Market research is where it all begins. If there’s no market there’s no dough. Most people think that in order to succeed in a market they must find a sub niche within that market that has very few or no competitors. They believe that they have no chance of making money in broad saturated markets. After all, how can the small guy compete with monstrous companies and affiliates that have never ending resources? This is certainly how I used to think.
I’d painstakingly go through thousands of keywords analyzing core variables such as, number of competing pages, monthly search volume, Number of Adwords advertisers etc. Yeah I used cool tools to do this but I was always stationary until I found that diamond in the rough. More often than not, that certain diamond turned out to be just a sharp piece of glass that sliced through my time and wallet. I had many PPC campaigns pointing to these shallow poorly structured and optimized sites. I made a few bucks but it certainly wasn’t worth the effort and time I was putting in.
Do it right or Just Don’t Do it
Things turned for me when I decided to stop jumping from niche to niche and decided to build a quality site and blog on a broad topic which I loved and enjoyed working on. I decided to stop focusing on making a few quick bucks and start learning how to create quality content, get lots of targeted traffic and inbound links. When I mastered this, I knew it would be easy to turn the online asset I’d built into a revenue stream. I could even sell this web real-estate for a large sum if I ever wanted to cash in.
First I want to detail why I don’t do much PPC affiliate marketing and prefer the slower less traveled, less risky route to online profit. Please note that when you have a high conversion site structure like we will be putting in place, PPC will be the next logical step to ramping up your earnings. If you are new to PPC the profit from your adsense revenue will more than help fund your PPC education.
PPC Advantages
- Quick entry to market
- Quick testing of landing pages and conversions
- Instant traffic
- Easy to ramp up winning campaigns.
PPC Disadvantages
- Extremely competitive
- Requires constant monitoring and tweaking
- Difficult and expensive to outsource
- Difficult and expensive learning curve for beginners
- Your campaigns can be easily monitored by ads spy software such as Google Cash Detective and AdSpy. This means a more experienced PPC marketer can let you do the market research and easily nudge you out of the way after monitoring your profitable campaigns.
- Sites and landing pages are only of value when your PPC campaigns are running.
2 . Quality Site, ranked with clever link building and promotion You will see as time goes on how we can guarantee a slice of the pie in any market by following a proven site building and linking system that the search engines love.
Silos And LSI ( Automated )
In a nutshell for those of you that do not know what “Silos” and “LSI” are. Silos are content rich websites that are made up of a broad topic broken down to many sub topics even those sub-topics are broken down further until its too narrow to sub-categorize any further.
LSI (Latent Symantec Indexing)
LSI is the practice of writing content so that it will perform well when put through the search engines LSI algorithms. E.g If you write a post you want to optimize it for say the term “classical music”. Mentioning “classical music” all over your post will not help your ranking for that term . However, clever tagging, head line and anchor text along with paragraphs containing terms that are closely related to “classical music”, e.g “Mozart”, “Composer” etc, will certainly catch googles attention.
Sounds Complicated?
It really is not and naturally makes sense when you are writing or building pages on a certain topic. The way we will initially set up wordpress means our site will automatically grow like a silo structure as we add content, categories and tags. You could take this much further by using http://www.themezoom.com to make suggestions on your best silo structure and analyze your topics and sub topics in dept. I wouldn’t recommend this for beginners. If you know your topic well enough you can easily and naturally create a good silo structure. Also, check out the free service at http://www.hittail.com . This cool free service gives you stats in real time about what keywords are bringing people to your site and even makes suggestions on terms that you can easily rank for. I guarantee you will find hittail invaluable as your content and rankings start to grow.
I will be showing you step by step how to build a profitable site network with a strong lasting search engine presence. You can make money in the following ways. (note many more ways to monetize appear as your sites presence and brand grows).
So How The Heck Do We Make Money?
1. Adsense / Yahoo / MSN / … (You will see earnings in Month 1)
2. Affiliate product(s) (Month 2-3)
3. Your own product(s). Physical Product labeling or creating info product out of your sites content.
4. Advertising – Pay Per Play, Links, Banners, Reviewing sites and products. (These guys come to you when you have the traffic.) (Month 9)
5. When your site reaches a certain PR and traffic level, I will introduce you to a network that will freely provide daily content on you site in exchange for some anchor text in each post or article. (Now this is what I call “Automated White Hat” at its best)
5. Sell Site and Content. This is huge. I’ve been introduced to people that do this for a living. I got one of my sites evaluated and was shocked at how much it was worth after 9 months. I aint gonna sell this baby yet as I can push her a lot more first.
I will be showing members how and where to list your sites should you ever want to sell or even just have them evaluated.
I hope this post gives you a clear picture of why I choose this path. I’ve dabbled in everything from Black Hat Portal Building, Arbitrage to Niche Marketing and nothing resonates more with me that creating a solid profitable online business like I’ve outlined above.
here are a few market ideas to whet your appetite. http://ezinearticles.com/category-guidelines.html