do you want to make money online?

Do You *Really* Want to Make Money Online?

I know – you must think it’s crazy that I ask you that question, but too many people jump into Internet marketing without really asking if this is really the right option. It sounds so easy to make money online…I mean, you have a computer, right? You use the internet? What more is there to know?

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The truth is, it’s really difficult and there is no guarantee that you will ever make money. In fact most people never make any money at all. Sometimes that is because they give up too soon (it’s only a rare lucky person that makes money right away) but other times its just business as usual.

Here are a couple of possible problems you could run into:

You choose a difficult market. Some markets are more competitive than others. Other markets are just not profitable. Maybe your market is very seasonal and you just missed the key period of time.
You don’t know how to market your website and thus never get any visitors.
Your website isn’t any good and so customers don’t stick around.

Your website is good but doesn’t turn visitors into buyers.
Your product isn’t good.

It’s not the right time…and so on…

In fact even if you make money, you may never see you money. Why is this? A lot of the major companies like Clickbank and Google have what are called payment thresholds. This is the minimal amount of money you must make before they will cut you a check (with a minimal fee.) And the whole time they hold your money they will charge you if you do not continually make sales. This is not a problem for established businesses but this can be a major shock for a beginner.

Keep in mind that many of the most successful players online worked for as long as five years before they saw any money at all. That’s five long years working until late at night on the computer while their families constantly asked them “why do you waste your time on this online business that doesn’t make any money?” You may hear exciting testimonials that claim you can start making money right away. Maybe you can, most people won’t, and those that do will have to lay out significant cash.

Maybe for you the best way to spend that time and money is to go back to school, get more training, or add a traditional second job.

So who should make money online?

People who have the ability to do as much work themselves without having to hire and trust contractors to do primary set up. This includes domain and website maintenance, marketing, advertizing, graphic design, link building, and writing. The more of this you can do yourself and do well, the better off you will be. Especially if you plan on rolling out multiple products or sites. This will keep your expenses low reducing the chance you will run out of money and making it easier to turn a profit. So if you don’t know how to do it, learn!

People who honestly have the time. Success will not come easily at a couple hours per week. Expect to spend at least 30 to 60 hrs per week on your project (less if you plan to outsource certain projects to third parties – but of course this costs money.) Why so much? Sometimes you will have to do research or learn new skills before you can complete a vital task. Sometimes what you were trying to do doesn’t work and you have to figure out why. Sometimes you will do the wrong thing. Multiple times. Really. And then you have to fix it. Finally – because there is a LOT of work you have to put into building a good product, website, marketing plan, advertising campaign, etc.

People who have no other option but to work from home. This is for you but please do not let anyone exploit you. Do not pay a lot of money for anything that seems to be too good to be true. Believe it or not, you can learn how to do almost everything using good books, online sites, and reasonably priced products. You do not need to spend hundreds of dollars – because odds are, you’ll wish you didn’t.

And finally – people who love it! I love working and selling online! I love checking my stats. I love the challenge and I love the endless opportunities.


My honest review of niche profit classroom

My Honest Review of Niche Profit Classroom

I haven’t always made websites – let alone niche web sites. In fact if you asked me a year ago if I would be creating content based websites that sell 60-100 page ebooks for a profit (on top of affiliate sales and advertising revenue) I would have thought that was impossible. But here I am and yes, that is exactly what I do.

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About a year ago I finally saw who I was and where I was going in life with clear vision and it made me very very angry. What was I doing with my life?!  Of course I have been angry like this before, but never before had I sought action. Usually I would drown my initial frustration in a) shopping b) ice cream c) alcohol and then try to put it all out of my mind.

This time was different – this time I chose action. I said to myself “You will be out of this job in one year” and at that point I radically changed my behavior and pursued my goal of running my own internet business with…nothing less than fanatical obsession.I set aside all other interests and spent all of my time and money trying to figure out how to make money online. I really felt that was what I wanted to do and if other people could do it, why not me?

In that time I learned -

What NOT to Do

Such as – buy some crap product cobbled together in a couple days and then sold to some fool (me) for $99.

In my experience, the vast majority of Internet Marketing products – be that newsletters, ebooks, or membership sites – give you much less than you would expect and ALWAYS leave you with unanswered questions and knowledge gaps. How is x,y, and z  going to make you money anyways? Usually when you buy some kind of “Internet Marketing Secrets Revealed” type product from some so called internet guru you end up spending $99 for say five videos that look like they were put together in the span of an hour with an anemic pdf document to accompany (and yet, you bought it. How did that happen?)

The information is NOT effective. In fact, the person who “wrote” it probably never even made money online. Other times the information is credible but just so general you don’t really know where to get started. Oh but look, an action blueprint can be yours for only $199! If only you’d know before you laid out the $99 that you would need to spend an additional $199…

The system is too expensive, too time consuming, or both. If a system is going to work for you, it has to work within your budget – time and monetary. Anything else is just throwing money away. Lots of programs advertised possibly could work if you had thousands of dollars to put towards a Google pay-per-click campaign, but even then you have spent your hard earned money only to hope for success.

The process is so complicated or poorly explained or its only for the very experienced…who…probably don’t need the system or the money for that matter.

Lastly boring or dishonest. Do you really feel good endorsing products you haven’t used or you know don’t work? Is it REALLY interesting to write article after article about how to stop excessive sweating?

What DOES Work (for me and maybe you too)

Back in April I heard a podcast interview of Adam Short on Yaro Starak’s blog. This interview got me really excited as I was sure, finally, that this method would work. Everything he said made sense. But, I really didn’t want to spend any money (as I had been burned too many times before) and so instead I watched every single one of the free videos and took pages of notes.

This is the system-

You create an information rich website on a hobby topic of some kind being careful to pick a market with lots of interest but not too much competition (finding these markets is easier than you would think and can be done in under an hour by using a few popular web sites.)

You then create a product for visitors to buy (or pay to have someone create a product for you, or you could link to an affiliate product on the same topic – its up to you.) This is the point of your site. For example, if your site has lot of individual articles on marble collecting, then you also offer a downloadable book (or audio book) on marble collecting.

Instead of paying for traffic through Google’s pay per click search advertising program you use simple techniques (see the articles in the side bar) to bring visitors to your site for FREE.

Once visitors arrive at your site you get them to opt in to your email list where you offer a free mini course on your topic. This is key as most customers do not buy the first time and many will not remember to return otherwise. Your email mini course will then send the people on your list one email per day on a key tip related to your topic as well as gently encourage visitors to visit your sales page and buy your book.

That is pretty much it. Maybe it sounds crazy to you, but people really do buy ebooks – just go visit Clickbank’s Marketplace and look! Books on dog training, weight loss, and other topics sell like crazy!

I knew right away this was something I could do and do well.

Did I quit my job in a year? Well no, I still made mistakes along the way which have caused me to waste time, but I am making money.

Do the methods really work? Yes.

Is it really as cheap to maintain as claimed? Absolutely.

Let me breakdown my project expenses:

Cost of my monthly web hosting which allows unlimited domains? About $10 with HostGator.

Cost of my email autoresponder service – $20 per month with aWeber – allows unlimited email lists and unlimited messages to my list members. After your list grows to more than 500 people, your cost will go up by $10 and then remain the same until you exceed 2,500 members (at which point it might make more sense to flush your list…)

Cost of one domain name a little less than $10 with Name Cheap. Best deal out there.

Then in order to process payments you will need to open an account with either Clickbank or Paypal. Clickbank has the advantage of allowing you to set up affiliate marketing for your product, this can be well worth the one time cost of $50 to set up an account. Oherwise, you may prefer to get started with Paypal, is up to you.

Cost of graphics and website design – none! I use Wordpress and a template from Niche Profit Classroom. This allows me to get sites up and ready to go in about an hour.

Cost of content – None. I write all content myself to keep costs low. In the future I will probably need to start outsourcing this as my project lists grow…

Side note: Hosting is included in the monthly fee (save you $10 per month) for Niche Profit Classroom but I prefer to keep ownership of this myself and so do not use this service.

And that’s it. $30 per month for reoccurring charges and $60 in one time charges for product creation. Not bad when you consider many profitable niche sites can make anywhere from $500 to $1500 per month when fully mature (a year or so, sometimes faster depending on the topic.) Don’t forget that you really only need to sell a few books per month to break even. This is the beauty of keeping costs so low! And you can always add more income by placing Google ads or promoting affiliate products!

Is Niche Profit Classroom a Good Product?

Ultimately I did end up joining Niche Profit Classroom as I wanted access to the proprietary software, free monthly niche packs (niche websites and email newsletters ready to post online and make you money), and online educational videos. I am still a member today because I continue to find the content helpful.

Niche Profit Classroom consistently exceeds expectations in many ways. The basic philosophy of making money without spending much money is one I can get behind. Adam and Alen show you how to find subjects that lots of people on the web are genuinely interested in but that there just aren’t a lot of competing sites. Using their guess free MoneyWord system allows you to position your new site (where you offer an eBook for sale) in Google’s top 10 without wasting money paying for traffic.

The quality of the 600 some video training modules is much higher than with other programs. The explanations and processes are dead simple and shown to you in real time using example or working websites. You never find yourself scrambling about what to do next. Oh, and they provide an action plan for free with each training module in case you still need it (I usually don’t.)

I find I really enjoy building my sales websites featuring a variety of hobbies I am interested in. My family makes fun of me but honestly, I really like writing about pets and tomatoes! The fact that I can actually make money doing something so simple and something that I enjoy – that’s the part I still can’t believe.

Take a Look for Yourself

When you first log in…

When you first log in to Niche Profit Classroom, you will get a splash screen – this is for the free Niche Profit Classroom Acceleration Program. The Acceleration Program is simply an additional educational “blueprint” that you can follow in order to get started making money and launching a site as quickly as possible. If you opt in to the 15-day email mini-course you will get a daily lesson with specific instructions to follow – all with the goal of getting your first site up in two weeks.

This type of program is great because its based around the idea of “If I could start over today, this is how I would do things.” I find this is so true. Over the months I have been working on niche marketing, I find my process has become much more streamlined and I have worked through many beginner “mistakes” on my own. I recommend opting in to this guided lesson first thing.

Here is a shot of the main landing page….

Across the top are ten menu options:

“NPC” – this always returns you to the main page

“Classroom” – This leads you to the area where all the online video modules are kept (keep reading to see more…)

“NPC Center” – This is a drop down menu that leads one to lots of useful resources like the monthly free niche website packs, the easy to use Wordpress template for building niche websites, pre-recorded webinars, etc.

“Software” – This is where you go to access online (market analysis tool) and downloadable software like the MoneyWord Matrix software tool.

“Outsourcing” – Covers specific training on how to outsource the creation of niche websites while still maintaining quality and profit margins.

“Hosting” – Covers the free website hosting that comes with your membership.

“T-Capsule” – This is where you go to find past niche packs and other resources that were distributed to members during previous months or years.

“Community” – This leads to the forums.

“CP” - This is the Control Panel. If you save any data in the online software modules, you will find it here.

Look inside the Classroom module…

Across the top you will find 14 learning modules ranging from an “Introduction” through “Product Creation,” “Sales Letter,” “Website Building,” “Traffic” and “Profit Boosting” tactics. You can select any of these modules, then choose “Video Training” – this will launch a list of all videos available on the subject. In the left hand side of the window you will see playable video. Ideally you would watch videos in succession. Most modules have around ten videos or more. Usually the length is around 4 minutes each so it is easy to start and stop a video according to your schedule.

If nothing else, check out the free videos. Most of the information is presented so simply that you won’t even need the classroom membership.

In these videos you will learn the same techniques that I use to:

Create simple content websites that do not appear to be sales sites at all, yet regularly generate between $500 and $1500 per month while 100% on autopilot.

Get FREE targeted traffic that only grows over time by using the “MoneyWord Matrix.”

Funnel your site’s traffic into a silent sales machine that will get you a great conversion rate.

List building secrets that can generate cash on command…

Secrets to creating high quality information products for pennies on the dollar by using a little known two step process…

Set the whole system on autopilot that runs 24/7!

Go now!


keyword analysis tool

Keyword Analysis Tool

In my last post, “How to Increase Traffic to Your Web Site,” I outlined a series of steps that you could do using exclusively free tools in order to increase traffic to your web site. For the first four to six months of my internet marketing career, this is pretty how I worked, by hand. There is nothing wrong with the manual method other than the fact that it is slow and tedious. Now, I no longer use this manual method but rather I have moved on to using a keyword analysis tool called the “Moneyword Matrix Keyword Tool” available from Niche Profit Classroom (my monthly membership includes the use of this proprietary software – other sites likely offer similar tools but this one is “free” to me.)

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What is the Moneyword Matrix Tool?

The Moneyword Matrix Tool is a downloadable keyword analysis tool that runs right on your own computer (right now it is Windows-only I believe.) Using a tool like the Moneyword Matrix Tool cuts the time I was spending on manual keyword analysis from hours to minutes and makes finding excellent “moneywords” even easier. Let me show you how I use the tool.

How to use a keyword analysis tool

Step 1

First you will want to go to Google’s External Keyword Tool and enter your first root keyword. For this example I am going to use a competitive category – weight loss -  so you can see how a keyword analysis tool can really increase the number of keywords you can find while greatly reducing the time you spend looking. Select “Get keyword ideas” to start your search.

As you can see, this search brings up a lot of high search volume keywords. These keywords are not likely to yield a lot of moneywords but they can likely point us in the right direction. Be sure to click “Global Monthly Search Volume” to sort keywords by number of monthly searches. This will place keywords in order of which get the most searches.

Step 2

Now, I am going to now select, starting from the top, unique keywords that stand out to me. I am going to start with ten and then run each keyword through the analysis tool separately.

These are the keyword results for “weight loss diet” – this search yielded 124 results.

Later, if I find I have not found as many moneywords as I hoped – I may consider running the top ten results of this search through Google’s Keyword Tool individually to yield additional moneywords as these results still show very high search volume.

Step 3

I am going to save this file as an excel csv (option is at the bottom of the list of keywords) file called “weight loss diet” as this will help me see which search terms I have gone through.

Do this for each of your selected keywords and save each list as a csv file.

Step 4

Okay, now you are  ready to send your first file through the Moneyword Matrix Keyword Tool.

This is what the main software screen looks like:

In the upper left hand corner there is the option to “Select a file to import from” – click “Browse” to navigate to your master keyword list that you just set up in excel. If you get a “file not readable” error, make sure your file is saved as a CSV.

Step 5

Now click the “Go” button.

You will see a list of your keywords appear under “Keyword” as well as the number of searches per keyword per month. Next to that column you will see the Moneyword Matrix program start to populate the data in the “Google Results” and “Money Word Rating” columns. You will see data per term populate about every second. Notice that the program is indicating the quality of a keyword for you – next to each keyword there is a rating of either “poor, fair, good, or excellent.”

Step 6

Once the program has stopped analyzing you can save all output to a csv file. That option is in the lower right corner “Export as CSV.”

Step 7

Then, when you open your new file, go ahead and sort by Money Word Rating. (Be sure to select a cell in your spreadsheet that contains data, then click the “Data” tab and then select “sort.”

In the window that opens select:

Sort by: “Money Word Rating”

Order: “A to Z.”

My file is now sorted with Excellent money words at the top.

So, in a couple of minutes you were able to find two Excellent rated money words (and 33 “Good” money words off screen) out of a total of 151 keywords. Think how long this would have taken if you had to gather all the search result data manually!

Step 8

Keep running all keyword CSV files through the program until you feel you have caught all the major “Excellent” and “Good Keywords.” This should take under an hour.

Conclusion

So, as you can see, working with a keyword analysis tool can really save you a lot of time. Instead of spending all day doing tedious manual computation – for a few dollars per month you can use a computer program that will do the work for you! If this sounds ike something that would help you – click here for more info.


increase traffic web

Increase site traffic web

What is the secret to running a profitable website?

You may think its choosing a hot market, creating a good product, or a designing a cutting edge website, but that is not true. Traffic! Traffic, especially free traffic is the key to success – because without traffic you will not have any customers. Many people think that in this day and age it is impossible to get natural search engine traffic and instead resort to spending a lot of time and money buying traffic from Google. This is simply not true. Getting free traffic and even ranking on the first page of Google  is actually quite easy and once set up, requires very little maintenance (provided you set it up a certain way.)

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Who should buy traffic?

Buying traffic from Google is fine for people with the time, experience, and budget to launch a successful Adwords campaign. Paid ad placement is also good for people who need instant traffic for a short window of time – examples include launching seasonal or time sensitive sites, and market research and testing.

Google wants you to think that placing ads is easier than competing for search engine rankings. Why? Because that is how they make money! The truth of the matter is – it is incredibly easy to end up spending lots of money with NOTHING to show for it. This happens to people ALL the time and is one of the main reason’s internet businesses fail within the first month. Unless you set careful limits on your account, in a single days you could accumulate a HUGE bill with Google, paying as much as $10-20 per click (that accumulates very very quickly) without making ANY sales.

This is what some people are paying per click to be on page 1!

The problems with buying traffic

  1. You will end up paying money for traffic that does not necessarily translate into dollars.
  2. Google is always changing its requirements for “quality” landing pages. Once this happens, Google is less willing to show your ads, and when you do – you have to pay more.
  3. People with smaller budgets (or no budgets)  cannot compete.
  4. You become 100% dependent on one source of traffic. If anything happens where you ad campaign suddenly stops or become too expensive to maintain – your traffic will disappear completely overnight.

How NOT to increase site traffic

Most people target only the BIG keywords for their market as these are the terms getting really high search volume (lots of people search using these words.) This is a big mistake. For example, if your market is migraines, then your big keywords are “headache” and “migraine(s).” For example, 1.5 million people search for “migraine” per month. Seems like it should be a profitable keyword then doesn’t it? But its not. Many people make the mistake of trying to rank for these keywords – this ends up being unsuccessful as there is just too much competition. If you enter “migraine” into Google you get 10.7 million hits – that’s 10.7 million web pages fighting for only 10 spots!

That’s a lot of competition. Getting to page 1 is going to require a lot of time and effort. Staying on top will also require constant work.

You will see a lot of people change their tactics completely because they are frustrated. These people target what are known as “long tail” search terms – these are keywords of greater length like “migraine without headache symptoms.” This technique seems very profitable but in practice is actually very time consuming. Using this example you can see that if entered into Google only four websites come up. Ranking on page 1 is now a sure thing! However…only 140 people search for this term per month. That’s about 4 people per day and there is no way you will get 100% of that traffic. 25% is a safer guess. This means if you want to build traffic using this method, you are going to need a lot of keywords (and corresponding web pages.)

Neither technique is ideal as both require lots of time and effort for limited payout.

How TO increase traffic to your site

You can get your site ranked on the first page of Google without paying for that privilege using basic keyword research, search engine optimization, and link building. If you are not familiar with these terms, this may sound scary and complicated – its not – trust me. Anyone can do it. Once you see how easy it is you will never feel forced to  pay Google ever again!

Money Word Matrix

What you need to find is a middle road . The most efficient method for doing so that I have found is using Niche Profit Classroom’s Money Word Matrix. What are “Money Words?” These are keywords that have the best ratio between high search volume and low competition. While the matrix supplied by Niche Profit Classroom has more detail and information (you can find that here) – essentially what you are looking for are keywords that have 1,000 or more searches per month and 10,000 or fewer competing web pages.

Let me show you how to do this.

First, you will only need two tools – all free:

You will want to start with a brainstormed list of “major keywords” in your market. You don’t need too many as Google will suggest possible keywords as well.

Go to Google’s External Keyword Tool and enter your list of keywords one per line.

Once you are done, hit “Get keyword ideas.”

This is going to bring up a list that looks like the one below:

Note that you can sort by search volume just by clicking on the heading and if you feel like you can change match types from broad to phrase to exact. Hit the question mark next to that option for more info. It is also useful to note that if you scroll all the way to the bottom, Google will allow you to save each listing as an Excel file. This is very useful!

Now what you need to do is start checking the number of competing web pages for each keyword. You do this by entering each search term (be sure to place in quotes) in Google and checking the number of hits. Keep in mind that keywords that have 1,000 or more searches per month and 10,000 or fewer competing web pages is an ideal, not the only level you aim for.

Keep selecting money words until you hit the monthly search volume you are aiming for. If you don’t know what to aim for, try 100 visitors per day for a start. That would be a monthly search volume of 3,100 – just keep in mind you cannot take the monthly search volume of all your key terms and assume you will get 100%. The number of hits you get will increase over time and as you continue to work to build traffic to your site. Many site owners notice that traffic bumps occur at 1 month, 6 months, and 1 yearmilestones as your web site gains credibility with Google.

What to do if you cannot find money words

Sometimes the first time you go through a list you will not find any viable options – this is VERY common in competitive markets. Simply go back to the keyword list that Google generated and take individual search terms like “cluster headache” and run those through the External Keyword Tool. This has worked very well for me.

Would you like to know how to automate this system to save time?

I have written a post on this topic here. This is the system I currently use.