Visualize building a website targeting the wrong niche only to find out after months of search engine optimization and internet marketing that your idea may be too general and rarely holds the interest of your visitors and makes it hard to earn money after spending hundreds of hours of your own time. What a nightmare!
Well this was me a couple of years ago. I created several websites and spent hundreds of hours of my own time and hired programmers to create scripts for credit card processing. Only to find out I could not make any money. None of my visitors purchased my products and I felt completely lost in the internet jungle. With all the hype of making money on the internet and after spending thousands of dollars buying training material from so called internet guru's I still could not get it right. What did I miss? Does this sound familiar to you?
Finally by trying lots of different ideas I magically hit the correct formula. I built a very popular website on trucks and to date earned over $70,000 from this. How did I accidentally discover this success? I tried building more websites only to fail again. Did I just get lucky? Could I duplicate my success again?
Most people underestimate the importance of getting this first step of choosing the correct idea when first starting a website. Only to find out months later that their idea cannot make money. After months of researching I finally discovered the magic formula of long tail marketing i.e profitable niche markets. When you understand this process completely you can duplicate your success every time you build a website and save yourself countless hours of wasted emotion.
Brainstorm some ideas on paper. Find topics that interest you like fashion, gardening or fish to name a few examples. If you can't think of any ideas look at the newspaper, shops in malls, yellow pages, tv or do a search in Google for general ideas. Don't worry about your keyword research yet. At this stage you would like to find a unique angle on your chosen idea. You want to give your visitors a compelling reason to visit your website and return. Preferably choose an idea that you already know a lot about. If you choose an idea that you are not familiar with you will be forced to hire professionals on Elance or similar websites to create content for you. Unless you already making significant money I do not recommend doing this. Rather keep your costs low when you first start out and create the content yourself.
Once you found a good idea (examples swordfish, organic gardening, bonsai trees) you need to do your keyword research. The importance here being that you would like to build a website that gets significant free search engine traffic from your chosen keywords but at the same time not too competitive. You can use the Overture Inventory Tool. In my opinion a profitable niche keyword searched 15,000 to 45,000 times a month with virtually no competition rates as the best keyword to use. You can also use the Wordtracker tool to check the competition on the keywords. You can check the amount of ppc adverts on Google and once you discover a keyword with virtually no competition will become your goldmine. You also need to look for similar keywords related to your theme that you can build your website around. Say for example if you chose truck bed liners as your profitable niche keyword you can also create content on keywords related to this like spray on bed truck liner, pickup truck bed liner, rhino truck bed liner etc...
After choosing your keywords you need to create your content and monetize your traffic using contextual advertising like Google Adsense, affiliate links or by creating and sourcing your own products.
You need to test your completed website with ppc marketing. You can use Google Adwords and do an initial test and send 200 visitors to your website to see if the traffic converts into money. If not you need to improve your sales pages or layout to improve your conversion statistics. Once satisfied with your conversion and that you can monetize your traffic you can start on your search engine optimization process that will take at least 6 months and years of consistent white hat optimisation. After completing this step you will generate cash with free search engine traffic for years to come. You can build your virtual real estate by duplicating this process with other ideas.
Make sure that you follow the steps outlined here. It will save you thousands of hours in wasted emotion and heartache when building a profitable niche.


Learn The Tricks Of Advertising A Network Marketing Business
Once you make the decision to start your own business in marketing your attention needs to turn to advertising a network marketing business in whatever way you feel it can be successful. Old stand-bys such as newspapers, radio and television have shown limited success with the basic theory being that if you want to attract online customers, you will need to advertise online.
Online advertising is not cheap and finding the right websites on which to post your ads can be confusing, as you will want to reach potential customers who have an interest in the product or service you are selling. The shotgun approach has been used by many businesses, which involves sending out messages in all directions to enough people, hoping to hit a few. This can be a waste of time and effort, not to mention money, and anti-spam laws are limiting how you can reach potential customers without offending them.
One method several successful businesses are using is affiliate marketing. By accepting websites who are willing to sell advertising space on a per sale basis enables you to leverage your web site advertising and not pay for it until you realize results. Typically, an affiliate will place your ad on their site free of charge with the understanding that if a lead from that site results in a sale for you, he will receive a sales commission based on the sales.
Utilizing this method can put your ad in front of a diverse group of web surfers without the typical up front cost of advertising and, if your is a reputable, well-know business, the affiliate gets the extra recognition as a legitimate entity by having an association with such a company. Surfers on the internet will not know the advertising is placed there on an if-come basis, if the sale happens, payment will come, and believe that site must be pretty good if you are willing to advertise with them.
You can be specific about which sites your name is associate with and have great control over which sites you do not want your ads posted on. By working with an affiliate marketing company they will even track all the visits and sales coming from each of the affiliates who agree to carry your advertising message. While this may be similar to the shotgun approach of shooting your message into space, the biggest difference is the cost as it costs you nothing unless you see results. This makes this approach a true results-based endeavor.
Additionally, over time you can trim the number of affiliates you associate with by rooting out the ones whose visitors never visit your site and then gear your advertising to types of sites whose visitors do show an interest in your product or service.

Diep Tran is Internet marketer, owns a Plug-In Profits Site and webmaster of Internet Home Business Opportunities. For An Internet Home Business Opportunity To Make Money Online, Visit: http://www.internet-wealth.biz


The Pros and Cons of RSS Feeds
What’s all the buzz about RSS feeds? To some webmasters it’s their knight in shining armor when it comes to adding relevant content to their web site. If your are considering adding a RSS feed to your site, get some background information first so you will know what to expect.
Let’s start off by explaining exactly what a RSS feed is.
If you’ve been hanging around the internet lately, then you’ve seen these 3 letters in many of the websites you’ve visited. It has become all the rave and it’s popularity is on a steady uphill climb. I predict that the day will come when 95% of all websites will incorporate a RSS feed of some sort into their site.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary; syndicating means republishing an article that comes from another source such as a website.
An RSS is a means of publicizing updates about websites. It may or may not include a summary and photos of the latest posting. But those that provide summaries (thus Rich Site Summary) allow users to skim through the article so that they could decide later on if they want to access the website source. The RSS feed usually contains the title of the update originating from the website. It is also usually the link to the website source.
What are the benefits of RSS?
RSS gives benefits to both readers and web publishers alike with it’s ease and simplicity of use.
1. It gives you the latest updates. Whether it’s about the weather, music, software upgrades, or local news. You can obtain a feed on an unlimited number of subjects and as it’s popularity continue to increase, so will the many different subjects you will be able to retrieve from a feed.
2. If you’re looking for a quick method of surfing the web, RSS feeds can meet that demand. Because it pulls information from outside sources and compile that data into a single feed, it saves on surfing time. Some feeds provides a summary of related articles, this saves the user’s time by helping him/her decide on which items to prioritize when reading or browsing the net.
3. It gives freedom of choice to the user. Users are given a free-hand on which websites to include in their RSS aggregators which they have the freedom to change at any time. This puts pressure on the RSS feed provider to maintain an up-to-date data base of current and relevant articles.
4. It lessens the clutter in your inbox. Although your email address will be required to enjoy the services of online RSS feed aggregators, RSS does not use your email address to send the updates. Everything is done from their servers. This makes it virtually hassle free.
5. RSS feeds are completely spam free. Unlike email subscriptions, RSS does not make use of your email address to send updates thus your privacy is kept safe from spam mails.
6. Unsubscribing is also hassle-free. When you no longer want to post an RSS feed from a provider on your website, all you have to do is delete the html code or the RSS feed’s URL from your site.
7. It can be used as an advertising or marketing tool. Users who subscribe receive the latest news on products and services from your site without it being viewed as spam mail by the receiver. This is an advantage to both the web user and the website owner since advertising becomes targeted to people who are actually interested in your products. As for the web user, he/she receives current, up-to-date articles about topics that interest them.
What are the drawbacks of RSS Feeds?
The biggest drawback to the use of RSS feeds is the fact that it’s a relatively new technology and it has been known to have some user-preference concerns such as:
1. Some users prefer receiving email updates over an RSS feed.
2. Graphics and photos do not appear in all RSS feeds.
3. The identity of the source website can be confusing. Since RSS feeds do not display the actual URL or name of the website, it can sometimes get confusing on what feed a user is actually reading.
4. Publishers cannot determine how many users are subscribed to their feed and the frequency of their visits. Moreover, they would not know the reasons why users unsubscribe which could be important in improving their advertising.
5. RSS feeds create higher traffic and demands on the website owners’ server.
6. Since it is a new technology, many website hosting companies do not currently support RSS feeds.
O.K. I’m Interested: How do I start using RSS feeds on my website?
There are two things needed: an RSS feed and an RSS aggregator or reader. The RSS feed comes from an RSS supported website. There are also websites that provide a list of RSS feeds of different websites. An RSS aggregator is used to read the RSS feed from the source website. It scans and collects data on the latest RSS feeds from the worldwide web.
An aggregator comes in two forms: a downloadable program also known as desktop aggregator and an online or web-based aggregator. Downloadable aggregators may require payment before they can be acquired, while internet-based aggregators are usually free of charge. All you need to do is to register an account then you are ready to use their services. Both versions allow you to customize or choose which RSS feeds to enter. Paid aggregators are usually chosen by more experienced users and they usually allow more freedom in customizing feeds.
1. Choose an RSS aggregator to use. For beginners, web-based aggregators are recommended since they are usually user-friendly.
2. Scan the homepage of your target website for the RSS or XML button. It contains the RSS code you need to enter in the aggregator. Copy this code. Syndic8 provides a directory of websites that support RSS.
3. Paste the code (which contains the URL of the website) in your aggregator. There is a space provided for pasting the code.
After you have done these three easy steps, you can start reading the RSS feeds coming from the website. New postings appear as they are published real time at the source website.
As RSS feeds increase in popularity, no doubt the number of websites that employ this method of Internet web site marketing will increase along with it. If you are looking for a quick and efficient way to provide relevant content to your web site, then consider incorporating a RSS feed.
Don’t give up! If at first you don’t succeed, TRY, TRY, AGAIN! There is a lot to learn when trying to figure out what works best for your online business. Give yourself a break and don’t set unrealistic goals. Don‘t be afraid to learn from others and keep at it until you get it just how you want it.
So, Good Luck, Make Money and Have Fun Doing It - Shirley Kelly
About the Author:
Shirley Kelly is a full time internet marketer who has written over 200 articles in print and 5 published ebooks. Her passion is helping others avoid the mistakes she made when she launched her first website. Her motto is "Knowledge is power and power is having a good understanding about what you're doing." To learn more about Internet web site marketing, download this great ebook “The Newbies Guide To Internet Marketing” at www.websitemarketing2.com