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30 Proven Ways to Monetize Your Blog Part III

Luis Sandoval — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 16:26:19 +0000

As we close this series of posts for 2008, my hope is that all of the readers came away with something. Whether you chose to do a few of these, or decided to go through all of them to get the most bang from your efforts, I wish you luck. 2009 is indeed a year for opportunity, and if you’re spending your time creating quality content, why not monetize it.?

The final 10 ways listed in this post are perhaps a little more time intensive. They are indirect methods of making money on your site, but they require you to do a whole lot more to achieve financial success. But, if you’re willing with the patience and determination, the following 10 could not only build you a small fortune, but you could also develop quite the online reputation for your area of expertise.

If you missed the first and second part, don’t fret, they are not in any particular order.

Let’s dig in!

21. Selling Your Website

Selling your site is something a writer does not achieve until he/she has spent years cultivating the right readership, has interacted with the community enough to keep them coming back, is considered to have high value content worth marketing. A great many of us may never read this point, but there are writers out there with content that others would love to market and acquire. There have been blogs that sell for thousands of dollars, and there are blogs that sell for millions of dollars. Time and patience is again one of the many keys to achieving this. It’s a rarity, but not impossible.

22. Selling an Ebook

If you can’t flip your entire site for money, perhaps you can flip the content. Because we’ve chosen to write within a certain arena, it would be safe to say tha we feel passionate or at the very least feel educated enough to put together a series of ebooks with related content that can be sold online. Gathering your posts and elaborating a little to connect the thoughts could net you a decent ebook that could fetch a fair prices online. Again, this all comes from content that others will find interesting, if you’ve got it, they will buy!

23. Selling A Hardcover Book

So you got a little author in you. Perhaps you take your content and decide that you want to write a lengthy read to showcase what you know and how other people can do what you do. This type of book is not uncommon, it will be considerably more work, but not impossible. There are lots of methods for self publishing, but also just as many if you wanted to get an agent. This is not a quick turnaround and will take lots of time, but a great how-to book that takes people step by step through the process is a great way to put out a solid book with your name on it.

24. Selling WordPress Themes

Got a little creative bug in ya? If you’re becoming a pro with WordPress, why not design templates? Not everyone involved with WordPress has the ability to do this, but if you’re confident manipulating your blog, why not attempt to create a wordpress template that others will purchase. With enough understanding of CSS, and ability to make it graphically appealing, your templates could be in a marketplace or sold off your blog site and the profit would start rolling in. It’s worth a shot!

25. Offering Consulting or Related Services

Perhaps you have the skills to communicate your ideas to people. You don’t have the desire to write a book just yet, then perhaps your looking at doing some face to face consulting. Offering your services and expertise is a highly valued way to build quality relationships with readers of your content. Any topic can be fair game as long as there is a need from your readers.

26. Creating An Email List or Newsletter

Providing a way for you to stay in contact with your readers is important, which is why a newsletter is key. The email list you acquire will be vital if you ever decide to do something where you will depend on them…like making money. With an email list, this is probably where your first customers will come from only because they’ve chosen to receive your emails, and they are the first line of marketing. Your newsletter does not only have to offer things you are selling, but can also offer advertising where users can click and you ultimately get paid for it.

27. Mentoring Programs

Different from consulting, cause perhaps you only get contacted a few times. Mentoring programs are like academies or training modules where for a price you take people through your expertise from start to finish. In the end there is a goal or product to achieve, and readers are willing to pay a fair price to acquire this type of training. It does take some prep time on the writers end to ensure that the training is of high value and effective, but it can also net you a steady stream of income.

28. Creating A Conference

Have you thought of getting together with some of the best minds of your area of expertise and holding a conference where people pay top dollar to hear you speak? Probably not, it’s a lot of work, but the benefits are long term. Start local, find a free venue, or a low cost venue like the library, or local community college or university. Set it up for 4-6 hours and find people just as passionate as you and by putting panels together attendees will find value in all the minds gathered in one place. this is something that would have to be planned a year in advance, but the long term is that if you are noticed you could be invited to speak at other conferences and truly begin to build your reputation as a go to expert.

29. Quality Podcasts

Recording a podcast is easy, and can be done at minimal cost. Recording a high quality podcast only take a few hundred dollars, but after the initial cost, that’s it, the rest is profit. You can distribute your podcasts for free to build up some fans, and afterwards find ways to monetize it either by charging for it after awhile or finding advertisers for various spots within the podcast. If you love to talk, this is an excellent option if you can find the right market for your podcast.

30. Donations

Nothing wrong with raising money for a cause. If you feel confident enough with your efforts and your readership, then put up a donation button where people can put money into your pay pal account. A few dollars can go a long way, and some might consider it begging, but if you’re writing, is your time not worth something? There’s a lot of generous souls out there and making a few bucks here and there is not so bad. Give it a try!

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30 Proven Ways to Monetize Your Blog Part II

Luis Sandoval — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 00:56:16 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

Still looking for ways to make money? If Part I was not enough for you, then let’s move on with the second part of “30 Proven Ways to Monetize Your Blog.”

11. Private Forums

If you’ve got valuable information to share, or your network is highly experienced in their fields, you can leverage that expertise into a paid forum on your site because others will want access to the information. Many sites have utilized the paid form method by charging anywhere between $10 to $100. This monthly recurring charge is revenue that requires little to no work after the initial setup and management. The community itself will create a level of importance, and you will simply provide key information from time to time.

12. Job Boards

If you’ve got your finger on the pulse of employment situations, why wouldn’t you share your abilities with the masses. Some people are just hubs for networking, and these individuals understand that people are tired of the free job sites which get spammed with false postings, or misleading information. By providing a paid for job board, you’ve limited the offerings to some of the best selections and by building your reputation users will have no problem paying for your board because they will come to expect premium level jobs depending on the niche.

13. Marketplaces

Ever heard of a garage sale? Perhaps you’ve been to a flea market? You can transfer the basic concept into the virtual world by providing a place where people can buy, sell, and trade specialized items. While the process can be complicated for new users, once you’ve gotten over the learning curve, it’s the community will take care of itself. Mashable is a good example of a site that has also integrated a Marketplace into its systems.

14. Paid Surveys and Polls

There are a lot of marketing and advertising companies out there looking to collect data. Many understand how users may not trust a site they have not been to before, but by partnering with popular sites with high numbers of visitors, some will pay to have their surveys and polls on your site. The data is collected on the back end and reportd directly to the company, but the survey itself is housed on your site, where users might be more likely to respond.

15. Selling or Renting Internal Pages

This is an odd practice but has been around for awhile and made notable most recently by sites like Million Dollar Wiki. The idea is to offer internal pages for users to purchase for their own use, naturally your site would have to have an existing high page rank or extremely high views to make the purchase worthwhile. For a small site this might be difficult, but not impossible. This might encourage some of the smaller sites to really implement some of the tools we spoke about in previous posts to increase the number of visitors to their site.

16. Highlighted Posts from Sponsors

If you’re site is well designed, and receives a fair amount of traffic, it’s not impossible to get sponsors to support your site. While your data is displayed somewhere on the site, whether it’s a side bar, or at the top, or a separate link all together, sponsors with blogs will highlight their latest and most viewed posts and thus direct qualified traffic both ways. It’s a method that was pioneered by Techmeme, and according to reports nets them $5000 per sponsored post, and guess what? They display six at any given time, you do the math!

17. Donations

Okay, so what’s easier then begging? Don’t like that word? Let’s say asking for donations, it seems to make people more warm and fuzzy. In any case, donation buttons seem to work well. It’s a moderate way to make income, not necessarily a cash cow, but if you’ve got a cause worthy enough, and the money is going to the cause and not to you, there is a good chance that you could raise a lot of funds. Just beware, mentioning a cause, and then taking the money for yourself is illegal, so do the right thing!

18. Online Webinars

With a thriving community of readers, it would be simple to coordinate a webinar on your site to provide information, training, or an open forum for ideas. Using a simple pay method like Pay Pal, you could charge a small fee for those attending, and utilize a closed video circuit to conduct the meeting, requiring a password and login for access. This is especially useful if your session is very visual and access to the webinar will provide insight to the process that would not be possible by just verbal or written explanation.

19. Pop Up Advertising

In the most desparate of situaitons, users could rely on the pop-up ads. The market is apparently still ripe for this type of advertising, though as tech savvy users, they are the bae of our existance. Typically there is a very small percentage of connected users that understand how to install pop-up blockers, and even fewer that know they should not click on everything they see. If you don’t plan on fostering a trusted community of users and you just want to make money…well good luck with that, this might be just what you need!

20. Audio Ads

When traffic comes to your site, they will be introduced to your site with a 5-7 second audio advertisement that does not offer the user a chance to turn off. The recording should be short, but offers 100% conversion rate because users cannot stop the advertisement from playing unless they leave the site. Like the pop-up advertising, this is very intrusive so think very carefully before using this method.

Net Audio Ads

Stay tuned for the final part to this spectacular series which will provide the last 10 methods to make your blog as highly profitable for 2009!

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30 Proven Ways to Monetize Your Blog Part I

Luis Sandoval — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 15:40:52 +0000

2009 is rapidly approaching! A new year is ahead and a great many of us bloggers are looking for unique revenue streams to add a little extra income to their current finances, or create a lifestyle where blogging can support all of your needs.

This series of posts is going to feed you some amazing information for you to digest over the next week or so. My hope is that thru this information, you can explore these avenues further, and perhaps find ways to achieve your goals.

1. PPC Advertising Methods

Google AdSense is the most popular example of this monetizing methods. The concept is for a user to sign up on a site and then include snippets of data on your site to monitor. Your results and the amount of money you make through this method is solely depended on two things, the first is the traffic that goes through your site, and secondly the niche that you’ve established yourself in.

2. CPM Advertising Networks

CPM is based on the number of page views your site receives. CPM (Cost Per Mille) is based on every 1,000 impressions your site receives. Rates will vary depending on the network you choose to align yourself with. The more impressions you receive, the more money you make; anything from as low as $.10 to as high as $10 is what you will find across the networks.

3. Banner Advertising

This method can be one of the most lucrative methods, again dependent upon the size of your audience, and the number of advertisers that you can attract. Using the site you’ve created, you decide what space you’re willing to offer up, and then attract quality advertisers to that spot. You have a direct line to the advertises which leaves you not having to depend on a middle man.

4. Text Link Advertising

Text Linking is a pretty straight forward method. Having links within your site that are not intrusive, but are available to market different items to your readers. The word will look like a hyperlink which will take you to a site of the advertisers choice, but it’s not so blatant that it forces users to click, so the opt in/out is beneficial. There are down sides to Text Link Advertising so make sure you read the links below as you research these methods.

5. Affiliate Marketing

Very popular amongst the vast majority of online marketers, where a merchant will allow others to sell the product either directly or indirectly for a commission. Whatever tools you use to increase sales, you are bound to make money and increase your exposure.

6. Money Making Widgets

These are basically what has been mentioned above in the last four listings, except the concept is contained within a widget making it easier for site owners to plug it into their site and hit the ground running.

7. Sponsored Reviews

The idea for this method is to charge for a review of a product or service that is offered. This can get sticky for several reasons. For starters your site must lend itself to this type of monetization method, a review will look odd if the site does not fit the post, secondly the review may not be favorable if the product or service is not good. You don’t want to give off the impression that your “positive” review can be paid for, so becareful with this one.

8. Advertising via RSS

RSS Feeds are the new hot trend. Everyone is receiving information through their feeds, and aggregators are becoming increasingly popular as users tap into their collective gatherings for all the information they seek. Attaching advertising to the RSS is a new practice with very few options, but it’s always worth a try!

9. Content Sponsors

If you have specific areas of your site that are highly specialized, or perhaps you create original online content for your site like a podcast or vlog, you can always seek sponsors for these. Depending on your topic, there are plenty of sponsors out there looking for the right exposure.

10. Premium Content

Many sites offer premium content on their sites; basically content that users will pay for in order to get more in depth knowledge or one-on-one expertise. Premium content is created and controlled by you, and if you are able to establish yourself as an expert and monetize your efforts, the sky is the limit for your endeavors.

Take a look at what Internet Business Mastery has done with their site.

These are just a few of the examples, as we go throughout the week we’ll discuss the rest of the methods in Part II and Part III. Digest these ideas and plan your attack for 2009!

Luis Sandoval is a media professional and consultant who shares his insights on social media and technology on his blog The Daily Slackr.

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Free Website For Your Blog at HyperWebEnable.com

Stephen Lee — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 04:50:15 +0000

HyperWebEnable.com is the next generation blogging service provider. It provides bloggers with a free website name as opposed to a sub domain name off the service provider’s main site.

This is how hyperwebenable.com distinguishes itself as a unique and FREE blogging service by providing bloggers with a complete web domain(yoursitename.com) compared to other service providers allowing only sub domain names(yoursitename.blogspot.com), and charging extra for site name, space and hosting. In addition, if you need help getting started, Hyperwebenable.com will help you build your blog or website through a quick and easy site building process. Also, gone are the days of forced ad hostings, bloggers are free to place their own ads on their own blog.

Here are the main benefits that comes with your free account at Hyperwebenable:

	1. Free website of your choice (yoursitename.com)
	2. Free Email service for your blog
	3. Free Multi flavored blogs for your blog like (tech.yoursite.com, movies.yoursite.com and more)
	4. Free add on services for your blog like Forum,CMS, image hosting and more.
	5. Unlimited bandwidth.
	6. Free domain name, hosting and renewal.
	7. Free Tools and tips to improve your site rank and traffic.
	8. Blogger earn money by placing their own ads on their own blog.

I encourage bloggers to take advantage of this great opportunity by visiting Hyperwebenable and get a free account now – registration is FREE !

So what are you waiting for ? Start building an identity and brand name for your blog now !

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Monetizing Your Blog At the Next Level

Luis Sandoval — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 15:18:16 +0000

Many writers have looked to blogging as a way to instantly create income that will work for them even when they are not at the computer. Blogging as a platform is easy to use and even easier to learn. There are some generally accepted practices to blogging, which have been covered here and on other sites, but overall blogging provides the freedom to communicate your thoughts to the world.

Monetizing your blog is a great first step to ensuring that your thoughts and time have value. Whether you work with affiliate advertising, use Google Adwords, or some other mechanism to make money, it’s important that we feel that our work is valued, and with increased traffic, it’s hard not to make money.

But what happens when you’ve peaked with your online income? Is there a next level?

The answer is yes, and we’ll briefly talk about how you can take your ideas and thoughts to a whole other level.

Understanding the Value of “Product”

In a previous post we discussed how vital it is to be an expert of the blog topics you are discussing. Over on my own personal blog I touched on the topic of accuracy with regards to being the true and accurate self when interacting online. All of this can lead to the foundation of taking the community you’ve built, that trusts in your work and utilizing a business model to put even more value to what you are sharing.

Product is key, in anything you do; product is what is valued as a commodity in the business world. You started with your writing, that was the first level of “product”, but now that you’ve hit your limit you will now take your existing product and turn out something new. This “new” product will be something that people will invest time and money into if done the right way. Everything I’ve discussed in the past on this site and others will help to put together a plan with limitless profits.

What is the Product?

Back in the early part of the 19th Century and early parts of the 20th Century writers like Charles Dickens were published in magazines. Month after month, or week after week, depending on the periodical, his works were continued in the same publication. Afterwards the pieces were removed from their original frameworks and thrust together into one continued storyline. His two most famous novels were A Christmas Story and Oliver Twist.

Do you see where I’m going with this? No, I’m not asking you to write a novel…not exactly.

Comb over all the work you’ve poured into your site. Chances are that over the year or two that you’ve been writing there are similar pieces that could ultimately come together to form some kind of instruction for someone to follow. By combining these you’ve now created a product that people can use instead of having to dig through your site to find all the articles separately.

This could add up to your own publication using self publishing methods, or you could create a series of e-books which are prevalent online and do quite well in the market. You’ve now found a way to offer yet another product that users may want to buy into, and by offering pieces of it on your site, you can increase the visibility of both your site and your product, reaping the benefits of making a profit on both ends.

Final Thoughts

This is something I have recently started to develop and already I’m happy with the return. Currently I’m taking the initiative further and developing instructional DVD’s for the topics that most interest me, along with providing an e-book, and podcasts. I look to turn this trifecta of media into a profitable business, and it all started by following the basic fundamentals of building a product and a community.

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Motive Interactive : Advent 2.0 Review

Stephen Lee — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 13:36:22 +0000

Motive Interactive an online advertising company established in 2003 in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, now based out of San Diego, California offers advertising solutions that are innovative and yet simple to use. The hallmark of Motive Interactive success in this highly competitive industry is their attention to detail and their relentless efforts to help publishers maximize their revenue while ensuring that advertisers and agencies reach their targeted audience. Coupled with their unique distribution opportunities and customer service second to none in the industry, Motive Interactive is poised to become a leading force in the Affiliate Marketing Network industry.

Motive Interactive first released their first version of Advent – a groundbreaking Affiliate Marketing Network Platform earlier this year amidst much fanfare. The first version of Advent was more of an Architecture release introducing their performance-based CPA network and performance lead generation platform that featured streamlined campaigns with ease-to-use state of art tools. Now, the Affiliate Marketing world is bracing for its second release – Advent 2.0 - packed with more publisher centric and advertiser features and an enhanced lead generation platform that is truly ahead of its time.

Background

Motive Interactive, like many industry leading companies are not without their secrets of success – it’s the superior intellectual power and experience of their staff that work tirelessly to come up with the next generation of Affiliate Marketing Networking and performance leads generation platform.

Brendan Smith – entrepreneur, founder and CEO of Motive Interactive was quite an accomplished internet marketer himself before joining NetCreations, a leading opt-in email marketing company with direct clients like MSNBC, CNET, ZDNet to name a few. Brendan also brought with him his association with trade and standards organization like Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Lead Generation Committee, and The Online Lead Generation Association (OLGA) where he is a founding member. Motive Interactive Online Advertising Marketing is also blessed with bright engineers and senior management who came from reputable networks like ValueClick Media, DoubleClick, and 24/7.

Features

Advent 2.0 is an advanced performance Ad Network that seamlessly integrates a publisher centric advertising network with a direct performance Leads generation network. Most Affiliate Marketing Network provides one or the other but not both.

It has the following main features that even other Affiliate Marketing Networks envy:

	1. Provides Ad serving, impression, search term tracking capabilities ;it also provides JavaScript and IFRAME conversion tracking.
	2. Highly scalable and adaptable to future enhancements which would enable Motive Interactive to stay ahead of its competition and easily integrate with changes in lead generation industry that is constantly in a fluff.
	3. Multiple Payout Support including commission based sales.
	4. Allocations among individual publisher and advertiser.
	5. Lead routing to multiple advertisers and agencies buyers.
	6. Real time and batched lead processing as well as very flexible and powerful data handling and validation capabilities
	7. Easy to use User Interface that is superior to most Affiliate Marketing Networks

Control Panel/User Interface

Advent 2.0 offers a clean and streamlined User Interface that enables publisher to manage their offers, campaigns and performance statistics quickly and efficiently by sorting them according to CPA, CPA (direct post), and CPS, and filtered by Co-Registration, Email, Incentivized, and Web Placement traffic types.

Advent 2.0 makes heavy use of AJAX – a leading edge technology that allows certain segment of the web page to load without ever the need to refresh – the effect is a rich desktop-like user interface experience for the user. For instance, if you click on one of your offers, the segment of the offer will open up with more information in its place without having to refresh the page or popping up a window like other non-AJAX enabled Affiliate Marketing Networks’ site. If you like what you see, you just click “Apply” to submit your application for the offer. The advantage of this is that you are off to applying for the next offer without ever waiting for a response – this saves you lots of time!!

Also, once you’ve been approved for an offer, selecting the banners and ad creative for it is a breeze with Advent 2.0 Control Panel powered by AJAX technology, by just positioning your mouse over it to see the banner and the Ad Creative. There is no annoying popup all over the place and wasting time waiting for the Banner to load and render itself.

Reports section or Campaign Statistics section in Advent 2.0 enables you to measure important campaign performance metrics across all time periods, campaigns and payouts in multiple perspectives including ‘effective’ perspectives like eCPM and eCPL. Reports can be filtered based on different performance criteria, and can be exported in various popular formats like PDF, EXCEL and CSV.

To enable finer grain of reporting capability based on publishing channels, Advent 2.0 like other Affiliate Marketing Networks also allow the usage of SubID’s to be added to campaign URLs.

Signing Up

The sign up process for a Publisher at Motive Interactive is quick and easy with the minimal of information required to get you started. The approval is sent to you via email within the next 24 hours and it’s usually quicker than that. As with any other Affiliate Marketing Networks, tax forms are required to be completed and faxed in before any payment can be made to you.

You would be assigned an Account Manager at Motive Interactive upon approval, and communicating with your Account Manager is never been easier by opening up a chat window.

Payment

This is an exciting part for all of us and Motive Interactive doesn’t disappoint here. Motive Interactive payout threshold is $50 and it’s paid on a Net-15 basis. Payment can be made to you through check, bank transfer or PayPal. My personal favorite is PayPal which I find is a rather rare payment method among other Affiliate Marketing Networks.

Referral Program

Motive Interactive referral earnings program is 5.5% lifetimes referral earnings.

The referral system is currently being tracked manually with reports each month via a unique referral link and a number of banners are available as well by request – signup to our referral program is usually approved within hours.

With the release of Advent 2.0, full daily, weekly, monthly reports will be available as well as a unique tracking link, and banners available from the referrals tab in off our dashboard. If you already have an account under the old system, don’t fret, it will be automatically moved over to the new referral earnings reporting system.

Rewards Program

In order to reward and encourage affiliates Motive Interactive offer a reward system as well. Same as referral program Motive Interactive will need an icon and link in the side navigation area that takes publisher to a page where they see the stats.

Rewards are paid each month based upon a publisher’s commissions for the previous month.

The reward payout starts at 1% then increases to 2% the higher the tier. The current payout tiers for the rewards program are as follows:

. $1,000 – $10

. $2,500 – $25

. $5,000 – $50

. $10,000 – $100

. $15,000 – $150

. $20,000 – $200

. $25,000 – $250

. $30,000 – $300

. $50,000 – $500

. $100,000 – $1,250

. $150,000 – $2,000

. $200,000 – $3,000

. $500,000 – $10,000

Summary

With it’s ease of use and loads of publisher centric features, doing business on Advent 2.0 is a breeze. There are many offers on Advent that are suitable for monetization on blogs, and I strongly encourage you to sign up for an account.

Interested in submitting your own review for your blog or someone else’s? Submit A Post and if your review is chosen, it will be featured here on Bloggin-Ads.com.

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Guide to Making Money on the Internet by Selling Your Own Information Product

lkcheng — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 03:03:02 +0000

The Internet has become a great source of Information. Billion of people use it to find the information they want. But, they aren’t always obtaining what they want because some valuable information isn’t available free on the Internet. They will have to pay money to get it. Since these people desperately need the information, they will be more than willing to pay the seller who can provide them the info.

So, if you have deep knowledge on a particular field, then you may sell the knowledge on the Internet for profit.

With the valuable knowledge you have in your mind, you can turn this knowledge into your information product and sell it to a target market. A quality info product will keep on making money for you. There are several types of information products and the types that are currently selling well are e-books, e-courses, reports, podcasts and video tutorials.

What Skills You Need?

Your information product is going to be focusing on a topic, so you must possess great knowledge in that topic. You may also need to gather more information from different sources like the Internet, libraries and other sources in order to produce a quality information product that contains loads of valuable information.

It will be even better if your have experience in Internet marketing. Your skill and experience in marketing will enable you to promote your products to your target prospects more effectively.

What Tools You Need?

This will depend on the type of information product you want to create. If you plan to write an e-book, a report or a guide, the MS word program will be suitable and once you have done writing, you can then convert the MS Word file to PDF format. Your e-book needs to be in PDF format to sell online.

For e-courses, you must use an autoresponder program to create them. Other info products like podcast and video are much complicated to produce. You need to have audio recording and editing software to successfully create your podcast. Video is most difficult, you need a digital camera or webcam, editing software and special knowledge.

How to Begin?

First of all, you must decide on a topic for your info product. Think about your expertise, the field that you have most knowledge in or the things that you are passionate about; ask yourself what valuable knowledge you possess. Doing all these will help you make the right decision on what topic to focus on.

A topic usually is very wide. You won’t be able to write everything about the topic. So, you should narrow down it into a specific area and then focus on that specific area.

Subsequently, you need to do some keyword research to find out whether there is a market demand for the product you want to create. This is an important step you must take as you don’t want to create something that no one wants to buy.

Then, you may research your topic and gather all information necessary for your info product creation project. Once you got everything needed, you may start creating it.

When you info product creation project finished and your product is ready for sale, it is time to put up a sale website to market your info product online. You need to have a sale letter on your website to persuade your potential buyers. It is not suggested that you write the sale letter by yourself because you don’t have the experience and skill in this field. It is better to leave the job to a copywriter.

Hiring a copywriter will cost you money but it is worth it because the copywriter can write sale content in a way that make your product so desirable that anyone would want to buy it.

Your information product should have an e-cover or a product image. So, you will also need to hire a graphic designer to create one for you.

People often like to receive more when it comes to purchasing information product. Don’t just sell your info product alone. Your info product should accompany with several bonus products. Add in as many bonuses as you can. This will make your offer more compelling.

When you website is ready, you can start several ad campaigns to promote your product to your target prospects. You are going to need to put in a great deal of effort and time in marketing and promotion in order to generate sales and profit.

This post was written by Alan Liew. Alan is the blogger of Money Maker Info. If you are interested to learn how to make money online, visit his blog at http://moneymakerinfo.blogspot.com.

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Part 3 – How to Choose a Profitable Niche in 3 Simple Steps : Analyze the Profit Potential of your Niche

Stephen Lee — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 22:30:40 +0000

This is the last of a three part series on “How to choose a profitable niche in 3 simple steps”. If you missed the first two parts of the series, you can get the first part here, and the second part here. If you never intended to make any money for your blog, you might still find some information here useful in the event that you’re selling your blog. The information here will help you gauge the market value of your blog.

Step1 – Analyze the Profit Potential of your Niche

For the rest of the folks whose intention is to make money from blogging, it’s important that you examine the possible income streams that your niche topic is capable of generating. In my previous post, I’ve talked about the many ways a blog can make money, but not every method of making money is compatible with every niche topic. For instance, contextual content Ads like Google Adsense and Kontera Context Link while works well with certain niche topics might do very poorly for other niche topics. Some niche topics work well with CPM (Click Per Mile) type Ads which is suitable for high traffic sites, while other niche topics do well with only certain affiliate programs. At this point, you don’t need to be concerned about what method of making money works best for your niche topic. Instead, you need to focus on potential profitability of your niche topic.

There is generally two camps here when comes to sizing up your niche earning potential – Advertising Networks (Adsense, Kontera, Bidvertizer etc) and Affiliate Programs.

Advertising Networks

We are just going to base our discussion on Adsense since it’s the market leader in this segment. In order to help you size up your niche topic earning potential, you need to familiarize yourself with two very easy to use tools – Google Adwords Traffic Estimator and Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool.

Merchants or Advertisers who have products and services to sell on the Web will buy keywords from the Google Adwords program. The “Average CPC (Cost per Click)” is the amount paid by the advertiser when the ad is being clicked on. These ads will show up on Publishers’ websites along with content related to the keywords. Publisher will get a slice of the ad revenue based on the CPC amount and also on how well Google rates your site content. This slice is generally around half the amount of the CPC assuming that Google considered your site to be good.

For the purpose of figuring out the profit potential of your niche topic you should go for something that has a pretty good search volume as indicated by the search volume bar and a CPC of between two to three dollars. If you are going for a niche that has the highest CPC in the marketplace, be prepared for a lot of competition from zillion of webmasters who are already established and competing for the keyword, and it may be a long while before you would get any kind of traction from your efforts at SEO and stuff.

The figure below shows how the different levels of CPC and how it played out for different niches. You would not want to target “Credit Card” because it’s highly competitive, but you might settle for “firm” or “plan”. Likewise, you might want to stay away from very specific niche like “paralysis” because of its low search volume and CPC. However, it might be a different story if you’re an authority site dedicated to paralysis, and have a strong passion for it.

Affiliate Programs

Some niches do phenomenally well with affiliate programs that carry a good variety of their product and services offerings. There are many affiliate programs on the web, some of the bigger ones are Amazon, Clickbank and CJ. Sign up for an account at CJ and check out the main category belonging to your niche and get an idea at the depth of the product and services offerings for your niche. Also look at their network earnings and 3-month EPC to get an idea how well their advertising campaign is performing.

There are of course other avenues you can explore when evaluating the income potential of your niche. Here are some unconventional ways you can get a rough idea on your niche income potential:

	Go to ClickBank and enter the category and sub category relating to your niche. If your niche is popular and people are making money off it by creating digital products like ebooks for it, you will no doubt see a long list. The list is sorted by gravity score in descending order. A high gravity score indicates that the product has been selling in the most recent period the score is taken. So what does this tells you, a high gravity and high payout indicates that the product is in high demand and popular among publishers. A quick Google search on the product’s keyword will confirm that.
	Go to 7 Search Keyword Suggestion Tool and type in your niche. You will get back a list of related searches based on your niche ordered by the search volume in descending order. The bid amounts that are displayed along with each keyword give you a good idea how much advertisers are willing to pay for the keywords. These bidding figures are taken across the advertising industry and are not specific to Adwords. The general rule of the thumb is to look for moderate volume and bid amounts of between two to three dollars.
	Go to Google and type in “PLR My Niche” where “My Niche” is substituted by your niche. PLR is Private Label Rights which is content that you can purchase and distribute on your own sites. If authors are writing PLR content on your niche you can bet that there’s pretty good demand for it out there and publishers are making money off it.
	Go to EzineArticles web site , a premium article directory, and drill down to the category related to your niche and look at the number of articles written for it. A good number of articles indicate that it’s a popular category. Also, looking at the most viewed section for the category and titles of the articles will give some pretty good ideas on the kind of subject matter within your niche that garner the most attention.

Can you think of anymore?

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Part 2 – How to Choose a Profitable Niche in 3 Simple Steps : Analyze the Traffic Potential of your Niche

Stephen Lee — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:51:34 +0000

If you’d missed the first part, please check it out here.

Traffic is the life line of a Blog or any type of online media for that matter. Only when you have traffic can you start thinking about ways of monetizing it, which will lead us to the next step – Analyze the Profit Potential of your Niche. You can be writing the best content in the world but if no ones visiting you, it’s as good as staying home and throwing away your house keys.

Step 2 – Analyze the Traffic Potential of your Niche

There are generally two types of traffic – organic and paid. We are only interested in organic traffic here – traffic that is brought to you when people search for information on a topic. The reason why you should be very interested in this is that you don’t want to be focusing on a niche that is inherently limited by poor organic search traffic. The size and potential of this traffic is directly proportional to the number of people searching for information relating to the topic. The goal here is to determine if the niche topic has at least a moderate amount of search volume to justify pursuing it any further. It is however not an exercise on finding and targeting keywords for your niche.

There are many useful tools available to help you estimate the search volume for a particular topic. The one that I find most useful is Trellian’s KeyWord Discovery Tool. I like this tool because it is very comprehensive with very well designed user interfaces which do not overcrowd your screen with a million things. Instead, it offers you the option to drill down to more details if you need to.

For instance, if my niche topic is “Sydney” and I’m interested to know how many people search for information relating to “Sydney”, using this tool it will display a list of all search phrases using this keyword in descending order of the number of searches performed. From this list, you can also derive at the overall search depth of this niche topic. This is important because it gives you an indication how big your blog can grow with this niche, and the number of keywords you can use with it. From the figure below, the total number of searches for “Sydney” is 63,453 which is prominently displayed at the top of the box. Tabulated inside the box are search phrases displayed in descending order with action buttons for analyzing trending and market share information.

The figure below shows a detailed analysis of “Sydney Hotel” drilled down from the first page. The first 2 entries are going to be tough to compete in with about a million web pages already using the keyword term, and only 10 are going to be ranked on first page of the search results. “Sydney luxury hotel” which has a pretty decent KEI, is much easier to compete in since it only has 127,00 web pages competing for top 10 positions. It will be much quicker to rank with this keyword then “Sydney Hotel”.

There are other freely available tools on the internet, but my absolute favorite one is “SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool”. This not only gives you the average number of searches broken down by 3 major search engines, it also provides convenient links to “Google Insight”, “Google Trends”, “Trellian keyword Discovery Tool” and others.

At the end of this step, you should have a pretty good idea how much traffic each niche topic can expect to have and the ideas around how to monetize this traffic will come to fruition in the next step – Analyze the Profit Potential of your Niche.

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Part 1 – How to Choose a Profitable Niche in 3 Simple Steps : Analyze Your Interests

Stephen Lee — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 17:26:14 +0000

A blog is unlike any other type of media like a static website or magazine. It has only one main topic and that’s all it talks about. The potential for profits is inherently dependent on the topic and how much you can write about it in a sustainable level of interest. That goes to say that you have to be passionate about the topic and have the energy level to support a prolonged content creation process before your blog can become popular. But, having all these pre-requisites does not guarantee success because there are topics that are not commercially viable. The process of selecting a profitable niche that you are genuinely interested in – as opposed to the myriad of popular topics other people are interested in – is a difficult and arduous task.

Since this blog is about making money, I’m just going to concentrate on giving you the simplest and the bare minimal steps in figuring out how to choose a profitable niche.

Step1 – Analyze Your Interests

Caligraphy – Anyone ?

Take a close look at your interests and what you are all about. What drives you and gives you the utmost satisfaction in doing? It all boils down to one thing – passion. What is the energy level and passion you have for a particular interest? These are important questions to ask yourself because building a successful blog takes considerable time, and blogging will fast become a chore if you are not enjoying what you are doing. In time to come, your readers will be able to detect that you are a fake, and they will leave in droves. There are many blogs on the internet that are in the same niche as yours, why should they spend time on your blog that is so dry and passionless.

Another litmus test you can apply to test your interest level in a topic is to ask yourself this question: Would I still be happily blogging about this topic a year from now? If you can’t picture yourself doing this a year from now, don’t even contemplate on starting a blog on it.

Whatever that you do, do not blog on a topic that other people find popular, and the only reason why you are interested in it is because of its commercial possibilities.

While having a heightened interest in a topic is a pre-requisite for a blog topic, it alone is not enough to build a successful blog. Here is a list of litmus tests that you need to apply to each of your candidate topic of interests, and see which ones come out ahead:

	Popularity – How popular is your topic? If there is no demand for your topic then no matter how interested you are in it, nobody is going to visit you. The quickest way to find out is to do a Google search and see how many results you get back. You can also try Google Insight and plot all your topic interests into one graph, giving you a pictorial view of how each topic fares against one another.
	Growth – You want to go with a niche that is growing not one that is shrinking. Predicting the next big thing people will be searching for seems like a surefire winner, but it’s not an easy thing to do. Be on the lookout everywhere – on the Internet, newspapers, magazines, TV, Radio, conversations with friends. Check out Google Trends for Hot trends.
	Competition – The worst thing you could do to yourself is to get into a topic that is so popular and competitive that it will take you a long time to become a successful blog. Do you have the staying power to withstand the long and arduous journey? I use the WordTracker tool to compare the KEI (Keyword Effective Index) of various keywords for a topic. A KEI is logarithmic scale that ranges from 0 to 10, and is used to weigh and quantify the effectiveness of a keyword. Its usage and interpretation is quite similar in principle to the Richter Scale, commonly used to measure earthquakes. So, the higher the KEI associated with a keyword, the more effective the keyword. The main topic is usually competitive with many web pages competing for it. The more popular topic has over millions of web pages competing for it. While your SEO campaign does not have to target the main keyword, you can probably get a pretty good ranking by targeting the long-tailed ones. With the phenomenal growth of the web over the last decade, the web has become more and more cluttered; it’s uncommon to find any singular keyword that has a very high KEI. But there are still many topics with moderately good KEI that can be monetized. If you are resolved to compete in a niche with a moderate level of competition, check out what your competitors are not doing or not doing it well enough. It is often easier for a new blog to position itself quickly to capture a captive audience for a niche that is not well served by their competition, in doing so they created a blog on a sub-niche of the main topic.
	Content – Do you have sufficient unique content as an author to sustain your blog over a long period of time before you can become a popular blog? The answer to this question lies in whether you have the staying power which is driven by your passion, energy and interest level for the topic. In today’s cluttered Web, you are bound to find other blogs in your niche that can offer you inspiration and content ideas. Analyze the posts that you and your competitors do well in, extend on it, and provide an in-depth coverage of it with new refreshing viewpoints and ideas

By applying the process of elimination, you have probably narrowed down to just a handful of candidate topics that you are interested to blog about. The next step is to take each of these topics and put them through a series of web based tools.

There are a number of free keyword discovery tools on the internet: Trellian’s Keyword Discovery Tool; WordTracker Free Keyword Suggestion Tool.

If you want to narrow down your field in a particular niche, you can use Wikipedia which does a very good job of providing informative articles on a topic that is well interlinked with others. I particularly find the subsections very useful in deciding what categories to go with my blog topics.

At the end of this step, you should arrive at a stage where you have gathered enough background information about a short listed number of topics that you want to concentrate on targeting for your blog which leads you to the next step.

In the second part of the series, I’ll talk about Step 2 – Analyze the Traffic Potential of your Niche.
Then, I’ll conclude the series with Step 3 – Analyze the Profit Potential of your Niche.

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