The Internet Marketing Challenge Blog

Archive for October, 2009

First of all, an apology for the length of time it has taken me to get the Adsense Bootcamp up and running. I will not try to make excuses except to say that I had to be sure in my head and heart that what I was going to deliver would actually work for Adsense newbies and generally people who are fed up with just making pennies from Adsense.

The good news is that I am now sure of what I am going to deliver and also I have a date that I am aiming to do a limited initial opening for just 50 people. This will be released to customers of my cash cow guide to Adsense initially at a discount. After that I may do a WSO at warrior before going on more general release to the masses. I am aiming to offer the first 50 slots to customers of my cash cow guide during the first week of December and will be sending out emails to customers so keep your eyes open.

The Adsense bootcamp will last 6 weeks and will be a one off payment which is yet to be decided but will be heavily discounted for the initial release for cash cow customers. The aim of the bootcamp will be to provide a blueprint to follow daily, a set of tasks that have to be completed daily. This obviously won’t be for information junkies, this is for people who seriously want to make money from Adsense and not just learn about how to do it.. Provision is going to be made for people who are having trouble keeping up though and a private forum will be provided for any help needed. If you fall behind in the daily tasks, don’t worry you can work at your own pace but will be strongly encouraged to complete all the tasks.

The bootcamp will provide a daily video detailing the process for that day and your tasks plus pointers to any pdf’s needed for reference and further reading.

The overall aim of the bootcamp will be to get you to determine sensible initial income goals and will then give you the blueprint to achieve that. It might be that you want to eventually get to 100 bucks a day in Adsense and you will the be provided with a way to break that down into manageable steps.

The bootcamp is about..

• Building real sites
• Monetizing with Adsense
• Promoting those sites the correct way
• Creating valuable and useful content
• Working smarter and not just harder

The bootcamp is mainly all about action.. It’s about putting in the effort to reach your goals. I understand that this won’t fit everyone’s desire for automatic push button solutions and if that is what you are looking for then stay away from the bootcamp. If you are prepared to work smartly and efficiently for your goals but just need to be shown what to do and how to do it and when, then this bootcamp will be just what you are looking for.. Further updates will follow soon!

Sorry it has been a while since I last updated on the UAW challenge but I wanted to give the UAW backlinks propagate for long enough. Well, now it has been nearly 5 months since the challenge begun and here is the latest results for the test domains in my challenge. First the 5 low hanging fruit domains…

There is no doubt about it that both Yahoo and Bing fell in love with my low hanging fruit domains but Google fell out of love with them to a large extent. After nearly 5 months, 3 out of the 5 main keywords for these domains are ranking between 3 and 10 in both Bing and Yahoo but languishing between page 2 and 5 on Google.

As far as traffic goes, my best low hanging fruit domain gets around 60 unique visitors a day with Bing providing most of that, followed by Yahoo and Google comes in with some obscure long tail keywords. The worst performing low hanging fruit domain gets just 8 uniques a day.

The results for the more competitive domains are not encouraging. The main keywords for each domain are indexed in all the main search engines but so low in the rankings that I am not seeing any traffic from those keywords. However, the long tail keywords are providing me with some reasonable traffic for the domains and the best performing one get around 50 uniques a day, split equally between Google, Yahoo and Bing. The worst performing domain is seeing just 5 uniques a day..

So, after nearly 5 months of this challenge there is no doubt about it that UAW does work in isolation but I am sure that if I used it in conjunction with some other good backlinking methods then it would be a strong weapon in my overall armory. Questions still remain over whether Google are onto the UAW backlinks and whether it is a good tool to use in the long term then I am not yet convinced. Maybe a year from now I will be able to give you a better idea on that.

Niche Research

So, to get the ball rolling these are the criteria I have used to find a good niche for this challenge..

1. There are at least 10 advertisers on adwords for the main keywords associated with my niche.
2. The top 10 of Google for the main keywords in the niche are not all made up of big players like amazon, microsoft, wikipedia etc.. (I don’t mind a couple of them just not all of them)
3. There is a search volume for these keywords of above 15,000 per month on exact match.
4. There is an abundance of active forums, newsgroups, social media sites, videos etc associated with the niche.
5. It is an interesting subject that can potentially be newsworthy.
6. It has to be something I am interested in, even if just a little bit or something that I can get interested in.

With this criteria in place, where do I start the whole process?

1. Brainstorm as many subjects as possible that I am interested in, or maybe just remotely interested in and list them down.
2. Keyword research to nail down the high search volume niches.
3. If the niche is quite broad I will dig down to check out the subniches.
4. Shortlist the best niches.
5. Research forums and other social sites to see how active people are in these niches.
6. Looking for plenty of posts and a lot of new ones.
7. Check out the competition in Google’s top 10 for each of the niches to see if I can take them on.
8. Check out the level of adwords advertisers in each niche and how much the average bid is for the main keywords.
9. Make a decision on one.

An Example…
For the sake of this example I will pretend that I am interested in sleep (not literally) and after a bit of digging I decided to research “sleep apnea” as a niche to see if its a good one.

First of all “sleep” gets an exact search volume of 368,000 per month and “sleep apnea” gets a very healthy 135,000 searches per month so it passes that test.

The next step is to see if there are any active forums etc in that niche. I googled the following term “sleep apnea” + forum and immediately I find apneasupport.org/forum-1.html which is extremely active. Hmmm.. looks good so far. While looking I will do a quick snapshot to see if there are some recurring problems or topics on the forum but that is as far as it goes so far. I can see with sleep apnea that there is, so that is another tick.

I will repeat the search to find videos, web 2.0 sites, newsgroups etc. and then log the URL’s onto a spreadsheet.

I will then go to google or better still fire up market samurai to look at the top 10 on Google for the phrase “sleep apnea”.. Oh dear, the competition is big, in fact to big for me to take on easily. Time to dig down deeper or also cast my net wider into sleep. After a bit more research I find “sleep aids” which passes all the previous tests but also has a top 10 in Google that I reckon I can take on. There are some big players in there but also some that can be beaten I am sure.

After a quick check on CPC and number of advertisers then “sleep aids” pretty much ticks all the boxes!

** This is purely an example of the approach I am taking, I have not decided on “sleep aids” as a niche **

I feel the urge for a new challenge again! This challenge is going to be me trying to get a brand new site indexed and ranked in Google’s top 10 for a few competitive keywords within 5 months from today.

“Big deal, I can do that already!” You might be saying, but here is the twist..

I will not…

1. Use any form of article marketing to get backlinks.
2. Do any form of blog commenting of any kind.
3. Contact any web publishers asking for backlinks or exchanges.
4. Use any linking schemes or backlink scripts of any kind.
5. Use any blackhat techniques whatsoever.

In fact, this is going to be the extremist form of white hat promotion of a brand new site that anyone could imagine, it will be so white hat that Matt Cutts will be very proud of me!

I will be…

1. Writing unique content for my site.
2. Using video on my site.
3. Using audio on my site.
4. Using link bait in the form of giveaways on my site.
5. Ensure that every piece of content on my site will be about creating a buzz in the niche I choose!
6. Publicizing the content on my site using forums, newsgroups, press releases.
7. Getting all my on page SEO spot on.. (Internal linking structure, usabilty pages, META stuff etc..)

Before anybody asks, there is absolutely no way that I will give out the URL of the site to anyone for the obvious reasons. In fact everything will be done with brand new hosting, pen names etc.. It will be untraceable for the super sleuths out there

I will be detailing every step I take here in this thread though and going into more detail on my 100 bucks challenge blog.

Here is a list of initial steps that I will be taking..

1. Locate a good, competitive niche.
2. Buy a brand new domain and new hosting for it.
3. Sign up to as many niche relevant forums, newsgroups, web 2.0 groups as possible (facebook, twitter etc).
4. Start posting regularly to those forums to build up a reputation.
5. Research the niche inside and out to determine biggest problems, anxieties, tips in fact everything that makes people crazy in that niche.
6. Create all forms of content around the buzzy topics.
7. Get analytics, webmaster tools etc all set up.
8. Submit to a few highly respected directories like DMOZ and Yahoo.
8. Start promoting my site in a non-spammy way on all the forums etc..
9. Write and release press releases.
10. Build a mailing list.
11. Try as many viral methods as possible.
12. Wash, rinse and repeat..

This is purely about letting the content on my site go viral and attain backlinks the natural way. This is about doing things the way Google would really approve of! As things start to develop then I am sure the plan will have to evolve and I am prepared for that.

My next post will be about the niche research that I will conduct.. Stay tuned! In that post I will detail how competitive the niche’s main keywords are and the criteria I used to find it.

There is a new keyword tool on the market.. Was that a collective “groan” that I heard? Okay, I know, I know.. There are already more than enough keyword tools on the market why do we need a new one? Well, this one is different…

This new tool is called Niche Horde and is created by Jonathan Leger. You may know of him from such products as 3waylinks, 1waylinks, WebComp analyst and Instant Article Wizard Pro to name but a few. Niche Horde is a tool that uses it’s customer’s computers to run a small and safe program in the background to trawl the Google Search Keyword tool to uncover literally millions of good niche keywords.

I don’t know of any keyword tool out there that can pull in so many niche keywords so quickly but that is just the start of it! As more and more people sign up to NicheHorde then the quicker and larger the database of keywords will be! That is pure genius if you ask me.

The other really cool feature in Niche Horde is the domain checker which will check to see if the exact match of a keyword is available as a .com, .net or .org which is priceless in terms of SEO for a new site. Anyway, enough of my jibber jabber, please watch this video of me using Niche Horde so you can see for yourself.

Niche Horde Review Part 1

Niche Horde Review Part 2

You can either visit the Niche Horde website directly to read more about it or if you feel inclined then you can go via my NicheHorde affiliate links on this page.

http://nichehorde.com

Probably one of the biggest challenges that any human in the modern world ever has to face, is staying motivated and focused on a plan of action. A plan of action that they hope will bring them eventually to some foreseen goal. Unfortunately for many this is one challenge that they never seem to be able to deal with. If you say yes to any of the following points then you probably have a problem with staying motivated..

• Do you always seem to give up on projects before they are finished?
• Do you feel overwhelmed by the amount and intensity of work involved in reaching your goals?
• Do you feel excited after seeing or reading something motivational only to feel that slowly ebb away after a few days?
• Does your head get turned easily by other opportunities when you are working on a project?
• Do you have trouble getting started on a plan of action even if you have the exact steps and blueprint in front of you?
• Do you tell yourself “I just need to learn about this & that before I can start my plan of action”?

If you said yes to all of those points, don’t worry you are very much not alone. In fact I don’t have any exact numbers and I am not a psychologist or anything but I would wager that over 90% of people will answer yes to most of those points. That is based on the amount of posts I read at various forums and also on emails I receive all the time.

The thing is, we all know that our lack of self motivation is the ONLY thing that stops us from achieving and reaching our own personal goals but that doesn’t mean that we know how to solve it. In fact, it seems, the more motivational articles we read and the more videos we see of people achieving personal success agaianst insurmountable odds the worse our own motivational problems seem to get. Please watch this video…

How do you feel after watching that? I bet you feel in awe and telling yourself that you can do it, you can be that person pushing through the limits of pain to reach your goal. That video is very inspirational and very alluring but how do you bottle that feeling of inspiration and sheer motivation so that you can use it whenver you need it? How can you stop yourself from that feeling of “I can’t do it”.. How? The answer for me is you have to stop trying to be motivated.. I know that sounds like a contradiction but it isn’t.

The thing is your internal dialogue starts questioning what you are doing and starts telling you that you will just fall flat on your arse so don’t bother following this plan of action because that is what you do, all the time.. right? Generally people that fail will unconciously listen to that dialogue all the time and no end of motivational videos can change that. However, the people who succeed with their goals can consciously hear that internal dialogue and know how to deal with it.

The whole point is, you have to be aware of the voices in your head that will try and stop you from reaching your goals because it means leaving your comfort zone, it means embarking on a new course that you have never been down before. I don’t mean this to sound schizophrenic or anything but we all have internal dialogues all the time. The trouble is, the more we TRY to be motivated the more unconcious we become about our negative thoughts. By confronting that negativity and knowing that it is there and by simply acknowledging that it exists and is there because it is fearful of leaving the comfort zone the we can deal with it.. Easily!

The next time you are about to try something challenging, try consciously listening for that negative voice in your head and acknowledge it. Then let your positivity flow and reassure yourself that although you may be leaving your comfort zone, there is nothing to be scared of and by following a plan of action and taking on challenges you will bring more pleasure and success than you could imagine.