Not only that, not only the amount of information, but the nature of the information that trains people how to make money on the internet is, as I know and you know, of varying levels of quality and varying levels of clarity in terms of how well they lay out the steps that you need to take. It’s so easy to waste your money, and it’s so easy to fail purely for that reason alone.

To have an understanding, like if you could somehow have foresight at that point starting out, the things that you’re looking at, the sales letters that you’re looking at and the products you’re buying are part of such an enormous, for lack of a better word, pile of information, strategies, tools, and offers trying to get you to spend more money and more money.

It’s a crazy world. That may be the first thing that I would talk about.

Mark Mason: It is a crazy world, there are 1,000 or hundreds of thousands of sales letters out there of different things you can buy. You’re right, some of them are just not very good quality. They’re well intentioned, but not good quality.

Andrew Hansen: Some of them aren’t well intentioned.

Mark Mason: Right. They’re not well intentioned, they’re actually kind of scam type things. What do you advise someone to do about this? Do you advise them to pick someone to follow, or focus their efforts, or do you just warn them?

Andrew Hansen: Yes, a bit of all of the above perhaps. I think one thing [inaudible] to the way I got started that was very helpful, and I know you did the same, was to start out when you start the search for information is to rather than jumping from kind of sales letter to sales letter and learning through the things that you read there, is to become involved in a community.

The Warrior Forum is a great one for people getting started, where you see a little more of the content and a little less of the offers, at least slightly. It’s the kind of place where there’s a bunch of people that are on the same mission that you are, and they’re looking at the same products that you are, and they can advise for or against a particular product, depending on your skill level.

They’re a group of people who definitely have been at the game longer than you have, so they will have made some of the mistakes that you are likely to make. So, you can learn from their experience. Learning from other people’s experience in that way is often a lot better than learning from your own experience, because when you have to go out and make every single mistake yourself, it becomes extremely disheartening.

It’s hard, you need a lot of will to carry on if you’re taking that way. Learning from other people’s experience cuts down the amount of time that you have to spend on everything. So, yes, joining a community is one excellent way to kind of fast track the process.

Mark Mason: Very good. That sounds like outstanding advice to me. How about thing two? What’s the second thing that you might advise someone that was new to internet marketing?

Andrew Hansen: The second thing that I had in mind when you first asked me, and some people listening may find it frustrating to hear, but it’s another sort of a mindset issue. Again, this is really difficult to do, and it’s very rare that people just getting started are able, even if they want to, to take on this mindset.

That is to just approach online business in two ways. Both as a long term venture, and something that you are building gradually and slowly, and that you want to have making you money, not just in the next 3 months, but in the next 3 years.

Then starting from that frame of mind, again is difficult, because all of the offers and all of the material that you read is always promising you that you’re going to be able to make X amount of money, “In the next 3 days you’ll have this stream of income coming next week, and then it will skyrocket from there and suddenly you’ll have an ocean front mansion and a Ferrari just like in the picture.”

It doesn’t take long for most people to realize that it doesn’t really work that way. Nor should you want it to work that way, because a general rule that I have is that the faster money comes to you, the faster it can leave you. You might be able to make 1,000 dollars by next week, but whatever may have brought you that money is almost always such that it can disappear just as fast as it came.

So, approaching it from the mindset of wanting to setup a real business is maybe the smartest thing that you can do. Again, it’s difficult, but if you do it you’ll beat many people.

Mark Mason: That’s excellent advice. I sometimes get these heartbreaking emails from readers of my blog, or people that stumble through my blog telling me how their credit cards are maxed out and they’re about to lose their house and they need to make 10,000 dollars tomorrow. There’s just not a lot you can tell those people, really.

Andrew Hansen: I know what you mean. I have the same emails. You’re right, what do you say to them? The truest thing to say to them is that you don’t need internet marketing right now, you need a loan or you need a job or something. If someone was in that situation, would you advise them to start a real business? Would you tell them to start up a Subway franchise and see if you can make money that way? Of course not. They shouldn’t be looking for a business. They should be looking to secure their financial situation first.

Mark Mason: That’s right. Okay. That’s excellent advise, number two. So, do you have a third one for me tonight?

Andrew Hansen: Yes. It’s hard to select a third one actually.

Mark Mason: Well, you’re allowed four. If it’s really coming down to that kind of thing, we’ll give you a fourth one.

Andrew Hansen: Sure. All right. The next thing, and this one is kind of related to your approach also in the pre-strategy stage, I would say. That is because like we’ve been saying, there are so many different methods to being able to make money, the thing is that actually there is also so many working methods.

There’s many ways to skin the cat. There’s a lot of ways that in the midst of all the ones that don’t work, there’s still a lot of ways that do work. What makes one method right for one person doesn’t depend on the method, but it depends on the individual.

For example, if you pick any given person off the street, that person would have preexisting knowledge, and preexisting skills, preexisting likes and dislikes. So, they would be better suited to one business model rather than another.

For example, you might really like writing, like me, I’m someone who really likes to write. So, writing comes easy to me. It’s never a rigorous process, I never begrudgingly start to write an article, because I enjoy it. So, I use that to my advantage by focusing on business models that utilize the skills and the things that I enjoy, and that I already have.

That’s how I got started out. I got started first just writing for other people. That allowed me to be able to make money from home. It wasn’t really a business, but I was able to make money from that. Then slowly as I learned more about actually making money with a proper business online, I was able to use those writing skills to leverage into content for blogs and for mini sites. Then to use the traffic generated from those to promote affiliate programs, and earn commissions and things like that.

The point after that discussion was try to find the method, and firstly, try to stick to one method, because the worst thing that you can do is get started with one method, see another method or offer tomorrow in passing and kind of hop over to that method and do a little bit of work there, and realize that it’s not really for you, so hop onto another method, and then maybe later come back to that first method, because you realized it might be more profitable after all.

That’s the worst thing you can do. That’s opportunity hopping, like I call it, and it’s almost always going to lead to failure. So, the first thing is to stick to one method at least until you get to the point that you realize you can’t do it, because it’s just not fitting with you, you’re not good at doing things that way, you don’t have the resources or the time, or whatever else to perform that particular method.

The second thing is when you are sticking to one method, make it one method that fits with the skills and the things that you like that you already have. So, if you like writing, blogging should be easy for you. You might find it easier to maintain a blog than to sell products. You could blog and to sell advertising on that blog, as opposed to doing all the research and the analytics and tracking and testing that comes with say making money with PPC.

That would be the third thing, stick to one method, and try to stick one method that fits with the things that you already are good at and enjoy doing.

Mark Mason: That’s a great tip. You know, I hear a lot of people, and I’m one of them, tell people to beware of getting distracted by what I call bright shiny objects. Every new email that comes into your inbox is trying to sell you a new method, you need to watch out for that.

But, I think you may be the first person I’ve heard who has really expressed this in this way, where you should take advantage of the skills that you have and try to get a match between what you’re good at and what the method teaches, so that you can leverage the assets you already have. That’s an excellent tip. I appreciate that.

Andrew Hansen: Absolutely. Part of it is that you only, and this is kind of unfortunate, but inevitable, that you will only really start to find what you really enjoy doing online and what you are really good at after a little bit of messing around. So, maybe one of the other side note points of the three is just be willing to kind of experiment a little bit with it, and be willing to lose a little bit of money if you absolutely have to.

Take your time and find out what it is you’re good at, because even if you take that little bit of time at the start and you start focusing on a method that you are really good at and that you do really enjoy, the dividends of that will pay down the track, both in terms of how much time it will save you and how much money it will make you, will be well worth the amount of time that you may waste in the beginning.

Mark Mason: Excellent. Did you have one more that you wanted to throw in here, because I’ve got time for you if you’d like one more?

Andrew Hansen: I think I will, actually, because we didn’t really get to talk much about strategy. So, I thought I might throw one little strategy point in there. It’s really hard to pick one strategy point out of everything that you could possibly say that would cover every kind of method and every kind of person who would be looking to start to make money online.

But, the thing that I thought of, and it’s such a recurring theme, and such a recurring thing that I see as the reason for people not achieving the results that they want to with their online business. That is firstly, whatever method or many methods that you will start to make money online with begin with finding a market. Whether it’s a market being an interest group to which you want to write a blog for, or whether it’s a market that you’re going to sell a product to, or it’s a market that you’re going to sell advertising to, whatever it is, many methods start with a niche or finding a market.

Different people have different definitions of what a market or what a niche on the internet really is. If you’re listening to this call, you probably will have already, or will in the future, come across the methods for locating markets on the internet. Like using the search analytics tools to see how many people are searching for a particular term.

A lot of people think, and it’s easy to fall into this trap of thinking, that things like somebody searching for a term is a market or is a profitable market. But, there’s a big difference between searches and buyers. If you want to make money from your online business, if you’re not just doing it for fun or because you enjoy it, you want to make money from it, you need to be in a niche where people are spending money. You need to be in a niche not just where you think people might spend money, but where people are already spending money.

Seeing the term, I don’t know whatever it is, Dragon Ball Z cards, for example, gets searched for 100,000 times, that doesn’t mean you’ve got 100,000 people who could potentially buy from you in that group, because that’s such a niche of kids and people who aren’t necessarily spending a ton of money. It doesn’t mean you’ve got 100,000 buyers. You might only have 1,000 buyers, if you’re lucky, maybe 100 buyers more likely.

Conversely, there’s markets where if you look at something like weight loss. People are spending money in that market. It’s an enormous market, not just on the internet, but offline as well. It’s a market where you know people are spending money. I’m not necessarily advocating that you get into the weight loss market, it’s extremely competitive, but I’m providing that as an example of a market where you are certain that people are already spending money.

So, your goal then, almost regardless of what method it is that you’re using, is to try to access and try to put yourself between the transactions that are already taking place and put yourself in the midst of the transactions that are already taking place. By doing that, you’re giving yourself a really increased percentage chance of being able to actually claim some of that cash that’s already changing hands.

Starting with a niche of buyers is my fourth, final, and only strategy tip.

Mark Mason: I know it’s amazing to me that people miss this, but I think you cover it pretty well in some of the materials that you’ve published over the years. There’s a lot of really simple things you can think about. One of the things that you teach is just the keyword modifier, “buy.”

There’s a hell of a lot of difference between the keyword “buy dog food recipes” and “dog food recipes.” One person is looking for a free recipe for dog food, and the other person is looking for a dog food recipe cookbook.

Andrew Hansen: Absolutely.

Mark Mason: There’s just a huge difference.

Andrew Hansen: One person has got their wallet in their hand as they type. They’ve got their credit card there and they’re looking to make sure they know all the different numbers so they’re ready to type it in when they find what it is that they want.

Whereas the other group, you can’t tell what they want. Some of them may be looking to buy, but some of them might be looking for a freebie, some of them might be looking for something they can print off and give to their friends. You don’t know. So, the group that’s got their credit card ready, and it’s a no brainer about which one you want to target.

Mark Mason: Very good. This has been incredibly helpful. There are a couple of other questions I wanted to ask you.

Andrew Hansen: Sure.

Mark Mason: I know that you’ve been very gracious and not actually talking about your own products, but they’re so good I want to talk about them. The first thing I want to talk about and want to point people to is one of my favorite ebooks that you’ve released, and it’s free, that’s really great, and I’ve actually sent my readers to it, because I really like it. That’s your Crap Cutter Marketing ebook. Can you give people kind of the 30 second lowdown about what they can expect in that ebook, and let them where to find it, and I’ll also put the URL in the show notes.

Andrew Hansen: Sure. Some of the things that I wrote about in Crap Cutter Marketing is the same as what we’ve talked about on this call. In part it’s about locating niche markets of buyers, locating groups of people that are looking to spend money and talking about strategies for putting yourself, your content, your website, or your offers in front of those people.

It’s talking about how to do that in a way that creates as little work for you as possible. There’s obviously work involved, but it’s try to make that as easy as possible for you. It also tries to do that without you having to spend a ton of money. So, it focuses on free traffic strategies. It looks at then leveraging that free traffic by promoting offers as an affiliate and using advertising revenue and using content, or things that you write, as the platform for selling stuff online.

There’s a ton of stuff in that report. A lot on mindset things, to finding niches, to monetizing your content, to generating traffic. It’s a really good free report, and it’s had a lot of good feedback. You can’t argue with free. There’s no cheesy up sell and you don’t have to spend any money in the process. It’s a good one to check out.

Mark Mason: Tell me the URL again.

Andrew Hansen: That’s CrapCutterMarketing.com.

Mark Mason: Have you gotten any negative feedback from people who are offended by the use of the word crap?

Andrew Hansen: No, I haven’t actually. Not as much as people offended by the use of the word crack in a previous report.

Mark Mason: Niche Marketing on Crack was another great one. I told you, that’s one of the first things I bought, so that’s good stuff.

The other thing I wanted to talk about briefly, because it’s your premiere product and I’ve written a lot about it on my blog, is Firepow. I was wondering if you could just give us the 30 second summary of what the Firepow system is, and give us some look into the future about Firepow and give me some breaking news here? Tell me what you’ve got planned over there.

Andrew Hansen: Sure. Firepow is kind of like a combination of all the intelligent things I’ve learned about making money online in the 5 or 6 years that I’ve been doing this. It’s a piece of software primarily, but it’s also kind of a suite of software tools, as well as a lot of training materials, like PDFs and videos, that focus on how to create blogs and use those blogs for the purposes of making money as an affiliate.

There’s other forms of monetization as well. The blog is for the purpose of generating really high quality, target, buying traffic that then you can push towards affiliate offers to earn commissions or to advertising on your site to earn Adsense clicks, or to your own products if you sell something somewhere else on the internet.

It’s a suite of tools that helps you to automate as much as possible that entire process. It helps you set up a blog in a matter of 10 clicks or something like that. There’s no HTML to write, there’s FTP programs to fiddle around with, there’s no uploading or downloading. You just fill in the forms and follow the instructions and it will spit you out a nice looking blog that’s not just a normal blog, but a blog that’s optimized to generate traffic for you from the search engines. So, it’s targeted to the right keywords that you’re looking to rank for.

It’s got proper permalinks. It’s got all the plugins and all the little settings that normally you have to learn how to set yourself or the add-ons that you have to work out. It’s got them all set in there for you, so you just click the buttons and you spits you out the blog.

It takes you right from that part of the process, creating your blog, to the generation of your content, which is the next thing that’s enormously important for anyone looking to generate free traffic. You need content. You need stuff to attract visitors that you can then monetize.

It helps you generate content both with ideas and with physically finding content for you on the internet that’s already out there that’s not being utilized as well as it might be that’s targeted to the terms that you’re looking to rank for. So, it helps you leverage other people’s content. Not in any illegal way, of course, just by grabbing content from syndicated sources from elsewhere on the internet.

Right through to the process of actually promoting your blog and being able to generate traffic to it, both through search engines and through social bookmarking sites, through directories, through other people’s private blogs, and building backlinks and generating exposure in as many places as possible to your blogs.

It’s kind of the whole enchilada from the creation of your blog to the cashing of your checks is what I always say. It’s automating that process as much as possible.

In terms of future plans, we’re really just trying to add new features or new tools all the time to optimize that and to automate it more for you. For example, we’ve got a feature coming out next week that’s for people who want to make Adsense sites.

We don’t have time to discuss that model, obviously, but it’s just creating content that gets ranked in the search engines that you position Adsense ads in, when people click those ads you make money. With this new tool, it will be in addition to something that we already have, but that lets you basically create a full Adsense blog that gets updated every couple days, however often you select, with content that’s targeted to the right keywords, that’s relevant and unique as much as possible, and automatically monetizing that for you.

So, you can create Adsense within, again, a number of clicks. You could create an Adsense site on any niche that you choose as long as you’ve got a keyword list that you’ve already researched within 5 minutes or so. So, that’s something we’re working on at the moment.

Mark Mason: Now, where can people find out more information about Firepow?

Andrew Hansen: You can checkout GetFirepow.com.

Mark Mason: That is excellent, sir. I appreciate all the tips, and I’m excited to give people an opportunity to hear about your products, because in both cases those two products are products that I’ve personally endorsed and have done so based on just the raw quality of both of them. I’m happy to give you that time to talk about that.

I do have one last question for you. I know you’re an accomplished affiliate marketer, you’ve sold all kinds of crazy things, which we don’t have time to go through them all here today, but now the question I have for you is, are you aware of any affiliate programs for vegemite?

Andrew Hansen: A vegemite affiliate program. You know, I’m sure there probably is one. You might have to sign up to some kind of online store, some Australian grocery store online. I don’t think it will pay out very high, because it’s a physical glass bottle with stuff in it.

After they ship it to you it will cost you 3.75, you might earn a 10 cent commission per jar of vegemite sold. I don’t know too many people that order it in quantities large enough to generate a huge commission. But, if you pioneer it, I’ll stand behind you.

Mark Mason: Okay, very good. Listen, Andrew, I really appreciate your time. The last question I have for you is, if people just want to follow the teachings of Andrew Hansen, where is the best place to follow you online?

Andrew Hansen: Sure. You can check out my blog, that’s at AndrewHansen.name, or you can follow me on Twitter as well, and that’s @AndrewHansen1.

Mark Mason: Very good. I’ll have both of those in the show notes. Andrew, thank you very much. I’m going to get some sleep. It’s creeping up on 2:00 in the morning here in Dallas, and it’s 3:00 in the morning there. I appreciate your time, and I hope you have a fantastic day.

Andrew Hansen: My please, sir. Thank you for having me.

Mark Mason: Thank you very much.

Thanks for listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. For more information about this program, and to get the show notes, be sure to visit our website at MasonWorld.com/podcast. Follow @MasonWorld on Twitter.

Have you got a question or comment for Mark? Let us know by leaving us a voicemail on our digital recording line at 214-444-8655. We may use your message on a future episode of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

Did you like our podcast? Help us out by telling your friends and leaving your review on iTunes by going to MasonWorld.com/iTunes.

Finally, always remember that all business involves risk. Internet business is no exception. Your ability to make money with the concepts discussed in this program and on MasonWorld.com depends on many things, including your effort and capability. Since these factors according to individuals, we cannot guarantee your success or income level, and we are not responsible for any of your actions.

Thanks again for listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, building internet businesses one night at a time. Have a great day.

I saw the following question in one of the internet marketing forums that I moderate (Coaching With Josh) today.  It was interesting, so I thought I would pass it along to you.

Question:  Should I mix affiliate links on my AdSense site.

Of course, the answer is like most things in Internet Marketing -- it depends on stuff, and you need to test.

But that is a boring answer, so I thought I would take a crack at the extreme cases -- AdSense vesus Links.

As you may know, most PPC programs teach that you should look for affiliate sites promoting the product that you want to promote and find the sites that are running AdSense.  They want you to put your AdWords ads on those sites.

So, I have always thought that you should not mix the two.  Because obviously these people believe that on average traffic that leaks off of a site through AdSense is worth more than what you have to pay for it.  And these people have big boats and fast cars, so they must be right (hey, I saw the pictures on the sales page for the PPC course).

Having said that, I do have sites where I have mixed them -- but they are crummy sites anyway, so it is hard for me to tell.

As my buddy "Coach Josh" says, you need to test.

Here is the way to think about it. Let's say you have 1000 visitors to a site in a month, and that your AdSense CTR is 10%. That means that you are getting 100 clicks per month. Let's say the clicks are worth $0.50. That is $50 per month.  Sounds cool.

Now, lets say that your copy is good and lest say that converting that same site to an affiliate banner/links gets you the same 10% CTR on your affilaite links and banners. You are now sending 100 visitors to the merchant site.

Now the question is, what is the conversion rate at the merchant site and what is the commission. Just to keep things simple, lets say that 5% of the people that reach the merchant site buy. This rate could be way high, and will depend on the quality your copy and their copy. If the commission per sale is at least $10 in this simple example -- it is a tie.  Of the 100 people that reach the site, only 5 will buy and you will make $50.

So, the bottom line is know your numbers and test.

But here is something to think about. In an affiliate site, you want visitors to trust you and then click through. You are preselling. In AdSense sites, you are usually wanting a high bounce rate, and many people argue that ugly sites do better.

So, before you switch monetization methods, you might want to think about the look and feel of your site.

Just some thoughts.

Best regards,

Mark

PS - check out my free video about making money with AdSense for more info about that topic.

As you know, I have spent some time building AdSense Mini-Sites, and have discussed before how important it is to consider your market if you want high AdSense payouts.  The method I use to build my AdSense mini-sites is based on the excellent $5 Formula eBook by Josh Spaulding.

Recently, I created a free 30 minute video that you can watch that explains the methods described in the $5 Formula eBook.  It's great for people that are not crazy about reading eBooks, and it offers my take on Josh's formula.  As a bonus, I have included audio of an interview that I conducted with Josh about the $5 Formula earlier this month.

If you are interested in creating passive online income with little investment, you will really like the $5 Formula Video.

There is no continuity program or other sneakiness  associated with the video.  I do have it set up on ClickBank so if you refer people to the video using your ClickBank ID and they buy any of my ClickBank products, you get the commission.  I figured that was only fair for people who send traffic to the video.  Just my way of saying thanks.  Look for the affiliate link at the bottom of the page at http://5dollarformulavideo.com.

Anyway, check it out and let me know what you think.

A few weeks ago, I talked about my experience writing copy for sales pages and promised a post about how to split test different elements on the page.  I had that post about half written, and then I saw that Spaulding had written a post on Google Website Optimizer.   So, since that was exactly what I was going to do, I wrote Josh a nasty email and then decided to just send you over there.  While you are there, I recommend that you opt in to receive his free reports on internet marketing -- they are all three excellent.  If you have a question about that post, just drop a comment and Josh (or I) will get back to you with an answer.

Automatic Website Visitors - A Case Study

With that task out of the way, I wanted to announce my latest case study -- I am calling it the "Jon Leger" case study.

As you know, I am a big Jon Leger fan.  He is a great internet marketer, and I own most of his tools.  For example, he is the father of the $7 Secrets script that I have written about before.  He is also a straight-up honest guy that stands behind his products, and I like that.

So, I wondered if I could create an AdSense Mini-Site using a simple formula and make money using only Leger's tools.  Here is the plan.

1. Come up with an interesting niche at random with high CPC (complete)
2. Do keyword research on a niche using Leger's WebComp Analyst (complete)
3. Based on the research, pick targeted keywords for articles and domain name (complete)
4. Register a brand new domain (complete)
5. Create 5 pages of content using Leger's Instant Article Wizard Pro (in progress)
6. Create an "spin ready" article for Leger's 1WayLinks (1WL) Product
7. Submit the above article to 200 blogs using 1WL, generating 600 backlinks over 2 months
8. Add the blog to Leger's 3WayLinks network, generating another 250 links
9. Add the blog to Leger's DirLinks network (free with 3WayLinks subscription)
10. Monetize the blog with AdSense.
11. DO ABSOLUTELY NO OTHER PROMOTION.

That is the study.

I wanted to use his new tool, Answer Analyst, to create some additional content for the site.  That looks like a pretty neat tool (you should check out the video).  To be honest, I don't have a copy yet and I did not take the time to get one.  Too much stuff on my plate these days...and I am hearing that he is re-launching Article Builder.  So I plan to wait and see what he does there (killer sales page graphics on that site).

Anyway, I plan to have this whole thing completed next week, and I will update you on the progress.

My Prediction (Hope)

I don't actually know what is going to happen here, because I usually use Jon's tools in conjunction with other tools.  I have never tried to isolate the impact of backlinks from his network.

So here is my prediction.  It is more of a hope really -- and it will give us something to debate.  I predict that this blog will make money from AdSense after a month or two, perhaps as much as a dollar per day after sixty days.   So, if I finish the blog by April 15th (tax day here in America), then I am predicting the following:

• March 15:  Case study idea hatched.  Delayed while working on other projects
• April 8:  Case study plan announced
• April 15:  Blog completely constructed, monetized and promoted
• May 15:  Blog completely indexed - some unique visitors and some AdSense revenue
• June 15: AdSense revenue steady approaching $1 day
• July 15:  $30 in AdSense revenue in last 30 days.
• July 16:  Reveal the URL for the site and publish results.

I am very interested on your thoughts and questions.  What do you think about this study?  Leave your predictions below and we can see who is right and who is wrong in a month or two.

Several months ago I posted that I would be working on my sales letter for Niche AdSense Themes for WordPress.  You probably remember that this was one of my very first products, and that I am always learning by doing.  Man, that first product seems like a lifetime ago.

Edit -- See my special guest post invitation to real copy writers in the post comments.

Since I was "learning" on that product I did a "toss" rather than a launch.  What I mean by a "toss" is that I did not do a full court press trying to get anyone and everyone to promote the themes.  Rather, I worked with a few friends to do an initial promotion:

• Josh Spaulding and Garry Conn promoted the themes to their lists and blogs.
• Josh featured the themes in his excellent eBook $5 Formula.
• Caroline Middlebrook featured the themes in her excellent Niche Site Video
• James Jones sent my Micro Niche Finder Video to his list

The Results Of My First Attempt

Well, I learned a lot about having a product.  I thought that you might be able to learn some stuff too.  I actually made lots of sales.  From my perspective, it was a huge success (and continues to sell).

But, as usual, there were lots of opportunities to improve.  Here are some highlights (and opportunities to improve):

• Highly targeted traffic from a list that was expected to convert at 5% or more only converted at 3.5%.  What's worse,  less targeted list traffic converted very poorly.
• Less targeted traffic from blogs in the make money online niche converted at much less than 1%
• Traffic from ClickBank affiliates was converting at a very low rate.

Increasing Sales Page Conversions

So, I decided that based on that information, that I needed to look at the sales page.  Since I am a glutton for punishment, I posted a request for feedback on and criticism of my sales page on both the Warrior Forum and Digital Point Forums.  Well, as you can imagine, I got some.  You need flame-retardant undies to withstand the comments I got.

Note to new Internet Marketers out there -- don't get your self-esteem wrapped up in your sales copy if you are going to ask for feedback on a forum.  And, be prepared to hear from people that have no idea what they are talking about.

I also got some very helpful feedback from of my very own readers.  That was awesome, and I really appreciate it when readers take the time to comment.  Here are some feedback highlights:

• Work on the headline and sub-headline. It was described by one guy on the Warrior Forum as a "confusing wreck." The great thing was that he offered me a couple of much better alternative headlines that really illustrated his point.
• Work on the copy -- let it breath. Again, a member of the Warrior Forum supplied new copy to illustrate the point.  I got similar feedback from a reader of the blog.
• Make the site look more professional. The one comment from Digital Point pointed out the fact that a website that was selling wordpress themes needed to be "very professional looking."   I agreed.  Josh actually made fun of my graphics (several times).

Taking Action

So, based on all that feedback, I changed the sales template to something more professional, I changed the headline, and I re-did the copy.  Conversions are up considerably.  You can see the new Niche AdSense Themes for WordPress sales page here and you can compare it to the old sales page.

What do you think?  Did I make it better or worse?  Time and split testing will tell (I will be making a post on how to implement split testing next week).

Let me know your thoughts.

Regards,
Mark

Last week I concluded that my blog was not a good as Garry Conn's blog.  For those of you that missed the joke, Garry helped me get this blog off the ground back when I had 25 RSS subs and no clue.  I am still looking for a clue, but the RSS numbers are up.

Anyway, here is some further evidence that Garry has me beat --there is a cool interview of Garry on  Success Circuit.  So, if you missed it, it is definately worth a look.

In the interview, Garry reveals that he is nearing the "500 blog mark."  Yikes.

• @rondavis007 thanks Ron. #
• @gushin bread was fantastic! #
• @rondavis007 TWIT? #
• Listening to NLP based podcast. Wondering if NLP really works, or is it just nonsense. #
• In the ER with youngest daughter and possible broken foot. Ouch! #
• Eating homemade jalapeno beer bread straight from the oven. Yum. #
• Finally celebrating Christmas with my parents. Better late than never. #
• My friend just started a new blog, and his first post is up. Check it out! InkHammer.com Stumbles appreciated. http://inkhammer.com/?p=10 #
• @jarret Check this out http://tinyurl.com/2tdkkj in reply to jarret #
• @colligan Right. But twitter is the tech. You are using the tech to some end. The nature of that tech is shaping the end result. in reply to colligan #
• @jasonvo @colligan But you cannot separate tech from the product. eg. Twitter. Before twitter, we would not have a 140 char debate. in reply to jasonvo #
• @aaronabber I am thinking that an IM product might generate more interest for your purpose. Like a copy of some cool course or software. in reply to aaronabber #
• @colligan I heard those 5000 people were all trying to fix Vista. Apparently, they gave up. Beyond repair. in reply to colligan #
• - Are You Having Trouble With AdSense? http://aweber.com/b/10B5Z #
• @PatrikBerggren It is going well but slowly. It is not my top priority right now. I have 30 sites up, creating content, and seeing some $. in reply to PatrikBerggren #
• Up early this morning preparing for a meeting. Need more coffee. #
• Just entered the $497 Blog Mastermind contest. You can win by following @JohnChow and retweet. http://xr.com/master He follows back too! #
• @jasonvo Are NDAs needed for mastermind groups? in reply to jasonvo #
• @jasonvo Should there be free alcohol at mastermind meetings, and if so, how much. Who should be responsible for bringing the blender? in reply to jasonvo #
• @jasonvo Mastermind group. Should there be a business profit model for a mastermind group, or should the group be "not for profit?" in reply to jasonvo #
• Wondering how to integrate my Google AdSense/AdWords/Gmail and Docs accounts under one login. Won't let me associate the accounts. Help? #
• Calling my grandmother. Sadly, she does not have twitter or facebook. #
• Taking kids to school. Rocking out to the Jonas Brothers CD. Not bad for pop music. Well produced. #
• @jasonpotash I don't go to bed. I write blog posts. LOL in reply to jasonpotash #
• Yep. Thanks. On my way. #
• IPod interfaced to car video. Watching @jasonvo how to register domain name tutorial on my car video. Too cool. #

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One of the things I love most about blogging is interacting with real people through comments.  So, if you read my blog, Thank You.

I had a really good comment on an old post that I wrote about making $5000 a month using AdSense.   I thought the comment was worth its own post.  The comment author is challenging some of the assumptions in my article based on his own experiences, and asks some good questions.  He starts off by saying that all of this "make money online" stuff is a lot easier to talk about than to actually do.  Boy, that is definately true.

Here is his full comment:

I’m doing the same from last 1 yr 2 months. It’s easy to say than doing all this. Here I prove:

1. In order to bring traffic from articles, you need to write them (time consuming activity).
2. One hr. per month is really not enough in order to promote your site for regular 100 visits traffic (link promotion, writing fresh content, publish it, ping it, social book mark it etc.)
3. On content network, adsense is paying very less money like 0.01 or 0.05 etc. so how you can make 6$ per day.

Waiting for logical answers…

I love comments like this.  This person understands that they have an issue, and they want to find the solution.  They are working through the issues.  From my point of view, the question was very intelligent.  Here is my response.

These are all EXCELLENT points. Let me take them 1 by 1.

1. This is absolutely correct. Not only do they take time, your time is worth money. When you get to the point of having some success, or when you have some money to spend, I would definately recommend outsourcing writing. You can get a 300 word article written for between $1 and $15 depending on the size of your order and the quality you want. If you have a site that will make $100/month once mature, it is easy to justify investing $100 in articles to get it started.

2. Again, your time is worth money. You can outsource. But, once a site is making money, you can often leave it alone. I have a good friend that has a 5 page site that he built 2 years ago. He has not touched it in a year. It has 6 pages and make $200/month in AdSense revenue. He spends zero hours per month promoting that site.

3. You have to select niches with high paying keywords. Examples are weight loss, travel, acne, legal advice, etc. You must not build sites with low CPC — like “sports socks” or “free cheese”. (I am being silly, but you get the idea.)

You can screen your niche ideas for CPC using a tool like the one at SpyFu.com. To see how crazy the CPC can get, check out this list of high paying keywords. http://www.spyfu.com/TopList.aspx?listId=3

Now, you are correct that you will not get paid the AdWords CPC. When estimating AdSense earnings, I assume that Google will keep 50% and the content network will result in a 60% reduction from that. So, I assume that I can get a CPC of 20% of the AdWords cost. That is a rough estimate. It means that if someone is paying $5 for a click, I will get to keep a dollar.

If you are getting $0.01 for clicks, you are either targeting a low-paying niche or your account is “smart priced” due to low conversions or low CTR.

Hope that helps.

This last point is critical.

See, if you are trying to make money from AdSense, you need to understand some basic economics.  The AdSense ad is on your site in the first place only because some business person is paying Google to get a click that will convert into a sale.   Google's gross profit is the amount that Google get's paid for the click minus the cost that takes them to get the click.

What is Google's cost to get the click?  Well, fundamentally, they need to pay for the people and machines that run AdSense, and they need to pay you for the click.  That is why they care about CTR (Click Thru Rate).  It costs them money to show the ad (computer time, bandwidth, etc).  If they have to show an ad 100 times to get one click, they are bummed.  That is why the penalize advertisers and publishers for low CTR.

So, the money they pay you is the amount they got for the click minus their cost and profit (basically).  This means that if you want to get good money from your niche site using AdSense, you need to target high-paying keywords.

What do you think about AdSense?  Are you having any luck making money with it?

Photo: photo credit: purpleslog

One of the time wasting traps that Internet Marketers can fall into is constant checking of stats throughout the day.  After all, it is human nature to want to know what is going on in your business, especially when you are just starting out.

When I first started out, I was always popping over to my AdSense account and checking my stats.  Same with ClickBank.  It totally annoys me that ClickBank does not send email when you make an affiliate sale.  So, I was checking my stats all the time.  That got to be a real drag, so now I use a couple of tools to notify me.

For Clickbank, I use CBNotify.  This little tool lives at the bottom of my Firefox browser and shows the day's Clickbank earnings.

For AdSense, I use a Google Desktop Gadget called AdSense Tracker.

Both of these will save you time if you are addicted to stats.

Do you use tools like this that save you time? What are they?

Have a great day.

Mark

As I have mentioned before, I am a forum moderator at Coaching With Josh.  That program is set up to help a wide range of people, including beginners.  Today, I got the below question, and I thought many people might be interested in the answer.

Of course, I have changed the names and some of the details to protect the innocent:

For the last couple of days I've been checking out XYZ product on ClickBank and I think it's a great product to promote as an affiliate, due to the fact that commissions are paid through ClickBank and the sales letter is really good.

I've been considering promoting it on specialized forums and on EZA.

I'm a newbie with no previous marketing experience.

The thing that really makes my head spin is keyword research. I don't know what tool I should use and how to tell which keywords are profitable and which ones are not worth it.

Also, my idea is to start generating not only keywords related to "xxx xxxx xxxx", but also to the "yyy yyyy yyyyy" term.

Since I've never designed a website in my life, I would like to know if starting with a blogger blog is a better option.

So, should I use the wordpress blog or start fresh with a blogger blog?

Now, I should say that entire $2000 courses are built around the above question.  So, it is hard to answer this kind of question in a single blog post.  I am not pretending to give all the answers here.

Additionally, I don't know much about the product that was mentioned.   I did check out the sales letter and  I agree the sales letter looks good.  The problem is that it is hard to judge how they will convert without testing.  I recommend always asking the publisher for conversion stats, and asking them what support they have for tracking your own conversions.

To promote a product like this, you have many options.  I am not a PPC guy.  I like organic traffic.  For organic search traffic, you can put up a site with a URL like http://TheProductURLReview.com using wordpress.

To get organic traffic to that URL, one option is to create pages that rank for keywords that are related to the product that you are trying to sell.  For each keyword that you want to target, you can write a short article talking about the product and linking to it with an affiliate link.

You can see one new site that I have like this here:

http://www.1waylinksreview.com

It's so new that I have not done much with that site, but you get the idea.

You can also take this approach with article marketing or a blogger blog.  But, I always think it is better to have a specific domain that you own.

Fundamentally, it boils down to conversions.  Get visitors to your site, presell them, get them to click through to the sales page, and a certain percentage will convert to sales.

Photo: photo credit: Dina Middin

I am working on a project over at Coaching With Josh where I am building an AdSense mini-site and documenting my progress day by day.  I am also taking feedback and answering questions as I go.

We just started selecting a niche today, and I posted over a hundred niche site ideas in the Coaching With Josh Forums.

I thought you might like a peek at a few of them:

• Holiday Games & Activities
• Kitchen Remodeling
• Moving house
• New Years Eve Party Planning
• Online Dating
• Parenting skills
• Pregnancy
• Real Estate
• Thanksgiving Party Articles
• Wart Removal
• Wedding Games & Activities
• Craigslist
• Feng-shui
• Formula D Racing
• International Airports
• Myspace
• New Air Travel Rules
• Re-Financing
• Renting A House Or Apartment
• Sports Coaching
• Supercross Racing
• Tattoos
• Vitamins and Supplements
• Astrology
• Auto Responders
• Backyard Activities

Have a great day!

Regards,
Mark

Let's face it. When it comes to search, there is only one game in town -- Google. Another fact that you should face is that the built-in search in WordPress is not that great. Put those two ideas together and it's clear that what you need to do is integrate Google's Custom Search (GCS) into you blog. You get a better search, and some opportunity to generate AdSense revenue.

To be honest, I'd be surprised if you generate much in the way of revenue. The reason to do this integration is to improve your readers experience. Frankly, if you always use user experience as the reason that you do things to your blog, you will often come out ahead in the long run in any case.

Google Custom Search Overview

As you can see, I have successfully integrated GCS into my sidebar. To do this, you basically need 3 things.

1. You need a Google AdSense account
2. You need code for your sidebar
3. You need code for the results page

The way GCS works is that you first create a custom configuration in your Google AdSense account.  The result of that step is the generation of two pieces of JavaScript.  One piece of JavaScript goes in your sidebar (or wherever you want the search bar).  This first piece of JavaScript is the code that presents the search box and search button to the user.  That code includes information that points to your search configuration on the Google AdSense servers.

When a search is submitted by your visitor, the first JavaScript program runs and loads the a results page that you have specified in your AdSense configuration.  In our case, that results page is regular WordPress page that has some JavaScript in it.    The results page JavaScript is the second script provided by Google mentioned above.   That code interfaces with the Google AdSense servers to get and format the results and AdSense ads.

Best Ways To Implement Google Custom Search

There are at least two ways to implement this Google Custom Search integration.  You can do it manually by following the excellent documentation provided by on Maki's blog over at DoshDosh.com, or your can use the Google Custom Search plugin.

As part of my research for this article, I tried the plugin.  Unfortunately, my theme was not compatible with it (I think because of some customizations that I have done to the WordPress theme code and file locations).  I suspect that most simple themes will work just fine.

I like to understand how things work, so I used the instructions at DoshDosh.  If you try to implement this and have problems, please feel free to leave a comment and I will try to assist.

Parting thoughts about Google Custom Search

Some things to consider based on my experience with this.

1. Don't expect to make tons of money on AdSense for search ads.
2. Try the plugin first.  It's easier to implement if it works.
3. If you have a narrow page area like I do, ads to the right will not work.  I recommend that you use ads on the top and bottom (specified in the AdSense search setup interface).

Let me know if you try this and you get it to work, or if you need some help.

Thanks,
Mark

If you follow my blog, you know that Internet Marketing is a hobby for me.  Admittedly, it has evolved into a very serious hobby, but it is still a hobby.  I do most of my Internet Marketing work under cover of darkness -- late at night after my family is asleep (like they are right now).

During the day, I work on the very integrated circuits (computer chips) that make this blog (the internet and other communication platforms) function.  In fact, if you talked on a cell phone today or are reading this blog post on a portable device like a laptop, there is a pretty good chance that something that I had a small part in building in my day job touched your life.  Pretty cool (I work for a cool company).

Time To Set Goals For 2009

I've been going through 2009 goal setting at my day job for the last several weeks.  In fact, big companies all over the world are making plans for 2009 right now.  Some companies are probably already done.  The point is that serious people are making serious plans for next year right now.

This stuff going on at work has made me consider what my Internet Marketing goals are for 2009.  In the past, I have published my goals in the MasonWorld Roadmap page -- and I will do so again in January.  Basically, I will have some goals in four major areas:

• Growing this blog and my list by helping people with Internet Marketing
• Hitting some AdSense site targets using FirePow and other automation
• Creating some new Internet Marketing products
• Create some successful PPC campaigns

Now those aren't my goals really.  Those are just the focus areas for my goals.   A good business goal needs to be measurable and specific.  It should also have a due date.  Sure, goals like "Be a better husband" are nice, but they are hard to measure, and are almost never good as business goals.  It's hard to make progress on a goal like that, because "better" is not well defined.

A better business goal would be something like one of these:

• Reach 5000 subscribers to my email list by 12/31/09
• Get 50 AdSense sites up with some content by 04/30/09
• Launch 3 new Internet Marketing products by 12/31/09

You get the idea.

What Are Your Goals?

When I meet with my employees at my day job about annual goals, I always as "When we are sitting right here having this conversation next year, what do you want to be able to say you accomplished in 2009?"

Let me ask you the same question.  What do you want to be able to claim in 2009?   What would get your really excited?  What motivates you?

Sometimes, being held accountable for your goals helps a lot.  I'll make you a deal.  Document your goals here in the comments of this thread and I will check in with you in July and December 2009 and ask you about your progress.   Don't publish your secrets here -- just tell the world what you are planning for 2009.  You will be amazed how public accountability will help you reach your goals.

Need some help setting goals?  Here are two cool resources:

myGoals.com -- Goal Setting For Everyone
GoalsGuy.com -- Helping You Hit Your Goals Is Their Goal

Regards,
Mark

It's Wednesday, and you know what that means. It's time for another weekly Internet Business Fortune Cookie.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and I am actually at my parents home in Houston, TX at this very moment. I have a lot to be thankful for -- so much so that it is hard to make a list. I was thinking about that today and I suddenly realized that I have never had any turkey-based Chinese Food. Why is that?

A quick trip to Google to search for "turkey Chinese food" reveals information about Chinese food in the country of Turkey, but little information about Chinese food containing turkey. Naturally, my next thought was to dominate the "turkey Chinese food" niche, but I don't see any AdSense ads on that page. Guess I'll hold off on that site for the time being.

This week The Cookie has come out on the side of the value of Joint Ventures in Internet Marketing.

Hear The Cookie:

"Take a trip with a friend."

Of course, the fortune cookie is obviously referring to the fact that some of the most successful Internet businesses these days rely on joint ventures. Joint Ventures (or JVs as they are called) are business arrangements where two or more parties get together to deliver a product and share the profits.

Why Do Joint Ventures?

The best reason to do a joint venture is to leverage unique talents of individuals. Let's say you know how to write killer code, but you are not sure what to write. Another guy has a great idea but neither one of you has any marketing savvy. The two of you team up and find a marketing guru with a list of 100,000 hungry buyers. That's a joint venture. You share the profits according to some prearranged split.

The awesome thing about JVs is that you can often achieve something much greater than the sum of the contributions by leveraging each others talents. That can mean more profit all of the participants.

Three Tips For A Successful Joint Venture

Here are three things to keep in mind when doing a JV.

• Communicate clearly.  Everything from financial arrangements to schedule and quality expectations.  Misunderstands and arguments are a leading cause of JV failure and disappointment.
• Know the law.  I am not a lawyer, and I do not play one on TV.  However, I do know that you need to be very careful to understand the difference between a Joint Venture, a partnership and other business arrangements.  If you do it wrong, you could be held liable for goofy stuff that your JV partners do without your permission.  Consult your attorney.
• Be honest and fair.   Treat your JV partners the way you want to be treated.  Expect a long-term business relationship, and behave accordingly.  Care what they think, and listen to what they have to say.

Bottom line as always is listen to the cookie.  A JV can be a great way to jump-start your business.

Have a great day.
Mark

Be sure and check out our previous Internet Business Fortune Cookies.

Photo credit: Uploaded on July 17, 2006 by headcase

It's Wednesday, and you know what that means. It's time for another weekly Internet Business Fortune Cookie. Last night I had Jalapeno Chicken and fried rice. Basically, I call this "Texas Chinese Food." It was really spicy hot, and that explains this week's cookie that talks about a hot new blog from Garry Conn.

The Cookie Speaks The Truth

As you know, everything you need to know about running an internet business can be learned from fortune cookies. This week The Cookie has obviously been surfing the Internet.

Hear The Cookie:
"Big things come in small packages."

Of course, the fortune cookie is obviously referring to the fact that I got a small little email from Niche Blog and AdSense Guru Garry Conn last weekend announcing his Next Big Thing -- a new blog!

Garry has launched BloggingQuestions.com, a blog where you can go to get your questions about blogging answered by the blogging community.  Here's how it works (in Garrys' words):

How the blog works is very simple:

People can follow or subscribe to the blog and read newly asked questions or even archived ones. Because these questions have been asked by readers such as yourself, it is very likely that you will have a personal interest in the questions being asked and the answers that go with them.

The part that makes BloggingQuestions.com "one of a kind" and totally unique is the fact your questions are welcomed! There is no such thing as a stupid question on BloggingQuestions.com. You are invited to ask your own questions! Simply create a free account and post your question LIVE on the blog. From there people who read the blog (including myself) can provide you with answers by using the comment form.

Besides being the coolest domain name that I have seen in a long time, this promises to be a great resource for bloggers.  Truly, a big thing in a small package.

The Cookie Speaks About Value -- Follow The Cookie

One of the things that I like about Garry is that he really tries to help people.  Sometimes, he does this to a fault, and people take advantage of him (you know who you are).

When I was just starting out working on MasonWorld.com, Garry took tons of his own time to help me.  This new BloggingQuestions.com blog is another great example of Garry's willingness to lend a hand.  Pay attention -- Garry builds trust and gives people something in exchange for their participation in his business.

As a side note -- I think Garry has a cousin or someone like that who works at GoDaddy.  That is the only way I can explain how he gets these killer domain names.

So, listen to the cookie.   Watch out for the small packages.  There may be something big in there.  Check out BloggingQuestions.com today.

Have a great day.
Mark

Photo credit: Uploaded on July 17, 2006 by headcase

I have been working with niche sites with Firepow a lot over the last month, and many of my niche sites are monetized with AdSense.  So, I have had AdSense on the brain lately.  As it happens, a valued customer of Niche AdSense Themes contacted me this weekend.  He may choose to reveal himself in the comments, but in case he doesn't, let's just call him George.  George had just gotten a generic email from Google, and wanted some help figuring out what he had done wrong.  Here is an excerpt:

Hello,

While reviewing your account, we noticed that you are currently
displaying Google ads in a manner that is not compliant with our
policies. For instance, we found violations of AdSense policies
on pages such as mycustomerswebsite.com.

Publishers may not place Google ads on pages that violate
Google’s webmaster quality guidelines
(http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35
769#quality). While we've included the following excerpts from
these guidelines, we recommend that you take the time to review
them in their entirety.

The problem is, this email went on to discuss the webmaster guidelines generically, but never indicated what George had done wrong.  His site was not on a forbidden topic, and was not "black hat site."  It was mostly legitimately republished content -- but that content was republished with permission.

Now, getting ads pulled from your site is not the same as getting banned from AdSense.  George's other sites are OK at the moment.  Oddly, the site was de-indexed by Google at the same time.  This is a more severe action, and suggests that the search engine people are talking directly to the AdSense people.

Anyway, the bottom line is, we are not sure what happened exactly.

Usually, AdSense advice is blunt -- "don't click on your own ads".  In my research this weekend, I was reminded of five more subtle things that you need to keep in mind when building sites for AdSense.  Here they are, in no particular order.

Make It About Google's Customer

Ultimately, Google search cares about getting the user a great search result so that the next time the user needs a search engine, they will choose Google.  It is all about Google's market share.  If they put spam at the top of their search results, people will eventually look for a better search engine.

So, if you do something to trick Google to rank your content so that you can make a buck -- that is OK.  Have fun.  Lots of "black hat" guys make a lot more money on the internet than I do.  Business is business.  As long as what you do is legal, you can make your own decisions.  Google is not the law.  But, don't ever forget that they do own the search engine and they answer to Google share holders.  So don't be upset if they yank your listings.  It is their search engine, after all.

Same goes for AdSense.  Always remember that the customer for AdSense is the advertiser -- not you, and not the person who clicks on the ad.  If your content does not generate clicks, or if clicks coming from your site do not increase revenue for the advertiser (Google's customer), you should expect Google to address that.  They do that by paying per click, smart pricing, and banning some sites from AdSense.

Create Some Unique Content

As I mentioned above, Google Search is about the searching user.  If your content is 100% duplicated content from elsewhere on the web, why would Google want to show it?  If they can figure out where it is, they will prefer to show the original content (all things being equal).   However, it is not clear to me that AdSense should care about duplicate content.  There is some hard-to-understand language in the Webmaster Guidelines about duplicate content, but I personally believe that passage refers to mirror sites and not PLR and other "duplicate content."

As I mentioned above, George had a lot of duplicate content.  While it is possible that this got his site banned from AdSense, I really don't think that was the reason.  Still, good unique content is a valuable defense against getting your site banned.

Be Careful About Competing Ads

While it is not clear what ads are OK, be careful about putting ads on your site that "look like" Google Ads.  Google is sensitive about protecting their brand, and will ban your site.

George did have competing ads on that site, and those ads had a footer encouraging people to refresh to get"fresh ads."  We are not sure if this matters to Google or not, but I think it might.  This is my best guess as to why George's site got banned.

Be Careful About Ad Placement

The AdSense ads on George's site are highly optimized to maximize click-through.  One concern we had is that Google gets upset if you try to "trick" the user and make them think that they are clicking on something other than an ad.

Because of this, one thing that people debate a lot is how close ads can be to page titles.  For example, let's say you have a page with the title "Used Cars For Sale" and right below that title you have an AdSense block that makes it seem that the AdSense ads are actually cars for sale on your site.

You can interpret Google's guidelines in such a way as to conclude this violates their TOS.   While I am sure you can violate their TOS this way, I don't think this is an issue with George's site.  However, it is something to keep in mind.

Make Sure You Have A Privacy Policy (and Disclaimers)

As of about last April, Google started requiring a privacy policy.  Make sure you have one on every page that serves AdSense Ads.  I also recommend a disclaimer, although this is not required by Google.  Fortunately, this was not an issue for George -- he did a bang-up job here.

The Bottom Line

Here is the real bottom line -- Google can pull your site for any reason or no reason at all.  So, my strong recommendation is that you do not put all of your eggs in one basket here.  Diversify with other affiliate offers and your own products.  You'll be glad you did.

Regards,
Mark

P.S. -- I know the title said three tips -- I got carried away and inclided five or six.  Sorry about that.

Hey -- hope you are having a great day, and are enjoying my daily post frenzy that I started on Thursday with my post on the importance of lists.    I'll be posting daily for the next few days (possibly longer) and then it will be back to my normal 3 posts per week (Monday, Wed Friday).  We'll see how that goes in November.  So much to do, and so little time.

October Was A Crazy Month

If you have been following my over the last month, you know I am working on three main projects at the moment.  It can be a bit confusing at times, so I wanted to update you on the status:

1. Build 30 quality "AdSense sites" in a variety of niches. This whole thing was motivated by my post about how to make $5000/month on line.  Now, I am calling these AdSense sites, but, in reality I have decided to add a variety of monetization options including eBay links (using the phpBay bay plugin), some ads through the PepperJam affiliate network and other affiliate offers.  Instead of 30 "AdSense sites," this will result in 30 "mini-authority" sites.    I call them "mini-Authority" because they will not have high frequency original content.  Rather, there will be a mix of content from a variety of sources presented in a useful way.  Status:  all 30 domains are purchased and up and running.  About 15 sites are actually running and some are generating a little revenue. I think I sould be able to "finish" them and drip back to 1 hour of work per site per month by December.  We'll see.
2. Full evaluation of Firepow. In building these sites, I realized that Firepow might be just the tool that I need to make this happen.  I have been helping Andrew's team beta-test Blog Import into Firepow (which is working for me in most cases).   Now that that is complete, I plan to get back to blogging about Firepow late next week.  Don't forget that I have arranged for a $300 Firepow discount for you if you cannot wait for my complete review and recommendation.
3. Build my email list using $7 Secrets. This is the big distraction for me at the moment.  I was so impressed with Josh Spaulding's New Age Email Marketing report, that I decided to move the management of my email lists to his "formula."  Part of that experiment involves growing the list, and that means I needed to write a great ebook to offer for sale for $7 as recommended in $7 Secrets.  That eBook is complete, and will launch Tuesday here on MasonWorld.com. If you have not read Josh's report, I recommend it (it is only $7, as you might expect).

So, that is what is going on at the moment.

Hope that clears things up a bit.

By the way, things are likely to get worse before they get better.

I have learned a lot of tricks building these 30 sites (and others before them), and before the end of the year, I will be launching a new Niche Site Building service. If you are interested, you can see the current sales copy at http://www.nichesitenow.com.

Also, am hoping to do a PPC experiment with one of my internet marketing buddies before the end of the year.  As you may remember, I purchased Commission Blueprint, and I am itching to try out PPC.

So, hang in there -- lots of stuff to come before the end of the year.

Thanks,
Mark

I am a little behind on my commitment to blog all week about Firepow, but don't worry.  I will get all of the information out there and answer all of your questions -- even if it stretches into the weekend.

To be completely honest with you, the first time that I saw Firepow, I wondered what in the world could be worth $100/month or more a month.  I had a hard time getting throught the long sales letter.  And, I don't like to buy software with recurring cost, and I really don't like to spend $100/month.   So my initial reaction was "Yikes."

Just to be clear, at the time of this writing, Firepow costs $147/month for the Premium membership and $117/month for the basic membership.  I have arranged a Firepow discount with Andrew for my readers that saves you $25/month.  So, when I say "$100/month or more, know the cost depends on the discount and what offer you pick.

Whether or not Firepow is worth the cost is a personal question. Anyone who tells you differently is just trying to sell you something.  It's all about return on investment (ROI).  If you invest $100/month in Firepow, will you get back more than $100 in savings or profit?   It really is that simple.  Don't be confused by all of the other crap out there.  You should only buy Firepow if you think it will make you money (good ROI).

In order to understand the ROI, you need to first understand what Firepow is.

From my point of view, Firepow is a tool targeted at people that want to create and manage "lots" of niche websites.  Whether "lots" is 5 or 50 or 500 is a question we will explore later.  It is certainly possible to make use of Firepow on a single authority site, but my feeling is that the best use of Firepow is across multiple niche blogs.

To make Firepow worth the money, you need to create 5 blogs that make at least $20 a month.  Or, ten blogs that make $10/month.  Or, 20 blogs that make $5/month.  You get the idea.  The cool thing is that creating 20 blogs with Firepow that actually get traffic looks amazingly easy.

Firepow Is Three Things (at Least)

From my point of view, Firepow is web-based software for creating and managing blogs, creating content, and promoting those blogs.

• Creating and managing blogs: The first thing that you do when you log into Firepow is create a blog.  Firepow is based on WordPress.   Enter some key information (URL, FTP information, Blog title, and some keywords), pick a theme, pick some plugins, and click "create".  A new blog is created instantly.  It takes me hours to set up a blog, download the software for themes and plugins and get everything up and running (including AdSense) for a new blog.   Firepow does this in 5 minutes (or less).  This is the ultimate in "one click setup" because it includes far more than just the initial install of WordPress.  There are tons of plugins (some unique to Firepow) and lots of cool options.  But suffice it to say that you can get a fully featured blog up and running in minutes.
• Creating content: One of the critical items that a new blog owner faces is getting some initial content out there.  For this problem, Firepow offers several unique and creative solutions.  You can "automatically" republish content from Article Directories, you can get content from RSS, and you can create your own blog posts using "cut and paste tools" from various sources.  Pretty slick.  You can create your posts right in the Firepow interface without ever logging into WordPress."
• Promotion: Ranking in the search engines is the key to organic traffic, and backlinks are a key to ranking.  The Firepow premium network includes access to the Firepow "blog network."  I will be covering this in a future post, but know for now that this provides backlinks in a way that is "similar" to article marketing (but you have much more control over the content and links).  You can also automatically promote your blogs via RSS and social networks.  This all looks really powerful to me.

There are some other really cool features like task plans that help you organize and manage your blogs and an amazing support forum.   More on those things in a later post.

The Bottom Line On Firepow

So, that is my personal opinion on what Firepow is.  To summarize, Firepow is software that allows you to rapidly create, manage, populate and promote niche WordPress blogs.

Over the next few days I will be getting more into what Firepow can do and why I think it is cool.

What are your questions about Firepow?  Let's make sure that we get all of them answered.

As I mentioned yesterday, I have been looking at FirePow as I work on building out my niche sites.

One of the things that I immediately started hearing from people was concern about the price of the FirePow subscription.

I talked to Andrew Hanson about the cost, and he immediately reminded me that it was about return on investment (ROI).  His argument is, quite simply, that you can make your money back many times over by using the tools in FirePow to create a blog empire.

"I get that," I said.  "But money is money." It's fine to say that in the near future, FirePow will pay for itself, but it is still expensive.  It still costs money RIGHT NOW.

So, Andrew responded by offering a discount coupon for MasonWorld.com readers.  For now, if you sign up for FirePow using my link, you can get a whopping $25/month off of your bill.  That's right -- I am offering you a $300/year discount on Firepow.

Use FirePow discount coupon code "mason".

Andrew did not say how long he would be able to offer that deal, and I have not finished my evaluation -- but I did not want to wait.  If you were considering FirePow anyway, I wanted you to have the discount now.

Regards,
Mark

P.S.  I am very impressed with FirePow so far.  If you have questions about FirePow, feel free to ask them here.

OK -- so now I sound like that reverse funnel guy or Jeffery Lant. After all, the great promise of something for nothing is what fuels a lot of the scam artists out there. I am not really interested in talking about "something for nothing." Rather, I want to do some math. Those that know me know that I am an engineer. I do more math before breakfast than most people do all day. So, let's do some AdSense math.

$5000 A Month Is Really Cool

Honestly, I just picked that number because it sounds cool.  Who wouldn't want an extra $5000 per month?  I mean, if I told you that you could make $5000 a month working only an hour a day, would you do it?  Well, that is what I am going to tell you.  Of course, there are no guarantees.  Your ability to make money on the internet has to do with your abilities and your personal situation.  I am not able to promise that you will make money online.  You mileage may vary.  Not valid in Nevada.  You get the idea.

I'll also tell you that the hard part is the traffic.  You can trade off click through rate for traffic, so if you think my traffic assumptions are too high, you should know that my CTR is low.  If you assume a higher CTR you can use less traffic.  You can also use less traffic if you assume higher earnings per click (EPC).

I've been thinking about this because I have been looking at FirePow (which is even cooler than I imagined).  It is so easy to make sites with that system, you can easily imagine making a ton of them.  FirePow also has some automatic traffic stuff -- so it looks really appealing for the creation of AdSense Sites.

Let's Do Some Math About Making Money Online

The vision is about passive income.  By passive income, I specifically mean websites that are set up for generating income via AdSense revenue.  As you probably know, AdSense are those little ads that show up on sites and say "Ads by Google".  If you own a site with those ads and visitors click them, you get paid.  How much you get paid depends on the following factors.

• How many sites do you have? For the purpose of this analysis, I am assuming that you have 30 sites.  I choose 30 because I will recommend that you get to the point where you can work on one site per day each day of the month for about an hour.  So, for site #13, you will work on it for about an hour on the 13th of every month posting new content, doing promotion, etc.  You may want to outsource the generation of 4 or 5 articles per month per site so you can post them on that day.  Of course, you'll probably want to work more at first to set the sites up.  I am currently working in October to get my 30 sites set up.  But once they are set up, you should be able to "invest" 1 hour a day to continuously improve the sites.  This is really cool for people that have a "day job" like me.
• How many people will search for the terms that your site is ranking for each day? I am going to assume that you have set up your sites to optimize around 5 or so keyword phrases, and that those phrases have a total search volume of about 1500 searches per day.  That's 1500 people searching for your keywords, not 1500 people visiting your site.  Maybe your site is targeting 5 keywords with 300 daily searches each.  This is pretty conservative.
• How many of the people that search will click on your link? I am assuming that you will choose keywords and do search engine optimization that will allow you to rank on the first page of Google for each of your keywords.  If you can get in the first 5-6 listings and you write a great page description for page, you should be able to capture 10-15% of that search traffic.  If you are in the #1 position, you might get as much as 40% of the traffic.  For this analysis, we will assume that you only capture 6% of the search traffic.  This will get you about 90 visitors per day.
• How much traffic can you get from Article Marketing? I am personally a fan of article marketing.  It works well with AdSense because it complements organic traffic and provides backlinks which improve search engine performance.  For this analysis, I am assuming that you can get 10 visitors a day from article marketing from 4 or 5 articles published to 15 directories each.  If you want to know more about Article Marketing, check out my blog post on that topic.
• Just 100 visitors total per day. So, I am assuming that you can create a 5 or 6 page site that can get 100 visitors per day using search engines and article marketing (social media traffic not included).  Think you can do that?  I think you can.
• How many people will click your ads? I have assumed for this analysis that 8 out of every 100 visitors that visit your site will click an ad.  For an AdSense site, that would be pathetic.  I have see conversions using my Niche AdSense Themes for WordPress between %10 and %20 (your mileage may vary).
• How much will clicks pay? For this analysis, I have assumed that clicks only pay a measly $0.55 per click.  That is terrible.  You can easily find higher paying niches on SpyFu.com.  When I look at SpyFu, I assume that I can get 20% of the average that the report.  So, for "home mortgage" where the average is around $10.00, I would expect to get about $2.00 per click.  That is just an estimate, but $0.55 is a very conservative number in this game if you are careful about keyword selection.

So, the bottom line is that if you do some search engine and article marketing so that you get 100 visitors per day, you can get 8 AdSense clicks.  Those 8 clicks could be worth $5.60 for each site that you have.  If you have 30 sites, you can make $168/day or about $5000 per month.

30 sites not the right number for you?  Here are the numbers for 1, 10, 20, 30 and 50 sites.

Once you are up and running, you can maintain the rankings an traffic with a little content and link building each month -- maybe one hour every month.

Don't like AdSense or have a site with traffic but low EPC?  Consider converting that traffic to affiliate sales using something like phpBay.  I am actually doing that with a couple of sites that have a low AdSense EPC.

What do you think?  Can you do it?  I am off to build a couple of these sites in FirePow and see what happens.

Regards,

Mark

For those of you that are interested in building niche sites for AdSense revenue, I wanted to let you know that I will be moving my focus back to niche site creation for the month of October.  My goal in October will be to end the month with 30 niche AdSense sites up and running and promoted.

I got motivated to do this after finally getting a look inside FirePow.  This is a really cool tool that should make it possible to create and promote niche blogs quickly.

I'll be doing lots of the following in October:

• Niche keyword research
• Buying domain names
• Setting up niche blogs
• Creating content
• Outsourcing content creation
• Article Marketing
• Social media promotion
• etc.

Some of the 30 blogs will be brand new, and some will be brought back to life (like the Elvis Blog).  My old readers will remember that one.  Others will live on domains that I have already purchased that are currently idle.

I'll try to report my progress as I move along.

My plan is to get to 30 blogs up and generating AdSense revenue and stay there for a while, touching 1 blog a day each month for about an hour.  On Monday, I'll post some additional information on my October Blog Blitz.

Let me know if you have any questions about niche blogging and I will try to answer them in October.

Thanks,
Mark

I grew up in Texas.  I'm still here.

In Texas, if you steal a horse, we hang you. In Texas, people are allowed to carry guns to protect themselves and their personal property. As a child growing up in Texas, I was raised to understand that stealing is wrong. Well, one thing is for sure -- not everyone is from Texas.

The other day, I woke up to this anonymous email message about my product, Niche Adsense Themes for WordPress:

To: mark
Subj: Your Download Page is Unprotected

http://www.nicheadsensethemes.com/thankyou2008-1.html
It is floating in a black hat forum.
Remove it.

Anonymous

And sure enough, download activity showed this to be true.  People were stealing my stuff. (And by the way, thanks very much to the anonymous emailer, whomever you are).

Protecting Your Electronic Downloads

Now, I had already followed all the recommended methods for keeping my downloadable product safe:

• Use a thank you page that is hard to guess
• Use file names that are hard to guess
• Use robots.txt to block searching
• Use nofollow tags
• etc.

The problem is, that just does not protect you against really determined hackers.  There are lots of ways that product security can be compromised.  Some search engines (one in particular) are said to ignore nofollow tags and robots.txt.  This can result in your thank you page getting indexed.  Another problem can be that you customers might accidentally (or on purpose) share your download link with others.

Using Software To Protect Software

My solution was to go out and purchase a copy of DL Guard.   DL Guard (or DLG as it is often referred to) was recommended to be by some other top internet marketers that are happy customers.  At $127, it is not cheap.  However, it is feature-packed and the customer service is highly regarded according to people I spoke with.

DL Guard is really a lot more than just a download page protector (which is all I really needed at the moment).  Cool features of DL Guard include:

• Single or multi-product sales
• Expiring download links
• Limited download attempts
• Integration with many major payment processors (including ClickBank)
• Mailing list automation
• Membership site features
• Many others....I have only scratched the surface so far on this software

How My Product Is Protected

Install of this software was super easy.  It took me 10 minutes to install the software on my server and convert my existing sales page to enable protection.  So, now when you purchase Niche Adsense Themes for WordPress, you get a unique download link just for you.  When you download the product, your IP address is logged.  You have a limited time to download the product before the link expires, and you have a limited number of times you can download it.  The actual URL of the download is never revealed to the user.

Bottom Line:  I'm Impressed

I have not even started looking at the rest of the features -- but the bottom line is that I am really impressed with DL Guard.  This looks like an excellent tool for my Internet Marketing Toolkit -- one that I will use over and over in my business.  So, while I was initially put off by the "high" price of $127, I am impressed with the product.  I plan to keep DL Guard and use it to protect my current and future digital products.  If you are worried about digital product theft, I recommend that you check DL Guard out (their product website is excellent).