The guy who explains his process (John, known as XFactor on the forums) was literally begged by people (right in the thread) to condense the material to an ebook.  That way we didn’t have to read through so much junk, and we could have his definitive answers to some of the oft-repeated questions.

He finally created his ebook.  No kidding, it’s one of the best ones I’ve read.  There’s no hidden affiliate links, no fluff.  He just walks through his exact method.  He does not claim to be the end-all be-all answer man…he just reveals what HE does.

I bought his guide and decided to put it to the test.  So many folks on the forums had given positive feedback, with actual results, that I thought I would give it a try.

The great thing about it is that it is very, very practical.  It isn’t just concepts that seemingly could make you money.  I can’t tell you how many guides I’ve read where I’m impressed with the IDEAS.  I know in my head that they could make money…but for one reason or another, they never implement in a way that makes the money that was conceptualized.

With Xfactor’s guide, the idea is to:

• find product-oriented micro niches (like “glass top end tables”),
• ensure that the proper search volume is there to support it, but that the competition on page 1 of Google is easy to beat
• validate that advertisers will indeed pay a decent amount per click,
• setup a small website, HIGHLY optimized for high click-through-rate,
• run an article marketing campaign that will put your site on page one quickly, and keep it there.
• see income of $2-$5 per day per site
• make many of these sites (since they take only about an hour to create)

Like he even says…there’s nothing new under the sun.  This isn’t some earth-shattering new discover, some secret Google hack, or anything black hat.  It just takes the CONCEPTS that we all have learned and gives it an actual step-by-step.

Now…for the RESULTS:

I have been doing this for 3 weeks at the time of this writing.  (Keep in mind I have a full-time job and work at this only in the evenings after the kids are in bed and the wife and I don’t have other plans.)  I have created 4 sites.  2 of them are now on page 1 of Google, and of those two, both are averaging over $2-$3 per day.  The other two are not yet on page 1.  I have not even completed the article marketing campaign that he recommends…not for ANY of the four sites yet.  The general consensus is that it takes about four to six weeks for the sites to ‘mature’.  (Sites bounce around on and off the first page during the early days.)

I’m about to start another site or two this week, so I’ll keep you posted on those results when I start to see them.

Xfactor’s Micro Niche Adsense Course costs $67 when I paid for it.  With these two sites alone, it will pay for itself in about 5 weeks…then every other site I create will be gravy!

By the way – he uses Micro Niche Finder as his tool of choice, and gives very specific results you should look for when choosing a niche keyword phrase.  It’s a phenomenal tool (my favorite keyword tool, even over Keyword Elite), and I already had it, but if you don’t, it’s worth the investment.

UPDATE: Well, I’ve made over $341 since I started. I had a learning curve, and I only spend a little time every week working on it. I only have 13 sites up, but frankly I don’t even count some of the early ones. (I did a bad job at picking the niche and the domain name.) I think the thing that helped me turn the corner was the membership forums he offers. There is a TON of good information about SEO, niche-picking, link-building, etc., that really make it easy. This is definitely a course worth picking up, and if you do, be sure to get involved in the forum.

In the past, people have sold lists of high-paying Adsense keywords, or built tools to figure out the best ones.

Now, Google itself has created the tool.

Google’s Search-based Keyword Tool provides all the information you need.

Go to that site, and ignore the idea of putting in a website URL to check.  Just click the link at the bottom that says ‘see top keywords across all categories’.

Then browse the categories on the left side to your niche and the results are displayed to the right.  You will see the phrase, expected number of searches per month, and suggested bid value.  Keep in mind that the bid value is for Google’s Search Results Adwords, which cost more than Content-Network bids (which is what you’d get paid with Adsense on your site).

But still…even though you might not make that dollar value per click, you can get an idea of what the high-paying phrases are.

You can even export the results into Excel (well…a .csv file which can be opened by Excel).  In Excel, you can use the AutoFilter option to eliminate phrases with low searches, and sort so you can see the highest-paying phrases at the top.

I know I plan on using this new Google tool.  I’m sure once you start to use it, you’ll find other uses, too.  (HINT:  spy on authority sites in your niche to find relevant keyword phrases)

It all depends on your perspective.  First, if you have your own eBook, an eBook cover will help sales.  Studies show that having an image of something tangible will boost your sales significantly.  Actually, the qualifier on that is that the image has to look good.  If it looks like garbage, it can hurt sales.  So the first way to profit is if you have your own eBook and you add a cover graphic to your sales page.

The second way is to refer people to my new eBook!    I have recently created an eBook that gives step-by-step instructions on how to create an eBook cover using FREE software.  (Most of the programs out there that make covers require Photoshop, which costs $300…and the programs themselves cost an additional $50 to $100.)  So we compiled a detailed walkthrough on how to use GIMP (free open source graphics software) to create those cool-looking covers.  You can see some examples here: Make eBook Covers.

So how does that help you profit?  Simple!  You can refer people to a product that has its own niche.  (It’s much cheaper than any other solution to get the professional-looking quality.)  And you DON’T need an affiliate account with Clickbank or anywhere else.  All you need is a PayPal address.  Then you can refer people who could use this kind of book to:

http://www.makeebookcovers.com/?e=NAME@PAYPALADDRESS.COM

…only you replace the NAME@PAYPALADDRESS.COM with the email address that you use to receive PayPal payments.  That essentially is your affiliate ID.

I give you 50% of the sales from your affiliate ID. The way it works is this:  For the first purchase made from your ID, you get 100% of the sale.  I get 100% of the second, you get the third, I get the fourth, etc.

There is NO WAITING.  When someone you refer clicks the button to buy, the system determines which of us gets that payment, and it goes directly into your PayPal account when it’s your turn.  No accumulation of sales to a minimum amount and then waiting for a check.    You get the payment right away.

The third way to profit from eBook covers is to design and sell them.  There are lists of folks who are looking for eBook covers who can’t do it themselves and will pay someone else to do it for them.  If you enjoy getting creative with graphics, learn how to make the covers and start selling them.  (Of course, there’s a chapter in the eBook with resources of where to find buyers and sell to them safely.)

So, depending on what your circumstances are, hopefully you can use one of the ways listed above to profit with eBook covers!

http://www.inlineseo.com/dofollowdiver/

This search engine finds blogs that do not use the ‘no-follow’ tags on their comments section.  In addition, this particular search engine finds blogs that use the ‘Top Commentator’ or ‘CommentLuv’ plugins.

So what does this mean for you?

See if you can ‘follow’ this chain of logic.  (insert pun groan here):

1. part of good SEO and ranking is by having related sites link into your site
2. part of good SEO is having those inbound links be about your particular keyword phrase
3. many blogs use a ‘no-follow’ tag on links in their comment section.  That tag prevents search engines from following the link.  In other words, even if you have a link from a comment section of another blog to your site, the Google spider will not find and index your page by crawling it…it ignores the no-follow links.
4. SOME blogs do not use the no-follow tag.
5. ergo, if you post a comment on those particular blogs, you are creating inbound links for the search engines to find and count.
6. In addition, CommentLuv is a WordPress plugin that will search your blog’s feed when you post a comment on a blog with it installed. It then places a link to your most previous post in the comment you wrote, for some extra link juice to an internal link on your blog.

And even more: Top Commentator is a WordPress plugin that allows the people who comment the most on a blog within a certain time frame (usually a month), a sitewide link, usually in the sidebar of the blog. This is great not only for great backlinks on every page of a dofollow blog, but also a great, free advertising opportunity.

To take advantage of this, you:

1. enter a search term related to your niche or your website
2. visit the blogs the search engine returns
3. read the post and make a RELEVANT comment
4. USE YOUR KEYWORD PHRASE AS YOUR NAME!! This is very important because it is the anchor text for the inbound link.

That’s it!  Adding a couple of comments on these blogs per day from various blogs creates a nice steady build of inbound links using your anchor text.  In addition, if you are one of the top commentators on a particular site (sometimes with as few as 1-3 posts in a given period of time), you now have site-wide exposure from that blog…that’s many pages, usually, with inbound links.

So, search the list of ‘DoFollow’ blogs, start commenting, and drive traffic to your site!

Let me share a strategy that I use from time to time. I don’t do it every day, but it only takes a few minutes. So if I have a few spare minutes, I’ll use this to make some money for free, very quickly!

I’m assuming that you have a blog with Adsense. (If you don’t, read the Step-by-Step Profit Guide from the menu at the top. It tells you how to setup a free blog and put Adsense on it.)

So, how do you get a surge of traffic to your site, spending very little time on it?

Three quick steps:

1. Hot Keywords – go to Google Hot Trends
2. Thought Stringing
3. Social Bookmarking

Hot Keywords – Go to Google Hot Trends.  It shows what people are searching for RIGHT NOW…the top 100 phrases by search volume.  (It’s updated every hour or two, and tells when the last update was.)  See any words that look interesting to you?  See anything that is related to a product?  Keep in mind that many of the searches will be of celebrities.  But you can find hot news stories, or hot products that are being searched heavily.  Something got mentioned on CNN or Oprah and everyone’s checking it.  You can click on the keyword phrases Google lists to see what the top news and blog articles are.  (Hint:  you have almost instant content.  Read a few of the articles and restate them in your own words for unique content relevant to a hot topic!)

Thought Stringing – Thought Stringing is the process of connecting related thoughts.  So, if a hot topic is the phrase “Madonna Divorce”, think about a thought that might be related to that phrase, or even use that phrase.  (You usually don’t want to copy that exact phrase because there will be WAAY too much competition for it.)  So, think about related phrases:  “madonna split up”, “madonna break up”, “madonna custody”, or think of a sub-phrase (one that contains the hot phrase.  it won’t get as much traffic, but will pickup some): “madonna divorce settlement”, “madonna divorce terms”, “madonna divorce agreement”, “madonna divorce rumors”…  The point about thought stringing is that you need to think like someone searching for information about the hot topic.  Pretend you just caught a snippet of the story on the news, or over-heard someone talking about the story.  If you wanted to learn more about it, what keywords would YOU use?  Chances are, others will, too.  (Maybe “madonna getting divorced”?) If you are stuck and have a mental block, you can use a tool like Keyword Elite, which lets you plug in a phrase and it comes up with thousands of related phrases very quickly.

Write a blog post on your blog, using your thought-strung keyword phrase as the title.  In addition to making it the title, make sure it appears in the first and last line of the blog post.  I prefer to re-type the title, and enclose it in <h1> header tags at the top. (That tells search engines that your page is primarily about this topic.)  I restate my conclusion at the bottom, using the phrase again, and surround that statement by <b> bold tags.

Almost there!  Now you’ve got good content about a heavily-searched keyword phrase…and a unique phrase that possibly hasn’t appeared on the web before, meaning less competition!

Social Bookmarking Marketing – copy the URL of your specific post (not just the main page of your blog), and head over to SocialMarker, and submit your blog to the major Social Bookmarking sites there.

Even if YOUR page doesn’t get in the top 10 of Google quickly, chances are good that a Propeller page or a Digg or Mixx page will!

It took me longer to type this article than it takes me to enact it.  I can literally check Google Hot Trends, find a keyword phrase I like, thought-string it, post about it, and crank it out through Social Marker in about 10 minutes total.  FREE!  NO COST to me other than that time.

My results from this have varied.  I’m not promising that you’ll get rich doing this all day long.  BUT, I will say that I’ve had hundreds to thousands of visitors hit my site within 30 minutes of me posting a new post, cranking out the Adsense revenue!!  With that volume of visitors, people WILL click some of your ads (assuming you’ve blended them properly, etc.).  AND, the cool thing is that somehow these hot topics have a way of re-surging.  For example, two weeks after I made one of these ‘quickie’ blog posts, after traffic has gone away (because it wasn’t a hot topic any more), all the sudden a bunch of visitors hit my page again.  Some news agency picked up the story in some remote place and re-published it, or it made it into a magazine article that just got delivered or something, and there was another surge.  Once you create that post, it NEVER GOES AWAY, and you own that little piece of virtual real estate.

Keep trying.  You will have varying results depending on how good you are at thought-stringing, keyword competition, value of the Adsense that appears on your blog, etc.  Eventually you will start to ‘fine-tune’ the hot phrases you pick.  You will find that some work easier than others.  You will start to look for phrase combos that likely haven’t appeared before.  For example, if a hot phrase is “Fannie Mae”, because it’s in the news…chances are that there are MILLIONS of pages with almost every conceivable phrase related to Fannie Mae.  But a phrase like “Dillon Suicide” (totally fictional, assuming Dillon is a famous actor), probably hasn’t appeared before, and you can thought-string from there to find a common phrase with little competition.

One final thought…if you are lucky, you will find keyword phrases that you can also tie to an affiliate product. As you are examining the keywords, look for product-based phrases (which is tough…most hot topics are people-oriented, like celebrities). Almost any product can be sold through an affiliate. If you belong to some of the affiliate networks, like Commission Junction or LinkShare, then many times you can add links in your blog posts to your affiliate product. Generally affiliate sales pay more than Adsense, which is why I mention this.

Anyway, I hope you understand this method for making free fast money using hot keywords. It works if you work it!

The search results ads are shown on Google’s page, when someone enters a search. If someone searches a term with a keyword on which you are bidding, your results will show up at the top or along the right side of the results (if you bid high enough). Search result ads are more expensive because they do get good, quality clicks, and because of the competitors bidding for a given set of keywords.

The Content Network are the pages on the internet that are using Google’s Adsense code to display relevant ads. So, for example, a blog about bicycles might have Adsense ads about bikes displaying on the site.

Content Network (CN) traffic is very different than Search traffic. It’s much less targeted, so people clicking are more likely to be ‘browsers’ than ‘searchers’. Browsers generally convert less. Content Network traffic is therefore much less expensive. Your bids for keywords on the CN should be much lower than those for search.

In fact, for search, many times Google won’t even activate your keywords unless you bid a minimum amount…and this amount can go up if the search term becomes popular.

But here’s the trick with the Content Network…some people will type in the displayed URL directly, without clicking.

I’ve had two different websites with campaigns running. On BOTH, I noticed an increase of 3% of DIRECT traffic after I started running my CN campaigns, and that was WITHOUT any clicks.

It feels like cheating Google. Google is displaying my URL tens of thousands of times per month, and I’m not paying a penny. Well, sometimes I pay a penny. In fact, my bid on those terms is set at $.01…one penny. So the times that someone does actually click my link means I don’t pay very much.

The point is this: if you are hesitant to pay for Google Adwords ads, start with the Content Network. Keep your bids to one penny. Enter a ton of relevant keywords (and segment your campaigns as much as possible to test which keyword combos are working well). And make sure that your display URL is something that people will want to see. They are more likely to type in a name that is short and directly related to what they are looking for.

So get going with your super-cheap campaigns and take advantage of the free traffic that will come as folks type in the URL directly instead of clicking!

When starting out with paid traffic, one question that arises is, “Do I direct link to the affiliate page or create my own landing page?”

To create a Google ad, you have to put in both a “destination URL” and a “display URL”. The display URL is the one that shows on the ad. The destination URL is the link that the click will actually follow. Google’s Terms of Use state that the domain on which the visitor ultimately sees after clicking should match the display URL. So, for example,

Direct linking is when the URL that your Google Ad points to is the one that belongs to the affiliate themselves. For example, if I were creating an add for the “Top Secret Magic Code” product at Clickbank, I can create the ad with a destination URL of http://makewowg.magiccode.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=MAGAD, but I MUST set the display URL to www.topsecretmagiccode.com, since that’s where the person clicking ends up. This is called direct linking. I’m using my ad to drive traffic directly to the affiliate page.

The main advantage of direct linking is that you don’t need any programming experience to build your own landing page, and don’t need to take the time or invest the cost in creating your own page. For some folks, it’s just easier to create a bunch of ads pointing directly to the affiliate page and let it go.

However, there are three disadvantages of direct linking:

1. ad rotation
2. direct traffic
3. some affiliate products restrict direct linking

Google rotates ads that point to the same display URL. If you and 99 other folks are advertising a specific affiliate product, and are all using direct link, you dilute the number of times your ad will be seen. Google will only return one ad per display URL when a search is performed.

Also, a good number of web users will type in the display URL directly to their browser rather than click an ad. (I have two case studies I’ll talk about in another article that prove this.) I’m not sure all the reasons why they do this, but some users are wary of ads. They figure that if the site is legitimate, typing the URL directly will take them there. That means you’re losing revenue by sending folks directly to the affiliate without ever having your tracking cookie planted.

Lastly, you need to check with the terms for your specific affiliate product. Some don’t let you direct link at all, and others restrict the keywords on which you can bid.

With those factors in mind, Direct Linking is already at a disadvantage over pointing clicks to a landing page of your own. There are several other advantages of using your own landing page which I’ll discuss in another article.

The easiest thing to do is to watch the video tutorial below:

Even Google itself acknowledges this. The diagram below is taken from their site, showing what are the ‘hot zones’ that generate more traffic.

People surfing the web become ‘Ad Blind’…that is, they learn how to glance at a web page and pick out the content they are looking for, and how to ignore the ads. The better blended your ads are into your page, the less likely they are to ignore it.

Be sure to follow the AdSense program policies. For example, I read an article by a guy who increased his click-through-rate (CTR) by 200%. He had aligned small pictures to go directly over each ad in a particular adsense block. People were clicking the ads thinking that it was more information about what was in the picture. Google has since made that practice off-limits. (And think about it…if you were an advertiser, would you want to pay out for a bunch of clicks that brought people to your site when they weren’t really looking for what your site has to offer?)

The keys to blending are:

• ad placement
• content-wrapping
• color matching
• font-style matching
• keeping within policy guidelines

Ad Placement – refer to Google’s heat map. One of the best practices is to keep ads ‘above the fold’. That’s a newspaper term for the articles that appear on the top half of the newspaper’s front page, since that’s the part that is displayed in the news stands. That’s what you want people to see right away. Ads that appear ‘below the fold’ on a website (ie: you have to scroll down to see them) get far fewer clicks than those that are above the fold.

Content-wrapping – This is the practice of having your content wrap around an adsense block. Tests have shown that it helps reduce ad-blindness…visitors notice the ad when it’s right in the way of what they are reading.

Color matching – Usually you want invisible boxes (borders and backgrounds of the ad that match the background of the page they are on). You want the text blurb and the url of the ad to match the text color of your font. The title of the ad could match whatever link color you are using on the page so that users might click it thinking it’s a link to another part of your site.

Font matching – Try to get the fonts to match closely. If your site uses a large-size font and you have an AdSense block with 5 ads in it, the text in that ad block will be small…and people will probably ignore it. Go with a san-serif (like Arial) type font since that’s what Google uses.

Keep within policies – Enough said. If you try to cheat, you will get caught, and banned for life. And it is very, very difficult to get another Google account once you’re banned. (If they find out you had been banned before, they will ban you again automatically.) Avoid aligning images next to your ads. (I’ve seen templates that actually make it look like each link ad across the top of a page is a different tab. Deceitful and bannable.) Make sure there are no pop-ups or anything that will cause users to click on the ads trying to navigate around the page or close a pop-up.

Most importantly – NEVER click on your own links!!!

Lastly, make sure to create a different channel in AdSense for each of your ad positions. That allows you to test to see what percentage of clicks are coming from which ad block, and adjust accordingly.

For more info on this, visit Google’s Adsense Help Center.

Comment Kahuna is a free tool that allows you to quickly post comments to blogs related to your keywords, and to increase the number of inbound links to your site.

It searches blogs based on whatever keyword you want. You can choose which type of blogs (ie: WordPress, Drupal, etc.), and even set a minimum Page Rank for the blogs you want to see. AND it will search for ‘DoFollow’ tags. DoFollow tags mean that the GoogleBot will actually follow the URL link to your site to help it get indexed and to count it as an inbound link. (Some blogs set a NoFollow tag, so even though a visitor can click and follow the link, the search engine bots don’t. Then the links don’t help your backlink count, or your indexing.)

You could get ‘spammy’ with Comment Kahuna, but its interface allows you to interact with each blog individually. You can either use your pre-made comments, or enter them individually for each site. I prefer to tweak the comment to fit the site so the webmaster is more likely to approve it if it’s moderated.

One tip: make sure that the ‘Name’ you use for your profile is a set of keywords you’re targeting. For example, don’t put ‘Joe’ as your name, put ‘Mower Blades’ if those are the keywords you want to get ranked for. Because the way blogs display comments, the URL you provide in the comment gets linked to the name.

So check out Comment Kahuna. After all, it’s free!