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Forest (Ian) Parks is a very creative individual who is inspired to make money online. Formally a print graphic designer of ten years, recently within the last year, Forest set out to learn the business of making money online with niche blogs. Forest invested time into learning about email list building, search engine marketing, the inner workings of WordPress and on WordPress themes. The only element Forest had coming into this venture was his graphic design skills and the strong desire to find success with making money on the Internet.

I first met Forest Parks back on October 22nd, 2007 when he shared his thoughts with me about his Google AdSense earnings in a comment on a post I wrote titled, Would You Walk A Mile For An AdSense Click. A lot has changed since that time and I am very happy to see how much Forest has learned in just under one year. Today, I want to share with you what I consider a success story. Continue reading »

In the business of making money online, choosing the right niche or topic for a web site is crucial towards your success. I’d say it is the most important decision to make. In this article you will learn why I chose to build a web site in the debt consolidation niche to make money online.

Choosing the right topic to build a web site and market in is so very important. I believe that this is the foundation to your whole product. Look at it this way. Let’s assume that you pick the wrong niche but do everything else right. You post all the right content, you get all the right backlinks, and you rank very well in all the search engines. All sounds great so far right? Well, wrong! If you choose a dead or poor niche, you will not make money.

Choosing something like Beanie Babies might not be the best idea for the fact that there isn’t much money per unit in Beanie Babies. Let’s look at this from an AdSense perspective. If you launch a Beanie Baby web site for the purpose of making money online with Google AdSense, you’re looking at displaying ads on your site that have a very low cost to advertisers in Google AdWords. Secondly, you are competing in an extremely competitive niche which means you’ll be working your butt off to get superior ranking.

The above screen shot (you can click on it for large view) is from one of my favorite programs called Micro Niche Finder. This program allows me to research keywords and discover how competitive they are among other publishers and marketers. Secondly, it allows me to discover how many searches are done within a 30 day period. Piece the two elements together and I have a program that will show me the keywords that have the highest amount of search traffic with the lowest amount of competition.

The above screen shot shows keyword phrase: beanie babies. You will see that this is a HOT TOPIC in the search engines. In the last 30 days, we’re looking at 36,720 searches. Seems great right! Wrong!!! If you look at the strength of competition, you’ll see that it is 12,500 with a big RED light saying “Too Much Competition.”

But here is the thing, here is the other element that makes Micro Niche Finder amazing. Let’s assume that beanie babies was fine. Let’s pretend that it still received 36,720 searches and had a very low strength of competition. Sounds, great so far!! Green light on the SOC!! If these conditions were met, we could assume that beanie babies would be a perfect niche to either write a post about or launch a full blow blog or website, right? Wrong!!!

Look at the ad cost section. You will see that advertisers are paying only .56c to get top rank in Google AdWords. What does that mean? It means that when you display Google AdSense on your beanie baby web site that you’ll only get a few cents per click.

Traffic is very valuable and what you do with the traffic you do get is important. All in all, wasting a visitor on a .03c click is not smart. Each visitor is worth a lot more. So the key with Google AdSense is finding a niche that pays well. Let’s looks at a new screen shot in Micro Niche Finder.

The above is a screen shot captured from Micro Niche Finder for the keyword phrase: debt consolidation. You can click on the screen shot above to view a larger size so you can see it better. What I have done here is used Micro Niche Finder properly to fully research the keyword phrase, debt consolidation. The above screen shot shows results of excellent keywords that I can use in my debt consolidation web site or blog. Let’s break things down:

1. I have found keyword phrases that yield a very high amount of monthly searches.
2. I have found keyword phrases that yield a very low level of competition.
3. I have found keyword phrases that yield a very high cost to advertisers.

What does this mean? It means that if I use the above keywords in an Internet and search engine marketing campaign, I’ll have a very good chance at ranking well in the search engines for these keywords and when I do, I’ll end up getting a lot of traffic from it. Secondly, when the traffic that I funnel into my site or pages click on my Google Adsense ads, I’ll be sending traffic out of my site for a much higher cost per click compared to beanie babies.

Now, I’ll be honest with you. I am not an expert Internet Marketer. I am not like Joel Comm, Mike Filsaime and others. However, I am indeed educating myself and training to be successful in Internet Marketing just like them.

For now, I have done very well with search engine marketing. I have proven to myself time and time again, that I can indeed rank very well in the search engines for topics that I seek out.

I believe that search engine marketing skills and Internet marketing skills are somewhat transferable. However, in the world of Internet marketing, it is much like any kind of product marketing. You need to learn how to successfully present products and services to people to score sales.

So in essence, Internet marketing is much different than search engine marketing. Search engine marketing is simple. It’s a matter of successfully marketing your services and products, web pages, etc… in the search engines with great visibility and attraction to people. Internet marketing is much more complex.

Internet marketing involves building mailing lists, very closely controlling what your traffic does and most importantly utilizing your traffic to the ultimate maximum. Many Internet marketers don’t even waste their time with Google AdSense. However, with me, I believe that by using Micro Niche Finder to discover which ads are the most expensive for Google AdWords advertisers, it tells me what is totally hot in the market. From there, I can filter down my results to discover not only which keyword phrases are hot but most importantly, which hot keyword phrases will land me a great ranking.

I think that using Google AdSense and Google AdWords as a basis for choosing my niche, everything else will go hand in hand. In the debt consolidation niche, consequently, I discovered that this niche is very hot and amazingly has a low amount of competition for many phrases. These same phrases are very expensive for AdWords advertisers. This tells me that there is obviously a lot of money being exchanged with in this niche. Internet marketing will go hand in hand.

Debt consolidation is a rich niche and as predicted by researching Google AdSense and AdWords I soon discovered that there is an abundance of products available in places link ClickBank. Secondly, this leads me to believe that I too could piece together a wonderful product and sell it in ClickBank. The possibilities are truly endless and the ball is in my court.

All in all I will say this… choosing the right niche market and topic for your make money online blog or web site involves common sense. In this article I used beanie babies and debt consolidation as examples. Think about this for a minute. Beanie babies is a dead market. You can go to the Dollar Store and purchase a brand name Ty Beanie Baby for a few dollars. Yet, everyone still blogs about Beanie Babies and everyone still has their crazy collections of Beanie Babies.

Unfortunately, because Beanie Babies have dropped in market value, the cost of the ads in Google AdWords have dropped too. This stems deep into the root of the niche. Consequently, there are no products to sell in ClickBank, there are no profitable affiliate programs to join and all in all there isn’t even any money to be made in Google AdSense.

With just an hour of research, I discovered the complete opposite in debt consolidation. Think about it. How many TV commercials do you see and how many radio ads to you hear that advertise debt consolidation? How many times per week do you receive junk mail from people that say you’ve been pre-approved for a debt consolidation loan or similar? Debt consolidation is a very hot and rich topic on the Internet. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out.

To be successful in the business of making money online, you have to choose a niche that is rich in money and balanced with a lower level of competition that will allow you to successfully have a good presence on the Internet.

For those following along in my competition against John Cow, I have chosen debt consolidation as my niche and in my next post I will be revealing the URL of my niche blog. Additionally, I have some amazing news about a wonderful product that has been donated to me from Joel Comm himself. This product is very expensive and very effective. It is a product that you will want to get your hands on for sure.

My next post will be coming very quickly. In my next post you will learn the URL of my niche blog and also discover how you can get your hands on this amazing product autographed, signed and shipped direct to your from Joel Comm. Stay tuned.

I few days ago was speaking to a fellow blogger friend and Instant message buddy, Forest Parks from The Random Forest. We were simply chatting about random things as I was working my tail off submitting an article into many of the popular social bookmarking and networking sites. Having caught wind of what I was doing, Forest sent me a message that just totally made my day and has totally saved me a ton of time with submitting my posts into all these social bookmarking and networking sites. Thanks to him, this post will show you what he showed me.

SocialMarker.com

SocialMarker.com is a site that allows you to quickly and easily submit your posts and articles into 46 of the most popular social bookmarking and social networking sites on the Internet all in one bulk shot. While it doesn’t do what I have been wanting and visioning in my mind for a long time, I’ll admit that it is very close and its a lot better than doing things manually.

My dream software is to have a program - preferably a desktop application - that allows me to fill out a Title, Description, Category and Title tag field and push the submit button. From there this program would then automatically submit my information into all the social bookmarking and networking sites. While this animal doesn’t exist (at least I don’t think it does… drop me a comment and let me know otherwise) from what I see SocialMarker.com is close… very close!

SocialMarker.com is very similar to what my dream software application would be, but there are a few minor differences. For one, its web based. Nothing wrong with that, its just a matter of personal preference. However, the real similarities in SocialMarker.com and my dream software are very close.

With Socialmarker.com, you simply fill out the form as shown above. You need to enter in a nice looking title, provide the URL of the post or article you’re submitting, include some very well researched tags for search engine marketing purposes and most importantly, include a well written description of the post or article you’re submitting.

The next step is the fun part: Choosing which social bookmarking or networking sites to submit your article or post into. As you can see in the above screen shot, it is just a matter of checking the box on the sites you’d like to submit your article or post into.

A very handy feature that SocialMarker.com provides are the pre-selection links found on the top of this section. They are highlighted in yellow on the above screen shot.

Your options are to hand pick individual networks, to select all, choose only News, choose only Bookmarking or choose only DOFOLLOW for scoring search engine friendly backlinks.

Once you have chosen the sites you’d like to have your article or post submitted into, simply click the submit button on the top right of the screen. What happens next is amazing and will literally save you tons of time!

You click the screen shots below to view full size:

The above screen shots show you live examples of how I quickly submitted a post in Digg, Propeller and made an entry into Twitter. These are only 3 of the 46 available sites that you can quickly submit your article or post into.

SocialMarker.com automatically fills out as much of the online form for each network as possible. There are many submissions that don’t require any edits or manually entries at all! Simply click the “Submit” button and then the “Next” button. Each time you click the “Next” button, SocialMarker.com automatically loads the next page and auto fills as much of the information as possible in the submission form of the next social bookmarking or social networking site.

The great thing about SocialMarker.com is the fact that it does not require a registration of any kind. You do not have to create a username/ password and you don’t have to join anything. The program works purely without the need to register for their service. If you choose to have your web browser to remember your username and passwords for all the social networking and bookmarking sites, then as you keep clicking the “Next” button you’ll be automatically logged into the site you’re submitting the article or post into. I would recommend allowing your web browser to remember your usernames and passwords so that you can quickly roll through all the submissions without having to take the extra step to log in each time.

What about Plugins?

SocialMarker.com has a WordPress plugin available. I have downloaded it and have started installing it on many of my blogs. The plugin works like a charm and it allows for your own readers to utilize their service. Most WordPress plugins I have used in the past allow readers to individually submit your content into the social bookmarking and social networking sites. By providing your readers with the SocialMarker.com plugin, you allow them the option of submitting your content in to multiple networks - up to 46 currently.

Overall, if you use the SocialMarker.com plugin, you’re giving your readers an easy way to do more for you in much less time. Long story short, this will help you increase traffic and gain even more readers to your blog. If you don’t have a WordPress blog, or don’t want to install their plugin, SocialMarker.com also provides a direct javascript code that you can install instead.

All in all, I think SocialMarker.com is awesome. It doesn’t quite fit the glove perfect in relation to my dream desktop application; however, it is very close and indeed, it does save me a ton of time and it will save you a ton of time too.

One last thing that I would like to add a comment on. When I visit SocialMarker.com, it is very clear that they are seeking donations. Their site has some Google AdSense ads on it and there are a few donation buttons on the site. While this is a totally free service, I can strongly see how the creators would like to gain some compensation for the creation of this masterpiece.

I’d like for you to help. If you can’t donate any money, that is understandable. Some people can’t afford to spend money on extra things, even more donate money. However, you do have a blog and writing a post about SocialMarker.com will have a huge impact on increasing their exposure. If you really enjoy using SocialMarker.com, do what I did and write a blog post about it. I think SocialMarker.com is a wonderful service and I believe that it will help my readers a lot. If you feel the same, then tell all your friends about SocialMarker.com too.

What Do You Think?

I am very into this whole social bookmarking and social networking thing. I have totally seen a difference in traffic when I submit content into these bookmarking and networking sites. What do you think about all the hype regarding social bookmarking and social networking? Has it been working for you? Do you have friends in these networks? Do you all work together to help each other out? What do you think about SocialMarker.com? Give it a try and please be sure to provide your feedback about the program, it can only help others decide on what’s best for them. Share your thoughts using the comment form on this post.

You shouldn’t pack it up and call it a day after you write and publish a blog post. In fact, after you publish a blog post, you should look at it as being the beginning of your day rather than the end of the day. I’ll admit, this strategy is new for me; however, it works. My traffic has increased so much over the last few weeks and partly due to what I have done after I publish the post.

If getting traffic to your newly published article is important to you, then you’re going to need to reach out and pull people in to view your post. It is your blog and it is your responsibility to capture the attention of people. Again, that is assuming that you care about having people read your posts. Some bloggers just blog to pass the time and don’t care who or how many people read it.

How Attractive Is Your Post Title and First Paragraph?

First thing is that you really need to write something special. Your post really needs to reach out and grab someone within the first few seconds of reading. The blog post title is extremely important. In many cases, the post title is the deciding factor whether someone even gives your post a chance.

If your post title is hot, then you’ll get people to visit the page. However, very quickly thereafter - within the first few sentences - if your writing doesn’t continue to interest the person reading the post, they will quickly lose interest and not continue to read your post. The post title and the first paragraph of your posts have to be spot on and be an attention grabber.

Don’t Waste Your Material.

Lately, in more recent posts, I have been suggesting that people reduce their post volume down a bit. To me, it seems pointless to publish new content until your most recent post has reached its maximum exposure. How do you determine the maximum exposure rate? Well, I am sure there is more of an analytical way to determine this, but for me, I relate my maximum exposure rate to cooking popcorn in the microwave.

When you cook popcorn in the microwave, the instructions on the bag say, “stand by the microwave oven and listen for the popping sound to slow down. Do not wait for the popping sound to completely stop before turning off the microwave oven.” I use those same set of instructions with my blog. In other words, I monitor how many times my most recent post has been viewed, I monitor the number of interactions (e.g. comments) the post has had and I observe when the traffic has hit its peek and comments start to dwindle down. To me that is how I determine when it’s time to publish a new post.

Marketing and Promoting Your Blog Post

After a new post has been published on a blog, most people will wrap things up and call it a day. This is far from what you should be doing. Publishing your post is really only a fraction of the work that you need to invest in. Most of your time needs to be invested into marketing and promoting your blog and most recent blog post.

How Do You Market And Promote Your Blog?

Well, this has been a recent huge focus for me. I have been studying, testing and trying to figure out some of the most effective ways to promote my blog and my posts. What I have been doing is far from a master plan or anything like that, but I can tell you that it has really helped me to get more people to read what I write and visit my blog.

Email Newsletter Subscription VS FeedBurner

I have found that promoting a free newsletter on my blog is more effective than promoting my FeedBurner subscription options. In many ways, this really does make sense. For me -and I believe it would be safe to assume that the same goes for many others - my Google Reader is filled to the maximum. At any given time, my Google Reader tells me that I have 1000+ unread posts. However, my email inbox only has less than 100.

If the same is true for other people, then when I write a blog post and then write an email to my list subscribers in Aweber, my notification gets bumped ahead of everyone else. In the game of marketing, I have to believe that I am really not much different than other people. And in doing so, I know that email takes a huge priority over RSS feeds.

The number one way to promote your newly published content on your blog is by establishing an email list and using it to notify people when you have written something new and cool on your blog. FeedBurner provides an email notification service, which I feel is better to promote than your FeedBurner RSS feed, but even that is still far from being as powerful as sending out a personalized email to your subscribers. I use Aweber for my email newsletter needs. you can sign up or learn more.

Social Bookmarking and Networking For Marketing and Promoting

Sites like Digg.com, StumbleUpon.com, Propeller.com and Sphinn.com all have their special blend of people who are primarily interested in certain topics. Contributing in social bookmarking sites is a very effective way to market and promote your blog and content within. However, your primary topic of choice will dictate which social bookmarking site works best for you. You need to invest time into researching many social bookmarking sites and not limit yourself to the just the four sites listed above. There are many different sites that hoard a lot of people who have specific interests (e.g. ActiveRain caters to the real estate niche).

Effective Method For Social Network Marketing and Promoting

There is a right way and a wrong way to market and promote your blog in the social networking and bookmarking sites. Each community has their own set of written rules as well as community based unwritten rules (e.g. what you do to be cool within the group). Most places such as Digg.com and StumbleUpon.com, discourage and frown upon others who submit their own content into their network.

The main reason why it isn’t good to submit your own content is because history usually repeats itself and most all people who submit their own content are doing it for the wrong intentions. Many consider this as spam. Many people know that the primary purpose for an individual to submit their own content is for the purpose of getting more traffic and exposure. That breaks the unwritten social community rules of engagement.

The community also understands that most people who do submit their own content will do so regardless of the level of quality. All in all, it is not advisable to submit your own content into social networking or bookmarking sites. The goal is to have other people do it for you.

How Do You Get Listed Without Doing It Yourself?

This is a slow growth process. In order to be successful with marketing and promoting your blog and content in social networking and bookmarking sites, you need to downplay the real reason why you are there and or just forget about your original intention or marketing and promoting your blog for awhile. If community members perceive that you are engaging into their network for the purpose of promoting your blog and content then they will likely not become a social networking buddy with you.

The key to success in social networking is having friends. So anything that you do to prevent gaining friendships in social networking sites is bad. Real bad! Gaining the trust and respect of others in social networking sites shouldn’t be hard, but make no mistake, it doesn’t happen overnight either. It’s a slow growth process.

In the long run, if you successfully establish yourself into one or two social networking / bookmarking sites, then your friends will automatically and naturally submit your content into the network voluntarily. The ultimate goal is to carry yourself well and build up a level of trust and respect with your peers within the social network to the point to where they submit your content and market and promote it for you.

How Do You Get In Good With The Social Networks?

Forget about your blog. You have to play the game and be the best at it. First, you have to recognize what the majority of the community members are interested in. Then you need to be the best at delivering the things the community wants. Be a contributor. View the profiles of members within the social networking community and observe the type of content they submit into the network. Cherry pick people and find individuals who share similar interests to the content that you typically publish on your blog. Select a handful of these people and cling to them.

Participate in their campaigns, vote or rate the content they submit into the network, visit their own blogs and read and comment on their posts. Submit or vote on content they have written and slowly over time, begin to build up an establishment of trust and respect with this selected handful of cherry picked individuals. Slowly, they will see your level of commitment and level of contribution.

The way most of these networks are set up, the members of your group will really have no choice but to recognize your efforts as everything you do within the network is documented. As time goes by, your name, your avatar and your profile will begin to be noticeable within your cherry picked group. Soon the tables will turn and you’ll hit the breaking point from being a newbie to an authority within your group. When that happens, people within your group will start to plug, rate, submit and or vote for your content instead of the other way around.

During this time as you’re attempting to conquer and become the authority in one group, you need to constantly be repeating the process in another. Commonly you will start to discover that these micro groups intertwine as you’ll start to see familiar faces from one one group to another group. This is a good thing!

What About Search Engines and Directories?

The reason why I am not talking much about search engines is for the fact that SEO is really a no brainer. People tend to over complicate SEO. Making a blog or web site friendly for search engines is not rocket science. The true challenge in getting hoards of traffic to your blog or web site is not in scoring traffic from search engines. If your web site or blog is built correctly, then search traffic will naturally come as your web site, blog and content within will rank accordingly in the search results.

The true challenge that is close to rocket science is in social networking. The reason being is simple. With Google, you’re trying to butter up to a computer program. Computer programs don’t have good days or bad days. Computer programs don’t base their decision to approve you, your blog or your content off emotion, personality or personal interest.

A computer program has a specific set of rules and instructions and regardless of who you are as an individual, race, gender, religious beliefs, etc… Google and all automatic search engines will still subject you to the same standards as everyone else. Search engines don’t care if you’re female, black, white, gay, satanic, etc. They care about content and ranking it accordingly.

The same is not true in social networking sites. In social networking sites you’re dealing with people and you’re attempting to harness the power of people within a mass group towards using them to market and promote your blog and content within.

In the long run of things, social networkings sites can harness more power than a search engine. I believe that word of mouth marketing is much more powerful and effective than any other form of marketing. Word of mouth marketing typically results in a higher success rate for the desired action. With that being said, in my opinion, social networking / bookmarking sites is the same as word of mouth marketing but on steroids.

Ranking in Google and other search engines is easy. The results are decent, but far from being as effective as getting a solid word of mouth lead. When a trusted friend tells you about a new and cool web site, more likely you’re going to check it out. When a trusted friend in a social networking site submits your content into the network, the only difference is instead of that person telling one person about your blog post, that person is telling thousands. The result is so powerful that literally thousands of people will come crashing into your site within hours.

I hope that you found this article helpful. I would totally appreciate if you took this moment to drop me a comment and share your thoughts. I would also appreciate being rewarded with your vote, rating or submission of this post into your favorite social networking / bookmarking site. As I had just mentioned, word of mouth marketing is very powerful. You’re small contribution of helping spread the word about this article carries a magnitude of power. Help me continue to help others by telling your friends about my blog and specifically this article.

To encourage you to share this article with others, I have converted this article into a free full high quality and downloadable mini eBook. You can download a copy here and share with others.

I have been writing posts about Micro Niche Finder and providing quite a bit of information about the product for about six months now. I am pretty busy today so I don’t have a lot of time to write a long and drawn out post, but I did want to jump on the blog for a few seconds and blast out this message.

I just received an email from James Jones that informed me that the price of Micro Niche Finder will be increasing from $67 dollars to $97 dollars in less than a week.

The reason for the price increase is because James is about to release the new version to the general public. When I purchased Micro Niche Finder it was version two. I granted the ability to update to version 3 and I have to say that I am very impressed.

For those who have already purchased Micro Niche Finder, you can upgrade to version 3 at no charge. Just check your dash board panel for “Update Micro Niche Finder”.

For those who haven’t already purchased Micro Niche Finder but have been kind of on the fence about doing it, now is the time to do it. Otherwise you’re going to to be spending an additional $30 bucks.

I know quite a few of my readers who have been on the fence due to being hesitant to invest the $67 bucks. However, now if you don’t purchase the program you’re going to be spending even more money when you do decide to order.

I totally enjoy this program. I back it up 110%. I use it everyday. I believe that Micro Niche Finder is worth every penny of $97 dollars. However, why pay that much when you can order it right now for only $67 dollars?

Visit the Micro Niche Finder home page, scroll down to the bottom of the page and submit your name and email address. James will then automatically email you and send you a video demo and references on how to order Micro Niche Finder.

I would really hate to see people who are interested in Micro Niche Finder end up paying $30 more than what is needed. This is honestly a very small window of opportunity and I am very thankful that James is offering this.

Learn more about Micro Niche Finder. Feel free to drop me a comment with any questions you may have.

For those who don’t know, I enjoy using Micro Niche Finder quite a bit. It helps me with finding low competition keywords in the search engine. The program is very affordable and well worth you’re money. If you want to learn more about Micro Niche Finder you can here is my referral link.

Mark Mason is doing a case study on Micro Niche Finder. He has selected a few keyword phrases to target. Follow along during this study and learn more about the study. You can learn more about Micro Niche Finder here:
http://www.garryconn.com/mnf

read more | digg story

Have you been wondering why your blog just purely sucks? Why it is the best kept secret on the Internet? Why you can’t even get your mother to visit it? Well, first off your blog doesn’t suck and as far as it being a secret on the Internet, I am hoping to help you change that.

If you’re a good blog writer, then your problem isn’t in your quality of content, it’s in your ability to promote and market your blog and the jewels hidden inside it. Writing an Ebook could be a very viable solution to your marketing problem. Here is why.

1. Ebooks are very popular, especially free ones. People download Ebooks like they were going out of style. The thing that is most ironic about this fact is that most Ebooks totally SUCK! They are terrible, offer zero quality and absolutely provide no material for helping people. Yet, time and time again, people download these digital pieces of garbage. If you can control yourself and manage to write something really useful, Ebooks aren’t hard to do. The people that break free from this viral trend of writing garbage Ebooks are the ones that really prosper.
2. Ebooks are very search engine friendly. I read tons of SEO blogs. Most of the suck, I just try to be a nice guy and not make a big stink about it. However, again… most SEO blogs don’t know crap about SEO. They just do a great job with branding their name and making people think that they’re an expert, while in reality they are not. I have never ones ran across a post on an SEO blog that talks about PDF files. Yet Google talks about PDF files all the time. PDF Files are very search engine friendly. If you write an eBook in PDF format and upload it to your server and then tell everyone about your Ebook and where to download it, in return they will write posts about your EBook and provide direct links to your the URL where other people can download it. That, my friends, is called back links and back links is what builds up PageRank and PageRank is what builds up authority in the SERP rankings. If you’re eBook then has links that point to various posts and sections within your blog, then you are helping build your own internal pages PageRank. You won’t get tips like that on any cheesy SEO blog.
3. Ebooks can help you make money. Again, if you’re not an idiot about it, you can use an Ebook to promote products that you approve on and feel like it would be helpful to share with others. If the products you recommend happen to have an affiliate program coupled to it, great! Make a little money by scoring some leads or sales. There is nothing wrong with that. However, keep this word in mind: PERCEPTION. What do people perceive of you and your Ebook. If people believe that you’re just using this Ebook for the purpose of making money, you’ll make readers feel as if you believe them to be simple money whores. If you come across to people as if you care only about making money off them, that is offensive and will deliver a negative reaction. If you have found a product that really helps you become better at something and it has impacted how you do things, etc… then sure! Write an Ebook about it and tell the world.

That is all for now about Ebooks, I could go on and on about them. One more thing that I want to point out is this: Ebooks are not hard to produce. They don’t have to be long, in fact, you can produce a 5 page Ebook and that would be fine too. I believe writing Ebooks and writing blog posts are very transferable. Meaning, if you ‘re good at blogging, you too can be good at writing Ebooks. Just remember that people want to be SEMI. If you don’t know what SEMI is, I suggest that you read this post that I wrote titled, Top Ways To Create A Positive Buzz on Your Blog.

So recently I decided to get hooked in with Aweber.com and start my email mailing list. By default, I decided to use my mailing list as a way to deliver really cool content to my subscribers. I haven’t sent out my first mailing yet, but will do so soon.

I had an amazing showing during the first few days of displaying the form on my blog. Day one I had over 150 people join. Day two was around half that amount and then the numbers of signs up slowed down to around 10 per day. So my list is definitely growing and growing strong. I am reaching near 500 people now and I think that is really cool.

So what can you do with a mailing list? Hmm… that is a good question. For one, I’ll be honest and admit this, having my new mailing list is a little nerve racking. This is much different than blogging and just knowing in the back of my mind that I am about to send out an email to nearly 500 people makes me nervous!

Here are some ideas that I will be doing with my mailing list, maybe this will help you when you decide to create your own, or perhaps it will give you some ideas on what to do with your current one.

1. Use your mailing list to direct traffic to your blog. This is very common and some folks like Joel Comm do that quite effectively.
2. Use your mailing list to ask for opinions about certain topics and issues. Depending on what topics you cover on your blog, you may at times face writers block. If you ask your readers open ended questions and things related to your topic, you can score quite a bit of material to write about.
3. Use your mailing list to promote products you like. This, unfortunately, is commonly abused. However, if you build up a reader base of people who trust and respect you and you don’t screw that up, then you can effectively use your mailing list to recommend products to your subscribers. An example of that would be Micro Niche Finder. I absolutely love that product and use it everyday and I am very comfortable making at recommendation to my readers and subscribers.

What else can you think of? These are pretty good suggestions, but I am sure that there are quite a few more things that can be done with a mailing list. What do you think?

For me, I am going to work on sending out my first mailing. If you haven’t signed up for my free email newsletter yet, fill out this form below:

If you would like to learn more about Aweber.com and starting your own mailing list, here is my referral link for you to do so.

I received a really great question sent in from Dave at a really crazy and unique blog called, Tailgating Ideas. First off before I go into my post, I want to encourage everyone to visit his blog. A blog about tailgating… now that is original! Nice work Dave!

Anyway, his question is a very simple but very good question to ask. He wants my opinion on when should a blog author start displaying their RSS FeedBurner Subscription numbers?

Should you install the FeedBurner Chicklet right out the gate at ZERO and look like a total noob, or should you wait until the numbers get higher? If so, then how high?

Here is his voice mail sent into me, take a listen:

This question was so awesome, I had to cover this topic in three parts:

Part One:

Part Two:

Part Three:

If you have a question that you would like to ask me, call me! Phone lines are open 24/7. I offer a wonderful way for you to not only learn more about blogging, but allow you to score some extra traffic along the way. All questions are posted live on my blog for all my readers to listen to and check out the references within the post. Call in your questions to (931)368-4120.

I received a really excellent call today from a blogger named Mark Mason from MasonWorld.com. Very nice guy and I have to say, it’s about time I receive some material worth writing about on my blog. When I got back from my Disney World trip, I had to clean out quite a few messages that were clearly just people who wanted me to visit their blog and had little to contribute. So it was really cool to get a “Real Call” with some “Real Material” worth writing about. Mark’s blog is a personal blog where he documents his latest projects and allows his readers to follow his progress. Like many, Mark holds more fascination with discovering how he can take a blog or a site and turn it into a money machine rather than making the money itself. If I understand this completely, it is more a of thrill factor or a challenge for Mark to be able to achieve the goal of building a successful site that makes money. Nothing wrong with that!

The current events going on at MasonWorld.com is Mark’s attempt to create a niche site that collects a nice passive or residual income but in a way that doesn’t completely depend on Google Adsense. Like many, including myself, Mark wants to experiment around with various affiliate programs out there.

In the message that Mark left for me, he was curious about my thoughts on creating niche sites that utilize affiliate programs and such, most importantly he wanted me to follow up and explain whether or not I still felt like these were viable solutions for making a passive or residual income.

Mark is investing some time and applying what he has learned in the past with a niche site called, History of Elvis. Now I have to say, I am really impressed with what Mark has done. I do not see why a site like this can’t make money. The remainder of the post is directed specifically to Mark, however it applies to anyone who has an interest.

There is always a thin line between determining which projects get pushed off into what I call the, “build, drag and drop” niche sites, or becoming a project that I take under my wing and invest more personal time to.

Yeah, I have tons of blogs that are made for making money using Adsense and various affiliate programs. However, these sites by themselves don’t make a lot of money. It’s the sheer volume of all the sites collectively that allow me to make a full time living.

From time to time, there comes a site that I feel has more potential than simply being plugged into the “blog farm” of niche sites. The Airplane Blog is an example of a niche site that I have been working hard on because I feel it has more potential than being plugged into The Matrix of MFM (made for money) blogs I own.

History of Elvis, I see and feel has similar potential to The Airplane Blog. I would strongly advice investing more individual time into personal development, social networking establishment and building up your RSS Feed Subscribers, Email List Subscribers and regular daily content readers.

I think you’re on to a great idea. I think your site is very unique, it has “surprisingly” low competition but yields quite a bit of potential traffic in the SERPs and can easily score the interest in thousands of Elvis Fans. So, totally… you’re on to something and I give you two big thumbs up on what you have done so far.

My advice to you would be to stop trying to monetize it initially build up all the elements needed to make money with a blog.

• Traffic
• Authority
• Regular Readers
• PageRank
• Superior Ranking In SERPS
• Word of Mouth
• Back Links

With a site like this, don’t get me wrong… it’s all hard work, but something like this, shouldn’t be quite as difficult compared to other people trying to be #1 in MMO or SEO. Honestly, you have a great idea and I feel that if you play your cards right, you potentially have in your hands more than a MFM (made for money) blog.

Here is what I would do if I owned the blog:

• Remove many of the things that draw attention away from the content.
• Hire or acquire a person who lives, eats, breaths Elvis and would be eager to write on the blog. (Multiple people if possible)
• Your time would then be free to market, promote the site in all the right places.
• Invest time into redesigning the site. If you’re good at CSS and stuff like that, save money and do it yourself. If you need to hire someone, find someone locally where you can watch over their shoulder. Make sure the person who does the redesign is also knowledgeable with search engines with heavy focus on Google.
• Slowly start doing reviews of various Elvis products. Preferably products that are within an affiliate program such as Amazon.com.
• Shape and mold your site into the place where people can expect to learn everything there is about the history of Elvis.
• Find various collectors who would be willing to write content on your blog in exchange for being able to proudly showcase their collectors items on your blog. Many people don’t want to sell, they just want to brag and show off their goods. This equals content. Content equals traffic. Traffic equals money.

All in all, I think you have a site that has a huge potential to make money. I would invest the proper time with this site and put it under your wing and push forward with it. You’ve done great work with it so far, and in my opinion, its not a site that I would push off into the pool of 100 blogs for making a few bucks a day.

Voice Mail Response To Mark:

Got A Question Related To Blogging?

Have a question about blogging or any of the topics I typically write about? Don’t be a chicken and pick up the phone like Mark did and I’ll write about you and answer your question. What are you waiting for? Pick up the phone and call, (931) 368-4120. Phone lines are open 24/7. The call is free, minus the typical long distance charges from your carrier.