As an example of a niche site that I have created for this purpose, check out The Top Secret To Fat Loss. This is a diet and exercise blog that was created using Wordpress and has been monetized using Google Adsense and affiliate promotions.

It is extremely easy to set up a site like this and have it up and running with content and have some of it indexed within a couple weeks time.

It is also important to note that a sites ranking is mainly dependant on how many backlinks it has. So in the next few articles, I am going to be walking you through the steps to set up your own niche sites and things to look out for to make it successfull.

Stay tuned.

According to many of the people, beijing ticketing appeared to be a completely legitimate website. This brought up a question in my mind. “What exactly constitutes a legitimate site?”

“As stated earlier this week, “beijingticketing.com” appeared first on Google searches for Olympic tickets, even ahead of the official Olympic site, making the distinction between ”questionable” and “legitimate” operation more difficult to discern(Pat Imig).”

Well if you believe that only legitimate sites can reach #1 on search engines(Google), then I got some swamp land I’d like to sell you. Just because a site ranks high in the search engines does not mean that it is on the up and up. Black hat SEO tactics can easily help you reach the front page of Google and other search engines.

I believe overall, that Google does a good job at delivering us the most relevant sites for our searches. I also think that Google will also try and make it more difficult to rank high in the search engines in light of situations like this.

By the way, as of me writing this, beijingticketing.com is still ranking in the #4 spot on Google even though the site is down.

What do you think? Will stories like this one force Google to rethink the way that they judge sites and rank them?

I was definitely a little skeptical at first. I’ve tried paid offer sites that claim you can make free money for completing offers that give you a free trial to their service. The problem I’ve noticed with the free trials is that sometimes you don’t get credit for completing an offer and then if you forget to cancel the service, you get charged a monthly fee until you cancel.

So against my initial feelings I decided to take a chance. I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised with the Zero 2 Riches program.

• The sign-up to the program was a snap. Took me less than ten minutes to sign up and complete my offers.
• The program is really thorough. It offers the applicant detailed videos that walk you through the whole process of signing up, to creating your own capture page and setting up your auto responder.
• In less than an hour I had a squeeze page with an auto responder and was ready to begin finding referrals.

Once you complete the requirements your $120 is credited to your Paypal account. The thing I really like about this program is the power it has to grow your money. With an initial investment of $0 you can grow it to $120 and then you can reinvest that money back into the program to double your money. I still can’t believe this program is free.

Honestly, I haven’t been this excited about working a program in a long time. Everyone really needs to check further into this program. Find out more information here at Magic Funds Online.

I’ll be posting updates to show everyone my progress in this program.

The reason for this is that at the start, theres a good chance you know very little about effective online marketing tactics. How would you? Your just getting started with your online business.

You need to realize from the start that succeeding with your internet marketing business, or really anything you market online like a blog, is a numbers game.

The more people that see your product, the better chance you have of selling it.

I see a lot of programs on the net right now that are telling you that you don’t need to really do anything to be successful. Just sign up and your given a website and some tools about marketing and thats all you will need. This is of course a load of crap.

If gaining traffic were really that easy, everyone would be successful in the internet marketing industry.

The truth is though is that 50% of the internet marketers never make any money. Worse yet, they end up coughing up a bunch of money and never see a return on their investment. 40% of the internet marketers make less than a $100 a month. Thats pretty bad. So as you can see, 90% of all internet marketers don’t make any money.

To get into that upper 10% of the marketers who are actually making good money means that you understand the industry very well and are excellent at marketing your brand.

Instead of joining an internet marketing business at the beginning, start a blog. A blog is a powerful way to market your brand and to establish trust with your readers. Then you can research ways of marketing online. Once you better understand how to market yourself, then you can work on promoting a product.

There has been a few issues it seems with some gaming Google Trends and getting bogus terms in the top 10. Although Trends is still delivering some good results and no doubt that Google will work to prevent most of these issues.

So what was hot today?

1. alaska ranger
2. the secret life of the american teenager episode 4
3. sleeping with the enemy
4. scablands
5. dana jamison
6. bel bambini
7. ed mcmahon
8. hurricane dolly path
9. estelle getty
10. john edwards love child

You can search for keywords that you wish to research and receive the most popular results. Very helpful when trying to establish a strong keyword list.

Miva

2nd tier search engines usually offer cheaper ppc because there are less people using the network. The cheap prices benefit the company because it draws in people that don’t have large amounts of money to spend on ads. One of these engines is Miva.

As with most large search engines, Miva has an affiliate program that pays you $20 for every person you refer that funds their ppc account with $25. As an incentive to those that sign up, Miva will also give the advertiser a $25 credit. This is a win-win situation for the advertiser and the affiliate. Then, the advertiser can also offer the affiliate program in order to make more money. So right off the bat, the advertiser has made a 100% ROI for signing up to Miva for free. Then you can use the ppc to sell your products for even more money.

This can turn into an infinite source of income for the affiliate. Everyone that sells products online or promotes their own site will often use ppc. So why not get a free credit and some cheap ppc while your at it.

For more info, check out Miva’s site.

How you define success is mostly a personal reflection on what you want to get out of something. There are many that define success as making a certain amount of money from their business.

Those seeking success will commonly ask, “what steps must be taken in order to make my internet business successful? In my opinion, the best way to be a success is to find someone that is already a success and try to mimic their system. I’m not saying that you should completely copy a business. What I am saying is that you should Reverse Engineer the product or business in order to know what it takes to be successful in that area.

Reverse Engineering is a very effective method for discovering what your competition is doing to be successful. Lets check out an example of how this can help us.

If we search Google for the keyword, “making money online”, we get the following results.

So if we have a niche site that is about “making money online,” and we want to rank high in the organic SERP’s, we would click on the number one result and analyze their site.

Money Maker Info Analysis

From examining the site we can see that it is a relatively standard blog with a modest theme. It doesn’t look like there is anything overly technical about the page. So how does this page get the #1 organic ranking with Google? Well I’m sure that the age of this blog plays a role. The blog was started in July of 2,006 and we can see that it has been updated on a regular basis with new fresh content. A note of interest is that the blog didn’t have posts until 06′, but the site was started October of 2000. Another observation is that the url contains the keywords: money, maker, info. Having the keywords of your niche market will help your ranking.

We also see that the keywords: make money online, appear often in the title tag and site description. I’m sure that the site using Blogger helped a little, since it belongs to Google.

Something that is also interesting to note about this site is that it has a page rank of 2. This is a low page rank score. So does this mean that page rank doesn’t hold much weight for ranking? I think it definitely helps in ranking, but is not the only factor when determining a sites rank. This site has 102,000,000 incoming links from Yahoo and more than 500,000 from .edu domains. So the amount of links definitely plays a role in its rank.

Conclusion

Reverse Engineering is a powerful technique for replicating an internet success. This is just one of the many ways that this technique can be used. Some things learned from our analysis of money maker info.

• The age of the domain plays a significant role in its ranking.
• Placing your niche keyword in the URL also helps.
• Updating your blog frequently with fresh, relevant content is a key to success.
• The amount of incoming links to a site affects its ranking.
• Using your keywords in the title tag and site description helps ranking.

There are of course other factors, on page and off page that need to be considered when judging a sites ranking, but these are a good start. The important thing to focus on is steady, continual progress.

Affiliate Programs

Affiliate Programs is an affiliate marketing forum/educational resource that helps newcomers get up to speed quickly on the industry. They offer a separate free section of articles and resources that lay out what your plan of action should be when your starting out an affiliate campaign.

You can check out Neil’s article:  AffiliatePrograms.com Launches New Website here.

If your new to affiliate marketing or would like to visit their forum and bounce some ideas off of others, you can check Affiliate Programs out here.

Picking a niche to work is one of the most important aspects of starting your online business. If you rush this step, you might find that you are inexperienced or you just plain don’t like the business that your trying to build. I’ve outlined a couple of points that you should consider before implementing a new niche.

Picking A Niche

• Whats Your Motivation

  Its best to get this one out of the way from the beginning. You have to know why you are doing this. Is it for the money? Are you trying to create valuable information to help people? Theres nothing that says it can’t be for both reasons.

  When you start, write out a short paragraph about what it is you hope to gain from your venture. List out your goals and then create a list that will get you from point A to point B. You will save yourself a lot of trouble if you do.

• Do What You Love or Do Whats Popular

  It can be tempting to pick your niche based completely on how popular it is. However, doing so can lead to you getting burned out. This is true if your blogging on a subject you don’t really have any interest in.

  So pick a niche you have an interest in and then you can figure out how you will monetize it. This helps at the beginning when things aren’t going as you had hoped. You can remember that you do it more for the love rather than the money.

• Could You Continue Working Your Niche Everyday Without Pay?

  If you can’t, then you may lose sight of the bigger picture and give up. It’s not entirely important that you love your niche with all your heart and soul. Some people do it and are successful at it. You just need to know what you want and are happy with.

Remember to plan your business and research your niche. Its better to figure out in the beginning that you don’t like a subject before investing in it.

The process for an effective affiliate marketing campaign would be to drive targeted traffic to your site and have them opt-in to your list by offering them some sort of incentive. Then hope that your sales page does its job and converts your visitors into dollars.

Well, we hope that, but what kind of content is in your sales page. Hope your not trying to sell anything to your visitor.

Plain and simple:

People don’t like to be sold to.

If this is the truth, then how does anyone expect to sell anything on the internet? The magic word for today is Pre-Sell.

To pre-sell isn’t really selling anything at all. It is simple but many people don’t adhere to it, and you can tell because their conversion rates are real low.

So the most important thing when pre-selling is to offer quality content that delivers a value or a solution to your visitor. In your content, you can mention your affiliate product as more information on the subject. It is especially important that you never try and sell that product. Many people will just turn a blind eye to it.