WARNING: This Video Will NOT Change Your Life

…Not Even A Little Bit

So, I got a video camera for Christmas. My hubby got me one of those snazzy Flip HD cameras….and it’s awesome! Today I got to use it to catch a totally spontaneous moment at my house. Naturally, if you know me at all, you know it’s not the best video in the world – BUT, it really got me thinking about something that applies to all of us when we work online. Shiny Things.

Oh, Look! A Shiny Thing!

Before I get to this video, let me tell the story behind it.

The day was…. today. Hubby was home, I was cooking in the kitchen (yes, I cook….at least once a year….lol). The sun was coming through our windows at just the right angle to cast a reflection off the face of my hubbys watch. That reflection made this shiny spot on the wall and the ceiling as he moved.

This Shiny Thing drove my cat INSANE!

She started running around, making this chattering sound….and we couldn’t figure out WHAT was wrong with her.

Suddenly, my hubby figured it out – so, we teased her some more with the Shiny Thing making it go all over the room, the ceiling, the walls – and I whipped out my handy-dandy Flip Camera =)

Oh, Look ANOTHER Shiny Thing!

As I am watching this cat of mine freak out over this little reflection of sunshine, I got to thinking about how I was when I first started working online. I was just like Bailey (our cat)…. chattering, running in all directions….. basically trying to catch something that can’t be caught.

Sound familiar? Anyone? A quiet nod will suffice to let me know that I’m not alone here….lol!

Also, am I the ONLY one who has many normal, day-to-day things happen that make you think of internet marketing? I mean, seriously, I can be washing the dishes and start thinking about how simple repetitive tasks get the big job done. That even tho the dishwasher is a VERY cool invention, it still doesn’t load itself so it can then work for ME.

But that’s a story for another day… Let’s get back to Bailey the cat.

I’m Gonna Catch Me One Of Those Shiny Things!

I can’t believe how possessed she was over chasing the shiny things. Her eyes were glazed over – you couldn’t distract her – nothing. All she wanted to do was catch that shiny thing. Even if it meant hurting herself in the process.

Meanwhile, our other cat (actually both cats are my older kids cats, but if you have older kids, you know that they don’t tend to take the pets with them as they grow up. Hence, reality is – they’re MY cats now)….. our other cat just sat there staring out the window or at the wall or something. She’s really not the brightest light on the Christmas tree, but she wasn’t the one chasing a reflection of light, now was she?

{perhaps she is smarter than I give her credit for…..nahhhhhh}

You’ll catch a glimpse of the other cat during this quick video. She’s the big black cat sitting in the shadows watching Bailey jump the walls like a fool….lol.

Again, I warn you…

This Video Will NOT Change Your Life!

Are You Hurting Yourself Trying To Catch Shiny Things?

It’s so easy to get distracted by the “latest and greatest” Shiny Thing being sold online. And they all look and sound SO great, don’t they? Simple systems… effortless….hands off….even a three-year-old could make millions…

We all know the drill.

What’s worse is that for many, many people I talk to online, they are not simply distracted by the Shiny Things – they are STUCK on the Shiny Things.

One new “latest and greatest” product after another and they still have yet to get anything real online that will get to work FOR THEM.

When you’re trying to build a real online business, trying to catch the Shiny Things can make you look and act like my cat. And, as Bailey can’t seem to figure out – you can’t CATCH Shiny Things. All you do is run around TRYING to catch the all-illusive “prize”.

What DOES Work?

Wanna know what really works when building an online business?

These are four things that I believe in firmly…..and the four things that have enabled me to get to this point of success I’ve had online so far.

They are also the same 4 things that can get YOU ahead online, too.

PotPieGirls Personal Under The Radar Notes

I do a lot more online that just “be” PotPieGirl. In fact, my preferred online business model is very “under the radar”. It’s something I deliberately worked towards and something I still deliberately work ON.

Just like my dishwasher, it’s something you load…and then let it work for you. No, it’s not “effortless”. And to be honest, if you’re still looking for that all-illusive “effortless” system to make money online, you’re reading the wrong blog

Also, unlike One Week Marketing, it’s not free to implement so I had to work with free techniques until I got to the point where I could get to my “under the radar” ways.

No, it’s not PPC or CPA offers or whatever the latest and greatest is…. It’s just good old-fashioned web real estate.

Yes, websites.

No, it’s not “sexy” and it’s sure not Shiny…but it works.

I’ve learned a lot about creating these little sites….and learned a lot of shortcuts, too.

I’ll be sharing these things with all you great folks that are on one of my lists in the upcoming days.

No, it’s not gonna cost anything….Just little ol’ me sharing some things I’ve learned – and things I am currently learning to make it even better.

While my silly video up there won’t change your life, I’d like to think that some of the info and insight I have to share might have some impact.

Even if all it does is help ONE person focus, get to taking real consistent action, and stop chasing Shiny Things, I will be super excited!

Do You Want My Under The Radar Notes?

If you’d like to read along as I send out my Under The Radar notes – great! I’m happy to have you with us!

If you’re already on one of my lists (ie, you get occasional emails from me now and then already) then you don’t need to do a thing. You’re all set!

If you are NOT currently on a list of mine, all ya gotta do is sign up here at PotPieGirl.com

OR at OneWeekMarketing

OR at 6StepNicheSites.com

OR get my free Squidoo 101 Guide.

OR, just follow me on Twitter (twitter.com/potpiegirl). As the emails go out, I will link to them in a Twitter Tweet post thingy.

All there is to it =)

That’s it from me for now. I’m thinking I might go get a flashlight and turn off the lights to see what Bailey does with THAT Shiny Thing!

Hope my Flip camera is all charged up!

Have a great day!

Jennifer
~PotPieGirl

RedGage – Money-Making Social BookMarking

Get Paid To Book Mark Your Content

RedGage is a new social bookmarking type service with a twist.  Apparently, when you bookmark your own online content at RedGage, you get paid for views of that bookmark.  Make any sense?  Confused me, too, so I thought I’d check it out.  Within my first 42 minutes of submitting a link book mark to my “How To Sell An eBook With PayPal” post yesterday, I made $5.80 on RedGage.  It appears I got some sort of bonus from the site owners or editors or something (not too sure yet), but it definitely got my interest and made me take a look closer at this RedGage site.  Here’s what I’ve learned…

What Is RedGage?

From what I’ve read (see the current Google search results for RedGage here), RedGage has been in development for the last 18 months and has just been opened to the public.  RedGage has various advertisements on their site and they share that ad revenue with their users.  There is a certain amount RedGage will pay it’s user per 1,000 views of a bookmark of your own shared content.   The amount per 1,000 views  is dynamic based on their earnings from what I can gather.

For my bookmark to my blog post, I simply linked to it via their upload tool, gave it a title, some tags, and a description – then I got to choose a thumbnail image and submitted it.

It shows on the RedGage site as only what I submitted in my upload with a link to my original content.  Google appears to crawl and index these little RedGage bookmarks and it appears the links are NOT no-follow links (which is super nice).

This is how my RedGage link for my sell eBooks with PayPal bookmark looks:

It was super easy to do and it appears to be a quality bookmark and maybe a quality back link, too (still checking in to this).

As you can see from that image, I somehow got a nice little $5.80 bonus for sumthin’….lol. Have no idea why, but thanks, RedGage!  I also received some nice feedback from within the RedGage community which I really appreciate (thanks y’all!).

What Can You Submit To RedGage?

First off, from what I’ve read, you can only submit your OWN content to RedGage.  To me, this is another nice twist to RedGage being that other sites seem to frown on submitting your own content.

It appears as if you can submit links (like I did with my post), video, images, and blogs.  I’m still trying to figure out how the blog thing works so I can’t comment on that one yet.  All the submitted blogs seem to be formatted the same so I’m not sure if it’s a copy/paste job of your blog post or what.  All I can say is be sure to add a trackback url so you get a link to your original content.

There also seems to be a way to set  RedGage up so your Blogger and Wordpress blogs, as well as your Flickr, FaceBook, and YouTube content get auto-added to RedGage.  I can see this being a nice way for additional exposure of your content so I plan to look into this.

You can also get RedGage to broadcast your content to your FaceBook, Twitter, and FriendFeed accounts – so again, that looks to be a good way to generate additional exposure.

You also get a profile page which Google does pick up (and they do seem to earn Page Rank).  You can link to your sites, and at the time of this writing, the links to your site(s) are NOT no-follow.

Here is my profile page – PotPieGirl on RedGage

How Do You Get Paid By RedGage?

As I said, the earnings per 1,000 views vary – right now it looks like the rate for 1,000 views is $1.07 (USD). This info is found under your “Account” tab once you are logged in.  So, at a little over a buck earned for every 1,000 views, I don’t see anyone getting rich doing this, but to me, it’s still a neat idea.

I don’t know about you, but I’m cool with free money 

Once you hit your first $25, you can request to be paid.  RedGage will then mail you a Visa gift card.  Payments after your original payment are loaded to that gift card (or at least that’s how I understood it).

If I did the math right (and it is HIGHLY possible that I didn’t…lol) – if you receive 43,925 views to all your RedGage content, you would earn enough to buy a copy of One Week Marketing.  So, if you need a free way to earn enough to get your OWN action plan, there ya go  =)

My Initial Thoughts About RedGage

I like the concept of RedGage.  I think their two “twists” of being able to freely submit your own content AND get paid when people look at your submissions is a great idea.

I have a feeling that RedGage will be hit by those that might not have the best interest of RedGage at heart (as commonly happens with sites like these), but being that there is money on the line, I feel that RedGage will be quick to delete accounts of those that are using the site inappropriately.

Also, for those that think, “Wow, I’ll just sit there and click to view my OWN submissions over and over….” – forget it, it won’t work.  ANd if you DO happen to get away with it for a short time, you’ll get banned.  They make this very clear on the site.

I did also submit my Squidoo Help Lens to RedGage and it took fine.  Hopefully, Squidoo users will take advantage of this opportunity to get more exposure for their lenses – but I also hope they don’t ABUSE it.

Since I just signed up for RedGage and started using it a little bit earlier today, it is too soon to give a whole lot of quality feedback.  I do like the concept and I wish the site owners and investors the best of luck.  Hopefully my post today will send them some new folks their way and get some more activity going there.

Signing Up For RedGage

I had one little issue when signing up with RedGage.  I signed up and a little window opened offering to let me sign in and enter my confirmation code.  Instead, I just went to my email and clicked the confirmation link.

BUT – the link didn’t confirm me.  I had to copy the confirmation code they gave me via email and paste it in the box for it to take.  Not a big deal at all – just a heads up in case it happens to you, too.

When you sign up, there is a place to type who referred you – please type PotPieGirl.  I don’t think this has any earnings potential but I do think I can see who is in my network or something.  The only way I can find out is if someone types me in as their referrer…lol.

While they do have a “refer a friend” area where you can email someone an invitation, that is not practical for me.  I’d be there for DAYS entering thousands of email addresses…..lol.  Just a note to the RedGage staff…. a referral link sure would be nice 

Anyway, go here to sign up for RedGage.com, type in potpiegirl as your referrer (please), and then let me know what you think.

Click here for a full “Getting Started” tutorial for RedGage if you’d like more info and/or help.

How Google Indexes Your Web Pages

Google Hocus Pocus Part 2 -

One day your lens is in Google, next day it’s gone. Sound familiar? While we’ve talked about why your lens falls out of Google before, I think it’s time we talk about it on a deeper level. I’ve hesitated doing this mainly because it is a more advanced topic – but also because Google does what Google wants. There is no absolute understanding of Google – and I don’t want anyone to obsess with trying to do just that. But, let’s talk about ol’ Googlebot and your web pages.

Rule #1 – You Can’t Understand Google

Cold, hard fact is this… it’s Google’s search engine and they’ll index however the heck they want to. They do not WANT us to totally understand how it all works. Heck, I read that last year (2008), Google changed their algorithm over 450 times! That is at least one change every DAY.

There is no “code” to crack with Google. Whatever the “code” is today WILL BE different tomorrow. The sooner you accept that, the better off you’ll be.

Rule #2 – The Definition of Insanity Is TRYING To Understand Google

Seriously, the more and more you try and “figure out” Google, the crazier you will make yourself. All my men readers – C’mon guys… how many times have you looked at your wife or girlfriend and thought, “I am going crazy trying to figure you out!” ???

Honey, we women have NOTHING on Google. Google is the most temperamental “woman” you will EVER come across. Worst yet, Google has absolutely NO desire for you to figure out a THING about her. Ironically, the most temperamental woman in the world was developed by two men in a dorm room. (makes me laugh a little)

How Google Indexes Web Pages

With all those disclaimers and warnings out of the way, let’s talk about Google and web pages. Did you know it is Google’s objective to index every page on the web?

This is a HUGE job.

They also take it one step further by trying to rank these web pages in order of relevance to a search query. Just think about all the information that is processed in that 0.15 seconds it took to give you your search results! It’s amazing to me – astounding!

Now, Google also wants to find all the newest and freshest online content and get it in their index asap, too. Yet another HUGE under-taking. Just think how many people are publishing blog posts and articles and lenses and videos and ALLLLLL that every single second of every single day!

Google’s crawlers (GoogleBot) are out on the web all the time looking for new content, updating older content – just spidering the web like crazy.

In fact, GoogleBot actually has two types of crawlers – FreshBot and DeepBot (no, I am not making this up…lol)

Meet FreshBot and DeepBot

Freshbot has one job – find all the newest and the freshest content as it can and get it in the Google index.

DeepBot has a monthly job – to deep crawl all the web pages on the internet, follow the links, evaluate the web pages, and then completely re-update the entire index and get it to all the Google data centers.

Let me use my blog as an example -

Good ol’ FreshBot is hanging around here or at least waiting on me all the time. I love FreshBot! Within minutes of me publishing a new post, here comes ol’ FreshBot. He grabs it and gets it in the Google index within about 30 minutes. Then, he will tell ol’ DeepBot to get over here to PotPieGirl.com and be sure to do a deep index of my site each month.

DeepBot also “remembers” to come do a deep crawl here by finding my blog from other links all over the internet (remember how important I said back links are???)

FreshBot finds you and gives you a bonus of getting in the index quickly. DeepBot decides what to do with you. In other words, DeepBot checks your back links and ALL that stuff that FreshBot could care less about.

What Does This GoogleBot Activity Look Like?

Now I want to show you an image from inside my Google WebMaster Tools. This is an image of the number of pages that have been crawled per day in the last 90 days here at PotPieGirl.com.

As you can see, ol’ FeshBot is in here daily checking for new content, new posts, new comments, etc etc. But, see that BIG spike there in the beginning of December? That is DeepBot coming in for a BIG look at my site. I’ve recently had two more big scans. I first realized this was happening here at PotPieGirl.com when I got a nice little “Warning!” message about my bandwidth usage from my hosting. Yes, DeepBot can eat up some bandwidth. The better your Page Rank, the deeper they go….and the more bandwidth they use.

I can only imagine what the big sites with high Page Rank go thru! You know, sites like Squidoo.com

FreshBot, DeepBot, and Your Squidoo Lens

Ok – now Squidoo has a nice high Page Rank of 8. FreshBot hangs around there A LOT- probably all the time. He KNOWS there is constantly new content to crawl on that site.

Problem is, sometimes he misses stuff when crawling the Squidoo site. This is why we get some links to our new lenses to help FreshBot get there. Or we could do some edits and republish helping to remind FreshBot that we’re there. Even if we do all that, he still might miss. Hey, he’s a computer program…give him a break…lol

OR, FreshBot DOES find your new lens and you are in that Google index in a matter of hours – or minutes! Awesome! BUT – then days go by and DeepBot hasn’t been….and your new lens falls out of the index.

OR, FreshBot DOES get to you and DeepBot does, too – BUT, ol’ DeepBot didn’t find or wasn’t aware of any back links TO your content – and your lens falls out again. Remember now, just because YOU know there is a back link to your lens does NOT mean that DeepBot knows about it yet. And also keep in mind that you may SEE your back link in the Google index, but that could be the work of FreshBot – not DeepBot.

Regardless, it’s Google’s party and they’ll crawl if they want to =)

Bottom Line

When your lens is new and if appears to be struggling with Google, keep it fresh. I’m not talking about major updates – just a little sumthin-sumthin and republish. Also, keep making those links TO your lens (preferably from places that FreshBot hangs out).

All this with FreshBot and DeepBot applies to article marketing and blogs and ALL web sites. I know it’s confusing, but the best tip I can give to understand all this is to simply accept that you will never completely understand all this.

Good content that is well-optimized with links pointing TO that content WILL come back into the Google index. The higher the Page Rank of the site your content sits on, the better your odds of being found and STICKING in the Google index. The only thing that WON’T work to bring your lens back into the Google index is obsessing over why it’s not in the Google index. As I always say – KEEP MOVING FORWARD =)

Just for the record, I do not KNOW all this. Nor do I personally KNOW anyone at Google who has told me all this. These are my observations and the results of my reading and testing. You can read more about the GoogleBot and all her buddies here.

Does Your Make Money Online Blog Make Money?

Make Money Online Blogs = Annoying?

I read a great post the other day. It was talking about blogs in the make money online niche and how some of these blogs sell too much while others don’t sell enough. It was an interesting post to me – I totally enjoyed it. That is, until MY name came into the conversation!

Do Make Money Online Blogs Annoy You?

The author of the post I am referring to was talking about a blog that belongs to a friend of his. While the author really likes the person who ran the make money online blog in question, he also doesn’t approve of how his friend is running his blog.

Why?

Simply because he feels that the blog owner is trying to SELL more than he is trying to HELP.

Worse yet, according the post author, is that his friend is using every blog post as an attempt to sell something…. anything.

“How it upsets me to see how he is attempting to lure people into purchasing products that — and without any hope — falsely claim that they help people learn or perform in a way that will enable them to make money online.”

It made me stop for a moment… and made me really think about make money online blogs…

Are we “Make Money Online Bloggers” wrong for trying to make sales from our blog posts? Are we doing a disservice to those that read our blogs? On the flip side, are we (the bloggers) doing ourselves a disservice by not trying to sell enough thru our blog posts?

I think this is a very interesting topic….one that should be discussed.

Why Make Money Online Blogs Make Money…and why they don’t

After some thought, I realized that there is a balance that a make money online blog reaches. When I first started this blog, I had this concept that all I need to do is make a post about some random product and I would make sales.

Well, ya see…. that does NOT work.

But then I flipped to the extreme opposite of that a few months later – I decided I wanted each of my blog posts to help as many people as I could possibly reach. I wanted the ultimate goal of each post to be that each person who read it felt better than they did when they got here.

FEEL Better? Have I Lost My Mind?

Now WHY in the world would someone who blogs about ways to make money online have any sort of goal that relates to how someone FEELS after reading it? Shouldn’t I focus on teaching and giving away my knowledge.. and selling stuff?

Yes…and no.

Yes, I DO teach things I know…things I have learned (because you see, I was once new, too…lol). But, when you learn something, or something “clicks” in your mind, don’t you FEEL better? I know I sure do!

Sometimes, I focus completely on how I think a lot of you are feeling. Working online at home can be lonely and sometimes it can be frustrating as you are trying to get your head around things. I know from my own experience, that at times, I don’t care what knowledge someone has – I just want someone to tell me that I WILL get this… that this DOES work.

And I want that “someone” to be someone I trust.

Trust

Isn’t amazing that somehow, in this HUGE wild, wild web we work on, that we come across people from all corners of the Earth that we TRUST. People we have never met, but for some reason, we trust their knowledge, their words of encouragement, and their recommendations.

How does this happen? Seriously. It’s hard enough in the “real world” to find folks we really trust – how do we end up trusting someone we have never even looked in the eye?

Just like in the “real world”, trust is EARNED online.

If your make money online blog is NOT making money – perhaps you need to evaluate the trust your readers have in you.

Trust = More Sales?

Does having the trust of your readers mean you can sell more stuff online? Well, in my opinion, yes…and no.

How’s that for a non-answer? haha!

When your readers trust you, respect your knowledge AND respect your accomplishments, they naturally want to know what YOU know. For me, this was a huge hurdle to jump. I found that people emailed me WANTING to know the products I’ve used and read…. what I use now…what I’ve tried.

What an honor!

I make no secret of the fact that when I started all this “hi-honey-I’m-gonna-make-money-online” stuff that I was a frickin’ IDIOT. I knew nothing…made ALL the newbie mistakes and blunders. It seemed the only way I could manage to CREATE something online was to BREAK it first! (well, I’m still that way a little…. OK – a LOT….lol!!)

I’m not ashamed of that – not even a little bit. Each of you needs to hear from someone who was once a total num-nut when it came to all this stuff….and we each need to hear that it DOES get better. It CAN be done. Sorry for this next part, BUT…

You Need To Hear That You CAN Change Your Life.

And there is one little quirky woman in Atlanta Georgia who totally believes in YOU. She knows it is possible – she has done it and she wants YOU to do it, too! She knows you CAN.

I think there are some blogs you just feel good being on…and feel better when you leave. I find I feel that way on the blog I was reading the post on that I was talking about earlier.

Who Do Make Money Online Bloggers Trust?

Ever wonder, who do the make money online bloggers trust? If we’re teaching things to others, well, we better not be new. We better know what we are talking about, right? So who do WE trust?

Garry Conn is a fellow blogger that got my attention from the git-go. As most of you know, I was invited to do a guest post on his blog not too long ago.

He is not only a good guy, but does REALLY well with niche blogs and he totally kicks a$$ with AdSense earnings. The more I read of his, the more I realized that I wanted to know what he knows.

No, I NEEDED to know what he knows…now!

(And I got to learn a good-sized chunk of what he knows yesterday I’ll tell you about that in a bit)

Garry was the one who wrote the post that brought this whole topic to my mind. What’s funny tho, is that the comments that followed his post were even MORE interesting to me.

The comments start off with another wonderful blogger, Mark Mason , making a comment fearing that Garry was talking about HIS blog (gee Mark, got a guilty complex? LOL!)

Garry comes back in his reply comment and reveals that no, it was NOT Mark’s blog he was referring to in the post. In fact, the blog in question was actually owned by a WOMAN.

OMG! Oh $#%%^$, a WOMAN?!?!?!?! Was Garry talking about MY blog here at PotPieGirl.com????

(Gee, Jen, got a guilty complex? hahahahahhahahaha!)

Was PotPieGirl.com The Offending Blog?

But then I kept reading Garrys follow-up comment. No, he wasn’t talking about me – nor did he reveal the offending blog in question – but….. my name DID get mentioned.

Y’all….just read what he said about lil’ ol PotPieGirl:

“I’d like to take this moment to direct people to Jennifer’s site, PotPieGirl.com. Now, in my opinion, this lady has class. Jennifer (aka PotPieGirl) in my strong opinion is someone who I would personally recommend that anyone follow who wants to clearly start from the ground up and learn the true and honest business, of INTERNET MARKETING.

She breaks barriers in this business and has also proven that Internet marketing can and should be a business that is based and founded on a trust relationship among followers and readers. She is a lot like me — in female form of course. The line of difference between her and myself is that she is more into Internet marketing, while I am more into building my own internal private network of niche sites.

Earlier, when I published her guest post here on my blog it generated explosive results in sales. It also allowed our two separate networks to fuse a connection. Many of my readers were able to connect with her readers and vice versa. That one guest post on my blog, I believe created quite a few new friendships among the community. And in my opinion, that’s what it’s all about.”

I can’t begin to tell you how absolutely blown away I was. Speechless…. tears… the whole she-bang. I know, I know… I’m such a GIRL! haha!

Getting Traffic TO Your Make Money Online Blog Via Trust

Ya know, someone recently asked in a forum what the BEST traffic was to get online. There were answers of social networks and organic traffic and all the other standard stuff.

My answer was the same answer I had while in business in the “real world”… The absolute best traffic to get is traffic generated by word of mouth.

Online… Offline… it’s still all about people. Behind every forum thread, every blog post, every comment and every email is a real, live PERSON. Once you begin to focus on the people and helping them… earning their trust because you are trustworthy… they naturally give you permission to market to them. No, not any ol’ latest-and-greatest guru product, but the things YOU use – the things YOU know – the things YOU genuinely recommend. The money is just a natural side-effect of this trust relationship.

I Want To Thank Garry Conn

Yes, I want to stand up tall here on my little soap box and thank Garry Conn for such genuine and touching words about ME.

But… I need to thank him TWICE. Remember how I said that he was one of those bloggers that I wanted….no, I NEEDED to know what HE knows? Yeah, well he let loose with some of it yesterday.

Garry makes niche blogs – and not only does he do that VERY well, he also teaches others how to do it very well and very unselfishly. I have the utmost respect for that.

So, yesterday when he popped off with the fact that he made a 60-minute video that lets you literally watch over his shoulder as he makes one of his special niche blogs with WordPress, well buddy, I was ALLLLLL over it. I didn’t hesitate for even a second.

Now, I make a LOT of niche blogs with WordPress. I think my current count is somewhere around 70 or so individual niche blogs. I also teach others for free how to get started using WordPress to build their own niche blogs at 6StepNicheSites.com. But I jumped on that video like I’d jump on a brownie if it was anywhere in my proximity =)

It was AWESOME. One of the best things I have bought online video-wise. In fact, I spent an hour or two building one of these niche blogs today….and I have 4 more lined up to build tomorrow.

How To Build a Niche Blog

If you are even a little bit into building niche sites with WordPress, I strongly recommend this video from Garry Conn. He takes you from start to finish…literally. From watching him pick a domain name, editing his theme, how he monetizes….the whole thing.

If I had to stop everything and pick just ONE business model to make money online – I would pick niche blogs. Owning your own websites is the key to long-term passive and residual income. My goal is to get as many of my readers to owning their own sites as possible. Yes, many of us will start off with One Week Marketing because if you are like I was – no money in the cookie jar to pay for domain names and stuff AND I didn’t know ANYTHING about making money online- but One Week Marketing will get you to where you CAN afford to do that and to where you DO know plenty to get you to owning and building your own sites.

If you’re already there and creating niche blogs- watch Garry’s video. There is a free 10-minute intro video that will help you decide if this is something you want to learn or not.

As Garry says in the video, if you don’t want it, no hard feelings. We are sharing and offering knowledge. that’s all – And yes, he will prove how much he makes with these niche blogs, too =)

Check out Garry’s video here.

Ok, that’s PLENTY out of me tonight. I can’t believe I just typed ANOTHER 2000+ word post. Thankfully, niche blogs do NOT require this much rambling….lol!

Money Making Niche Sites – The SnowBall Effect

Money Making Niche Sites – Free Lesson

I don’t think it is any secret that PotPieGirl loves to make niche sites. I have a good bit of them and they are a source of consistent passive income for me each month. By passive, I mean that I did all the work on the front side, kicked them out of the nest to fly on their own, and now they bring me money each month…and I don’t have to do a thing. Are you interested in seeing a great way to get profitable ideas for your first, or your next, money-making niche site?

The Things People Just Give Away!

I found a real gem today. Through a weird process of steps…errr… clicks, I ended up on a fantastic blog. And on this fantastic blog was a link to a even MORE fantastic video. I want to share that with y’all today…but in just a minute.

Many of you are familiar with my 6StepNicheSites.com website. If you aren’t, it is a totally free tutorial website focuased completely on the topic of how to create money-making niche sites using WordPress.

I take you from the very beginning with topics like how to pick a topic, getting keywords, buying a domain name, getting a hosting account, installing WordPress on your site , etc… and we keep on all the way thru promoting your blog… and then kicking it from the nest so you can build ANOTHER niche website.

Now, one thing I don’t talk about in depth is how to choose keywords if you plan to monetize your niche site primarily with AdSense ads. There is SO much information out there about sub-quality ‘made for adsense’ sites that it is almost a negative thing to talk about now. I certainly didn’t want to come across as someone who was endorsing those kinds of sites.

What I wanted to teach others was how to create small, optimized, laser-targeted websites that have high-quality content..and I wanted to teach them how to use WordPress to accomplish this.

WordPress is…. well, it’s just awesome when it comes to creating a website. In all seriousness, if you can type email, you’ll be able to manage using WordPress. Gone are the days when you need high-tech HTML and coding skills to create a website. WordPress makes is SO SO SO much easier.

The Secret To Profitable Adsense Niche Sites

However, when you are creating niche websites, AdSense is a very common monetization option. In fact, with the right topic/keywords, you can make some good money each month just from the AdSense clicks.

But – How Do You Know WHICH Keywords Will Make Your Niche Site Profitable?

I have my own little way of getting an idea of what keywords will bring me more money with AdSense. Naturally, you can’t know for SURE, but you can definitely get a good idea. I thought about making a little pdf or video to show you what I do, but with all the craziness since One Week Marketing launched, I just never got to it.

So, that brings me back to today and my wandering on the wild, wild web (that IS what www stands for, right?)

I Found a SnowBall GoldMine

I came across SUCH a great blog… just a fabulous resource for those trying to make money in the blogging world. I read on that site for a long time… great info!

Then, I tripped into a goldmine.

Yes, an absolute GOLDMINE for snowball builders…

And…

IT WAS FREE!

This wonderful man links out to a 25 minute video he made that shows exactly how he goes about picking topics for his niche websites/blogs. He shows you, for FREE, exactly how he finds keywords that have the best opportunity for high paying AdSense clicks.

Right there… for free! I couldn’t believe it!

I want to share what I came across with you. I know, whether you are interested in AdSense for money-making niche sites or not, that you will get a lot out of the entire system as you get to watch and listen as he goes thru his process. It’s really good stuff!

But, we’re gonna make a deal first.

My readers here at PotPieGirl.com are awesome. Seriously! Y’all are some of the best people I have ever come across so I know this “deal” won’t be an issue – but I need to say it out loud anyway.

This blogger has gone thru a lot of effort to offer not only his video, but all the incredible content on his blog. He is GIVING AWAY this info to anyone and I imagine he is a bit like me when he hopes that maybe… just MAYBE….someone will follow through and DO what he shows.

So, I’m going to give you the link to the site, and you are going to do nothing less than leave this generous man a comment on his blog thanking him. If you do MORE than that, GREAT! I have NO DOUBT that it will be totally appreciated.

I will tell you that sometimes being a “helper blogger” can be…. well, it can be…. Odd – I’m at a loss for the right word. (TOTALLY unlike me to be at a loss for words! haha!)

Lonely. It can be lonely.

The SnowBall Effect

You see, we type and we give and we try…and sometimes it feels like we are talking to ourselves. Sometimes we feel “shunned” if we try to do anything but GIVE AWAY our info and learning for free. Sometimes we feel like no one puts any value in what we DO give away for free (because it was free) and no one just TRIES the method or tip or suggestion or idea.

While I can only really talk for myself, I will say that without sales of some sort, I couldn’t afford to be a “helper blogger” anymore, ya know? Being able to help others is a perk of my accomplishments, but sometimes it can feel as if it is a requirement.

I hope that makes sense? I certainly don’t want to sound like I am whining…. I just want it to be food for thought. I can promise that I am NOT whining – I LOVE what I do and I am incredibly blessed to be able to do it (and incredibly sleep deprived….hahahaha!)

I am a help-a-holic by nature, most likely from birth – it’s just how I am. It is just REALLY nice to come to place in my life, by my own hand, that I can afford to help.

I am so driven by my belief that ANYONE can do what I do. I started all this with nothing but a computer and internet connection, and I turned it into THIS.

If I didn’t think I would get arrested or booted from my community for being “that weird woman”, I would stand downtown at our town square (small Southern town. Yes, we have a town square…lol) and I would stop anyone who drove by and ask them two questions -

• 1. Do you need more money?
• 2. Do you have a computer and internet connection?

If the answers were “yes” and “yes” – Well, do I have an idea for them! It’s not about having resources – it’s about being resourceful. You don’t need a lot of money or a lot of time to do this, you just need the determination to DO IT. If you have faith and take the time to build the little snowball in your hand, you can then set it down and give it a shove downhill.

And it grows. It snowballs.

And… I am totally on my soap box again. Ugh! Bless my little heart! I’m sorry. I just REALLY believe in all this and I also believe there is room for EVERYONE. If the economy is pinching you – PINCH BACK! :::stepping off my soap box::::

Back On Topic

Part of the reason I can afford to help is because I am a BIG fan of money-making niche sites. I also would venture to guess that the reason Garry Conn can afford to help is because of his love of money-making niche sites. His blog is targeted to help others learn how to make money blogging - and the man does an amazing job of it (that said from one help-aholic to what looks to be another…lol)!

So head on over and read his post and watch his video on how to build a niche blog. You’ll like it =)

And I HOPE you’ll tell him thank you. He deserves it for putting that kind of help and free info online for all of us.

You can watch his video here.

Hey Squidoo’rs – Can We Talk?

So, you’ve got 50, 100, 150, or more lenses on Squidoo…now what? Seriously, have you thought about what to do now? I think it’s time for all us Squidoo lensmasters to sit down and have a talk. While what I say may not make everyone happy, if I can get just ONE lensmaster to really hear what I am trying to say, it will be worth it. So, let’s talk….

If you’re like me, you’ve been busting it on Squidoo for over a year now. You’ve got a dashboard full of lenses… maybe even dashboardS full of lenses. You’re making some regular income straight from Squidoo each month, and you’re also making money from various affiliate programs. You have also learned how to create online content, probably learned some HTML and a few things about graphics, too. More importantly, you have learned how to get traffic to your web page in the form of organic traffic from Google and other search engines and from social traffic. Even more importantly, you have learned how to get TARGETED traffic to your Squidoo web page that converts into sales.

Do you realize the learning curve you have conquered?

Do you realize how much you know?

…and the biggest question of all….

Do You Realize The Goldmine That Sits Within Your Squidoo Dashboard?

Yes, that’s right… a goldmine. Sorry to use such a hypey word, but it really is a treasure chest of information sitting right there in front of you.

Let me give you a real-life example:

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there was a lensmaster named PotPieGirl. PotPieGirl was cranking out Squidoo lenses as fast as her little hands would allow. Within a short time, she noticed that one lens in particular was doing very, very well. That lens was making consistent affiliate sales. In fact, it was converting at something like 40%, meaning 40 of every 100 visitors bought the offered product. Nice, huh? Thing is, that lens didn’t get a lot of traffic, but the traffic it DID get was highly targeted. Oddly, when looking at keyword research for the appropriate search terms for this lens revealed nothing exciting. Had she known more about keyword research when she made this lens, she never would have messed with it.

However, she DID make the lens and the lens proved to be a brilliant testing ground for the market of that niche. PotPieGirl looked at her stats and suddenly this glowing lightbulb went off over her head.

“If ONE web page is making this many sales, what if I have a niche SITE to use in conjunction with it?”

One web page = good

Many web pages AND an additional site = WAY BETTER

But, what keywords would she use? The keyword research wasn’t any real help.

Oh, wait….. what about the traffic stats for that lens on her Squidoo dashboard? If her lens ranks #6 for those keywords folks were using to get to her Squidoo page, what if a niche site ranked #4 and #5 for the same searches? Or even #9 and #10?

A-HA!

And from that moment on, PotPieGirl started making niche sites using the research her Squidoo lenses gathered for her…and she lived happily ever after.

So, how many of you just had a little lightbulb pop over your head? If only ONE of you raises your hand, I will know that at least ONE person is now on their way to making REAL money online. I will know that at least ONE person is about to make the smart move to OWNING virtual real estate. I will know that at least ONE person thinks like me =)

Some Straight Talk About Squidoo and You

I want to talk straight here… completely blunt and honest… but before I do, I want to make my disclaimer heard perfectly clear.

I love Squidoo. I love the Squidoo community. I love the Squidoo staff. AND I think Seth Godin is a genius. In my opinion, Seth Godin has helped change the internet by reducing the entry requirements needed to be ‘heard’ online. He has helped changed the internet from a place full of online brochures and annoying advertisements, and turned it into a place of creativity, recommendation, and interaction. Best yet, you don’t have to be a high-tech person OR pay a single penny to be a part of it. To me, Squidoo is THE best ‘online marketing school’ there is, period. I don’t care if you are marketing an ebook or talking about your pet ferret – it is all a form of online marketing.

The most brilliant part of the whole thing is that somehow, he has made it so THOUSANDS of individuals spend every waking second BUILDING HIS WEBSITE – and…. BRINGING TRAFFIC TO HIS SITE.

Absolute Genius!

Right up there with YouTube and MySpace, isn’t it? No wonder both those sites sold for sick amounts of money!

Ok – enough of my bragging on Mr Godin… let’s talk about YOU.

Do you know that YOU are busting your bottom to not only build a website that belongs to someone else, but to also drive traffic to it? What if one day you wake up, and Squidoo is gone? What if it gets sold to a new owner who says, “No More Selling ANYTHING on Squidoo?” and it becomes a real fancy article directory? I have no idea if these things will ever happen, but the fact remains – you are building a site you have no control over.

Why aren’t you using even HALF that energy to create YOUR OWN sites? If you have 100 lenses, you have built a 100-page website…. or ten 10-page niche sites.

Why aren’t you building your own network of small, profit making niche sites that you do some work on the front side, and then ’set it and forget it’ – and it continues to earn you money? Why don’t YOU own some virtual real estate?

Common answers I hear are:

“It costs too much”

“I don’t know how to make niche sites”

“It’s too hard”

“I don’t have time”

You have time to build the Squidoo site, right? So, you have time to build your own online business. Squidoo seemed too hard when you first started, right? You are plenty smart enough to learn how to build niche sites, too – in fact, you already know a LOT of what others don’t know.

You don’t know how to build niche sites? You didn’t know how to ‘do Squidoo’ either at one time, right? I have spent a LOT of time making a complete website where you can learn – for FREE – how to make niche websites at 6StepNicheSites.com.

Building Niche Sites Is Too Expensive

Oh, I LOVE this answer. Did you know that you can have your OWN niche site up and online TODAY for a grand total investment of $5.96. Yes, five dollars and ninety-six cents.

Ok, but how much will it cost to own niche sites every month following the first month?

Let’s do some math for owning 10 niche websites using the 6 Step Niche Sites method.

Buy 10 domain names = $59.50

Hosting account for a year = $109.46

Grand total one year investment = $168.96

Average Cost Per Month to Own Ten Niche Sites = $14.08

Average Cost Per Month PER Website = $1.41

ONE DOLLAR AND FORTY-ONE CENTS!

Is THAT too expensive?

How Much Does A Niche Site Need To Make To Be Profitable?

Think you could make ten small websites that earn even $2 a month each? First off, I have NO DOUBT that you can, and secondly, if they each make only two bucks a MONTH – you have STILL made a profit.

And let’s keep this in mind. If a niche site makes one affiliate sale a month for a commission of $30 – that site has earned an average of one dollar A DAY. If all ten sites make just ONE $30 commission a month….

That is $300 for a net profit of $285.92!

Folks, I could go on and on about the benefits of doing this, but I know I need to hush now. There ARE some folks reading this that really do get it.

It all comes down to this choice:

a) Do You Want To Build Someone ELSES website and Make THEM rich, or

b) Do You Want To Build YOUR OWN Websites and Make YOURSELF rich?

If your answer is ‘b’ – get over to 6StepNicheSites.com and start learning how to make niche websites.

Thank you for letting me get all this off my chest! I feel much better now

My Readers ROCK!

It’s been just a bit over 24 hours since I released my free site that teaches others how to make niche websites with WordPress over at 6StepNicheSites.com – and folks, you all are the best! I sent out one quick email to my newsletter subscribers, then later did a quick blog post here at PotPieGirl.com…. Wait til you see what happened!

6StepNicheSites.com has been brewing in my brain for some time. Yes, I considered making it an ebook and selling the information. I also considered making it a membership-type site and/or offering some sort of mentor program. But something about charging for this information just didn’t feel right to me. I have been SO blessed and the folks I have met in this online marketing world have all been so wonderful… why is it ‘bad business’ to give information I have for free? It’s not really about business to me…

Why My Readers Are THE BEST EVER!

I believe in trying to give more than I get – but folks, you… each of you that are readers of PotPieGirl.com… have absolutely blown me away!

Do You Know What This Is?

That is a traffic graph for 6StepNicheSites.com. The first part represents the past few days before I “finished” the site, and that last HUGE leap in color represents what happened the last 24 or so hours since the site was announced!

Holy Cow!

Believe it or not, I was actually getting ‘accidental’ traffic to that site the past few weeks – and actually had some wonderful emails and comments from folks that stumbled across the few steps that had some content on them. But all-in-all, the site was getting maybe 30 or so organic visitors a day. I haven’t done any real off-site promotion or back link building for it… heck, Google didn’t even index it right at first… but a few visitors trickled in anyway. (Why is that when you WANT traffic, it feels hard to get it, but when you are hoping no one will find a site yet – PRESTO, there they are? LMAO!)

But yesterday, as tired as I was, I couldn’t tear myself away from my stats as I watched the traffic pour in… I couldn’t stop opening the wonderful emails I was receiving, either. This little 11-page website was getting some love =) Y’all are so wonderful!!!!

What People Are Saying About 6StepNicheSites.com

“… Wow, what a great site that turned out to be!!! I am going to blog about it on monday. You are awesome…. This is a great resource and I will add it to a bunch of my internet marketing lenses on squidoo as well. “

Thanks for being YOU!!

-Jackie from Internet Marketing Strategy for Moms

“I’m signed up but I gotta say I love it when women ‘talk straight’ like you do! There was a time when nobody on the net was talking that way. Nowadays, a few do, but not nearly enough…”

-Art from Wandering Salsero

“You rock. I love your http://www.6stepnichesites.com. I’ve purchased material from you before, and have been nothing but happy about the results they have brought me. I appreciate your straightforward and easy-going writing. So I’ve decided to follow your plan on that website, and document every step in my first niche blog….Thanks for being such a reliable resource. All the best,Brian (a huge fan)”

-Brian (follow Brian’s progress on Twitter)

“Oh boy, I am SO ready for this…you’re the best, Jennifer!”

-Cheryl from Lake Mary Musings

“I have just luckily run into your “thesis” on 6 Step Niche Sites. I don’t know if it is new or old, just that it may have kept me from throwing in the towel after trying for two months to get started.”

-Saul (Saul found my site LONG before it was finished. Thank you, Saul – you let me know I was on the right track!)

What’s Next for 6StepNicheSites.com?

I’ve already had some questions emailed to me that have set me to work creating some tutorial pdfs for readers. It looks like there are some areas that need to be expanded on – but its info that doesn’t need to go into each actual step/blog post.

But what else? Seriously, I am asking YOU. What would make 6StepNicheSites.com better? What information did I miss? What info was I too vague on when I covered it? What else would be helpful – another blog? a forum?

All you long-term Squidoo’rs out there – I’m sure you’re ready to make the next step into online marketing… what would help YOU?

I want to hear what your thoughts are. I want to make 6StepNicheSites.com the best resource for creating WordPress niche websites around.

Also, I’ve had inquiries about a potential affiliate program (wow, thank you!). Would anyone be interested in that if I can dream up a good program? I’ve tossed around the idea of paying to advertise on other sites….not just ‘other’ sites, but your sites. Those blogs and websites where people ‘like us’ really hang out. Naturally, I can’t pay a ton to advertise on your site….but, well, would anyone be interested in that?

I’m just tossing ideas out there, but what I really want to hear are YOUR ideas.

Go on, throw ‘em at me… Let’s see if something ’sticks’!

To all of you…. THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

How I Make WordPress Niche Sites – Free Tutorial Site Now Live!

My eyes hurt. My back hurts. My brain REALLY hurts…. but it’s here and it’s live..and it’s ready to teach YOU how to make small and profitable WordPress niche sites. I did just about a complete ‘brain dump’ of all I can think of that I do when I create my niche blog sites. We’re talking way over THIRTEEN THOUSAND WORDS on this new, free niche site tutorial website! (Yes, I counted!)

Introducing – 6 Step Niche Sites! ( 6StepNicheSites.com ).

I created this system and called it the RICHER 6 Step Niche Site System. Why? Well, we all would like to be a little richer, wouldn’t we?

Here is a break-down of the 6 Step RICHER System:

Welcome to 6 Step Niche Sites

What You Need To Create WordPress Niche Sites

Step One – “R” is for Research

Step Two – “I” is for Install

Step Three – “C” is for Create

Step Four – “H” is for Hell Day (sorry, but it IS…lol)

Step Five – “E” is for Evaluate

Step Six – “R” is for Repeat

Notice how each step spells “RICHER” – ain’t I the clever one? haha!

As I said before, all this information is FREE! When I got about 10,000 words into it, I had this momentary thought of, “Gee, I shoulda made an ebook about this….”, but I am still glad I didn’t. It’s about time someone put some real information online and I am more than happy to be the one to do it. Yes, it took me a LOT of time and brain power…. but here it is. I really hope it helps folks get out there and start owning some virtual real estate that makes them some money!

Know what else is funny? As I went back and tried to review/edit with my bleary eyes, I realized I recommended a good bit of some great products that I really use. I started to think, “Uh Oh…. is this all going to cost my readers too much if they want to use these things, too?”

First off, you do not need any of the products I recommend to make these niche sites, but as I tallied it up, I saw that even if you decided to buy every, single thing…. it would all cost a grand total of..

::drum roll please:::

$150

…and that is if you bought EVERYTHING!

Please, tell me any other business you can start for a measly $150 investment? And name another business that will work FOR you after the initial work is done? Oh, and no employees, no commute (gas prices- yuck!), and no fancy wardrobe or office politics, either! This is a business you can work from home at 2 am or 2 pm – one day a week or 7 days a week.

I’m telling you, I LOVE online marketing!

Hope you enjoy 6 Step Niche Sites.

As always, your feedback and comments are more than welcome and very appreciated!

Now, go make some niche sites!

Blog Exposure with Squidoo

In my opinion, Squidoo is an excellent platform to use to drive traffic to your blog (or blogs). Here at PotPieGirl.com, the traffic I get from Squidoo has a much lower bounce rate than other referral traffic sources. Visitors via Squidoo tend to not only spend longer on my site, but also read deeper than any of my other sources of traffic. Squidoo visitors actually spend, on average, 2 minutes longer than any other site visitors. All in all, Squidoo is an excellent way to increase the traffic to your blog!
 
 

Increase Blog Traffic with Squidoo

 
While I recently talked about using blogs to promote your Squidoo lenses, this post will be the opposite – using Squidoo to promote your blog. Folks, I’m here to tell you that traffic from Squidoo.com is high-quality traffic. True, there a lot of my posts here on PotPieGirl that are about Squidoo, so there is a common tie between my Squidoo traffic on my lenses and those that click through to my blog. However, I also use Squidoo to push traffic to many of my niche blogs, too – and it is still just as wonderful.

So, for all those that have heard of Squidoo, but have no clue what it is and how it works… and for all those that have blogs, and have Squidoo lenses, but don’t know the best way to tie them all together… this post is for you.
 
 
 

What Is Squidoo?

 
Squidoo.com is a web site that allows users to create a free account which allows them the access to create as many individual pages on the Squidoo site that they want. A user on Squidoo is called a ‘lensmaster‘ and a page on the Squidoo site is called a ‘lens‘.

You can compare a Squidoo lens to a camera lens in the sense that both focus in on a subject. High-quality lenses will have unique content, images, RSS feeds, and yes, even affiliate products and merchandise that all center on a single topic. Most users catch on to making these Squidoo pages fairly easily and then learn to fine tune and SEO optimize their Squidoo lenses for better performance in the search engines.

Squidoo is VERY user-friendly and has a fabulous team and community behind it. Squidoo also will pay you, the lensmaster, a little bit each month as a co-op share of the revenue earned on the entire site from AdSense and other advertisements. (If you are new to Squidoo and would like to learn how all this works, feel free to check out my Squidoo Profit System.)
 
 

How Will Squidoo Improve My Blog?

 
There are two wonderful ways that utilizing Squidoo in your blog promotion can really help your blog.

1) Increase your blog traffic - Every time you get another exposure point on the internet for your blog with a link to your posts or home page in it, you increase your chances at more traffic fro your blog.

2) Generate Back Links to your Blog - The Squidoo.com site is currently a PR7 and each individual lens (Squidoo page) will develop Page Rank of its own. This alone, can provide you with very valuable back links to your blog which, in turn, can greatly improve the Page Rank of your blog and your rankings in the search engines.

Aside from these two reasons, because of Squidoo’s high Page Rank, these individual pages (lenses) you create have an opportunity to rank very well in the search engines on their own. Instead of having one or two pages of your blog ranking for your key terms in the search engines, you can increase your exposure with lenses you have also made – and end up having 3-4 positions covered for a search.

Squidoo is free. Squidoo pays YOU. Squidoo is powerful. Got it?
 
 

How to Improve Your Blog Using Squidoo

 
Blogs have a wonderful little option attached to them called a RSS feed. On any, or all, of your lenses, you can put the RSS feed on your lens for a big boost in exposure for your blog. If, for example, your blog is about cars – you could make a lens about blue cars, and red cars, and green cars, and new cars, etc etc, and each of those pages can include an RSS feed of your blog. Not only will this help your search engine exposure for each individual ‘long tail’ keyword, you have also just greatly improved the exposure of the content of your blog to people who are LOOKING for that kind of information. As I said, QUALITY traffic.

I am also now testing adding the RSS feed for my comments here on PotPieGirl.com. If you go to the browser window while here on PotPieGirl.com and click the orange RSS button, you will see in the drop down menu an option to subscribe to the comment RSS feed for this blog. I added this RSS feed to my lens and presto-chango – the recent comments from PotPieGirl are showing on my lens.
 
 

How To Get a RSS Comment Feed Option on a WordPress Blog

 
Some blogs themes come with this option pre-installed, however many do not. All it takes is a simple piece of code added to your header file for WordPress blogs and you’re done. This post right here tells you how to do this.

I’ve added this comment feed to my Squidoo Help lens (feel free to take a peek). My hope is that this additional feed will generate more interest to this blog based off what my READERS say. Also, my readers gets some additional exposure for their blogs simply because I use ‘Comment Luv’ on this blog. Comment Luv will try and locate the last blog post from someone who comments here and link to that at the end of their comment. Nifty little plug in!

Now, here is the thing about RSS feeds that are found on Squidoo lenses. They do NOT create backlinks to the web pages listed in the feed. Google cannot read them. (read this post from CaptainSquid about common squidoo mistakes).

If you already have a Squidoo lens that has an RSS feed on it using the RSS module, go ahead and Google the url for your lens. Now, take a look at the ‘cached’ version of your lens. You will see in that cache Google has that the RSS feed areas all render with the little spinning wheel icon and the words “fetching rss feed… please stand by”. Apparently, these RSS feeds load after the Squidoo lens does, and Google can’t read them.

Just for fun, look at this Google search for “fetching rss feed… please stand by”. Yup, looks like quite a few web pages get indexed for this term… haha! The Squidoo “Ever” lenses are very popular for ranking for this useless term.

RSS feeds from the RSS module on Squidoo are for your humans… not for the search engines. These RSS feeds give your readers unique and updated content to look at – but Google has no idea they are there. Don’t be fooled into thinking that these type of RSS feed are providing fresh content for your Squidoo lens at regular intervals.
 
 

Using Squidoo to Build Back Links to Your Blog

 
Ok, so if the RSS feeds for our blogs doesn’t generate back links, how can we get good links from our lenses to our blogs?

There are four main areas that are great for generating backlinks from your Squidoo lens to your blog.

1) Your Bio Box - This is a powerful little space on your Squidoo lens – please don’t leave it that old default of “hello world, this is my bio I can edit it later” or whatever it says. That is some prime real estate on your lens. Get your links in there! Also, keep this in mind, even tho your bio area may be larger than the space shown on your lens, Google still reads the whole thing AND the first four lenses listed on your lensmaster page. Be sure to utilize that bio box!

2) Your Intro module - Yet another powerful area of the Squidoo lens. As we discussed in how to SEO optimize your Squidoo lens, the intro module is also your meta description. I believe that a well optimized link to your blog from within the first words of your lens intro is good stuff.

Text links to your blog from within any text area on your lens are good. (Don’t know how to make a HTML text link? Read this post on how to make live links.)

3) Guestbooks - These links appear to be accounted for in Yahoo as a back link to a web page. Here’s the thing about guest books on Squidoo, tho. Many lensmasters are not happy at all about ANY text links in their guest book (even those that point to another Squidoo lens) – and even more aren’t nuts about text links that link to a page OFF the Squidoo site. As far as I know, there are no official rules about genuine lens comments that include a text link, it is more of a personal preference from lensmaster to lensmaster.

My preference? I really don’t care….lol. If you take the time to interact on my Squidoo lens and leave a genuine comment – link your heart out. Remember, that is MY personal preference and I speak only for me. (Also, don’t forget that when you are trying to get Google to index your lens, be sure to NOT link to your lens on other Squidoo guest books until AFTER your lens is in the Google index. Read this post: Getting Google to find your Squidoo lens..and How to Screw it Up.)

4) Automatically Updating BackLinks to Your Blog - Yes, there IS a great way to get constantly updating links back to your blog. To do this, you will use the Google Blog Search module. This little module is either hidden away, or I am just not seeing it easily. To find it, go to “add modules” from your edit/workshop mode, then choose the alphabetical search function. Choose “G” then add a “Google Blog Search” module.
 
 

How to Use Google Blog Search for Back Links

 
Google DOES read these regularly updating feeds and they do count as back links to your blog. To use this function, you first need to make sure your blog in found within the Google Blog index (not the normal Google.com search). Just go here to the Google Blog Search Engine and search for your blog. If you’re in there, great! If you’re not, no problem – you just might need to wait a bit to use the Google Blog Search module on your lenses. (If your blog is NOT listed in Google’s Blog Search Engine, go here to ‘ping’ your blog and get Google in there).

Making this module work for you on your Squidoo lens can be a bit tricky. Sometimes, I have to really fool with it to get it to show what I want. Sometimes the url of your blog is enough of a search term to get this module to return what you want…. sometimes its a pain and it doesn’t work. At times, I’ll try my blog name without the www or the .com…. sometimes some exact text from my blog as the search term for this module works, too. Other times, the name you use to post on your blog could do the trick. (Hint: When making new blogs, try and pick a unique admin name that you post under… it could save you some hassle later on)

After doodling with the module’s search function and getting the results you want, be sure to set -

- Your module title (and some content, too if you want)

- How many posts to show (max 4)

- How often you want the posts to update

- Whether you want the title of each post only, or title with a little content from your blog post.

When these four areas of your Squidoo lens are optimized for your blog, you can offer some great content for your readers AND gain valuable back links in the process.
 
 

Squidoo and Blogs Go Together Like Peas n’ Carrots!

 
Ok, sorry for the Forrest Gump reference, but seriously, Squidoo and blogs are made for each other. The traffic I receive to this blog from the Squidoo site accounts for about 38% of my traffic. Naturally, organic traffic from the search engines is my biggest traffic source as well as all you wonderful return readers.

Also an interesting stat is that out of all the traffic that got here from Squidoo the past 2 months, over 72% of those folks were here at PotPieGirl.com for the first time! Now THAT is great exposure!

I mentioned ‘bounce rate’ earlier, but didn’t define that term. When you have a blog and install Google Analytics to get some sweet stats for your blog, one of the stats is referred to as “bounce rate”. Basically what this refers to is visitors who come to your site and only look at one page. Now, from what I can see, one visit to this blog that reads one page and leaves counts for a 100% bounce rate. However, I have some stats when one visitor looked at two pages and stayed for a total of 6 seconds… and it was only a 50% bounce rate for that visit. The lower your ‘bounce rate’ the better. You want visitors to find what they came for on your blog AND read more of your blog.

Naturally, with any blog, you will have regular readers who will come when you post something new, read that one page, and then leave. That’s the nature of blogs, so don’t obsess that much about bounce rate. I mainly look at bounce rate as it applies to new visitors from various sources. I like to know which traffic sources are sending me ’sticky’ traffic that sticks around… and which sources send me ‘one hit wonders’. Squidoo sends ’sticky’ visitors =)
 
 

Bottom Line on Blog Exposure With Squidoo

 
If you have a blog (or many blogs) get to Squidoo and make some lenses! Just think, if ONE little Squidoo lens might bring you 20 new visitors a day…. what if you made TWENTY Squidoo pages? I’m telling you – It is a win/win situation all the way around! (And it sure beats PAYING for traffic!)

Want to see what the search engines see when they crawl your lens? Try this Spider Simulator – it is very enlightening!

Want to see some real stats from a Squidoo/Niche blog experiment I did? Look at these Squidoo stats for ONE lens linking to ONE blog!

Blogspot, WordPress, and Niche Sites

I get a LOT of questions about niche websites. These questions are mainly about using free blog platforms from Wordpress or Bloggers BlogSpot vs using your own domain and your own hosting – and all the confusion about how this all works. So, lets talk about Blogspot vs WordPress, Free vs Paid, and niche sites.

Niche Blog Sites for Beginners

First off, my apologies to any readers that already have this figured out. This post is aimed at those that are slightly baffled by this whole ‘own domain’, ‘own hosting’, ‘let BlogSpot host it’, etc statements that are made across the web about niche blogging. My terminology will be VERY basic and I don’t intend to go deep into the subject. If others have additions to add to this post, please feel free to say something in the comment area.

Sometimes, one or two seemingly irrelevant things we say or post can REALLY help someone – so let’s help someone today!

What You Need For a WebSite

In order to have a website you need two things – a domain name and a hosting account. In order to make this more understandable, I am going to relate websites to cell phone service.

When you want to have cell phone service, you need two things other than an actual cell phone. You need a phone number (relate to a domain name) and you need a cell phone service provider (relate to website hosting).

Your cell phone number, just like your domain name, is uniquely yours. You can take that cell phone number and transfer it to new service providers and that phone number is still unique to you. However, that cell phone number is worthless unless it is activated and live through a service provider.

Domain names work the same way. You can buy a ton of domain names, but no one will see anything unless you get website hosting. Your domain name is unique to you – your hosting gives you the ability to be ‘live’.

Niche Site Blogging Options

When it comes to blogs you have options:

1)

You can get a free domain name with free hosting from sites like Blogger and WordPress.

These sites will assign you a domain name you choose and will make your blog live for you at no cost. Your domain name will most likely be a ’subdomain’ of the main site (ie, YourChosenName. Blogspot.com or YourChosenName.WordPress.com )

Pros:

You can have a blog up and running in minutes.

There is no cost to you involved.

Both Wordpress and BlogSpot are very easy to use and a great way to learn about blogging.

Cons:

Your domain name is an off-set of another website (a subdomain)

While it is ‘your’ blog, it still belongs to either Blogger or WordPress.

Both of these sites have their own rules and TOS, and for any reason, your site can go ‘POOF’. Being that it is not YOUR website/blog, you have little recourse.

This would be like a company giving you a free cell phone number and free service. While that is great, they can turn it off on you or take it away at any given time for any given reason. “Free” has strings, of course.

2)

You can buy a domain name and then let Blogger’s BlogSpot host it for you for free.

This is not difficult to do, and in fact, I have a few sites left that are still operated this way. The domain is unique (TheNameYouChose.com) but actually redirects to a BlogSpot blog.

Pros:

Only cost is the yearly price of a domain name (expect about $8-$9 a year for a .com)

You have a unique web address for your blog.

Cons:

You still don’t own that site. Yes, you own the domain name, but since the hosting service is free, you can still be booted offline for THEIR reasons.

3)

Buy your own domain name, have your own hosting, and install the WordPress blogging software onto your site.

This is the best way to go in my opinion. I have had (and DO have) niche sites on blogs that are set up in all of these 3 ways. In fact, this very blog (PotPieGirl.com), started out as a free blog on Blogger’s Blogspot, then I bought my own unique domain name and had it hosted by Blogger, and then in January of this year, I moved my Blogger blog to my own hosting and started using WordPress.

Pros

It’s all YOURS baby! YOU set the rules for what you can and can’t do on your own site.

Installing WordPress on your own hosting is easy to do, and once installed, having your own WordPress niche site on your own hosting is just as easy as using the free option of WordPress.

Cons

This costs money. Domain names (a .com) will run about $8-$9 a year, and hosting will cost you anywhere from $5 a month and up. Many hosting accounts now let you host MANY websites on one hosting account for that price. Without getting too technical, I’ll just explain it this way. Yes, again with the cell phone comparison. Having a hosting account that allows you to host many websites (different domain names) is similar to having a cell phone service company that allows different phone numbers to share minutes.

While I could go MUCH, MUCH deeper into this topic, I won’t right now. I want this to be very basic and just enough information to get the lightbulb to go off over a few heads. Then, you will be ready for deep details.

How Do You Get WordPress on a Domain Name You Host Yourself?

This is another popular question – how the heck do you get the WordPress blogging software on your own domain name that you host on your own hosting?

It really is very, very easy. When choosing a hosting account, make sure they offer something called “cpanel” and “Fantastico”. I know those terms mean next to nothing to many of you, but that’s ok!

Cpanel is kinda like the settings option on your cell phone. This lets you go behind the scenes and make changes to how things work. You can do all kinds of things from your Cpanel, but the cool thing that relates to this post is the use of a tool called “Fantastico”.

Very simply, you go into your Cpanel and you click on Fantastico. From that dashboard, you choose “WordPress”, pick which domain you want to put WordPress on, and then click ‘install’.

Presto-chango – the WordPress blogging software is on your site (on your domain name) and you can now dress it up with a new theme if you want, add great WordPress plug ins that make your blog SO much better… you can do whatever you want because it is all yours (as long as you pay your monthly hosting bill… just like with your cell phone…lol)

Which Hosting Service?

I use HostGator. They have proven to me their outstanding customer service lately, they have Cpanel and Fantastico, the price is right, I can pay monthly as opposed to 6 months or a year in advance, and well, it all works great for me. There are other low cost and reliable domain hosting services out there (that link is a review of 5 hosting services), so feel free to shop around and do what is best for you.

How To Make WordPress Niche Sites?

This is a lesson for another day. In fact, I will soon be unveiling an entire website I have created that walks you thru the steps of creating simple WordPress niche sites (yes, the kind that make money…lol). The entire site will be free and hopefully, it will get a lot of you up and running with LOTS of your own profitable WordPress niche sites.

I hope this post was helpful to some and helps you get your head around this whole Blogger, WordPress, free vs paid niche site options. I have used all the options above so feel free to ask any questions you may have.

6 Best WordPress Plug-Ins for Profitable Niche Websites

I make niche websites. I make a LOT of niche websites. I have this theory that while one niche website is good… many, many websites is WAYYY better! Think about it, if you can get one little niche website to make you $50 a month ( which is like $1.60 a day ), how much could I make if I build 50 sites that earn me a little over a dollar a day? $2500 a month – on autopilot? Works for me! I’ve been sick the past few days, but even while I was sitting in the recliner, looking like death, my niche websites have still been working for me.

I’m telling ya – internet marketing is my kind of business!!

How I Make Easy Niche Websites for Profit

So, let’s talk about making niche websites. I use WordPress for all my sites now. There is nothing easier and nothing more flexible than WordPress. Plus, the search engines have this little love affair going with Wordpress blog sites now and that makes it all so much better.

I learned how to make these Wordpress niche sites the hard way…. reading, reading, testing, tweaking, testing, trying, and breaking things. The good news is that you don’t have to learn the hard way, like I did. You can make a small investment in yourself and read WordPress Goldmine. Read it… read it again… and then DO IT. Want to learn more about WordPress Goldmine? Read my review here.

The only investments you will need to make this niche marketing system work are domain names and a hosting account – which you will need anyway. As for hosting accounts, I HIGHLY recommend HostGator. I had an issue with some of my sites recently, and not only did HostGator email me to make sure I was aware that some of my sites were down, they also CALLED me. Host Gator did everything to help me make sure I got the issues taken care of and my sites back online quickly.

You can host as many websites as you want on your HostGator account… all for less than $8 a month. You can’t beat the rate, you can’t beat their customer service, either. Finding low cost and reliable website hosting is not something you will need to learn the hard way – Just get HostGator.

Ok, so now you’ve got your domains and your hosting…. you’ve read WordPress Goldmine and you’re ready to get to work. Great! After you’ve gone into your cpanel and used Fantastico to install WordPress on your new site and installed a WordPress theme you like, it is time to get those magical Wordpress Plug Ins that will make your internet marketing life SO much easier… and much more profitable.

I install the following six free WordPress plugins on every niche website I create.

My Top 6 WordPress Plug Ins for Niche WebSites

#1 - All in One SEO Pack – Hands down, the most important plug in you can have on your Wordpress niche site. This SEO Pack allows you to truly SEO-optimize each post on your niche site and the entire site. We all know the title tag is one of the important parts of your web pages to optimize. All in One SEO Pack allows you to do that easily and effectively.

#2 – Privacy Policy – Here’s the facts now… If you’re going to monetize your niche sites with AdSense ads, you must have an approved privacy policy now. This wonderful plug in automatically creates a custom privacy policy page for your WordPress niche website.

#3 – XML SiteMap – I use Google Webmaster tools. Each niche site I create gets added to my Webmaster tools dashboard and a site map is given to Google to enable them to crawl my site properly. While no program will tell you everything about your site that you want to know regarding rankings and back links, etc, Google Webmaster Tools will give you a really healthy glimpse into what Google sees.

#4 – AdMan – This nifty little plug in allows you to pre-format each post with whatever ads you want before each post, in the middle of each post, and at the end of each post. Say, for example, you want an affiliate banner at the top of each post, and then AdSense ads to display within and after each post. Simply enter the code into the AdMan dashboard and you’re set! Also, it is MUCH easier to CHANGE ads on each post this way instead of going to each individual post and making edits.

#5 – Link Cloaking Plug In – Some of my readers have noticed that no matter what I link to here on PotPieGirl.com, that it always shows a PotPieGirl.com url. That is because I use this link cloaking plug in. You can set this plug in to automatically cloak all links – meaning that you just type in your post as usual and once your post is published, all your links are automatically converted. Or, you can be more selective and only cloak certain links. Here is another great benefit of using this link cloaking plug in – you can go into the admin area of your WordPress site and cloak any link you want to USE anywhere you want (hint: Squidoo). This plug in also tracks clicks to each cloaked link. Great plug in.

#6 – ALinks – This is, by far, my favorite WordPress plug in for niche websites. ALinks allows you to predetermine where targetted keywords will be linked to. Imagine this – your niche site is targeted for “cow tipping”. With ALinks, you have the ability to designate a link for any keyword phrase you type in a post. In this example, each time I type ‘cow tipping’ within the content of a niche blog post, it would link to the blogs homepage… automatically. You can also set up ALinks to link to Clickbank products or Amazon products with any pre-determined keyword phrase you choose. Now, imagine this – you found an even BETTER Clickbank ebook about cow tipping that you would rather promote than the original one. Yikes! Now you have to go edit every single post where you linked to the previous Clickbank book. Not with ALinks! Simply go into your ALinks dashboard and edit the keyword phrase to the new Clickbank book and ALL links on your blog will be changed. ALinks is WONDERFUL and has many more uses that you will really like.

WordPress Niche Websites – All You Need

There you have it – with these six free WordPress plug ins, some domain names, and HostGator Hosting (get for $7.95 a month thru this link), you can set the proven WordPress Goldmine System into action.

And we all know…. it takes ACTION to make money online.

Good luck – and please feel free to ask any questions!

Want MORE Profit Pulling WordPress Plugins Specifically for Affiliate/Niche Marketing Blogs?

Check out these 250+ WordPress PlugIns… You Will Be AMAZED At What Is Available To Make YOU More Profitable!

5 Tips to Start Making Money Online

With todays economy and the real signs of recession, more and more folks are taking a good look at their computer to see if there is income potential. This is a smart move. Making money from home with your computer is a very real possibility for anyone who takes the time to learn.

However, learning is the roadblock that many run face first into while trying to learn this online marketing business.

There is SOOOO much information about making money online – it will certainly make your head spin. Worse yet, WHAT information is reliable? What program or system is real… and which are just out for your money?

The usual course of events for someone looking to start making money online goes like this:

1. I’m gonna get rich… really quick and really easy.

2. Spend a day, maybe two, reading all the great ways I can make a lot of money from my computer.

3. Buy a lot of programs, AdSense sites, sure fire systems to overnight riches…. read them once (maybe), work a system half way (maybe)….buy another program or system.

4. Spend too much money while trying to find a reliable way to make money online – and still not making a dime.

5. Quit trying and go back to life as it was…..with even less money than when you started.

Folks, I am living, breathing proof that it does NOT have to go that way. Making money online…sitting at your kitchen table…kids running around…whatever…. It CAN be done. If you are still relatively new to this whole online marketing thing, or if you are brand-spanking new, I have 5 simple tips I’d like to share with you.

5 Tips to Successfully Start Making Money Online

1. Do NOT fall for the latest and greatest, get rich quick, “I made $50,000 overnight”, so-easy-a-two-year-old-can-do-it online money making system. Better yet, resist the urge to pay money for ANY information, period. There is way too much FREE information online to help you start making money that it is silly to waste any of your hard-earned cash on anything until you have an idea of what you’re doing.

Online Internet Marketing forums are a great place to start. Internet Marketing blogs are also a very valuable source of FREE information. But Beware – there are also way too many people online that know so little about what they are talking about and give out bad advice and information.

When you can distinguish between GOOD online business advice and BAD online business advice, THEN you can start thinking about buying something to help your online business grow.

2. Diversify. Let me say that again… D-I-V-E-R-S-I-F-Y your online earning opportunities. Do not put all your income opportunity eggs into one project. While closing out my February earnings I realized that I currently have 25-30 sources that send me income earnings each month. Yes, I am quite proud of my AdSense earnings lately, however if AdSense stops working for me (or goes out of business, etc), I still have 29 other sources of revenue kicking each month. I also have 35+ web sites of my own that I use along with free sites like Squidoo. Do not put yourself in a position where ONE project or ONE affiliate program can break you.

3. Learn how to write articles and content for the internet. It is NOT the same as it was when writing term papers for high school. Being able to write content that converts and gets good rankings in the search engines is a LARGE part of the make money online battle.

4. Do not rely on any ONE internet marketing tool. When doing keyword research or market research, use MANY tools to get your information. No ONE tool is THE tool to have. There are PLENTY of great free research tools to be found online – no need to go forking out money until you KNOW what you need and KNOW what will make your work easier. There are no miracle tools, so please diversify your business tools, too.

5. Two Must Have Guides. If you absolutely, positively, have GOT to buy something to start making money online, then I recommend two products. Yes, only two and neither are my own…haha!

Online Business Information and Guide Book – This hunk of a book about starting an online business is fantastic. I wish I had bought it sooner. I refer back to it often and it is a great place to start to try and get a grip on this whole ’start making money online’ thing.

Solid System to Make Money Online – I have read a LOT of these ’systems’, and this one, hands down, is THE BEST. I did a review on this blog money making system the other day after reading and watching everything this system offered. No matter what place you are in this online money making thing, you will love this system. Learning how to create simple money making blogs is HUGE online now… and WordPress is the solution. I am still completely impressed with this package and can’t say enough about it.

Ok, I’ll admit that it IS the system I’ve been using for quite some time now, but this author explained it all so completely…MUCH better than I would have done. Best part about this system is that it is so easy to do over and over again. It works, but make no mistake… you still have to DO work. An online business is still a business…it’s not a get rich quick thing. However, you will probably like your boss when working online MUCH more than any other boss (uh, that boss would be YOU..haha)

I can not stress enough how valuable these two products are for the success of your online business. When you are ready, please check them out. The total investment for both is about $65. I would say that is a quite a bit cheaper than a college education, isn’t it? =)

Whatever you do to start making money online – do NOT quit. Yes, the learning curve can be a real wing-dinger, but you CAN get past it if you stick with it.

Above all, this last ‘bonus’ tip is the one I want you to take with you.

When in doubt, ASK. There are so many folks, like me, that have blogs designed to help others make their first money online… ask us! I answer emails all the time and would be glad to help you, too.

Niche Marketing with Squidoo | Anatomy of a Successful Squidoo Lens

Back in October, I began a niche marketing experiment using Squidoo and good keyword research to generate traffic to a niche blog. Between good keyword use and Squidoo lenses, I wanted to generate a profitable, organic niche marketing campaign. I wrote one article to also promote this effort.

Niche Marketing with Blogs and Squidoo

Process for My Niche Blogging/Squidoo Experiment

First, I did keyword research to pick a keyword/niche that looked to offer an opportunity for good exposure in the SERPs (search engine result pages). I would not be paying for traffic so I knew I had to find a market where there was opportunity for top placement in Google and other search engines. A quick note: While I did the keyword research for this project, I did not do extensive market research for potential profitability. My goal of this test was to show how Squidoo could enhance traffic to a niche site and enhance search engine exposure – this test was not about profit in terms of a dollar amount.

After choosing my niche keywords I bought a domain name and directed the domain to Google’s Blogger/Blogspot to host for free. (You can get a domain name for less than $10 a year). I then created a few blog posts to start based on my keyphrase list I had generated while doing keyword research. I found a few Clickbank and Amazon products to complement the niche blog and also installed AdSense on my new niche blog.

This niche blog site has only 14 pages/posts – all are indexed in Google – and I haven’t touched anything on that blog since November.

Next, I went and created a Squidoo lens with links out to my niche site using good anchor text from my keyword research and also added a few niche-related products for sale on the lens. I do go into this lens from time to time to check keywords and to better optimize the title tag to improve search engine rankings.

I then wrote and sold an article to Associated Content based on info from my niche blog. I added the url to my niche site in the resource area on that AC article. Associate Content paid me $5 for that article and I’ve since made that same amount in Page View Bonus since the article was published. I paid $7 for the domain name and made more than that from that one article, so total cost for this experiment is nothing.

Why Doesn’t Everyone Use Squidoo?

Anatomy of a Successful Squidoo Lens

These are the stats for the LAST 7 DAYS on this ONE Squidoo lens:

Squidoo Traffic Sources

Total click-outs from this Squidoo lens to my niche site the past 7 days = 557. Out of 1197 visits to this Squidoo lens the past week, that is almost a 47% click-thru rate! An extra 171 visitors to my nice site EACH DAY just because I created ONE Squidoo lens. Folks, that is an extra 2200+ visits to my niche site in a month! From ONE Squidoo lens.

Statcounter Traffic Stats for Niche Blog

Between good keyword research and good blog and Squidoo SEO, my niche blog sees pretty good traffic.

Is this Niche Blog/Squidoo Lens Experiment Profitable?

I guess in the long run, we all really still want to know dollar values, don’t we? Ok – Well, first off, let’s say this – after purchasing the domain name and then selling the one article to Associated Content, I’m pretty much even as far as out of pocket expenses.

As for Royalties from Squidoo:

Other Squidoo/Niche Blog Revenue

I make a few affiliate sales here and there and this niche blog now earns a consistent $3-$4 a day from AdSense earnings. In fact, I’ve earned $168.30 from AdSense revenue just from this one niche blog since its creation in October.

One Niche Blog. One Article. One Squidoo Lens.

Can you imagine if I created 5….or 10… pages on Squidoo to enhance this one niche blog? Guess what? I’m thinking I WILL do that =)

What if I did the ol’ rinse and repeat and created 5 or 10 niche blogs that each have 5 or 10 Squidoo pages to improve search engine placement and traffic? Guess what? I AM doing that =) And, I am helping others do that, too, every day!

What if I owned a niche web site and I created one Squidoo lens for each product I offered or for each page on my site? Guess what? Clients ask me about how to improve the traffic to their niche sites all the time. I say “Squidoo”. They say “What the heck is a Squidoo?”….lol

What if I didn’t have a web site and just made Squidoo pages all around one niche and inter-linked them? Guess what? That works, too!

Creating useful, valuable content on the free pages of Squidoo is a win/win for everyone. The Squidoo site gets better and bigger and gets more traffic (and more co-op revenue to share with YOU), and YOU get more traffic for your site and/or more revenue from your affiliate efforts.

“What the Heck is Squidoo???”

For those that want to improve search engine placement of their web site or blog, or for those that would like a free platform to create good content for profit, Squidoo is the answer.

To any web site owner, to all bloggers, to all article marketers…. if you’re NOT using Squidoo you are losing. Period.

You are losing traffic. You are losing revenue. AND you are losing an opportunity to share your knowledge and unique products to the Squidoo community- and missing an additional opportunity to show these things to the world.

Guess what? I bet your competitors ARE using Squidoo and you’re lagging behind in your market. If they’re NOT using Squidoo – you just found the ‘point of difference’ in your online efforts that will separate you from the pack.

Get a Squidoo guide and learn how to create good Squidoo pages. Don’t want to learn? Then PAY someone to make SEO-optimized Squidoo lenses FOR you. You’re gonna have to come OFF your site to PROMOTE your site these days. If you don’t learn how to use off-page opportunities in this Web 2.0 world, you’ll be constantly trying to play catch-up in the search engines and in your niche market. The search engines love good anchor texts to web pages from within content – Squidoo offers that opportunity for free – and yes, Squidoo pages mature to have individual Page Rank, too.

So, now I ask… why aren’t you using Squidoo?

Find Your Niche – Free Niche Finder Video

When learning how to start an online business, I’m sure you came across someone mentioning the phrase, “niche market”. The all-illusive, all-important target-market for your business known as your niche.

Niche. Some pronounce it “neesh” and some pronounce it “nitch”. Why? Heck if I know… I think it has to do with what side of the “pond” you live on and if you pronounce tomato as “toe-may-toe” or “toe-mah-toe”. In my personal opinion, if “niche” was supposed to be pronounced as “nitch”, then why didn’t we just spell it n-i-t-c-h?

Anyway….

Please, Define a Niche…

Finding a niche market in any business is crucial to its success. I read somewhere a great conceptual definition of a niche market. A niche is a market within a market, if that makes sense.

Lets take for example, Cat Food. The cat food market is pretty well dominated, right? If you were interested in penetrating that market it would feel like running into a solid, brick wall. However, in your niche research, you found a little chip in the brick wall….a little hole that you could work with. Say you found an area for cat food for adult cats, or cat food for indoor cats, and that market was NOT saturated with products, yet DOES have a market that is pretty much under-served. Bingo – you found a niche market.

Think: Vitamins. Think: Vitamins for Women. Think: Vitamins for pregnant women, vitamins for older women, vitamins for vegetarian women…etc etc. The niche finding thought process starts there. Then you do your market research and keyword research to find a viable market you can be profitable in.

Seems easy enough, right? Sadly, if you are like most of us, that brain freeze locks in. When you can think about anything in the world, why suddenly does nothing come to mind?

I’ve always wondered what brainstorming processes successful internet marketers use to find those golden niches. The internet is an endless buffet of brain food to feed a brainstorming session for a new niche market to conquer – what are their secrets?

How to Find a Profitable Niche Market

I found a fantastic free video entitled “Find Your Niche” that is put out by an extremely successful internet marketer names Jermaine Griggs.

Jermaine Griggs, is different from these other internet marketing guru types. Mr Griggs started off online with a grand total of $70 at the age of 17. He turned an idea into millions – and changed his life.

Jermaine’s niche is so unusual – so unique – and it turned into a goldmine for him. Ready for this niche he found? Learning Piano by Ear.

Can you stand it?? Who would ever think of that? and HOW did he think of that?

Jermaine shows this video of his sales from 2002-2007. You actually see him go from making $2000 to months of $112,000+… but I still can’t wrap my mind around the fact that he makes this much as an online piano teacher (and 80% of his products are focused around gospel music at that).

I’m really excited to be talking about Jermaine today. He has a phenomenal site launching tomorrow where for a grand total of $2.97, I can get inside his brain for a full month. No, I didn’t misplace the decimal – that is two dollars and ninety-seven cents. I told ya, he’s not like the other $297 gurus…lol!

If you watch his video on his info page and see the story he tells of his up-bringing and the circumstances he rose above, you will most likely be just as amazed as I am at his accomplishments. Jermaine pretty much takes the phrase, “I can’t” out of our vocabulary as you see how he DID.

If anything, I sincerely recommend everyone go at least watch his video story. It’s just a few minutes of your time, it is put together in such an out-standing way….and it is so genuine and inspirational that, like me, you’ll get back to busting butt this week to make YOUR millions!

Here’s your links:

Find your Niche Video Instruction

Jermaine Griggs Personal Story

Jermaine Griggs Sales Proof Video Story

Have a great day!

P.S. I sure wouldn’t be a good little internet marketer if I didn’t tell you how YOU can promote Jermaine Griggs launch tomorrow. He has an EXCELLENT affiliate program. Click here for more info.

Brand New to Internet Marketing? Read my four-part blog series – How to START Making Money Online

To PPC or Not to PPC – That is the Question

Website traffic – gotta have it… all there is to it. PPC, or pay-to-click, advertising always seems to be the “easy” answer. Need traffic? Pay for it!

I have refused to go that route. I don’t want to pay for traffic, yet I know my online business is getting to the place where my niche markets are more refined and defined. My keyword lists are better…I’ve found “buying” niche markets..so why not throw some PPC advertising on these campaigns? Adwords can be learned. It’s not rocket science, but it is also something you do NOT go into blindly.

Ok, so I can learn and I can pay for traffic to my already profitable niche sites and make even more money. Right? Right.

To PPC or Not To PPC ???

Perhaps you are in this same situation – trying to decide if you are ready, willing, and able to pay for traffic thru Google Adwords. If you research the topic of PPC like I have, you may have also found many generous souls willing to charge us $97 or so for all the deep, dark secrets.

Also, perhaps you are thinking what I am. If I use PPC, I am cutting into my profits. There WILL be a learning curve. I WILL need to focus a lot of attention on my new PPC campaigns or else it WILL be a very expensive learning curve!

Ok, NOT to PPC, that is my answer.

Sorry folks, I am still all about FREE WEB SITE TRAFFIC. There is nothing better than organic, targeted traffic to your web site. I also believe that consumers have gone “ad blind” and don’t even see adwords ads anymore.

Free Web Site Traffic – the Solution

So, how do you get free traffic to your niche site or blog? This is where “Make Money Online – on a Budget” comes into play. This is a fabulous resource for many, many free traffic generating strategies – that work. Some of these strategies work very quickly, too.

Whether you are new to this make money online thing, or you’ve been doing this for some time, Make Money Online – on a Budget will give you great ideas, proven concepts, AND get traffic to your site or blog.

PotPieGirls Traffic Mindmap

No Traffic = No Sales = Bad
Random Traffic = 1 or 2 sales = Better
Paid Traffic = Lots of Traffic = Expensive
FREE TARGETED TRAFFIC = Lots of Sales = Pure Profit Revenue…and lots of it!

Gee, that PotPieGirl is a genius, isn’t she? (yes, I am picking on myself. It’s part of my charm…lol)

To PPC or Not to PPC – What is your answer?

If you are also toying with the idea to try PPC (Google Adwords) and think there is no other way to get high-volume traffic, stop for just a sec and check out these free traffic generating strategies. Even if you DO end up using PPC, you will need these strategies working for you, too.

Brand New to Internet Marketing? Read my four-part blog series – How to START Making Money Online

Niche Blogging- Making Money Online Starts With a Niche Blog

Making money online using all low-cost to NO-cost methods can cause you to get creative in your marketing efforts. It also forces you to come up with a system that is not only profitable, but duplicable so you can recreate the process over and over again. I have found that niche blogging is at the heart of my system and it has not only proven to be quite profitable, but it has become super easy for me to recreate time after time.

What is a Niche Blog?

A niche blog is a simple blog (that can be a free blog) that has content and monetizing actions based on one topic, or “niche”. If the niche blog is about gardening, all the content will be geared towards the reader who is looking for gardening information – and you won’t start posting about playstation games or BMWs. A niche blog stays on topic. It is an “authority” site on a given topic.

Here is an example of a niche blog I’m working on: Puppy Training Tips. (Go ahead and look, the window should open in a new window.) As you can see, this blog is all about puppies, puppy training, new puppy care, etc, etc. This niche blog is also still a work in progress. Something VERY important is missing on this niche blog…Can you tell me what is missing?

Why Use a Niche Blog?

If you are making money online using all free and low-cost methods, you most likely do not have your own web site. However, internet marketing strategies require that you have a “landing page” that is NOT an affiliate site. Your niche blog is the heart of your affiliate marketing efforts. This is where your Squidoo pages will lead viewers, your article marketing bio boxes will point to, your forum marketing will point to, and all the other great and FREE methods of advertising will direct to. This is where your visitors…your buyers LAND. Got it?

What Should be on Every Niche Blog?

Your niche blog is not only your “landing page”, it also needs to be your “squeeze page”. A squeeze page is where your build your list. There should be an opt-in box to join your free newsletter, get a free ebook or ecourse, or something of value to the reader in exchange for their name and email address. The list – you must build your list for every niche you work in. This way, when a viewer leaves your blog, you can still have contact with them – and build a relationship with them.

FYI – if you guessed that my Puppy Training niche blog is missing an opt-in form, you are correct!

What is the Best System to Learn Niche Blogging?

In a previous post I mentioned Niche Blog Affiliate Profits. This is an excellent system that is over-loaded with info. The system itself has six modules that include:

- Affiliate Programs for your Niche
- Niche Blog Automation
- Free Blog Traffic
- Choosing a Domain for your Niche
- Longtail Niche Keywords (excellent!)
- How to Find Hot Niches

From the site:

” Now you can start generating multiple affiliate commissions from ClickBank, Commission Junction, ClickBooth and more using this killer blog system!

No Pay Per Click Costs
No SEO Skills needed
No HTML Knowledge
No Customers To Deal With

Create… Profit… Duplicate! “

Create, Profit, DUPLICATE

Couldn’t have said it better myself =)

Niche Blog Affiliate Profits is a steal for only $4.97 (Yes, I’m serious…less than $5). This system also comes with a TON of bonus products (one of which is Easy Blog Traffic which is terrific). If you are interested in owning Master Resale Rights (MMR) to this system, it will cost an additional $9.97 (total of $14.94).

Just a note: I had some readers tell me they went to order and the Paypal screen showed $14.94 when they were only wanting to buy for $4.97. Look carefully and you will see there are TWO payment button options on the info page – one for product only, one with rights – make sure you are clicking the right button for your choice when you purchase.

Brand New to Internet Marketing? Read my four-part blog series – How to START Making Money Online

Adsense Ain’t Got No Cookies! Two Great – and FREE – Money Making Discoveries Today

What a great day! I came across two really cool ways to make some more money online. They’re both new to me – and both are F-R-E-E!

Many of us use Adsense to monetize our niche blogs. Adsense is easy enough to use, but there are two problems with it (from my perspective).

1 – Well, pardon my “french”, but the payout pretty much sucks.

2 – When someone DOES click an adsense ad on your site, sure, you make a few cents, BUT you just lost your reader. Whatever action that viewer takes after clicking your adsense ad will not be of profit to you. But, hey – you did make 10 or 15 cents. Whoopie.

So I came across this little program for webmasters/bloggers called Auction Ads. Totally free to use (which makes me like it even more..haha!).

Auction Ads makes MORE money than Adsense, and can be used WITH adsense – that’s a nice “plus” to this totally free revenue-generating program, isn’t it?

Auction Ads work with the eBay affiliate program. I placed one of the ads on my right sidebar down towards the bottom. No, those type ads don’t really “fit in” on this blog, but I like using this blog to show different ideas for making money with niche blogs. I guess it can make this blog look a bit “cluttered”, but I think you come here for information – not to be dazzled, right? Right. Besides, I really want a new laptop, so those ads will help me keep an eye out for a great deal.

ANYWAY – for a product-specific or review type site, these ads are awesome. With Auction Ads you get to choose the keywords that decide which products will be shown on your site. there are different ad formats and colors to choose from and over-all, it is WAY easy to use.

The ads are linked to auctions on eBay.

How do you make money? Lets get that answer straight from the source:

When your site’s visitors click on an Auction Ad listing and take an action on eBay you earn cash. Actions are defined as a Winning Bid, a Buy-it-Now or a confirmed user registration. AuctionAds is committed to paying out a minimum of 100% of eBay commission revenue. See eBay’s affiliate program for details on the payout.

Ok, WHEN and HOW do you get paid?

We send out payments the first of every month via PayPal. The payment is for all revenue generated the previous month.

SO what I earn this month, in September, will be paid out October 1st – Nice!

Ok – so how ELSE can I make money with Auction Ads?

There is no need to sign up for our affiliate program because our affiliate program is built right into the ads you display! If a user clicks on the “Ads by AuctionAds” that is displayed and signs up for our service you earn a bonus 5% of all revenue generated by that user for the 6 months.

You will get paid the first of every month via Paypal. We feature a 30 day cookie on all referrals.

Wah???? A 30 days cookie?!?!? That means if someone clicks my ad today, but doesn’t actually buy anything for 2 weeks…3 weeks… 30 DAYS, I STILL get credited? Now, THAT is awesome! Adsense ain’t got no cookies! haha!

As you can tell, I’m a bit fired up about discovering Auction Ads. They fit in real niiiiiiice with my niche blogs

Second Cool Discovery of the Day:

Now this is brand-spanking new – actually, it’s not even “live” yet. It’s a little program called DealDotCom that shows promise to make BIG money – or, at least a nice additional revenue stream from your online efforts.

Here’s the deal with DealDotCom:

(note from me: I love the humor on this site)

How Do You Make Money (ie, Whats In It For me?)

We give you a special link to share with your friends. You strong-arm them into signing up for a free DealDotCom account, and anytime they ever buy anything from us, you get paid. Our affiliate program is 2-tiered, so not only will you get paid for purchases that your friend makes, but you’ll also get paid for purchases that THEIR friends make.

Ok, sounds good, but what’s up with this “two-tiered affiliate” business?

When you refer others to DealDotCom and they get their free account, they are marked in our system as having been referred by you. Anything that they ever buy from us nets you a 35% commission. Notice the word “ever” in the previous sentence… as in FOREVER. It doesn’t matter if they buy something tomorrow, next week, or fifty years from now – you’re going to get paid. What’s more, anyone that they refer to DealDotCom goes on your second tier. Anything people on your second tier buy nets you a 15% commission. Again, FOREVER.

Lifetime Cookies..awesome. Again, I feel the need to say, “Adsense ain’t got no cookies!!”

Pretty sweet deal, huh?

So, they are only selling “make money online” related products (and they are also accepting new products to market for review – hint hint to my product owners out there). They will be selling ONE product per day and at a really low price (lower than the general public can get it) and will only offer a very limited quantity of each product. When people you refer buy – you make money. When the people you refer have people THEY have referred make a purchase, again, YOU MAKE MONEY.

Now, here’s the sweet part – pay attention

You see, DealDotCom hasn’t even launched yet. The doors open on Tuesday, Sept 18th. You are only seeing this page because someone really, really cool (and well connected, and probably very good looking too) hit you with a link to this preview page. You should thank them.

Awww shucks…. I’m really, really cool AND good looking (and well connected, too!)

Take a peek at DealDotCom – you’ll be glad you did.

Brand New to Internet Marketing? Read my four-part blog series – How to START Making Money Online

Breaking the Rules with an UNfocused Blog Post – I’m Such a Rebel!

I know the rules of blogging are to do focused posts and type about specific topics, etc, etc…. but there is one thing I love about rules – and that is breaking them!!

First off – Let’s talk Squidoo. Squidoo paid out, and boy oh boy is it CRYSTAL clear that the so-called “Squidoo Slap” was very, very real. It appears that while this “Squidoo Slap” didn’t effect me all too horribly, it sure must have hit the Squidoo site as a whole pretty dog-gone hard.

My Squidoo payment in August was $61.64 – which was quite good considering that was 54 lenses and just about all of that payment was from Squidoo adsense co-op revenue.

The payment I just received in September (for July Squidoo revenue) was for $35.81.

YUCK!!!!!!

I wasn’t impressed. However, I imagine that some lensmasters on Squidoo took a much bigger hit than I did. Besides, its “free money” so my over-all opinion is… “Oh well”.

It WILL be better next month.

Speaking of Squidoo… I have a lens that is being featured on the Squidoo homepage! My home energy lens has been there for a few days and man, has traffic taken off for that lens! It was funny in a way, too. That lens hadn’t really done anything, then suddenly I noticed traffic to that lens was going thru the roof on my stats. I couldn’t figure it out! Then I just happened to really LOOK at the Squidoo homepage, and there I was! Cool beans! Thanks, Squidoo!

For all you Squidoo-doers out there, there is a cool new site for Squidoo lensmasters out on the web now. This is like a luxury version of your Squidoo dashboard. From this site, you can access your stats, update, lensroll, bookmark…and even ping with one little click. It is AWESOME (and FREE). Check out SquidUtils. SquidUtils also makes getting those amazon links/images on your lenses possible now that the iframe option is gone (for those that use their personal Amazon links). Definitely a must-see for Squidoo users.

Associated Content has also updated their page view bonus threshold. Content Producers used to have to hit $15 (10,000 page views) before a payment would be sent. This threshold has now been lowered to $1.50 (only 1,000 page views)! This is a great change and helpful opportunity for those with lower page view counts to get paid much more quickly. Thanks Associated Content!

I’ve got some articles on AC that are really taking off. It’s like a game to me to try and find those illusive little keywords that bring in major traffic. I found a little golden nugget of a keyword that brought in almost 6000 page views in less than 3 weeks….another article that has almost 20,000 page views, too! Considering I joined AC in late May, I am quite proud of my Clout Index of 7 – and very happy with the little revenue stream I now have coming in regularly.

Speaking of hidden “golden nugget” keywords – my love of the niche finding game is also showing in my Clickbank account, too. I’ve made some Niche Blogs last month and traffic (and SALES) are really picking up and showing some promising results.

Even my Adsense earnings from blogging have improved drastically! It’s amazing what can happen when you learn to do something the right way… ha!

Brand New to Internet Marketing? Read my four-part blog series – How to START Making Money Online

Blog For Profit – How Do I Start Blogging Niche Marketing Style?

Choosing a niche market to blog about for profit can seem over-whelming – especially when you’re not quite sure what you’re doing. Many niche blogs also tend to get started by enthusiastic bloggers only to die a lonely death from lack of interest.

I have really gotten into niche blogging this month. I have found a really super system that makes it simple enough for me to create and maintain. Actually, I don’t do a whole lot to maintain my niche blogs.

As I’ve been (not-so) patiently waiting for Squidoo to announce our latest payment amounts, I’ve spent some time finding a better price on the system I’ve been using for my niche blogging efforts. The other day I found the same system for less than $10 and I almost sent all you wonderful readers to that link. I sure am glad I didn’t! Today, I found the whole system PLUS a TON of great bonus products for $4.97.

I admit, it made me a bit distressed to know that I certainly paid more than $5 for MY copy of this niche blogging system, but that’s ok. I wasn’t patient enough to wait. Not only was I not patient enough, I also bought a product for $7 that is included for FREE in this niche blogging package. Ugh!

Anyway…

This huge niche blogging package will teach you things like:

choosing a niche market

how to choose (and find) a niche affiliate marketing program for your blog

how to target the right long-tail keywords This part was so helpful for me. I created one of my niche blogs last week (sorry, can’t tell ya what niche..lol), and I wrote ONE article to promote it…that darn article has gotten almost 1000 hits in a week…and about 200 click thrus! Trust me, this makes my Clickbank account happy….and that makes ME happy! That one little niche blog is responsible for over $100 in Clickbank commissions in just a few days! One little blog… I am amazed at what a difference it makes when you combine the right niche market, with the right niche product, and put it all together properly on a free niche blog.

I can’t wait to see what happens when the real traffic starts!!!

Ok, I’m rambling…sorry. Back to the point of this post…

:::start sales pitch:::

This niche blogging package is awesome and it is a steal at $4.97.

:::end sales pitch:::

Click here for complete details of this niche blogging profit system.

Brand New to Internet Marketing? Read my four-part blog series – How to START Making Money Online