Maybe you were one of them or perhaps you’ve started up your blog more recently or are considering getting one up and running soon. Either way, the chances are that you’ve pondered one big blogging question — how can you turn your blog posts into cash?
There are basically two types of bloggers in the world — reporters and experts — and some people perform both roles (usually the experts, it’s hard for reporters to become experts, but it’s easy for experts to report).
If you have ever taken an Internet marketing course or attended a seminar specifically for beginners, you have probably heard about this two different methodologies. If you blog for money then your business model is based on the content, by this, people are taught to either start as reporters, or if possible step up as experts.
I’ll be frank; you want to be the expert.
Reporters leverage the content of the experts. As we see, in most cases, people start off as reporters because they haven’t established expertise. Because of perceived value, experts enjoy the perks of preeminence and higher conversion rates, thus, it’s easier for them to get publicity, In the other words, experts in most cases simply make more money and attract more attention.
Most Bloggers Are Reporters
The thing with expertise is that it requires something — experience. No person can becomes an expert without doing things and learning. For new bloggers, in general case, they start their blogging journey by talking about everything going on in their niche (reporting) and by interviewing and talking about other experts (reporting again). There is nothing wrong with that, for many people, before you build up some expertise, it’s actually a necessity thing to do at first.
Unfortunately, when it comes to reporters and experts, the ratios are pretty skewed, there are a lot more reporters than there are experts, hence reporters tend to struggle in order to gain attention, and when they do, they often just enhance the reputation of the expert they are reporting on.
Don’t Replicate Your Teacher
If you have ever spent some time browsing products in the learn internet marketing niche you will notice a pattern. Many people first study Internet marketing from a ‘guru’ (for lack of a better term). The guru teaches how he or she is able to make money online, often time the view a student gleams is that in order to make money online you have to teach others how to make money online.
The end result of this process is a huge army of amateurs attempting to replicate what their teacher does in the same industry — the internet marketing industry — not realizing that without expert status, it’s hard to succeed.
Even people, who enjoy marginal success, let’s say, growing an email list of 1,000 people, for example, then go out and launch a product about how to grow an email list of 1,000 people. I have no problems with that, I think it’s fine to teach beginners and leverage whatever achievements you have, but the problem is that people gravitate to the same niche — Internet Mrketing — and rarely have any key points of differentiation.
Do you know how many products out there that claim to teach the same things — email marketing, SEO, pay per click, affiliate marketing, and all the sub-niches that fall under the category of internet marketing? There are lot, it’s a saturated market, when you see your teachers and other gurus making money teaching others how to make money (and let’s face it — making money as a subject is one of the most compelling) — your natural inclination is to follow in their footsteps.
If the key is to become an expert and you haven’t spent the last 5–10 years making money online, I suggest you look for another niche to establish expertise in.
Report on Your Process, Not Others
The secret to progress from reporter to expert is Not to focus on other experts and instead report on your own journey. When you are learning how to do something and implementing things day by day, or studying other people’s work, you actualy can use the things that you learn to create your own blog.
Exampke, if you learn a technique from an expert, you should take that technique, apply it to what you are doing and then report back YOUR results, not there’s. Frame things by using your opinions, your stories, and don’t regurgitate what the expert said. The key is differentiation and personality, not replication.
Expertise comes from doing things most people don’t do and then talking about it. If you do this often enough, one day when you wake up, you may heard others call you an expert too without even realizing how it happened.
You Know You are Already an Expert
Most people fail to become experts (or perceived as experts) because they don’t leverage what they already know. Every person who lives a life learns things as they go, takes action every day and knows something about something. The reason why they never become an expert is because they choose not to (which is fine for some, not everyone wants to be an expert anyway), but if your goal is to blog your way to expertise and leave the world of reporting behind you, you have to start teaching and doing so by leveraging real experience.
Experience can come from what you do today and what you have done previously; you just need to take enough steps to demonstrate what you already know and what you are presently learn along your journey.
Blogs and the Web in general, are amazing resources when you leverage them as a communication tool to spread your expertise. If all you ever do is to talk to people in person and share your experience using limited communication mediums, then you haven’t hope of becoming an expert. Take what you know and show other people through blogging, and you might be surprised how people change their perception of you in time.
Reporting is a Stepping Stone
If your previous experience and expertise is from an area you want to leave behind or you are starting from ‘scratch’, then reporting is the path you must walk, at least for the short term.
Reporting is a lot of fun. Interviewing experts, talking about what other people are doing and just being part of a community is not a bad way to blog. In many cases, people make a career of reporting (journalism is about just that), but if you truly want success and exponential results, at some point you will have to stand up and proclaim yourself as someone unusually good at something and then proceed to demonstrate it over and over again.
Have patience and focus on what you do to learn and then translate that experience into lessons for others. It’s okay to be a big fish in a small pond, that’s all most experts really are.
Finally, there are a number of great ways to create and market your blog, convert your random musings into cold hard cash. It is actually a pretty straightforward in creating a rather good income from blog writing, and surprisingly the secret is little to do with being a great author or writer. Instead it’s just a case of knowing how to start and construct your blog in a compelling way that builds readership and creates trust.
Related Posts
]]>The first thing you need to do is click on the ‘New Installation’ icon that will transfer you to the main installation information page as shown below (I will still use the same example, boxerdogtraining):
At the top of the page,
(1) will be the main domain name, below which you have the option of choosing a sub-directory of your site to install the WordPress
(2) Because in this case, you want to install the software on the main BoxerDogTrainingExpert.com site, you would leave this box empty.
Next, you need to create an Administration username and password (3 and 4), after that you move onto the ‘Base configuration’. The ‘Admin nickname’ that you choose for yourself
(5) is the name that will appear as the author every time you add new information or content to your site, with the e-mail address
(6) being the one to which any queries or comments that are submitted to your site by e-mail.
Next, you give the site a name (7) and a ‘byline’ that will appear underneath that name at the top of your WordPress page (8).
Finally, click the ‘Install WordPress’ button (9) and that is the installation essentially complete.
Using the information from the previous screen shot, you now have a site that looks something like this:
Yea, the look is plain and basically little more than functional, but from time being, at least you have a site that is live and published on the net.
The next step is to change the appearance of your site by finding and installing a new site template.
Finding a New Theme
There are dozens of websites where people make free WordPress themes available. No matter in whatever the niche or topic your site is about, there has a theme for you. To find free themes, you can search Google by using a search term like ‘free WP themes’ or just ‘WP themes’ to see what you can find, or you can also try to shortcut the process to find something you really like by searching for ‘your topic + theme’.
To help you save time, I suggest you use Professional Designed Theme, the design of the themes are not only look super, they are also search engine friendly.
After you done your theme search, the next job is to upload it to your site by using FTP Program.
Uploading the Theme
An FTP program is software that enables you to upload files from your computer to your website. There are many places where you can download a free FTP program but I would recommend Core FTP, primarily because it is extremely easy to use and of course, it is completely free. Just download and install it to your computer, open the program and then you can start to upload the new theme to your site.
The first time you open the program, you will see one window that shows you the folders and files on your ‘local’ computer (i.e. your desktop or laptop that you are currently using).
What you need to do is to add your server information (your site on your web hosts computer) so that the FTP program is able to create a connection between your pc and the remote server to where you want to upload the theme file.
Click the ‘File’ link at the top of the Core FTP window and then ‘Connect’ when it appears directly beneath the file link:
Clicking the ‘Connect’ link pulls up a window where you need to input the appropriate information that enables you to establish a connection between your local computer and the remote server:
The first thing to do is to give this particular connection a name that will help you to remember which site it is (1). It is important because an aide memoir can help you remember the sites, which means if you do not use an easily distinguishable name, eventually it might become difficult for you to remember all of them.
Next, you need to add the domain name or IP address of your site (2) followed by the user name and password that you use to log into the cPanel for that site (3 and 4).
Finally, click on the ‘Connect’ button at the bottom of the screen (5) to let your computer and your server communicate together. Assuming that this is the case, you should now see two windows in the Core FTP client, one of which shows the files and folders on your desktop whilst the other shows the folders on your remote server:
Next, you need to find the unzipped theme file on your local machine. The easiest way of doing this is to leave the unzipped theme file on your desktop which you can then locate by clicking on the ‘Documents and Settings’ link on the ‘local’ side of your FTP program:
After this, you should be shown a list of users, so click on your own user name (I am PC User on my machine):
And then finally click on ‘Desktop’:
You should now be able to see the folder which contains the new theme that you want to upload on your desktop:
Generally speaking, you will need to open this folder to make sure that you upload only the theme and not any other files or the information that might be contained in this main folder:
Okay, you have now located the appropriate theme information on your desktop. All you need to do now is upload it to your site. In order to do so, open the ‘public_html’ folder on your remote server:
Next, look for and open the ‘wp-content’ folder:
There are three folders in the ‘wp-content’ folder:
You need to upload the new theme to the ‘themes’ folder. To do so you just need to click and dragging the new theme folder from your local computer across to the themes folder on your remote server. Whilst the transfer is taking place, you should be able to see the individual files that are contained in the new theme folder that ‘stacked’ at the bottom of the page. The list of files will gradually decrease as each one is transferred from your local machine to your web hosting account:
Of course, once there are no more files to be transferred across, the theme should be uploaded.
The next job is to check that the transfer took place successfully and to activate the new theme, I will show you how to do in coming up next lesson.
Related Posts
]]>So in today’s lesson, I am going to show you the two different options toward how to build your sites.
Let’s back to our boxer dog training niche that I used in the lesson 4 as an example, you are going to create a site that is focused on providing boxer dog training information whilst promoting a dog food related information product from that site.
The first thing to consider is — “what are you going to feature on your site apart from details of the affiliate product that you are promoting?”
The answer to the question is, you are going to provide your visitors with information about dogs and dog training. Even more specifically, the majority of your content on offers are going to focus on providing information that relates to training boxer dogs. Thus, if you are using free Hostgator site builder program to build your site, its probably not going to be particularly well-suited to what you want to do. You therefore have two choices of how you create your site.
Option one is to do things in the ‘traditional’ way by building your site using HTML. If you have no experience of using HTML, You can simply run a Google search for ‘HTML tutorials’ and you will find plenty of sites where you can learn everything you need to know about HTML scripting, like learn from W3Schools.
Using the information from HTML tutorial sites like W3School, you should be able to create a simple web site pretty much as you want it to be. Another HTML option to go is to start from a site template of the kind that can be downloaded free from OSWD or Free Web Templates.
Doing it in this way obviously cuts down the amount of time and effort you need to expend on creating your website. It is not until your site is finished and published that you can start to earn money, hence getting to that situation as quickly as possible is definitely something to aim for.
Create a website by using HTML can be a slow and relatively time-consuming process, particularly if you are learning how to code in HTML as you are going along. For this reason, I would recommend an alternative non-HTML site building option that is quick, easy and at the same time can help you create superbly effective websites. It is particularly working well for an online marketing beginner, which is WordPress.
To install WordPress on your BoxerDogTrainingExpert site, you have two choices. The first choice is download the program from WordPress.org directly, and the second installation method is through your cPanel that located in your Hostgator account, once you login to your account, look for the icon for ‘Fantastico’ or ‘Fantastico De Luxe’ near the bottom of the page under ‘Software/Services’:
‘Fantastico’ is a suite of programs that are already pre-installed on your site, ready to be activated whenever you want to. One of the programs that is included in the ‘Fantastico’ suite is WordPress. All you need to do is just click on the WordPress link in the program list:
And then follow the step by step installation instructions, which will discuss in the next lesson. So stay turn.
In the mean time, if you are a type of person that prefer to learn it by watching videos, here they are:
* Setting Up a WordPress Site Part 1
* Setting Up a WordPress Site Part 2
* Setting Up a WordPress Site Part 3
Related Posts
]]>Speaking of blogging, there are many different ways to do that, you can do it by writing your own content, or re-publish other people’s material (article marketing), or create the videos and post it to the YouTube. The great thing about YouTube is that you can always go back to older videos and add your website links in the description area, and you can also use annotations to add your website address inside the video — that will help you capture a lot more of traffic from YouTube.
In this X-Factor video, Gideon (Blog MasterMind) reveals 7 tips you can use to optimize your YouTube videos to bring in maximum traffic for your blog.
The essence of an X-Factor technique Gideon talking about is to use combining multimedia, such as audio or video method with a social media service. The idea is that multimedia has more impact than text and through the use of social media you can syndicate the content further, thus bringing more traffic back to your blog.
We all know that YouTube is purchased by Google, and we know how good Google is at delivering traffic, they have placed YouTube videos at the top of their search result pages. As a result of this, simply learning How to Effectively use YouTube to Market Your Videos can bring in significant traffic back to your blog.
So watch the video now and learn the tips toward how to do it.
Related Posts
]]>In the previous lesson, I have guide you how to do your market analysis and domain registration. With your domain name registered, the next step you need is to set up a web hosting account, to ‘rent’ space on a computer (known as a ‘server’) from where your website can be presented to the world via the internet.
Set Up Your Web Hosting
There are literally hundreds of companies in the web hosting market, each of them vying for your business. However, you have to be extremely cautious when selecting a hosting service because the firm May Not immediately appears to be the best one in regarding to the level of service they provides.
For instance, the web hosting market is an extremely competitive place, many web hosts use rock bottom prices as their main point of attraction, but the problem with this is that the majority of web hosts who charge honest prices will have to cut the price or skimping on the services that they provide to their customers in order to keep business moving forward.
This is a critically important point to grasp because you have to reliant on your web host to keep your website live, you want your site to be visible 24/7/365, and anything that potentially threatens that visibility is a threat to your business. Unfortunately, no matter which web hosting company you choose to use the service, there is always a possibility that your site will occasionally have problems, or down, or crash, thus a web host who offers a 24 hour service support is very important, together with provide high quality level of customer service.
On the other hand, if you go for a web host who is charging rock bottom prices, generally they will not provide 24 hour service, and they are working only normal working hours instead. If there any down or crush happened to your site, it could be offline for a period of 12 hours, during which time you could lose an awful lot of sales and money.
In short, choosing a web host because they are the cheapest is normally a completely false economy, from the surface, it will save you a couple of dollars every month but it might ultimately cost you several hundreds of dollars over the course of the year. Thus, use a reputable web host firm to host your site with a certain percentage ‘up-time’ guarantee is crucial. Your sites need to up all the time.
Beside that, you also need to know the amount of disk space that a web host offer you, and you need to check on the bandwidth that would be associated with your account as well. In a lot of time, the majority of webmasters never come anywhere near using their full allocation of disk space (which basically equates to the number of megabytes of information that make up your site), bandwidth represents the amount of traffic or number of people who can see your site every month. Hence, you need to make sure that the web host you’re considering to use offers sufficient bandwidth.
Another important factor to consider is that some web hosts are far more internet business friendly than others, which means if your host understands the demands and requirements of online business, they are far more likely to be flexible than the one who are not particularly familiar with the world of online commerce.
Among those web hosting companies, one of them I would recommend you to get started is called Hostgator — a hosting service provider that is used and recommended by many thousands of experienced online marketers.
The organization is well versed in the demands and requirements of the online marketing community, they offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee and they use the excellent cPanel through which you control your site:
As you can see from the screenshot above, Hostgator even offers a free site building program resource.
Although this particular site builder is not primarily focused on building the kind of website that you need for online marketing purpose, but it is a reasonable fallback option that you can use to construct a site in an extremely quick way.
You can see the bandwidth and disk space is unlimited as is the number of domains that you can host under the same account.
Changing the Domain Name Server (DNS)
With your domain name registered and hosting account set up, the final job is to tie the two things together so that when people type your domain name or URL into their web browser, The internet company immediately ‘point’ that query at your site on your Hostgator account.
You probably noticed that when you do your domain registration, the Internet Company that you use also offer web hosting, but I will not recommend you do that because put all of your business into one single firm is a risk. If for whatever the reason, the company got problems, your business could be wiped out by their difficulties. That’s why you should register your domain and set up a hosting account with different organizations, which is in turn the reason why you need to change the DNS.
In order to do so, open up your domain name registry account, find the specific domain that you want to make alterations to and click on it, then you will see a ‘Nameservers’ button at the top of the page that looks something like this:
On the next page, take the information that Hostgator have sent you by e-mail toward their own nameserver, you can just copy/paste those nameserver details into the appropriate boxes on the detail change form as indicated here (you always need to change two nameserver addresses):
Click on the orange ‘OK’ button and you should see a message that tells you the changes will be made in the next few hours.
Generally speaking, it is never likely to take more than 24 to 48 hours before these changes are propagated. In my own experience, the propagate generally happen far more quickly than this. Once these changes are made, you are now in a situation where anyone types your domain name into their browser will be immediately redirected to your Hostgator web hosting account to see your site.
However, there is obviously nothing on that site at the moment, so creating your site is the next step.
If you still confusing or not clear the step, I also have two videos for you to watch in regarding to how to set up your web hosting account videoPart 1 and Part 2.
Related Posts
]]>In the other words, you are back at Square 1.0, not at Web 2.0 for you! If you think of it, your blog is merely content that you create for Blogger and others like them. They will benefit from it far more than you ever will.
If you haven’t read my previous post about SBI 2.0 Solution for e-Businesses, you should read it NOW!
Speaking of e-business-building, SBI! has long been the best way to achieve that success. No other product has its proven track record of success. It is a solution that includes a proven process, all the tools to execute, superb support and unmatched forums, and constant updating a product that delivers success at a rate that no other company can document.
With the addition of their Content 2.0 technology (C2), SBI! 2.0, it explodes its unique ability to reach out across the Web in a way that magnetically attracts the sort of targeted, receptive traffic any e-business needs to thrive on the Net. And it allows you to easily develop an interactive site and create a Web community within your niche, instantly changing the landscape of your business.
SBI! 2.0 transforms your site from a one-to-one line of communication (like a regular Web site or blog) into a “many to many” environment, where visitors actually create original information or “content” for you by submitting articles, images, stories, videos, etc. to your site.
In short, visitors create entirely new, relevant and Search Engine-pleasing content and traffic for you.
You can check out the demo of How the SBI! 2.0 Works, explore and read the stories on the site’s pages, and learn how some SBIers even put their sites on cruise control and let their visitors grow their Web business for them!
If you have a passion for something. Your knowledge and life experiences are unique. You should use SBI! 2.0 to tap into your interests and to connect with like-minded people. From that kernel of passion, sprout a growing, profitable Web business that can change your life.
The other great news is that from now until Valentine’s Day (midnight Feb14), they are offering I Love SBI! Special $100 Valentine Gift — for only $100 more for your subscription, you get a Free SBI! You can give it to whomever you want to give, even yourself, great deal.
Hope you can read through and study the solution, and remember that your future is in your own hand!
Have a good weekend 
Related Posts
]]>Before you move on to start creating your first genesis to success make money affiliate marketing site, there are still few couple more jobs you need to do and get them finalized.
As far as online marketing is concerned, the easiest products to promote generally are digital information products because the nature of its immediately deliver (download directly via the internet). Hence, in a world where instant gratification is becoming the accepted norm, promoting and selling digital information products make a great deal.
Market Analysis Steps
The biggest repository of digital information products of this nature is Clickbank, a place where there are over 10,000 information products listed, and the other digital marketplace for information products is Click2Sell. So no matter which market niche you want to get into, you will be able to find the products to promote from either sites.
Let’s use the same example from previous guide — If you were targeting the boxer dog training market, this would be a product that would work, because no matter what kind of dog individual pet owners have in their home, it needs feeding:
Alternatively, if you want to promote tangible, physical products and services, there are also plenty of sites where you can find the right products for your niche, you can go to the sites like Commission Junction and ShareaSale etc.
Promoting or selling tangible products or services is often a little more difficult than pushing digital products because physical products have to be delivered, whereas services are often geographically localized.
Due to these slightly disadvantages, most new affiliates tend to prefer to promote digital products, so I am going to ‘run’ with the information product related to dog food that we discovered earlier at Clickbank.
The other thing to consider is the money aspect. Is there money being spent in this market?
To find out this fact, you usually need to do nothing much more than run a standard Google search. If there are plenty of advertisers shown on the search results page, it is a market where there is money being spent because advertisers do not waste money on advertising the product that is no demand:
You can see from above image, there are obviously plenty of advertisers in the dog food market, so there is money being spent.
Although you are going to generate income by promoting a dog food related products as an affiliate, but the primary focus of your site should be focus on boxer dog training. So after you done your market analysis, the next job is to register a domain name that is relevant to the subject matter of the site that you are going to create.
Choose an Appropriate Domain Name
Ideally, this domain name should be one that is directly related to the primary subject that matter of your site, you can choose a domain name that related to the product or service you are promoting.
This is important step because having a domain name that is appropriate or directly related (keyword) to your sites’ topic makes it easier for both human visitors and search engines to understand what your site about. It has plenty of value to your business in the long run.
In the other words, the topic of your site, product name and the domain name you choose would all logically tie together very neat.
Like in our boxer dog training example, if you want to create ‘The Boxer Training Bible’ product, you need to check that the same domain name is available or not before you start the product creation process.
As every domain name on the internet has to be unique (there is, for example, only one Google.com or yahoo.com), if someone else has already grabbed the name, you cannot have that one. If that is the case, you need to try to come up with a list of the least half a dozen viable alternative names before beginning your domain registration process.
To register a domain name of your choice, you need to use an online domain name registration company’s service, such as use cheapname or godaddy.
As part of the domain registration process, you will be offered a choice of how long you want to register the name for. You can register for as short a period as only one year, but I would recommend that you register your new domain for at least two years. This is because generally Google and the other major search engines will accord more credibility to the domain names that are registered for more than one year.
If you missed the previous lesson, here they are:
* Part 1: Your First Genesis to Success Make Money Site Guide
* Part 2: Your First Genesis to Success Make Money Site Guide
* Part 3: Your First Genesis to Success Make Money Site Guide
Related Posts
]]>With Internet, you can start a business with either invest little, or invest a dime if you don’t want to. You don’t need that much money to make money any more. You don’t need to buy a website. You don’t need to pay for equipment. You just have to Spend Time to Learn the skills, the knowledge, to be prepared, to pick up the Tools that Internet marketers, companies have made available, put them to use and work to bring the results.
You can be an affiliate and use Affiliate Marketing method, together with the new development, use the easy way to help you get an effective affiliate site up, which is builds SEO friendly ‘review’ style sites Affiliate Genie to build as many sites as you want with it, in as many niches as you want, to speed up your results with affiliate programs. And you can promote those affiliate products that you choose to an audience of people who might want to buy them to extract revenue from that market.
None of above these are rocket science, none of them are that expensive, especially if you compared to the costs involved in an offline business. However, none of them will happen overnight, they can Only happen to anyone who is prepared to put in the hours, efforts, energy and work.
If you want success, and has only time and effort to invest to get it, now it is a fantastic time for you. It is time for you to make a amazing change in your life.
Related Posts
]]>Some people are registered in free blog hosting websites, while others are makes blogs in paid blog websites. No matter which every the way you choose to use, you will see that blogging is indeed enjoyable. You will be able to write about absolutely anything and everything you want to discuss, and blogging brings fame.
The internet is one big marketplace where you will be able to buy and sell almost everything you want. Blogging is not just an online journal, it can serve as an emotional outlet for some people by writing about their feelings, it can serve as a website that can let people tell their original short fiction or non fiction stories, and it can also serve as a website for advertising etc.
Although there are thousands of people have their own blogs and blogging websites, but the fact is that not many people become successful, many sites out there are sleeping and have not generate much traffic. However, some bloggers who are so good at writing great things do make thousand dollars a week by just simply out of donations from readers.
As a business owner, no matter you are running a multi-million dollars or only an one man show business, you will definitely want to use blogging as your tool for marketing. In fact, you maybe already see that there a lot of businesses today are now using blogs as an advertising tool to help them in ranking in the profits and attracting more people to buy from their business.
And it’s become clear that blogs have uses beyond the ad revenue that business can bring in. They’re also important for search engine optimization. They can provide a focus for a community and they can help to support a commercial site as well.
Set up a blog is really easy, but create a blog that wows and inspires is not really a simple task. If you want to make money from your blogs, as it said, it is always best to try and make money from what you know because it is far easier to write about what you know than to try and make money writing about other things, the things you don’t familiar with.
In this week’s MBA Digest, you will learn few secrets toward creating blogs that are totally pro, inspires or does the exact job you want it to in just 7 days.
Till next time — happy sharing
Cheers!
Related Posts
]]>If however you have no specific business notion in mind, in this part 3 series of Your First Genesis to Success Make Money Website Guide, you will learn how to find a market into which you can launch a successful website.
The golden rule for when it comes to launching a new web-based business is, firstly, you have to find a market in which is active and secondly, you must ensure that there is money being spent in that market.
Most of the time, people come to net is for seeking for information. Hence, if you establish the kind of information those people are looking for, you have taken the first step right. By establishing that there is money being spent in this particular market, you satisfy the second necessary criterion too.
There are literally dozens of websites that you can refer to in an effort to discover what people are looking for. Some of these sites are places where people buy products or services, whereas others are sites which visitors use to either ask questions or to give an indication of their interests and hobbies.
Sites like eBay and Amazon fall into the first category, because with both of these sites, it is a fairly simple process to find out what people are looking for and buying. Example, on the ebay pulse page, you can see the most popular products on the site in the previous 24 hours.
You can click on the ‘Category’ drop down menu at the top of the page to discover what the most popular products or services are in each market sector. In this way, you can grasp some idea of what people are looking for when they use the world’s biggest auction site.
Amazon, on the other hand have a ‘Bestsellers’ feature that you can use to generate a picture of the products or services that people are buying from one of the most popular online retail sites.
To find these ‘Bestsellers’, you can just click on any of the categories at the top left hand corner of the homepage:
Click your chosen selection – books is always a good starting point if you have no particular idea in mind – and then look for the ‘Bestsellers’ link at the top of the page:
Other sites where you can gain an idea of the sort of information that people are seeking, giving or discussing are Yahoo! Answers, 43 Things, and the DMOZ Directory site.
After researching all of these sites, you should have some ideas for your first business website.
Let’s say based upon your research, you have seen that there appears to be a good number of people searching for information related to dog training (a huge active market) on the net, and your initial thought is to create a website that focuses on dog training, example.
Before you begin to do so, you need to extend your research a little bit further. To make money online, you need to give yourself the best chance of doing it if you find a market sector or niche where there are plenty of people searching for information but not too much competition.
For instance, since there are certainly plenty of people searching for information about dog training, there for sure will already have quite a few web pages where they can find this information if you Google it:
As you can see, Google have 6.25 million pages listed for ‘dog training’, the number is increasing every minutes. Thus, the chances of you being able to successfully promote a site that is focused on dog training would be extremely limited.
If however you were to narrow this down to something more specific, you might find that there is considerably less competition.
For example, it you decide to create your dog training site that focuses on just one particular breed of dog, you would stand a significantly higher chance of achieving success and making money from that site:
Any Google search that indicates less than 30,000 competing web pages for an exact search term match (with your chosen search term in inverted commas – “.”) is one for which competition is acceptably limited. You could therefore reasonably expect to achieve a top search ranking relatively quickly.
Consequently, rather than trying to compete with 6.25 million other web page owners by building a site focused on dog training, it would make much more sense to build a site focused on ‘boxer dog training’ instead.
