But it’s a common problem.  You want to make your blog profitable, but you run out of ideas about which you can write.

I have developed a package called Uniquification which solves two problems:

1. getting over writer’s block and finding topics to write about
2. generating unique content quickly and easily

In fact, I’ve created an entire blog over at No Duplicate Content (www.noduplicatecontent.com) to help document strategies to solve those two problems.

If you have trouble coming up with you next post, or if you don’t know what to write, check out the ideas at No Duplicate Content.  The Uniquification report is free!

Here’s a taste:

• special searches you can do for your niche to find hot topics
• one of the biggest sources of content that is NOT indexed by the search engines, but easily lends itself to creating blog content
• how to convert exisiting content on the web into your own, original, unique content for your site

I even have some macros that you can run in your web browser that automate some of the brainstorming and content-gathering.

So check it out, and drop me a line to let me know how you like it!

Uniquification – Generating Unique Content Quickly and Easily

Oh…these ideas apply to way more than just blogs.  If you are doing article marketing or want to develop your own free report (or paid report!), these ideas will help!

BUT…should I waste my time on certain keyword phrases?

It’s pretty clear if someone is looking for “cheap antique clocks”, that they have commercial intent…in other words they have a high likelihood to BUY.  As opposed to someone searching for “colon cancer”.  Those folks are probably just reading and researching, with no intent of spending money.

The difference between “cheap antique clocks” and “colon cancer” is obvious.  It’s easy to tell that one might have commercial intent and the other doesn’t.  But what about phrases that aren’t as obvious?

There is a new tool that can help:

MSN’s Commercial Intent Tool

The tool gives a score of commercial (or non-commercial) intent.  You enter the keywords, check the ‘Query’ radio button, and hit ‘Go’.  The scale is 0 to 1, so just multiply by 100 and you have the percentage that the keywords entered have the intent listed (either commercial or non-commercial).

So, if you have a choice between multiple keywords, try using this tool to help discern what is in the hearts of the visitors to your site.

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)

I’m one of those “go-with-what-you-know” guys.  Start with something you feel passionate about, because that is something that you will most easily stick with, and you’ll probably have an easier time finding and building out content for your websites, ebooks, etc.

Still, we can all use some help when it comes to this kind of brainstorming, so here are some questions I like to ask to get the thoughts going:

• What are your hobbies?
• What problem have you solved recently?
• What information have you searched for on the internet recently?
• Go to Yahoo Answers, and plug in a keyword related to a niche you think you like.  Browse through to find out what questions people are asking about that topic.  Can you answer any of them?  (Don’t do it yet…wait until you have a site to link to.  But if you can answer them, that means you have content in your head that people are looking for!)
• What forums to you frequently read?  What forums are related to your potential niche?  (hint: google the word ‘forum’ with your niche keyword)  What questions are people asking on the forums?  What are the hot topics about on those forums?
• If someone offered to buy you lunch if you would present on a subject, and speak for 30 minutes, what would you talk about?
• What have you and your friends been talking about on Facebook, MySpace, etc.?
• What was the last exciting thing that happened to you?  Could you talk about that for 30 minutes?

With these questions in mind, you can usually narrow down from a broad niche to a specific subset.  The next question you need to ask is extremely important:  “How do I monetize it?”  That’s what it’s all about, right?

To figure out ways to monetize the niche, try some more Google searches (replacing niche with your specific one), like:

• affiliate niche
• review niche
• niche accessories

Then try searching Commission Junction, eBay (if you’re lucky enough to be an affiliate of theirs), ClickBank, PayDotCom, $7 Offers, etc., for related products to market.

Hopefully those questions will give you a place to start.  For me, once I pick a niche topic, it’s then pretty easy to drill down into the different aspects of that topic by visiting a site like Yahoo Answers.  That site is worth its weight in gold for determining what information people are looking for.

I was one of the casualties hurt by eBay’s decision.  I had an ebook that had been selling well every month.  For a while it was making me a ton of money.  As more competition crept in, it ended up making me only a small amount.  However, the ebook was loaded with other affiliate links…so I was happy anytime someone took it, even if I was just barely breaking even.

So, when eBay decided that they weren’t going to allow Digital Delivery, I pulled down my auctions, and my ebooks sat on my hard drive.

Until now.

I received an email newsletter the other day with information on a new book about using Kindle to sell ebooks.  Now, I get about half a dozen newsletters a day, usually with some pitch to some product to help me make more money…and I usually pass, since they are nothing new.

But Kindle Secrets was different for me.  It gave me the tools I needed to start selling my ebooks again…with LESS effort than eBay. With eBay I had to go in every two weeks and setup a bunch of auctions.  With Kindle, I set it up one time and I’m done.

Not only does Rebecca teach how to use Kindle to start moving your ebooks (with the power of Amazon and all its affilates behind you!), but she provides some excellent ways to find content for new ebooks!  I’m talking EASY (and FREE!) ways of getting a ton of new content for whatever niche you have.

I’m now taking that tool and creating new ebooks every day!  And I now have a world of blog content using the techniques she shows in her book.

The Kindle Secrets guide is an awesome way to help you create a digital delivery network of your own.  Combining those strategies with some of the other strategies here on this blog, and you can really jumpstart your online revenue stream!  Check out Kindle Secrets!

Video Proof:

If you want to see a really quick video that gives a great overview of how this works, check it out:

Video of the Kindle Secret

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!

There’s a well-known proverb: “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” Basically what that means is to be wary of teachers or self-proclaimed ‘gurus’ that claim to know all the secrets and all the answers. ESPECIALLY when it comes to making money.

You’ll see many, many products on the internet offering ‘the secret’ to making online money. Ask yourself this question: “If this guy knows a secret to making thousands of dollars per day, why is he taking his time to teach others, instead of working his own system to make more?” Sometimes they anticipate this question and try to answer it in their sales letter. It usually is something like, “I’m so excited, I just had to tell someone!”, or “I sleep better at night knowing that I’ve helped others achieve their dreams.” Whatever.

The truth is that they know they can make lots of money by selling a product, and that many people trying to ‘get in the game’ will buy their stuff.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. And not that some of their products don’t have good information. In fact, it can be a service to compile tons of information from across the entire internet and put it in one place that’s easy to understand.

Before you buy any product about how to make online money, hop over to the DigitalPoint Forums or WarriorForum and do a quick search for the product name. Find out what the folks that are in the trenches actually say about the product first. If it still sounds helpful, go for it. Most of the time you’ll find that the information already exists out there (especially on those forums), and that it’s just not worth the money.

Lastly, you’re probably thinking, “OK, mister. Then why are YOU doing a website about making online money.” Glad you asked. That means you were paying attention!

I’m doing this site for two reasons:

First, I have 4-5 different friends of mine who are so interested in what I do that they are always asking me about how to optimize a page, how to build links, how to monetize a site, etc. It got tiresome answering the same questions over and over without one place to point them to. So I created a place where I can store all my links to useful places (like the aforementioned forums), a place that describes SEO, talks about link-building, keyword research, and all the other questions they ask. That’s how this site started. A dumping ground of all the stuff in my head so that I could explain to my friends what I do for a hobby.

Second, and I mean that it is the secondary, not primary reason, it is to make money. I’m always trying new methods, or tweaking existing tactics for making online money. I’m experimenting and testing. And this site is one of those tests. I figure, since I’m putting it up for my buds, other people might find it and maybe they’ll click an ad or buy an affiliate product. Maybe after I really build an all-encompassing site I might create an info-product and become a ‘guru’.

But for now, the reason I’m not here ‘teaching’ very much is that I’m busy ‘doing’. Aside from real life, I’ve been busy experimenting with some new Adwords tactics to drive affiliate sales, as well as testing out a new product that puts eBay links into a WordPress blog with ease. (It’s called phpBayPro, and my new test site is For-Sale-On-Sale.com.)

I’ll probably write again soon when I get some more definitive results from those two campaigns, though things are looking good for now.

This tool does an incredible amount of work. Typically I use it to:

• develop long lists of relevant keywords and phrases
• determine the quality of those keywords (how many results, how many searches done)
• find keywords with high-paying Google AdWords campaigns for my AdSense sites

And it does more than that…those are just a few of the tasks I use it for all the time.

I’m not a salesman, and I would do Keyword Elite an injustice if I tried to describe it. It really is a powerful tool. They have a money-back guarantee, so it’s definitely worth checking out. When you read various Internet Marketing forums, it tends to be the one tool that no one slams as being junk, and in fact many of the gurus use it.

Think of this as a brain-storming exercise. If I were to pick a niche of, say, lawn mower blades, I need to think about all the possible related words and phrases to that niche.

Why? Because keywords (or keyword phrases) are how people will find your website. When someone asks Google a question like, “Where can I buy a blade for a Toro zero-turn radius?”, they never mentioned the word “lawn mower”. But ‘Toro’ and ‘zero-turn radius’ are related keywords.

The more keywords you can come up with the more topics you have to create web pages for (blog posts), increasing your virtual real estate.

The problem is, humans can only think of so many related words…computers can come up with thousands of words, much faster than we could come up with 100!

In another post, I’ll list several tools that can help you brainstorm thousands of keyword phrases.

But there’s more to keyword research than just developing a long list of related terms and phrases. Good tools will provide information like how often people are actually searching those terms, and even how much competition there is out there for a given keyword phrase. Ideally you will discover a phrase that is frequently searched, but has not many pages out there about that phrase. This will make it easier for you to be found in the search engine results. You want a low “Results/Search” ratio. Take two different phrases, for example (completely fictitious):

• mower blade sharpening – searched 1000 x per day – 20 websites resulting for that phrase (R/S Ratio of .02)
• mower accessories – searched 2 million x per day – 6 million websites resulting (R/S Ratio of 3)

It’s tempting to go after ‘mower accessories’ because of the number of searches per day. But the competition is such that you might never get found. On the other hand, if you go after the keyword ‘mower blade sharpening’, you only have 20 other sites to beat…and you can do that easily!

So you want Quantity (lots of keywords to choose from) and Quality (good phrases with low R/S ratios).

You will use these keywords to do things like:

• choose a domain name (your dot.com name – DON’T buy a domain name until after your research!)
• select topics to write content about
• use correct keywords for ‘anchor tags’ for inbound links that you post
• pick keywords to bid on for advertising (if you choose to spend money on inbound clicks)

The ultimate goal is to have some page from your website rank highly in the search engines (chiefly Google) when someone enters in the keyword phrase.

There are two tools that I commonly use, and have written other posts about them:

• SEO Keyword Tool - This one is free, but limited in its results.
• Keyword Elite – This one is the best keyword research tool available.  Period.

This is a frequently-asked question: “What’s the best, most profitable niche?”

This reminds me of the question asked to the really good fisherman: “Which of your lures catch the most fish?” The answer: “The one I use the most.” In other words, whichever lure he picks, if he uses it the most, becomes comfortable with how to work it, and it’s the lure that spends the most time in the water…THAT lure will catch the most fish.

Likewise, the niche you put the most effort into will be the one that is most profitable for you.

With that in mind, the common advice is choose the ‘niche that you know’.

If you are going to be creating content for a site, the more interested and knowledgeable you are about the subject matter the more you are going to stick with it, and like everything else in life, the work you put into it is going to drive the benefits coming out.

Here’s a question that I like to use to help people figure out what niche they might use:

“What do you know that someone might be willing to take you to lunch to discuss?”

Even if it’s a cheap lunch…if one person is willing to treat you, others will be, too. And chances are that if you know enough about a topic to actually talk to someone non-stop for an hour over lunch, you know enough to create online content that is marketable.

Here are some other questions to help you get started:

• What are your hobbies, that you spend lots of time thinking about?
• What message forums do you browse/read or even post to alot?
• Do you have any special training, either from school or through work?
• What do you spend your discretionary money on?
• About what do your friends consider you the ‘expert’?

(Stay tuned – I’ll have another post about how to refine the niches and keywords to figure out the right way to monetize the niche.)