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

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

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

My Approach to the Niche Site Duel

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

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

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

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

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

Keyword Research for Learn Guitar

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

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

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

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

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

Niche Site Traffic Strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creating the Niche Website

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

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

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

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

Outsourcing Tasks for the Duel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Current Status and Next Steps

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

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

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

Best Regards,
Mark Mason

Sometimes I am amazed at how long people have been in internet business. For example, my friend Lynn Terry who helps people learn how to make money online over at Clicknewz.com has been in internet business for over 13 years, which just seems amazing to me.

I personally started my internet business seriously in 2007, my website had been online since early 2001. Two and a half years seems like a really long time to me.

A lot of people might look at that and think, “Wow, all these people have such a huge head start. Is it too late for me to get online?” To that I say absolutely not! The internet age is really just beginning. This is still very much in its infancy, people are still coming online all over the world, handheld mobile devices are coming online in enormous numbers, mobile ecommerce really hasn’t even started yet.

So, to those people I say, No, we’re still in the beginning of this thing. There’s still plenty of time to get online and be early to the party.

As proof of this I saw something truly shocking today on the way to work. Here’s a picture...

I’m driving down Central Expressway in Dallas, Texas and I see a billboard in the middle of the highway for Host Gator. Now, this has got to be the clearest indication that internet business is about to turn mainstream that I can possibly imagine.

You wouldn’t typically think the average person running down the street would need to know how to register a domain name and get internet website hosting.

So, for that billboard to appear on the highway indicates to me that this whole thing is about to explode. I imagine everyone with a website, and hosting being so common that it pays to advertise on the highway.  Once that happens, internet business will simply be a matter of how to increase blog traffic and match offers with buyers (which is all it is about now anyway).

I say to you we’re still at the beginning, but you need to go ahead and hurry, because if you don’t go ahead and take decisive action you’ll never get where you want to go with your internet business.

Thanks. My name is Mark Mason from MasonWorld.com and it’s my pleasure to help you build your internet business one night at a time.

Tonight I have been playing around with Micro Niche Finder.   In this video, I demonstrate how to find niches with Micro Niche Finder and find a domain that will help you rank for your chosen keyword.  I show the old Strength of Competition feature as well as new Measure Of Backlinks feature and the domain name availability feature.

At the end of the video, I find a domain and register it.  In the next video I will create a site for this domain using Firepow.

I hope you enjoy the video

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAAgKxdqblc

I’ve been playing around tonight with the latest download of Micro Niche Finder, by James Jones. James has added some features, and quite frankly, they’re so cool I thought it would be fun to go ahead and make a video and show you what’s going on with Micro Niche Finder 4.62, I think is the version I have here.

I was having a conversation with someone about their pet grooming site, actually they had a site about pet care and one of the sub-niches on the site was pet grooming. So, in order to facilitate that discussion, as I often do, I just cranked open Micro Niche Finder to get an idea of what the keywords were. So, I just typed in dog grooming, because I was trying to niche down a little bit from pet grooming.

What Micro Niche Finder does is it goes off to the Google Keyword External Tool and it pulls some stuff. As you can see, I’ve been monkeying around in here a little bit in Micro Niche Finder looking at some of these different keywords.

Now, what you’re usually looking for when you use Micro Niche Finder for niche marketing, as opposed to pay per click, is a keyword with some traffic and you’re looking for a keyword that doesn’t have a ton of competition. A lot of people debate how you determine whether or not there’s not competition. I’m not here to tell you what the right way is, I just want to show you some of the cool stuff that Micro Niche Finder does.

One thing that you can do is you can see how many keywords, how many websites and webpages there are that exactly match the phrase that you’re looking at. Let’s say you’re looking at dog grooming and you see that there are 90,000 global searches for that every month. You want to understand how many pages have exactly the phrase dog grooming on them, well there’s 1.7 million.

We can bet that that’s going to be very competitive. In fact, if you click on strength of competition, James tells you that strength of competition scores 1,000, which he considers high, which is why it’s marked in red. So, that doesn’t look like a very good place to go do niche marketing, because it looks pretty competitive.

Maybe we can go with something a little bit more narrow, like dog grooming supplies. We see that there are 8,100 searches per month there. When we get the exact phrase count we see that there’s 83,000 competing pages. James evaluates the strength of competition as 53, which he considers barely into the caution region.

Now he has added a new feature called the measure of backlinks. This is his estimate of how many quality backlinks you would need to get on the first page of Google. I don’t know what the algorithm is, I haven’t tested it and I don’t know if it works. But, I do understand the what he’s doing is he’s going to Yahoo Site Explorer and looking at the top ten results and seeing how many backlinks they have.

Based on that he’s making some estimate of how many backlinks you would need to beat people who are already on the first page of Google. So, that makes sense. I don’t know the exact algorithm that he’s using, but I understand what he’s trying to do and it makes sense. He says 384, that sounds a little high to me. I don’t really want to mess with that for a simple niche site.

So, I come down here some more and I looked at dog grooming scissors. Sure enough there are 3,000 searches for dog grooming scissors every month, and if I look at the exact phrase count I see that while there are a ton of websites with the phrase dog grooming scissors on them, James estimates the strength of competition to be green at 14. That’s pretty cool, so let’s see what he says about the measure of backlinks.

It turns out the measure of backlinks for dog grooming scissors is pretty low. When it comes back here you’ll see that actually it’s very low at a value of 1. So, you can look at that and see what he sees by clicking on the number. You get this cool thing where you see these different websites that are ranking for the term dog grooming scissors. These have very few backlinks.

Now, that’s pretty neat. It’s a brand new tool. I haven’t tested it, so let’s test it. One of the things that you can do to maximize your chance to win a keyword is to register the exact domain. You can see what happens, he’s got a domain column here. In fact, if you go up to the top you can see it’s the availability of the domain.

If we go back down to the dog grooming scissors, you can see I already clicked on it. When you click on these, what it tells you is whether or not the keyword.com, .net, and .org is available. Sure enough it turns out that it looks like DogGroomingScissors.org should be available for us to buy. So, let’s go buy that and throw up a site.

As it happens, I do business with NameCheap, login to my NameCheap account and sure enough we can go see if DogGroomingScissors is available. Is that available? The answer is absolutely DogGroomingScissors.org is available. Great. That’s exactly what we want. We want a .org, .net. or a .com. Let’s buy it. We add to cart, do an express checkout. Let’s put in the coupon code here and save a dollar. Always good to save a dollar. Use funds available in my account, proceed to secure payment, charge in process.

So, we’ve bought the domain. Next, what we’re going to do, which is really cool, we’ll do in the next video. We’re going to go to FirePow, which is a product that you can use to quickly generate websites and we’re just going to throw up a website on this domain.

Again, my name is Mark Mason from MasonWorld.com and we’re just having fun with dog grooming scissors. I hope you have a fantastic day. Thanks.

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.

• @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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Internet Marketing Fortune Cookie #12

Staying Out Of eBay Jail

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

This week's Internet Business Fortune Cookie made me stop and look at something that has been bugging me in the back of my mind for a long time.  When I cracked open the cookie this week, I knew right away what it meant.

Hear the cookie speak:

"Be Willing To Admit That You May Be Wrong"

So what did I think I might be wrong about?

Terms And Conditions For eBay Niche Stores

As you know, I have several eBay niche stores powered by the incredibly cool phpBay software.  That software allows you to create an eBay store in any WordPress blog or other PHP-based site almost effortlessly, and it has killer SEO features not found in other tools.  In fact, I just released a video a couple of weeks ago on how I use keyword tools like Micro Niche Finder to build eBay niche stores in minutes.

But something has been bothering me.  When I did that video, I used the trademark term BMW in the URL.   Now, this may not be a great idea for several reasons, but one reason bothered me particularly.

I have been told (and believed) that the eBay terms of service (TOS) does not allow you to use a trademark name in URL before the third slash.  So, if you want to set up a BMW site using eBay tools, BMW cannot appear before the third slash.

OK: http: //www.mycarshop.com/bmw

Not OK: http://www.myBMWcarshop.com

I believed this was true -- but I don't any longer.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer and I do not offer legal advice. What follows should not be considered legal advice. If you need legal advice, you should consult an attorney. You have been warned.

My Research on the eBay TOS

I researched this "third slash" thing. I think I had it wrong.  I think it is OK from eBay's point of view to have trademarks in the URL of eBay niche stores.

Here is the TOS from eBay on PepperJam's site:

You will not adopt or use any company name, trademark, trade name. brand, shop sign, domain name, or URL (specifically, any term before the third "/" of your URL) that incorporates as a part thereof any of eBay Inc.'s, or its corporate affiliates', (a) trademarks, tradenames, company names, brands, shop signs, domain names or URLs (including the translations and transliterations), or any variations thereof; or (b) any term that consists of a generic or descriptive word, followed by the term BAY. Further, you will not display your company name, branding or trademark in an uneven, staggered, multi-color format that, in ePN's sole discretion, invokes the distinctiveness of the famous multi-color eBay logo.

I believe that this says (paraphrasing) that You will not have a store name or URL that uses any reference to eBay or it's affiliates.

I do not believe this says that You cannot use brand names in the URL. Now, using the term BMW may aggravate someone in Germany, but eBay does not care.

Let's break it down:

You will not adopt or use any company name, trademark, trade name. brand, shop sign, domain name, or URL (specifically, any term before the third "/" of your URL)

Above means you cannot use anything in your store name or URL

...that incorporates as a part thereof any of eBay Inc.'s, or its corporate affiliates', (a) trademarks, tradenames, company names, brands, shop signs, domain names or URLs (including the translations and transliterations), or any variations thereof; or (b) any term that consists of a generic or descriptive word, followed by the term BAY.

Above means that uses any eBay trademark names (or those of eBay corporate affiliates)

Further, you will not display your company name, branding or trademark in an uneven, staggered, multi-color format that, in ePN's sole discretion, invokes the distinctiveness of the famous multi-color eBay logo.

Above means you cannot rip off or parody the eBay logo.

Now one open question is what are "corporate affiliates"? I think they mean other eBay companies like PayPal, but I am still researching that.

I spoke with an anonymous "legal professional" with experience in Internet Marketing. He did not offer me legal advice, and he is not offering you legal advice (neither am I). He recommends that you and I both consult our attorneys. He also said the following:

I interpret this to say that you may not use any ebay trademark in the space between the second and third slash of your URL.

I do not read it to say anything about what comes after the third slash.

I do not read it to say anything about the use of a NON-affiliated company's info between the second and third slash.

Determining what companies are "affiliates" is the art.

Again, BMW may care, but I do not think eBay does.

Remember, I am not a lawyer and I do not offer legal advice. The above should not be considered legal advice. If you need legal advice, you should consult an attorney. You have been warned twice (maybe three times).

As the cookie says, Be Willing To Admit That You May Be Wrong.

Have a great day.
Mark

Photo credit: Uploaded on July 17, 2006 by headcase

Internet Marketing Fortune Cookie #11

The Truth About Internet Marketing

It's Wednesday (well, in China anyway), and you know what that means. It's time for another weekly Internet Business Fortune Cookie.

This week has been crazy busy (Christmas is tomorrow in case you missed the memo).  With three kids and lots of extended family, I have been happily toiling away at holiday tasks.

So, in a shocking twist of events, I have had no Chinese food for more than a week.  Lucky for you, I have a stash of old fortune cookie fortunes in a wooden box on my desk.   Seriously, I save them.  I pulled this one out at random.  Hear the cookie speak:

"Honesty Is The Best Policy."

Clearly the cookie speaks about the brand new internet marketing blog by Michelle Adams (www.michelle-adams.com).   I ran across Michelle's blog today when I was checking out the action at CoachingWithJosh.com (I am a moderator there).

Michelle is a "student" there.  I say "student" in quotes because she has over 500 posts and helps a lot more people there than I do in my role as an absentee moderator.

Welcome To Michelle-Adams.com - Pay Attention

Anyway, Michelle-Adams.com is a brand-spanking new internet marketing blog with a grand total of 2 posts.  The shrink-wrap is not even off of the WordPress box yet, and the site still has that "new-blog smell" just like a shiny new BMW.

Before you scoff and wonder why I am talking about a newbie blog with 2 posts, note that Michelle is paying attention -- her autoresponder is already up, and she has a killer USP (unique selling proposition) that made me opt-in.  Here is what she has to say:

How I Saved $2,000 Overnight

If you want to find out how being treated like dirt saved me $2,000 then just pop in your email below and I’ll send you the report. Included in this report is a no BS way of making money online that has no fluff, almost no cost except time and a domain name and is a proven method. You can’t lose. Enjoy!

That is one of the more creative opt-ins I have ever seen (and I have seen many).  In fact, I was starting to think I had seen all of them.

Raw Truth In A PDF

When you opt in to her list, you get access to a PDF report.   I am not going to spoil it for you.  Let's just say she puts herself out there and tells it like it is.  It's fresh, and raw and valuable.  Everyone just starting in Internet Marketing should read this report.  I thought it was great.

Best thing, I could not find one affiliate link in the whole report.  She does point to an excellent free resource in her report (one that I strongly endorse on the blog in other places).

Obey The Cookie - Be Honest In Your Marketing.

Go check out Michelle's report.  You'll be glad you did.

As the cookie says, Honesty is the best policy.

Have a great day.
Mark

Photo credit: Uploaded on July 17, 2006 by headcase

I have written several times in the past about how Micro Niche Finder was the first keyword tool that I ever purchased, and how I still use it today because of the great user interface. I have also talked about how you can build cool eBay niche stores using WordPress and the phpBay plugin.

In November, James Jones from Micro Niche Finder had a contest and asked people to send in videos about how people were using his software.  I completed an entry as a way to say thanks to James for all the great support that he provides, including free lifetime upgrades for his customers.  As I wrote recently, James is right in the middle of a serious of major upgrades to his keyword tool.

I thought you might be interested to see my entry.  My idea was simple -- think up a niche store idea and build a quick and dirty site. In the video below, I show where I got the idea for a BMW autoparts store, how I did quick and dirty keyword research using Micro Niche Finder, how I bought the domain name and set up the store in about an hour using WordPress and phpBay.  It's all there.

Enjoy.

The video had to be under 10 minutes for the contest, so there is some stuff that goes by pretty quickly.  For example, I wanted to talk about creating and promoting the site in Firepow -- guess that will have to wait for another video.   In the mean time, I need to do some article marketing.

If you have a comment or a question, I'd love to hear from you.

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

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 have been working on the release of a new eBook using Jonathan Legers $7 Secrets approach, and in doing that work, I ran across this checklist for eBook creation.  I am publishing it here.  I hope you enjoy it.

Checklist: How to Create & Sell your Own eBooks

Is the thought of selling your own product intriguing but also overwhelming at the same time? Here is a checklist to get you started.

1. Research your target market & come up with an idea for your product.

I could go into great detail on this step, but I’ll make it short and sweet. The following three criteria must be met. Choose a topic where…

• People are looking for information.
• They are willing to spend money on that information.
• You, personally, are at least moderately interested and knowledgeable about this topic.

Although the third point is optional, I recommend it if you are going to stay interested and motivated to promote your ebooks for months and years to come. You have the option of choosing something you love or something that is popular. Make work fun by choosing a market that you enjoy.

Here are some ideas for you…

• Weight Loss and Dieting
• Health (or fixing health problems)
• Fitness and Exercise (lifting things that are drooping and tightening things that are sagging)
• Looking good (reversing aging, removing hair, keeping hair, etc.)
• Relationships (finding then, keeping them, getting over them)
• Making Money (online or offline, small business, finding jobs, etc)
• Saving Money
• Parenting problems/concerns

2. Purchase a Domain name.

Important things to keep in mind when choosing a URL are:

• Make it memorable.
• Make it short.
• No numbers or dashes.
• Easy to spell.
• Descriptive of your product.
• It should end in a .com (not a .net, .org, or .biz – unless you have a darned good reason to do so)

Also, if this is going to be your main site, be sure to buy any similar domains to protect your branding.

You can buy your domain names anywhere, but I recommend: www.GoDaddy.com or www.NameCheap.com.

3. Purchase Hosting.

I recommend ServInt for many reasons, including:

• Excellent customer service.
• Reliable uptime.

4. Load autoresponder/set up squeeze page while developing product.

The best autoresponder, in my opinion, is this one.

This autoresponder will manage multiple ecourses and lists, including your customers and affiliates. It will grow with your business.

If you don’t have a squeeze page, you can start with one at www.MostlySanePLR.com

By setting up your squeeze page first, you can start to develop a list of people interested in your topic. That will help you later when you launch – you'll have an instant boost for your new product.

5. Develop product.

Don’t know how? Here are some options…

If you can write 7-15 pages on your topic, I recommend that you grab the free report on this page - www.SmallReportsFortune.com

Take a shortcut by buying Resale Rights products. You can find some here:

www.srzone.com/rights.html

www.FullTimeWAHM.com (includes resale rights)

www.BeginnerCoach.com (also includes resale rights)

http://easyplr.com/resale.htm (great reports with rights)

OR

Start with PLR content. Here are some places to look…

www.EasyPLR.com

www.JustPLRcontent.com

www.easyplr.com/bestplr.htm

OR

Record an interview with an expert, have it transcribed and sell it. It's really easy if you use www.audioacrobat.com

OR

Hire a ghostwriter to create a custom product for you.

6. Order graphics or create them yourself.

You’ll need, at the bare minimum, an ecover for your product and at least one banner and button to promote it. A professional header or mini-site design can also convey a professional image.

7. Create sales page.

This is a highly important piece.

For best results, unless you have studied copywriting, I recommend that you hire a skilled writer to draft it for you.

You can find skilled writers at elance.com or www.Shelancers.com

8. Create thank you/download page.

Your download page should contain a few basic pieces:

• Who you are
• How to contact you
• Download instructions
• Download links (of course)
• What company name will show up on their paypal statement or credit card statement.
• Any bonuses they were promised and how to claim them.

9. Load the sales page, thank you page, & product to site.

If you’ve never done this before, you can either outsource the task or use a free program like www.smartftp.com

10. Decide on payment processor. (Figure out how you’re getting paid.)

Here are some popular options to choose from:

• Clickbank - click here for info (Very easy to use and popular for that reason.)
• Paydotcom - click here for info
• E-junkies - click here for info
• 1ShoppingCart - click here for info (Much more control & room for growth. More hands-on.)
• WAHMCart - click here for info (Similar to 1ShoppingCart, but more affordable.)

If all of those options sound overwhelming right now, then a simple paypal button will work just fine for now.

11. Once the pages are loaded, notify your lists. (Tell your friends.)
Contact the following people about the product:

• Your leads lists.
• Your customer lists.
• Your JV partners

If you don’t have lists, don’t panic. Just move ahead to the next step. Although... I do recommend that you read the free report at www.ListProfitSystem.com to learn more about list marketing.

12. Create affiliate tools and notify your affiliates. (Get your Sales Army on the March.)

If you have affiliates, TELL them about your new product and let them promote it for you. Why not have your team of affiliates promoting it for you?

Recommendation: Sign up for the free ecourse at www.SalesArmySecrets.com right away if your affiliate program needs serious help.

The very basic tools that you’ll need are…

1. Banners & buttons
2. Articles
3. Solo ads
4. Text ads

But, of course, there are many more tools that you’ll wish to offer. Just get started with these.

13. Continue promoting your new product. (Market the heck out of it.)

Don’t forget to promote the report like you would any of your other products.

• article marketing
• pay per click
• ezine ads
• forum marketing
• SEO
• web 2.0/social networking

And anything else that you’d normally do to sell your products.

You can certainly outsource many of these activities and/or train your affiliates to do them for you!

14. Start researching your next product. (Rinse and Repeat.)

Go back to #1 and do it all over again.

Does this sound like an insurmountable task? Don’t panic. I recommend that you check out www.OutsourceWeekly.com for a step-by-step course that will show you how to easily and effectively outsource many of these tasks – and increase your income in the process.

So much has been going on in the last few weeks. Most obviously, I was able to convince Garry Conn to redesign my blog and create this killer custom theme just form me. Garry is a great guy, and he knows a heck of a lot about niche IM. On top of that, he is pretty handy at php, CSS and graphics. If you need someone you can trust to work on your blog for a fair price, I can honestly recommend him unconditionally. I am still turning some knobs and adjusting some dials (most notably, Aweber), but I could not be happier with the new look (and the amazing service from Garry).

Turning my attention back to Elvis Presley

Now that the new theme is up, I simply cannot believe that my plan to document my creation of a Niche Super-Site started on February 4th. Man, time flies when you are having fun with part-time Internet Marketing. In case you missed the press frenzy in early February (LOL), I am quite literally taking a page out of Caroline Middlebrook's free eBook and documenting my experience of trying to create a niche site. I picked a random topic (Elvis Presley), and so far on our journey to build the Niche Super-Site we have discussed:

• Definition of the Niche Super-Site case study
• List of Niche Super-Site design goals
• How to select your niche
• Choosing your keywords
• Choosing a domain name
• Setting up your niche site
• Making things look nice
• Installing Plugins
• Getting listed in Google
• Making Money with phpBay
• Adding PopShops to your site
• Adding Adsense
• Adding Amazon Omakase Widget
• Adding a favicon
• Testing the Long Tail Keyword (1) (2) and (3)

At the end of the long-tail keyword test, we were able to declare victory because I now rank on page one of Google for the killer MMO phrase "Elvis Aaron Presley Collectible Necktie.” This shows that on-page SEO works to get listed for a search term. The problem is that where you rank for that term depends on your off-page SEO. For more on this, I recommend the free EasySEO eBook from Josh Spaulding. As I mentioned in my previous post, with “Elvis Aaron Presley Collectible Necktie” under our belt, it is now time to attack higher competition phrases -- “elvis presley collectibles" (74 searches per day), the "life of elvis presley" (226 searches per day) and "elvis presley history of" (4383 searches per day).

Simple plan for niche market SEO

Simply put, my strategy is to create a landing page for Elvis Presley collectibles and another for Life of Elvis Presley. I'll write good SEO copy and pay attention to details like making sure the keywords appear in the title tag, headers, beginning of the article, exerpt, etc. Basically, I will simply do all of the things that are documented in the free EasySEO eBook. Once those pages are complete, I plan to use the variation on Bum (article) Marketing taught in Josh's Article Marketing Domination (AMD). If you are not familiar with article marketing, the basic idea is to write articles about your niche containing your keywords. At the end of the article, you include links back to your site for your keywords. You submit the article to article directories. These directories are well indexed, and they allow you people to copy your article, propagating your links. (Note that you do not put these articles on your own site).

In Article Marketing Domination, Josh outlines some key steps for article marketing, including

• Creating effective articles
• Creating an effective signature block
• Submission strategies

So, I plan to put this to the test starting in a few days. The problem is, I need some articles. I am not sure I have lots of Elvis Articles in me (this is why it is useful to choose a niche you really care about).

Buying Articles

Article marketing is the perfect place to use a writer for hire (ghost writer). I was able to hire a lady on ScriptLance to write 20 300 word articles about Elvis for $70 ($3.50 per article). ScriptLance is neat because your job goes out for bids, and you can select from the people that respond. This writer has a BA liberal arts and is US based. The $70 is held in escrow until I am happy. Now, I might not always want to spend $70 on a marketing -- but this is an experiment...

So, we'll see how it goes. The traffic data for HistoryOfElvis.com is contaminated by this case study, so it may be hard to judge. Again, we'll see.

Topics remaining on my list for this niche super-site series include the following:

• eZineArticles Content
• Write your own content
• Set up AA404 plugin
• Set up a pseudo-link-directory as pillar content
• Remember to back up your data.
• Comment Kahuna
• Secure WordPress
• Other marketing ideas
• The 50 site checklist
• Others…

Best regards,

Mark

%RELATEDPOSTS%

I think my eyes are finally returning to normal, so I will be getting back to focusing on the Elvis project after a few days off. Did you miss me? I hope so.

So far on our journey to build the Niche Super-Site we have discussed:

• Definition of the Niche Super-Site case study
• List of Niche Super-Site design goals
• How to select your niche
• Choosing your keywords
• Choosing a domain name
• Setting up your niche site
• Making things look nice
• Installing Plugins
• Getting listed in Google
• Making Money with phpBay
• Adding PopShops to your site
• Adding Adsense
• Adding Amazon Omakase Widget
• Adding a favicon
• Long Tail Keyword Test
  

You will recall that the purpose of this case study is to get a niche site up and running as quickly as possible in the style recommended by Caroline's eBook and then expand the site into a "Niche Super-Site" by monetizing it with other methods like Adsense search, Amazon, PopShops and phpBay. When you need to get up and running quickly, you need content. The absolute best thing to do is write some compelling original content. Content is king.

Sometimes, you might want to get started by borrowing some content. In this context I really do mean borrow with the permission of the author. I do not mean steal.

One source of content that is "designed to be borrowed" is Ezinearticles.com. EzineArticles.com is a service that tries to match the articles of content authors to the needs of publishers. Article writers can post their articles to be featured on Ezinearticles.com. They have hundreds of thousands of original articles available for use on publisher sites (you are limited to 25 articles per year per site according to their Publisher TOS). Ezinearticles.com has some social-media-like features that allow popular authors (experts) to be featured on the site. The attraction for authors is exposure to "hundreds of thousands or even millions of people" (according to their web site).

So, with the task at hand being bringing up the HistoryofElvis.com website, I searched Ezinearticles.com for "elvis" and amazingly found 921 results. I selected on that I liked based on keywords and posted it on the History of Elvis page on the historyofelvis.com site. Now, organic site traffic gets something like what it expects -- some information on the History of Elvis, and I have started a base for some great original content (to be added later perhaps in the form of blog posts).

Of course, it is well known that use of massively duplicated content is penalized by google.  So, you should use this approach at your own risk.

Topics remaining on my list for this niche super-site series include the following:

• Traffic strategy
• eZineArticles submission
• Write your own content
• Set up AA404 plugin
• Set up a pseudo-link-directory as pillar content
• Remember to back up your data.
• Comment Kahuna
• Secure WordPress
• Blog by email
• Great podcasts
• Running adwords ads
• eBooks
• Other marketing ideas
• The 50 site checklist
• Others…

So far on our journey to build the Niche Super-Site we have discussed:

• Definition of the Niche Super-Site case study
• List of Niche Super-Site design goals
• How to select your niche
• Choosing your keywords
• Choosing a domain name
• Setting up your niche site
• Making things look nice
• Installing Plugins
• Getting listed in Google
• Making Money with phpBay
• Adding PopShops to your site
• Adding Adsense
• Adding Amazon Omakase Widget
• Adding a favicon

We really need to start turning our attention to traffic for HistoryofElvis.com, but I wanted to start a small test first. Everybody always talks about long tail keywords, and they can be important for making money in a niche. In fact, Caroline Middlebrook has an excellent article on Long Tail Keyword Research that you should check out.

As a complete aside, saying "Caroline Middlebrook has an excellent article" is completely redundant. Every word on her site is excellent. But, I digress.

Anyway, I thought I would run a test. Let's see if we can rank for a really long tail phrase on HistoryofElvis.com. The phrase I have selected is

"Elvis Aaron Presley Collectible Necktie"

Now, those of you on the other side of the pond will notice that I have intentionally selected the Yank spelling of Collectible. According to Wikipedia, although "collectable" is the spelling listed first by the Oxford English Dictionary, and is standard spelling in British English, the dictionary observes that the "-ible" form is also valid, and has come to be common spelling in the United States.

A quick check on google confirms that there are only 200 pages answering to this search, and none of them match very well. Additionally, a look at the Adwords keyword tool confirms that there is no search traffic and that there is no competition for that phrase. So, this should be like shooting ducks in a pond.

So, I have created a page on HistoryOfElvis.com with the following characteristics:

• Page title tag is Elvis Aaron Presley Collectible Necktie
• Page title is Elvis Aaron Presley Collectible Necktie
• Keyword meta data is set to variations on the target phrase
• Description meta tag is set to include the phrase 3 times.
• Page slug is elvis-aaron-presley-collectible-necktie
• The phrase Elvis Aaron Presley Collectible Necktie appears in the copy many times
• The page is linked from the HistoryofElvis.com home page
• There is lots of related product copy on the page

Now, to keep from passing page rank from masonworld.com to this page, I am not linking to it from here.

So, I launched the page today. You can find it from the HistoryofElvis.com main page of you are interested. Let me know what you think. I will report back the results in a few days (or you can check google yourself).

Thanks,

Mark

Topics remaining on my list for this niche super-site series include the following:

• Traffic strategy
• Really long tail keyword test
• eZineArticles Content
• Write your own content
• Set up AA404 plugin
• Set up a pseudo-link-directory as pillar content
• Remember to back up your data.
• Comment Kahuna
• Secure WordPress
• Blog by email
• Great podcasts
• Running adwords ads
• eBooks
• Other marketing ideas
• The 50 site checklist
• Others…

If you have a topic that you would like to see added to my list, please feel free to leave a comment. Thanks!

%RELATEDPOSTS%

So far on our journey to build the Niche Super-Site we have discussed:

• Definition of the Niche Super-Site case study
• List of Niche Super-Site design goals
• How to select your niche
• Choosing your keywords
• Choosing a domain name
• Setting up your niche site
• Making things look nice
• Installing Plugins
• Getting listed in Google
• Making Money with phpBay
• Adding PopShops to your site
• Adding Adsense
• Adding Amazon Omakase Widget

As I mentioned, I had Lasik (PRK, actually) last week, so I am just getting back to where I can see the computer screen. I am excited about the end result of 20/20 vision promised in 4-6 weeks, but the transition is a challenge for blogging.

Today, we'll talk about adding a favicon to your niche site. That silly icon beside the url at the browser address bar is called a favicon. Why bother? Well, I think that often times in blogging, as in life, it is the small things that matter. Favicons suggest a professionally maintained site, and a favicon can remind people to bookmark your site when they see that quite little icon at the top of their browser. Anything that adds that extra bit of trust that can help us monetize a click should be taken care of. Finally, adding a favicon is EASY, so we should do it for completeness.

Adding a favicon to WordPress is really easy, but it involves editing your theme.

• Pick a picture for your favicon. Something simple is most appropriate since the final image is going to be only 16x16 pixels. Not a lot of detail will be possible. Obviously, it needs to be a square image.
• There are free tools for drawing your own favicon, but I never use them as I cannot draw (and I have never tried the previously mentioned tool).
• There are free favicon libraries too. I never use them either, and I have never tried the previously mentioned site.
• There are free tools for reducing a pic you like to 16x16 for use as a favicon. That is what I usually do. For the Elvis site, I have located a jpg of the letter E and used a free site to reduce that to 16x16. That free site results in the creation of a favicon.ico file.
• Next, you need to upload the favicon.ico file to your WordPress site. I like to put the icon into ./wp-includes/images/, but you can put it anywhere you like as long as WordPress can find it.
• Next, find your theme header file. It should be in ./wp-content/themes/ in a directory named for yout theme (i.e. Prosense or K2, etc.).
• I like to take this moment to copy my current header file to a safe location for later retrieval in case disaster strikes.
• Using your favorite editor, open up your header.php file and locate the <head> tag.
• Add the following code just after the <head> tag but before the </head> tag: <link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”<?php echo get_settings(’siteurl’).’/wp-includes/images/’;?>favicon.ico” />
• Save the header.php file and reload your home page. You should see your favicon.
• If you do not (or if you get an error), check closely the path to the favicon file and the quotation marks above. Some editors will munge the quotation marks during cut and paste operations.

Thanks!

Topics remaining on my list for this niche super-site series include the following:

• Traffic strategy
• Really long tail keyword test
• eZineArticles Content
• Write your own content
• Set up AA404 plugin
• Set up a pseudo-link-directory as pillar content
• Remember to back up your data.
• Comment Kahuna
• Secure WordPress
• Blog by email
• Great podcasts
• Running adwords ads
• eBooks
• Other marketing ideas
• The 50 site checklist
• Others…

If you have a topic that you would like to see added to my list, please feel free to leave a comment. Thanks!

%RELATEDPOSTS%

So far on our journey to build the Niche Super-Site we have discussed:

• Definition of the Niche Super-Site case study
• List of Niche Super-Site design goals
• How to select your niche
• Choosing your keywords
• Choosing a domain name
• Setting up your niche site
• Making things look nice
• Installing Plugins
• Getting listed in Google
• Making Money with phpBay
• Adding PopShops to your site
• Adding Adsense

I had Lasik yesterday, so this will be short.

I mentioned yesterday that we were really focused on 3 ways to monetize our niche site -- Adsense, eBay using phpBay, and affiliate links through PopShops. I forgot to mention Amazon Omakase links. I like adding the Amazon Omakase gadget because I think it makes a positive association between your site (mostly unknown and unbranded) and Amazon (well know excellent brand). Now, in most cases, I have Amazon below the fold. The commissions are low. Still, if some is really looking at your stuff and is unwilling to buy from you because they don't know you, Amazon gives them a way out where you still get paid. Just a personal theory -- but I do see some clicks. Amazon offers lots of page widgets. I like the Omakaze widget because it automatically features products based on "Amazon's unique knowledge about what works for your site" (whatever the heck that means).

To add Amazon widgets:

• Sign up at Amazon
• Pick your widget (like the one below)
• Add to your page

That's about it for monetization for the moment. See you tomorrow.

%RELATEDPOSTS%

So far on our journey to build the Niche Super-Site we have discussed:

• Definition of the Niche Super-Site case study
• List of Niche Super-Site design goals
• How to select your niche
• Choosing your keywords
• Choosing a domain name
• Setting up your niche site
• Making things look nice
• Installing Plugins
• Getting listed in Google
• Making Money with phpBay
• Adding PopShops to your site

Over the last to days, we have talked about how you could diversify your niche income by taking advantage of the eBay affiliate sales program using phpBay Pro and how you can make affiliate sales of niche items using PopShops. The third piece to our monetization puzzle is, of course, Adsense.

If you don't know about Adsense, you are living under a rock. In fact, you are living under the same rock that I was under until my wife learned about Adsense on the Today show and asked me about it three months ago. Adsense ads are everywhere, but I never stopped to think about how I could benefit from them.

If you are following along in Caroline's eBook on how to build a niche site with WordPress, you will be using the Prosense template from Dosh Dosh. That is a great template because the Adsense stuff is already done for you. All you need to do there is change your publisher ID, and optionally set your ad channel. I wonder how many clicks Dosh Dosh gets from people who forget to change that?

In our case, I wanted something a little different for HistoryofElvis.com, so I am using the k2 WordPress template. To make Adsense work with that, I am also using the Adsense Manager WordPress pluging. There are other managers, and you are free to choose the one that you really like. I am placing the following Adsense ad blocks on my nice site:

• An Adsense for search box at the top of the middle column.
• An Adsense link unit block at the top of the middle column, just under the search box
• An Adsense skyscraper adunit in the second column under the link unit
• An Adsense link unit at the top of every page at the start of the 1st post
• An Adsense ad unit at the end of single posts

I usually set one ad channel for the entire site. that way, I can tell the difference between ad clicks coming from historyofelvis.com and those coming from masonworld.com. If traffic gets high, it might be worth setting one channel for each ad placement. But, until we have enough traffic to optimize for, it does not make much sense.

In my case for the k2 theme, I actually edited the theme to so that the Adsense ads related to posts (the link unit at the top and the ad unit at the bottom) would appear where I wanted them. So, if you know a little php, this is a nice thing you can do (and something that you don't need to do if you are using the Prosense template from Dosh Dosh.) If you want to attempt that, be sure to check out the complete usage instructions for Adsense Manager. The other thing that I like about Adsense Manager is that you can send a percentage of the click revenue to the plugin developer. Pretty neat.

So, that is about is for Adsense. There are 16 other Adsense Plugins for WordPress if you don't care for Adsense Manager.

Tomorrow, talk about one more revenue tool from Amazon.com.

So far on our journey to build the Niche Super-Site we have discussed:

• Definition of the Niche Super-Site case study
• List of Niche Super-Site design goals
• How to select your niche
• Choosing your keywords
• Choosing a domain name
• Setting up your niche site
• Making things look nice
• Installing Plugins
• Getting listed in Google
• Making Money with phpBay

Yesterday, we talked about how you could diversify your niche income by taking advantage of the eBay affiliate sales program by taking advantage of phpBay Pro. Today, we'll look at our second method of nich store diversification -- PopShops.

PopShops provides tools for setting up an affiliate store inside your website. PopShops claims to be the largest searchable collection of affiliate products (said to be currently over 28 million and growing). They work with the major affiliate networks, including Commission Junction, LinkShare, ShareASale, and Performics. With the PopShops program, you keep all of your commissions. ProShops offers a Free Basic account where users can add affiliate products one page at a time using JavaScript. I use the Pro account ($5/month) because that allows you to use php instead of JavaScript. This is important because the php is SEO friendly and the JavaScript is not. This is because with the Pro account shops, the product descriptions are actually in your page, and can be inded by Google (similar to phpBay Pro). PopShops also offers an Enterprise account (at $30/month). The latter account offers better sales tracking, supporting multiple commission junction PIDs (among other things). If I am making so much money at some point that I am confused about where it is coming from, I plan to upgrade. You can read more about PopShops in PC World (good description of what they do).

To make this work really well on our nice site, we need the PopShops plugin for WordPress. As of this writing, it is still in Alpha release, but it works quite well for me. Features include (from their website):

• Add products to your WP blog from any of the major affiliate networks.
• Click the POP button on your WYSIWYG post editor to add affiliate product links directly into your posts.
• Build affiliate stores for your sidebar, footer, static pages, under a post, or randomly after posts.
• As always, keep 100% of your commissions

So, for HistoryofElvis.com, we want to add shops that Elvis fans will enjoy. You can use your imagination. For this demonstration, I have added shop pages targeted at Elvis Apparel, Elvis Auto Accessories, Elvis Pins, etc. I also created a sample Elvis t-Shirt PopShop at the end of this post for your viewing pleasure.

One thing that you have to watch out for with PopShops is adding products for merchants in commission junction for which you have no relationship. As far as I know, there is no way to tell PopShops what merchants have accepted you on Commission Junction. So, if you accidentally add a CafePress shirt to your PopShop page and you are not a member of the CafePress affiliate program through Comission Junction, you will not get any commission for the sale of that item.

One great thing about PopShops is the AutoFeed feature (available on Pro and Enterprise accounts). With AutoFeed you can automatically display additional pages of products similar to the ones you originally selected for your shop. The technology uses the same shop keywords and merchants you originally chose to decide what items to add. AutoFeed pages are SEO friendly when using the php code option.

So, that's about it for PopShops. Man, this blogging stuff is hard work. Phew.

Tomorrow we need to talk about Adsense. That will complete our three-pronged monetization attach (Adsense, niche store and niche auction). In the mean time, don't forget to check out the cool PopShop store below. Neat, huh?

So far on our journey to build the Niche Super-Site we have discussed:

• Definition of the Niche Super-Site case study
• List of Niche Super-Site design goals
• How to select your niche
• Choosing your keywords
• Choosing a domain name
• Setting up your niche site
• Making things look nice
• Installing Plugins
• Getting listed in Google

You'll recall from our List of Niche Super-Site Design Goals that we are striving to create a niche site that generates $2 per day in residual income. We said that we did not want to rely only on Adsense alone to accomplish that. So, one thing that we can do to diversify our niche site income is add affiliate sales. One great affiliate program to look at is the eBay affiliate sales program.

As I reported previously, phpBay Pro is the way to go when you want to add eBay auctions to WordPress.  According to the Wired Studio’s website, phpBay Pro enables web publishers to quickly and easily add keyword rich eBay auction listings to WordPress or php driven sites to generate serious affiliate revenue in a matter of minutes!  Boy, can I confirm that claim personally.  In our case, we need to focus on the feature rich phpBay WordPress Plugin (for more information on why, see Build Niche Sites with WordPress). There are at least two great ways to use this plugin. You can embed auction items in posts, or you can created entire pages of auction listings.

Wired Studios’ product boasts several important features:

• Simple installation takes minutes to get up and going
• Keyword rich results adds SEO value to your content
• List auctions from specific categories
• List auctions from specific vendors
• Mask outgoing Ebay links
• First Class support in case you have a question or need help

From my point of view phpBay Pro delivers all of this and more. Specifically, the support is over the top - outstanding.  In fact, since I was new to WordPress, I had a couple of newbie questions that were answered by the developer himself (Wade) the same day.

You will recall that our niche site (www.historyofelvis.com) is up and running in WordPress.   When people visit there, we would like them to buy things (thus helping us make our $2/day).  The great thing about  phpBay Pro is that we can install the plugin and have a page up and running in just a few minutes after becoming an eBay affiliate.  Generally speaking, the steps are as follows:

• Sign up with Commission Junction (www.cj.com)
• Apply to become an eBay affiliate.
• Install the phpBay Pro plugin for WordPress
• Set your affiliate sales ID in the software
• Insert one line of code in any WordPress page and see your auction come alive.

You can see an example on HistoryofElvis.com implemented in the Elvis Autographs page.  The cool thing is that phpBay content is indexed by Google.  If you mix in some ad copy, this can have a dramatic impact on your page SEO for your search keywords.

So, that's it for today.  Tomorrow, we'll talk about PopShops.

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So far on our journey to build the Niche Super-Site we have discussed:

• Definition of the Niche Super-Site case study
• List of Niche Super-Site design goals
• How to select your niche
• Choosing your keywords
• Choosing a domain name
• Setting up your niche site
• Making things look nice
• Installing Plugins

Today, we need to focus on getting listed in Google. This is a pretty straightforward process, and is not the same thing as landing on the first page of Google for a certain keyword phrase. Although, if you are not listed in Google, chances of landing on page 1 are pretty slim.

Telling Google we are here involves

• Generating a Google-compatible site map
• Pointing Google at the map

For our purposes, a sitemap is really just an XML file that lists the pages of your blog and gives Google hints about how often those pages change. Google requires that this file be in your root directory.The task of automatically generating a Google sitemap is handled very well by the Google XML Sitemap Generator plugin that we installed yesterday. This plugin creates sitemap.xml in the root directory. If you look at that file, you will be able to recognize URLs to all pages on the target website. For example, you can see the sitemap MasonWorld.com here. Now the question is, how do you tell Google about it?

There are at least two ways to notify Google about your sitemap.

• You can register with the Google Sitemaps program and submit your sitemap. This is what I do, as this will also allow you to see some interesting statistics about your site like the most used keywords and spidering problems.
• If you don't have a Google account or for some reason don't want to create one, you can notify Google about your sitemap by "pinging" them. You can hit the following URL (where mapurl is the fully qualified sitemap URL for your site). Google will come by on a regular basis, so you only need to do this once:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=mapurl

As I said, I prefer to register with the Google Sitemaps program and submit my sitemap.

Once you do that, you can get a result like this in a day or so

:

Have great day. Tomorrow, we'll discuss phpBay.

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I know we are making some progress, because we were mentioned on Caroline's blog and our site HistoryOfElvis.com is up and running. So far on our journey to build the Niche Super-Site we have discussed:

• Definition of the Niche Super-Site case study
• List of Niche Super-Site design goals
• How to select your niche
• Choosing your keywords
• Choosing a domain name
• Getting your site up
• Making things look nice

Today we need to spend some time installing some important plugins. If you have not done this before, I recommend that you spend a moment looking at this post about installing plugins in WordPress.

Here are the plugins I recommend for the Niche Super-Site and why I recommend them:

• Adsense Manager. We will be using Adsense ads, and I like this manager. There are other managers, and you are free to choose the one that you really like. In a niche site that relies solely on Adsense, this is the bread and butter. As we discussed in our design goals, we will be trying to diversify HistoryOfElvis.com to build income streams in addition to Adsense. Still, we want a good ad manager.
• Akismet. Kills blog spam. Standard with WordPress 2.3
• All in One SEO Pack. Allows us to optimize on-page SEO for our blog. We will need to get organic search engine traffic on our blog, and this tool will help.
• Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress. It is really important that Google knows about all our pages and how often to visit them for fresh content. This tool will build a map for Google. I'll have another post later about how to tell Google about our map and verify our site on Google.
• phpBay Pro Plugin for WordPress. This plugin will let us make money from eBAy auctions on our site. It cost $49, but you can use it on as many sites as you want (as long as they are your sites).
• PopShops Plugin for WordPress. Like phpBay, this plugin lets you sell Commission Junction stuff from your blog.

That's about it to get started. This will allow us to end up with a nice looking blog with SEO potential where we can sell Adsense ads and niche merchandise.

Tomorrow we'll go get an article from eZineArticles as our very first piece of content.

Have a great day.

So far on our journey to build the Niche Super-Site we have discussed:

• Definition of the Niche Super-Site case study
• List of Niche Super-Site design goals
• How to select your niche
• Choosing your keywords
• Choosing a domain name
• Setting up your niche site

Now that is done, and we are ready to make things look nice. Caroline covers the Prosense template -- which is great. I really like Prosense because it is clean, easy to use, and ready for Adsense. I am not crazy about the way that Prosense jams ads into the top of single posts (a personal taste thing). So, I am actually going to recommend that you use the k2 template for two reasons:

• I plan to take control of Adsense placement
• K2 supports a banner graphic natively
• It is widely used and well supported in general

Note that it is possible to take control of Adsense placement in Prosense easily with just a little php programming. I just really like K2. Note that the latter point above about wide distribution means that plugins often (but not always) play well with k2.

You can get the k2 theme from www.getk2.com (where else?).

As I mentioned, one reason that I use k2 is built-in banner graphic support. What I recommend is that you search for a copy write-free image that is related to your niche. Once selected, size and crop the image to 950x200 pixels (the default size for k2). If you are a graphics guru, you can do some manipulation of the header with your tool of choice. For example, I use Paint Shop Pro to resize, crop and edit banner images. It's really nice and has lots of advanced features.  It's not the cheapest image software on the block, but it's not the most expensive either.

You can install the k2 theme by downloading it to your hard drive, uploading it to the wordpress/wp-content/themes directory and unzipping and installing (the latter from the WordPress admin interface.) The banner you create can be uploaded from the Presentation menu. As you can see on HistoryOfElvis.com, I have updated the banner to include a picture of Elvis. Nice and clean, it is my belief that little touches like this will set your site apart from all of this MFA (Made For Adsense) sites out there.

Once you have k2 installed with a banner graphic, you can drag some widgets to display comments, pages, posts and feeds into the rightmost column. I'll be reserving the middle column for ads (Adsense and Amazon for sure) and some affiliate links.

Tomorrow we discuss adding some plugins (including my favorite, phpBay).

See you then.

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So far on our journey to build the Niche Super-Site we have discussed:

• Definition of the Niche Super-Site case study
• List of Niche Super-Site design goals
• How to select your niche
• Choosing your keywords
• Choosing a domain name

So now it's time to register the name and set up the site. You will remember that last time we settled on www.historyofelvis.com. We had confirmed that it was available by checking either AjaxWhois or DomainBot.

If you don't have a webhost provider, now is the time to find one. I can recommend two -- LunarPages and ServInt. I have used them both with good results. Caroline Middlebrook recommends BlueHost (I think she uses them to host her blog). Note that while I think these are all great hosts, the previous links are affiliate links (I get paid if you use my link to sign up with them). So, do your research if that bothers you.

At this point, I am going to recommend that you read chapters one and two of Caroline's excellent free eBook entitled "How to Develop Money-Making Niche Sites with WordPress. In that book she teaches

• Signing up with a host
• Using Fantastico to install WordPress

There is a lot of debate about this, but I believe that if you are serious about running a business around WordPress, you should consider learning to install it yourself too. If that scares you, the fantastico route is great.

For installation, I recommend you install WordPress into the ./wordpress directory in your home directory and that you modify your wordpress configuration to make pages appear from your webroot directory. This keeps you from having the word "wordpress" in every URL, and generally makes things prettier. Here is what that setup looks like on the MasonWorld blog.

We are going to need lots of plugins and a theme to make things nice. I'm even going to recommend that you buy phpBay (you can check it out before we discuss it tomorrow if you like). Anyway, we will start to install plugins tomorrow.

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So far on our journey to build the Niche Super-Site we have discussed:

• Definition of the Niche Super-Site case study
• List of Niche Super-Site design goals
• How to select your niche
• Choosing your keywords.

Remember, our overall goal is to build a niche site that returns $2/day in residual income.

Today, we pick a domain name.

I think that domain names are of limited importance for SEO. Why do I feel that way? Search for "California Surfing" in Google. What do you see? You see none of the page 1 results contains both california and surfing in the domain name. Some have surf or surfing, though. So, while it can be helpful to get some keywords in the domain name, it does not seem to be critical to get them all.

I think that Dosh Dosh has this about right. To select a domain name, you need to:

• Determine what kind of blog you will have (we did that)
• Research keywords (we did that too)
• Brainstorm for domain names
• Check availability
• Register an available name

You will recall that our keyword search showed that people want to know about history of Elvis -- they are searching for elvis presley "history, born, death, funeral, etc.". Some quick brainstorming get you stuff like historyofelvispresley.com. As expected, a quick domain name search reveals that "historyofelvispresley.com" is not available.   Like Dosh Dosh, I tend to use either AjaxWhois or DomainBot to check name availability.  I tend to buy my domains from ServInt (they host this blog), and you can also check domain name availability there.   More on hosting tomorrow.

For now, we need to check some other names.  And, as if by magic, historyofelvis.com is available. Or, it was available. I own it now.So, based on our results, we have spent about the right amount of time selecting a niche domain name: http://www.historyofelvis.com. It has two of our keywords (history and elvis). In a few days, that will be up and running with our new niche site.

See you tomorrow, when we can talk about registering our domain name and choosing a web host for our site.  For that, we're going to rely heavily on Caroline Middlebrook's excellent eBook on building niche sites.

So far on our journey to build the Niche Super-Site we have discussed:

• Definition of the Niche Super-Site case study
• List of Niche Super-Site design goals
• How to choose your Super-Niche

Remember, our overall goal is to build a niche site that returns $2/day in residual income in the Elvis Presley niche.

Before we rush out and buy a domain name, we need a keyword strategy. Now that we have settled on Elvis Presley, let's hop over to Wordtracker.com and see what they have to say about The King and his Keywords.

If you sign up for the Wordtracker free trial you can access their competition search tool. If you enter the starting phrase elvis presley, you can then pick your 30 favorite phrases returned for further analysis. The 30 phrases come from analyzing the keywords from 100 other "elvis presley" webpages.

The results are very interesting.

Based on the KEI (a measure of the goodness of the keyword), people want to know about history of Elvis -- they are searching for elvis presley "history, born, death, funeral, etc.". So, for now, let's decide that our main keywords are:

• elvis and elvis presley (these are implied but very competitive. We will not try to rank for these. Some day, if our page rank is high, we might make the first page for these (but not any time soon).
• history of elvis and history of elvis presley
• elvis born/birth/death/funeral
• elvis presley born/birth/death/funeral

As a note, let's remember the other top keywords (KEI greater than one with some traffic) and try to create a page for each phrase. More on that later. Also, note the misspelling of Presley (as Presly).  We are also going to want to add some keywords specific to the affiliate programs that we will be offering (like eBay through phpBay).

See you tomorrow when we'll talk about registering a domain!