First, I used eBay.  Then, the $7 script.  Then Rapid Action Profits.

I won’t even talk about selling digitally on eBay any more, since the glory days are past.  And the headache I always had with the 7 dollar script and RAP are the setup…particularly the template editing to make the pages look right.  AND, it’s always been difficult to integrate those sales platforms into WordPress, which is what I build all my sites in (because of how easy it is, and because of the Google love).

FINALLY someone built what I’ve been requesting for a long time…a WordPress plugin that handles digital sales/delivery/security AND handle the affiliate side of things.

I don’t have to explain the power of having an affiliate program for your digital product, right?  I mean…having OTHER people sell for you…why NOT give them a cut of each sale?

Check out this WordPress Affiliate Program plugin called WP Instant Pay.  It is phenomenal.  It is SO easy, SO well-documented, and I can just plug it in and start selling on my WP sites!

When I found out this was coming out, I actually delayed a few projects I was working on until it was released.  I knew that it would be worth the wait, rather than hassle with RAP or $7 script.  And I was right.

Check it out!  And start selling through your WP sites, and recruiting your affiliates!!

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.

Short version (for the details behind it, keep reading after the outline):

1. Become eBay affiliate. (Free)
2. Keyword Research on Hot Niches
3. Create Squidoo Lens for your Niched Keyword Phrase. (Also Free)
4. Add an RSS module to the Squidoo lens with the product.
5. Normal traffic-driving methods for the lens.
6. Profit!

First, become an eBay affiliate. eBay wants traffic, and if you drive traffic to their site, they give you a part of their profit (fees) on the completion of any sale. AND they pay $25 for people who signup for eBay if they came from you. Signup for the affiliate program at: http://www.ebaypartnernetwork.com

Next, research a product. Ebay itself can be a great resource for this. Visit the Pulse section of eBay at http://pulse.ebay.com to sift through most popular searches in a given category. Then use the Keyword Research tools like SEOPro and Google from the Tools section of this website to find related keyword phrases with high searches and low competition.  For example, Pulse shows that “webkinz” is a popular search term.  Entering “webkinz sale” into Google’s tool (without synonyms) shows how many searches there are…then hop over to Google for a given phrase (like “webkinz for sale cheap”) to find out how much competition there is for that phrase.  I like to have a thousand searches or more per month, with under 10,000 competition for exact match.

Go over to Squidoo and create a lens with the name of the lens being the keyword phrase.  Use dashes or underscores between words.  Choose “do your own thing” for the type of lens, and use some hot related keywords to start with when asked, based on the research you did.  When setting up your Squidoo lens, haven an Intro paragraph.  Do a quick Google Image search for a picture of what it is your lens is about, save the image to your computer, and upload it to your lens.  Then add a ‘My Favorite Link’ module (with the big arrows), and an RSS module, and a YouTube video module.  Go to eBay’s Partner Network site, login, and use their tools to generate a link for the ‘My Favorite Link’, and the RSS generator to create a feed to display in the RSS module (include all the details).  Have the YouTube module pick a video related to your keyword (helps with visitor likability, Squidoo ranking, and bulks up your content with related keywords).

Do your normal traffic driving methods (social bookmarking, forum posts, blog comments, even other squidoo comments, comments on social bookmarking sites, etc.).  Squidoo gets indexed quickly with Google.  If you have other blogs, etc., make sure you link to your new lens.

Squidoo has built-in traffic tools, so no need for Google Analytics.  (I wish I could, though…GA is better…but still, at least you can do SOME tracking!)  Watch visitors hit the site…then those visitors go to eBay and eventually bid/buy/subscribe, and you get a check from eBay (or direct deposit into your PayPal account).

I know this tutorial was very ‘light’ as far as the details, but I’m thinking that you’ll be able to figure it out from here.  Try it out on a few lenses.  Soon you’ll be able to throw a lens together in about 10 minutes or less, and you can try multiple ones.

I’m all about cheap…this could be one of the methods you use to generate some cash without having to lay any money out.

Note: for an example of what a squidoo lens should look like when you’re done: Webkinz Polar Bear
. Admittedly I could have done better on the keywords (like gone for “Buy Webkinz Polar Bear”), but I only did this while I was typing up the post to provide an example, so I didn’t do all the research I would normally do.

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

GA lets you create a snippet of code that you can place in your website’s footer template.  Then it tracks all sorts of useful information about your site:

• Number of Visitors
• Number of Page Views
• Source of Visit (referral, search engine, direct link)
• Keywords used in the search engines to find you
• Time spent on each page

…and more!

It’s tracked near-real-time…I’d say the refreshes usually happen within 10 minutes.

Here are a few things that I’ve found to be useful by examining the stats:

Popular Page – I noticed on one of my blogs that most visitors were viewing a particular page (not my home page).  It was a popular topic for that niche, and ranked well for the search engines for a particular keyword phrase.  But I didn’t have anything to sell on that page.  Since so many visitors were coming to my site, reading just that one page, then leaving, I decided to increase my chance to sell something by adding a blurb to the bottom of the post which was related, but pointed to an affiliate product.

On another site I noticed that most visits were going to the main page.  Since it was a blog, the main page’s content changed as I added new posts.  I looked at my affiliate sales and noticed the correlation between having clear affiliate links in my post on the front page.  Since most visitors were looking at my main page, sales always were higher when my front page post contained affiliate links.  If my content was ‘just’ informative, sales, while still there from other links on the page, dropped.

Keywords Used – I frequently check to see what keywords are bringing people to my site.  Sometimes I find that people are arriving at my site quite unexpectedly, using keywords that I never would have thought would be used.  The practical application of that is to take those keywords and create related posts so that other people searching variations of that keyword phrase might find a way into your site.

Traffic Sources – It’s good to know how much traffic is coming ‘naturally’ through search engines, vs. coming from referral sources.  And, it’s good to know what those referral sources are.  For example, I have found that for my niche, certain Social Bookmarking sites tend to drive more traffic than others.  Which means that I always make sure to include those sites now, when bookmarking a new post.

Visit Google Analytics and try for yourself!  Choose the URL you wish to track, copy the code snippet GA provides, and paste it into you template…usually right above the </body> tag, which is usually found in the footer of your template.

Have fun watching and learning as you track your website stats with Google Analytics!

I have a website called “Redneck Computer Geek“. It’s a blog where I write about what I know. (Yes, I’m both a Redneck, and a Computer Geek.) I wrote an article called “Don’t Smell the Deer Poo“, about the time I found a pile of deer manure on a walking trail with a coworker.

While checking my webpage stats (I use Google Analytics), I was looking at the keywords used to find my site.

SOMEONE had found my site by searching for “computer poo” in Google!

I have no idea what they were searching for, but they visited my site! That’s one more visitor to click ads, possibly buy a product, or who might simply enjoy the site and return again or create a backlink…

Once you have a site or blog up and running, try to add a new page at least once per day.

Remember – with a blog, when you write a simple post, you are creating content that gets replicated in several places:

1. your front page/index
2. the single page of the post itself
3. archive pages
4. category pages

The name of the game is VIRTUAL REAL ESTATE. You are occupying territory. The simple discipline of writing every day will steadily gain you ground.

So, the point is, KEEP IT UP! Now you can understand the importance of continuing to write and build your content. Keep adding pages, because you might just hit on a combination that works. Also, it logically follows that if one person could find one of my pages with such a random and obscure keyword phrase, the more pages I add, the greater my chances are of picking up other random visitors!

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.

So here are two tips for getting good, free graphic images on your website:

Stock Xchng – this is a free stock photography site that I find to have really good contents.  Most of their images are royalty-free and license-free.  Some of the individual images may require that you notify and give credit to the author, and they do have some ‘premium’ images that you can buy.  A great resource for images.

GIMP - If you can’t afford a really good tool like Photoshop (which is expensive), GIMP is a fantastic free photo-editing tool.  It’s almost as powerful as Photoshop (some would say AS powerful), and it’s completely free.  And there are plenty of resources online to support how to use it (forums, blogs, etc, with tips and tutorials).

As an example, the banner on this page was created with images from Stock Xchng and blended together with GIMP.  I’m nowhere NEAR a graphic artist, but by using these free tools, the results aren’t half bad, if I do say so myself!

You can read all over the internet about the “power of the list”.  There are many money-making opportunities that come from having a list of people to email…especially a list of people who have “opted-in”, and chosen to receive your emails.

Technically, you CANNOT email someone selling a product unless they have opted-in to your list, or expressly given you permission to contact them.  If they don’t give you permission, you are breaking the CAN-SPAM laws.

For example, after I realized the power of the list (after years of selling my guide online), I could have gone to my PayPal account and looked up the history of all of those emails.  But if I were to email them with, say, an affiliate offer, that would be illegal.

Enter AWEBER.  Aweber is a company that handles your mailing list for you.  (Try to do a mass mailing from your own email address and watch how fast your IP gets blocked from everyone’s list!)  They create the code that handles the sign-up form, and they do the auto-response emails that let the person click a link to confirm they are opting in.  They also can do mass mailings, and handle all the people who opt out.

They cost about $50 per year for unlimited numbers of lists and no limit on the number of folks in the list.  For me, that’s worth it for the ease of use (considering I usually make more than that from just one mailing).  And knowing that I didn’t have to code anything to handle the forms and the list, or the mass mailing, and knowing that I am not breaking the law, helps me sleep at night.

So if you are going to do capture any kind of mailing list (and I highly recommend that you do!), make sure to check out Aweber.

GoDaddy allows you to search for domain names (www.DOMAINNAME.com). Try to find a domain name that uses your keywords. Here are some tips:

• Use hyphens to break up words, like “www.mower-blades.com”, “www.lawn-mower.com”, “www.lawn-mower-blades.com”, etc.
• Repeat the words:  “www.mower-mower.com”
• Use words that are memorable but search engines will ignore, like “my”, “your”, “the”:  “www.mymowerblades.com”, “www.your-mower-blades-here.com”

By the way – I recommend GoDaddy because they have incredible customer service, and really good prices.  I have all my domains registered through them, and all my hosting through them as well.  (Once you reserve a domain name, you’ll need someone to ‘host’ it, or be the place your web pages are stored.)