The other thing I think you need to do is you need to get as much software as you can to automate tasks. Now, I’ve got some recommendations here and these are products that I actually use.

• If you’re going to submit your websites to directories I recommend Deep Linker Pro from Josh Spaulding. It automatically submits websites to directories.
• If you’re going to submit articles to article directories I recommend Automatic Article Submitter from Millan, who lives in eastern Eupore and I’m not going to say his last name, but it begins with K.
• There’s a really good social bookmarking application out there called Bookmarking Demon.
• If you want to automate the setup of blogs, if you have a business model where you need to run many blogs, I recommend Firepow from Andrew Hanson.
• If you are going to try and get some automated backlinking going one of the products I recommend is One-Way-Links from Jon Leger.

There are many other products that compete in these spaces and a lot of them are really good. These are just the ones that I use. The point is I definitely recommend that you go out and you invest in software.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that one of the highest leverage investments that you can make is software to automate your business. It’s right up there with outsourcing and just the most critical business knowledge, learning, course work that you can get. So, definitely look into software to automate your business.

This has been another post in our Part-Time Internet Business Series at MasonWorld.com, where we build successful internet businesses 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.

My friends and mentors Andrew Hansen and Collen Slater just released a free video promoting their new product -- Niche Blogging Institute.   The video is great.  Andrew reveals three important keys to niche marketing.   I recommend that you take a few minutes to watch it.  It is a promotional video, but it is great content and you don't even have to opt-in.  You can even skip the first 4 minutes if you want to jump straight to the content.

Anyway, seeing that video made me think about Andrew's other products -- specifically Firepow.  I use Firepow, I have promoted it, and I get a lot of questions about the Firepow software.   Specifically, and specifically whether or not it is worth the cost.

When I am asked this question, I usually tell people that it depends on your business model.  I often think in terms of "wide" business models and "narrow" business models.  A wide business model would imply that you have lots of streams of revenue, and this probably means lots of web sites (and lots of blogs).

If you have a narrow business model, then you might only have a few streams of revenue and a couple of blogs.

I like wide business models because they are well suited to passive income and can allow you to diversify easily in many cases.  Nothing wrong with narrow business models -- I am just a fan of wide.

When you have a wide business model, Firepow is easy to justify in a lot of ways.

Here is a simple one.  Check out this image from inside of FirePow.

As you can see, at this writing, I have 74 blogs live inside of Firepow.  Most of them have something that needs to be updated.  These updates are critical for security and blog functionality.  What a pain.

Let's say that without Firepow, it takes just 15 minutes once a month to update the plugins and WordPress software on a blog.  (It takes me much longer some days, LOL).  If I have 74 blogs that means I need to spend something like 18 hours updating sites every month.

With Firepow, I just click the big green button.

If my time is only worth $10 an hour, that simple task "costs me" $180.  Now, I know don't actually have to spend $180 out of my pocket that day -- but in reality my time is worth more.  If I take that 18 hours and invest it in another Firepow blog, it will be worth a lot more than $180 to me.

So, Firepow is totally worth it to me -- that's my answer.

Wondering if it is worth it for you?  Andrew let's you try Firepow for a dollar.  But whatever you do, make sure your investments in your business make sense for your business model.

Thanks,
Mark

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.

In this episode of the MasonWorld Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, we continue with our series introducing the different ways that you can make money online. Specifically, we take a look at how you can make money on eBay.

We have a special interview with Internet Marketing Guru Andrew Hansen and he reveals what he considers the three most important things that a new Internet Marketer needs to know. Well, actually he reveals four because he did not want to stop at 3 things.

eBay has made millionaires out of a lot of people. I am not an eBay guru myself, but in this episode I summarize what the other guru's out there have to say about eBay, and I share my thoughts about how someone might build an eBay business.

Key points about eBay:

• Great source of traffic
• eBay is not just an on-line garage sale
• Consider the use of "loss leaders"
• Spend time on your eBay copy

Some links mentioned in the podcast

• Moonlighting On The Internet
• Ten Ways To Make $10K On The Internet
• eBay Affiliate Program Through PepperJam
• Lynn Terry Elite Member Forum

Interview with Andrew Hansenr included in this episode.

Andrew has an awesome product for internet marketers:

Firepow

Be sure to leave us some feedback and subscribe in iTunes!

Podcast Alley is another option:
My Podcast Alley feed!

Here is the Raw RSS Feed.

I'd love to hear what you think about the podcast. Drop me a line here on the blog on on the digital recorder at 214-444-8655. Ask a question or leave a comment and we may use it on the show.

Hey there;

If you have not heard, Andrew released Firepow 2.o.  It is really awesome -- but I have talked about the greatness of Firepow before, so I will not bore you with that again here.

Firepow Discount Coupon

If you are considering ordering Firepow 2.0, use this link and coupon code to get a $10/month discount.  As far as I know, this is the cheapest price available on the internet as of this writing.

Link:  http://www.masonworld.com/recommends/firepow

Code:  mason

Enjoy Firepow.  It totally rocks.

Thanks,
Mark

I was reading Andrew Hansen's blog last night and he published this:

For those of you who don’t know - Lebron James is the 24 year old, widely accepted as the best basketball player in the world.

Not only that, but if you contemplate the following quote from him, he might even help you make more money online; not to mention dominating life in general.

This is an excerpt from an interview with him I was reading earlier:

Q: Who’s the best defender on the league on you?
Lebron: Myself
Q: No, the best defender against you?
Lebron: I’m the only guy who can stop me.

Here was my reply:

Andrew;

I think this is right on the money (so to speak).

When it come to making money online, most people stop themselves. They get started and they try stuff that will eventually work, but they quit too soon. I’ll bet you see a lot of this with Firepow. People sign up, follow your blueprint, but quit after they don’t see $1M in their PayPal account in the first week.

The thing that most people don’t realize about making money online is that you have to work consistently and follow a good system to get results. Firepow is one such system, and there are other good ones out there.

The bottom line in life and in the make money online business is that you are the only person that decides your own success or failure.

Regards,
Mark

Do you agree?  What is the biggest barrier for you (I am assuming that you have not quit if you are still reading my blog?

Thanks,
Mark

I really like Colleen Slater.  As many of you know, Colleen is the author of an eBook that I recommend called Blog Inferno.  Colleen is a "super affiliate,"  and her eBook is a step-by-step guide building a affiliate empire part time.  One of the things that I like about Colleen is that she builds her internet business part time.  She has a serious day job (like me), so I really identify with her.  I also like the fact that she is a big fan of Firepow, which is another product that I believe in.

Really Weird Promotion

Colleen's list is one of the few lists that I subscribe to.  Well, actually, I subscribe to many lists, but her emails are some of the few that I actually look at.   Anyway, the other day she sent me this weird email promotion about a $5 eBook.  The email was from Colleen, so honestly, I just bought it sight unseen.

It Was The Weirdest Sales Page I Had Ever Seen

The eBook is called Secret Associated Wealth, and it is all about how this guy is making $10,000/month using sales pages that tie in his products to big Hollywood media things like Star Wars and Indiana Jones, etc.  It is by far the strangest sales page that I have ever seen.  You need to check out the video on the sales page. Totally weird.

Whether or not you need this product is up to you and where you are in your business.  If you are writing some sales letters or landing pages, then you may want to take a look.

The case studies are actually quite good, and the product is well worth the $5.  Of course, $5 is not a very high hurdle, and the low price really confuses me.  Especially since the product comes with the 4 case study videos and the eBook content is solid.

On thing that is interesting is that this guy went from zero dollars in April of 2007 to $10,000 per month in just over a year.

The bottom line of the eBook is that presentation graphics are really important in marketing materials, and there are really cool ways you can leverage mainstream mind share that already exists around HollyWood products like Star Wars.

Even if you don't purchase the eBook, I'd love to know what you think about that weird sales page.  Leave me a comment and let me know what you think.

Just a quick note to let you know that I talked to Andrew Hansen of Firepow today.  You'll recall that Andrew previously authorized a $300 Firepow discount coupon for MasonWorld subscribers.  Yesterday, I asked him if I could offer you an even better and more special discount, and today has agreed!

So, now the special discount for MasonWorld readers is $30/month ($360/year).  As far as I know, this is the best discount available (let me know if you see a better offer).

EDIT -- Since this was first posted, Andrew has reduced the price of Firepow. The discount has changed, but as far as I can tell my coupon code still gets the lowest price available.

I have a special Firepow bonus announcement planed for Monday (and it is sweet) -- but if you buy Firepow before then using my affiliate link, you will still be eligible to get the bonus (I promise).  That will allow you to get started this weekend!

For now, if you sign up for FirePow using my link, you can get a whopping $30/month off of your bill.

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 promotion materials for Monday -- but I did not want to wait to offer you the discount.  If you were considering FirePow anyway, I wanted you to have the discount now.

Be sure to check out the no-risk guarantee Andrew is offering.  There really is no risk to giving Firepow a try today.  In fact I am told that lots of people actually sign up with the intention of cancelling the service, only to find out that the Firepow system is worth way more than the cost.  They happily keep it, laughing all the way to the bank.  Pretty cool.

Regards,
Mark

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

It's Wednesday (well, actually it is Friday, but who is counting?), and you know what that means. It's time for another weekly Internet Business Fortune Cookie.

Since I am running behind (evidenced by the tardiness of this post), I'll keep it short.

I was at a Chinese fast food chain this week. I know -- not up to my usual standards. Truth is, I'll eat anything that does not eat me first.

I had their lo mein noodles and some mysterious chicken. Honestly, It was not all that great.

On the plus side, there was no MSG and the fortune was fantastic.

"You Will Be Travelling And Coming Into A Fortune"

This was obviously a reminder to use the Global Translator plugin for WordPress to increase search engine traffic. This is a tip that I got from Andrew Hansen of Firepow fame.  The Global Translator plugin is cool because it brings search traffic to your blog.

Global Translator automatically translates your blog in the following 34 different languages: Italian, Korean, Chinese (Simplified), Portuguese, English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Russian, Greek, Dutch, Bulgarian, Czech, Croatian, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, Norwegian, Catalan, Filipino, Hebrew, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian, Vietnamese'.

When these pages get indexed, it can result in some traffic for you. Check out these search terms from November at MasonWorld.com:

o poder da internet
afslankproducten met geld-terug-garantie
mikronischen
gratis ting internett
neultabstoula
a procura do feminino ebook

I hope none of the above phrases are offensive. I have no idea what most of them mean, but traffic is coming to my blog from them.

Here is a cool example of this article translated.

Anyway -- listen to the cookie. You'll be glad you did.

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.

For the last few weeks we have been taking a look inside of Firepow.   Today we are going to sneak a peak at the options and features in the Firepow blogging software by browsing the Firepow menus.

Don't forget, if you are interested in Firepow, I have arranged for a $300 Firepow Discount for Masonworld.com readers.

This is the second video in the series.  The first Firepow video is an overview of the Firepow home page, and describes what major features are available in the Firepow system.  In this video, I log into Firepow and take you through the menu items so that you can get a detailed idea of the features.

The more I work with Firepow, the more I like it.

I hope you enjoy the video.

Regards,
Mark

Several weeks ago, I promised you a look inside of Firepow.  Well, I have finally gotten caught up enough to make that happen.  So, over the next couple of weeks (between now and the end of the month), I will be posting some video about Firepow so you can get a better idea what it is all about.

Don't forget, if you are interested in Firepow, I have arranged for a $300 Firepow Discount for Masonworld.com readers.

This first video is an overview of the Firepow home page, and describes what major features are available in the Firepow system.

Enjoy, and don't forget to leave me some feedback.

Thanks,
Mark

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.

On a whim I bought Matt Callen's SimplyPLR product tonight to see what it was all about.  Basically, the product is a membership site that delivers 225 limited distribution Private Label Rights articles each month.  The articles are delivered in two formats -- normal text files and "spin ready".  The membership site is hooked up to the free spinner at ArticleApps.com -- which gets you 12 versions of the spun articles at a time.

There is also a cool automatic blog posting feature that will allow you to post to your blogs automatically using the XLMRPC feature present in WordPress and other popular blogging platforms.

I am pretty impressed by the slick nature of the user interface inside the membership site.  Also, I am totally impressed with the quality of the articles that I reviewed (just a few at random so far).  Pretty quality stuff.  The spun articles are high quality as well (mostly spinning complete sentences).

Here is an example of a couple of paragraphs out of a spun article titled "Enterprise Rental Cars:

Some people don't own an automobile. Even in America it's a fact. Many times people own cars but aren't at home and thus need temporary wheels. It's rental cars to the rescue when people don't want to put wear and tear on their car, or need a car for another reason. Enterprise is one of the most popular auto rental businesses. That's because Enterprise car rentals are not overly pricey, they're generally in good shape, and Enterprise will even pick up the renter from home, from the office, or from the airport.

Enterprise has many locations all over the nation. Compact cars, full size cars, sedans and coups are all there for the taking. There are even luxury cars and convertibles for rent. Why not take advantage of the sun and weather especially when it can be expensed? They even have cheap rates. A weekly rental for under $300 can be a great deal. Do the math on this one. Use public transportation for the daily commute. When cars are about $20 per day, on the weekends, run errands. All the car needs are then taken care of for about $60 weekly. Even a car lease can't match the value of $3500 a year for auto use.

And here are those same 2 paragraphs out of another spun version of the same article.  You can tell the article is similar, but it is very unique compared to other spun content that I have seen.

Not everyone owns a car. It may seem impossible, but it's real. There are also people who have a car but travel to different cities where they'll need a car. Whether it's for a trip near home over the weekend, running errands that can't be done via public transportation, or getting around while 1000 miles away from home, that's where rental cars come into the picture. And one of the companies people choose most often is Enterprise. these cars are reliable, cheap, and Enterprise will pick people up from home, the office or at the airport.

Enterprise has many locations all over the nation. They offer a variety of cars from sub compact all the way up to SUVs. Some even offer sporty convertibles. Life is short, why not live a little? They even have cheap rates. $300 for the week is a real bargain for a car. Get out the calculator. Use public transportation for the daily commute. When cars are about $20 per day, on the weekends, run errands. For about $60 a week all the car needs are fulfilled. Once price, insurance and all the other car costs are taken into account, under $3500 for a rental year is a lot less than owning.

All in all I am very impressed with this the Simply PLR membership site after looking around for about an hour.  Each month there are articles on topics chosen by Matt's team.  You do not get to choose the topics, which is the only downside that I can see to this site.

Still, if you are paying $47 a month for this site and you are getting 225 spin-ready articles (15 topics) each month, that is only $0.21 per article.  That's crazy cheap.  Let's say you build a website from each article pack using a tool like Firepow.  Now that would be cool.  You could easily build 15 sites a month with Firepow and SimplyPLR in combination.   I may do that this month.  Do that for a year and you would have a small blog empire.  Then you could use the spun versions for marketing through article directories (they don't generally like PLR, but this stuff looks really unique to me, especially if you spin and then rewrite a little).

All in all, I recommend this if you are looking for PLR.   Matt Callen's SimplyPLR is a class act.

Regards,
Mark

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

One thing I know for sure about Google search engine rankings is that it is just about impossible to know anything for sure about Google search engine rankings.   Sometimes, it's good to know what you don't know.

How Google decides what websites appear on the front page for any particular search term is like the formula for Coke or the recipe for Kentucky Fried Chicken -- it's a secret.  We know Coke has caramel in it, but the exact recipe is classified.  The difference between Coke and Google is that the formula for Coke never changes (they tried that once -- what a disaster).  In fact, the formula for Google SERPs is changing periodically as Google works to improve the experience for end users.

Of course, what you hear all the time on blogs just like this one are "stories" about what people did on their web site for their keywords that resulted in page one rankings.  I call this anecdotal evidence. It's usually very interesting, but it is almost never conclusive.  Just because someone got a page one ranking by including their keywords in the footer of their pages in flashing pink with a blue background, does not mean that you will get the same result.

So, let me tell you an anecdote about Google page rank.

Backlinks Do Seem To Be Important

However, some themes keep coming out.  For example, we are pretty sure that Google pays attention to backlinks when determining ranking.  We believe this for at least four reasons:

• The Google search engine was originally called "BackRub" (a reference to the use of backlinks in their algorithm).
• Google Page Rank patents discuss backlinks
• Matt Cutts talks about certain backlinks being important in various blog posts and forums
• We see anecdotal evidence of the importance of backlinks

So it's that last point that I want to talk about today.  I have some anecdotal evidence I want to share.

My PR2 Website

Last January I created a site for my wife called PalsLoft.com.  My wife was going to blog about our new baby and review various baby products.  I got the site up with some bad graphics and posted two sample affilaite landing pages complete with eBay affiliate links and some text.  The home page (where the weekly blog posts were going to live) was basically empty.

Note -- I plan to work on this site some soon, so by the time you read this, it may have changed.  Here is a screen shot of what the site looked line for about nine months between February and October 2008.

To get the site going, I submitted the URL to a directory link submission service.  This particular service submitted links to "brand new directories" as they were announced in Digital Point Forums.   So the backlinks that were created from this service were pretty crummy.  They came from link directories (bad) that had no authority (worse) and were brand spankin' new (terrible).  Basically, they were junk links.

After about a month of that, I forgot about the site.  I ended up with about 70 backlinks.  I literally never touched the site after January of 2008.   Earlier this month, I checked the site and found that the empty home page was PR2 (toolbar PR), and both of the two pages linked from the home page are PR1.  Go figure.  Here is a site that has little real content and Google is ranking it as PR2.  So much for content is King.

So What?  Who Cares About A Toolbar PR2 Ranking

So, what is that worth?  Who cares about a toolbar PR2 site with no content?  Well, as I stated before, it is only anecdotal evidence.  But, it suggests that tools like Firepow, 1WayLinks and 3WayLinks that provide quality links might be worth the investment -- at least in terms of getting page rank.  The problem is, page rank does not convert directly to sales.  Traffic converts to sales.  Is this page rank converting?

Well, I am embarrassed to say that I never finished adding Google Analytics to the site, or properly set up the Commission Junction ID to track clicks and sales.  But, the AWStats seem to suggest that there is some traffic there, and that it has been growing over time.

The Bottom Line on Backlinks

The bottom line -- Build Backlinks.  But you knew that already.  If you are working on sites, your promotion strategy needs to include a backlink plan.   Based on this traffic data, I conclude that tools like Firepow, 1WayLinks and 3WayLinks that provide backlinks links might be worth the investment -- but you need to evaluate this for yourself on your own site.  As I mentioned before, the above evidence is anecdotal, and your mileage may vary.

It's time for another weekly Internet Business Fortune Cookie.  Last night I had General Tso's chicken.  It's funny, because a Chinese guy at a restaurant told me once all about General Zuo Zongtang, who was a Qing dynasty General.  He explained how the dish was prepared for the General by his wife and served for him and his staff.  Sources I can find on the internet suggest that the dish was actually invented in New York City in the 1970s. Go figure. I like the Qing dynasty version of the story, but I am thinking the NYC version is probably right.

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's cookie actually hits right at the heart of Google rankings -- "The thing that you lost will be found this month."

Of course, that fortune cookie is obviously referring to the fact that one of my newer eBay sites using phpbay was "sand boxed" this month. I was ranking on the first page for my terms and making some nice sales. Suddenly, the site is nowhere to be found.

So, I am adding the site into Firepow to see if I can add some content and back links to it to get it back in play.  Firepow has a new very cool "blog import" feature that I am testing. There are still some bugs, but it is working well for a couple of my niche blogs. I plan to use the Firepow "BNet" to get some back links and some of the other Firepow promotional tools. It will be interesting to see if that helps the site or makes things worse. It's really hard to tell, because you never know what Google is doing in the first place.

Stay The Course

I've had this Google Dance happen before. The sites impacted by a sudden loss in ranking usually come back stronger than when they left -- which is what the fortune cookie is trying to tell me.

This is another really good reason to have 60 sites making $100/month and not 3 sites making $2000/month. If you are at the mercy of Google for your traffic, you are hosed if they slap your site or otherwise impact your rankings.

So, the message for you today is, don't freak out if your site moves in the rankings (especially if it is still indexed). Generally speaking, it will come back. Keep working on the site while it is in the sandbox and watch it come back even stronger in many cases.  Use good fundamentals (keyword targeting, on page SEO, white hat linking techniques, etc) and you should be fine.

Have a great day.
Mark

Photo credit:  Uploaded on July 17, 2006 by headcase

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.

Greetings!

Except for a brief time when I went shopping with my two daughters this weekend, I have been knee-deep in Firepow doing an in-depth evaluation (as promised). Right now my plan is to blog about it several times over the next week. I have gotten permission from Andrew Hansen (the creator of Firepow) to include some screen shots from deep inside the software -- so stay tuned. Bottom line is that I am really impressed with Firepow. It's not perfect, but you can see perfect from there -- a comment that I will explain in detail all next week. I hope that when I am done with you next week you will be able to tell if Firepow is for you without even reading the sales page.

Why Am I Telling You This?

Like I said, I am busy with Firepow, but I got interrupted today.

Josh Spaulding just sent over a pre-release copy his new eBook product. He is launching it Monday, and it is called New Age Email Marketing.

Now, on Monday, I will be talking about Firepow, and will not be able to help Josh promote his report (which is killer -- read on). So, Josh gave me special permission to let my readers know tonight, ahead of the launch.  The ink is not even dry on the sales page.

You need to know something -- Josh is one of the very few people that I both trust and respect in this business. I read the report (26 pages), and I was amazed. The report is about exactly how Josh manages his very profitable email campaign. It's all the details you need to build and make money from a list, even if you are a beginner.

The crazy thing is, it is only $7

(with a money-back guarantee, no less).

Why Is Josh Doing This?

Well, he tells you right in the sales letter. He has created an incredibly valuable report and it selling it at a really low price as a way to grow his list. He explains all of this in the report -- and tells you how to duplicate his approach.

So, if you are interested in making money from your email list (even if you don't have one yet), I recommend this report unconditionally. Josh is a great guy. He shoots straight, and will help you make money online.

Get New Age Email Marketing for $7 today.

You will be glad you did.

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