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Whether you are brand spanking new to the world of Internet Marketing or you’ve been around for a while, these tips will help save you time, energy and money on your path to Internet Marketing Success.
Especially in the beginning, this part is crucial. If you are like most aspiring Internet Marketrs, you are starting out with more time than money – especially if you’re working on this while “in between jobs” aka “laid off”. Don’t spend more mony than you can honestly afford to. There are thousands of free resources on the web and hundreds of them are just as good, if not better, than anything you could pay for. Granted, finding your favorite, honest and trustworthy guru(s) will be majorly beneficial to your IM success. If the “guru” is smart – he/she will freely shar much of their best ideas and suggestions for free.
That being said, be selective in just who you listen to. Sign up for mailing lists, try it out – if you’re not getting true value from what is being sent to you then unsubscribe. You may have a lot of time on your hands, but reading every newsletter/ezine, sales pitch and product push that arrives in your mailbox will hinder your progress.
There is one IM guru I follow who sends out e-mails promoting products quite reguarly. He runs many different mailing lists and I’m probably on 3 or 4 of them. While I find the constant sales pitches rather annoying, I have become almost impervious to them. I stay subscribed to his list for 2 reasons: 1) When he does share information it is good quality, useful stuff and 2) I take a look at his sales pitches as examples of good sales copy – if he is sending out so many sales pitch e-mails, they must be working for him. I, personally, would not choose to send out that many, but I can still learn from his.
If you are subscribed to a membership site – especially one with a forum – use it to your full advantage. Stop being just a lurker and start adking questions. You are probably not the only one wondering about X,Y or Z and others who usually keep silent will thank you for bringing up the topic. You are paying to have access to the site and those running it – pick their brains, ask for guidance and get your money’s worth!
In my opinion, one of the best IM membership sites is My Silent Team. It has been an invaluable resource for me and was especially helpful when I was first getting my feet wet in the Internet Marketing world. And there’s also the Warrior Forum which I believe is the best free forum around.
You know you have several hundred dollars worth of e-books, guides, reports and how-to’s just sitting there collecting virtual dust on your hard drive – most unread. Now is the time to go through them, sort out the baloney and only keep the true gems. If it makes you nervous to delete some, just move the potential junk to a new folder. Should it actually prove to be usefull in the future, you can still get to it.
You also may have several e-books/guides printed out. When I finally sat down to go through my IM junk collction I had 4 copy paper sized boxes stuffed with printed out e-books, guides, reports and how-to’s !! 4 boxes!! Over the course of several days I went through ALL of them. All that remains is approximately 10 of them that I put in binders, labeled and put on an easily accessible shelf. They are worthy of taking up space in my office. All the others, well, I now crumple them up and use them as packing material for items I sell on eBay! They were useful after all…lol. Besides those 10 lucky winners, I do also have some sitting on my hard drive. But the ones I actually printed out – those 10 – are the ones I use the most often.
These tips I have given you will seriously save you a lot of wasted time. All together, I probably wasted years of time reading IM junk. Follow my suggestions and you’ll move along the road to Ineternet Marketing Success much quicker than I did.
Hello, I’m Beth and I’m a web site statistics addict. There – I said it. Admitting the problem is half the battle – right?
If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent way too much time obsessively checking your web site statistics, hits, Google Adsense, EPN, Amazon Affiliate stuff, bids on your auctions…….etc. Here and now I make a pledge to limit myself to checking all of those numbers only once a week. Besides, it’ll be so much more exciting to see the larger accumulated #’s than the smaller, daily incriments.
It’s going to be tough – but the amount of time I will save is worth it. I can then spend that time concentrating on driving traffic to the sites instead of watching traffic – much more exciting and a better use of time.
I challenge you to do the same. I’m going to check all of my stats once a week on Sunday evening. I figure that way it’ll help with planning what areas/sites I need to focus more on for the following week – and – it will give me a good boost of happiness to carry along into Monday morning.
As I find more time-saving tips I’ll share them with you here on this blog and through my newsletter.
What time-saving tips do you have that you can share with me?
I was poking around the web looking for an audio of the old “Who’s On First” routine from Abbott and Costello. It has been a favorite of mine for a long time. I found it and put it on my MP3 player so I could listen to it while I walked the dog.
Well…it turned out to be the entire radio show they did which includes the routine I was looking for but also has this hysterical routine about “Niches or Notches” – it had me cracking up (my neighbors must’ve thought I was nuts).
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Finding a good tiny niche is extremely important with the new Ebay pay-per-click model. Besides EPN, having a good tiny niche will benefit you with other affiliate programs. When you have a good tiny niche you can essentially “own” that market. And yes, “tiny niche” can also mean it is a tiny sliver of the market. But being able to dominate a tiny sliver can be much more successful than attempting to compete for the entire pie.
As in any successful venture, you first must start with research. When researching a tiny niche I suggest finding a happy medium between too much research and too little. You want to find something you can act on sooner than later. You don’t want to spend hours upon hours doing research for something that ends up being a flop.
First, I’ll explain to you how to do the boot-strap method. Otherwise known as “I have a lot more time than money and can’t afford to spend much to speed this process along” method. To research your tiny niche you can use a combination of Google searches, Ebay Pulse and Google’s Free Keyword Tool. Then I’ll tell you about the tool I use to really help speed up my research.
Come up with an idea for a tiny niche site. I have a whole notebook full of random niche site ideas that pop into my head. They may come from reading something in a magazine, personal experience with a good product or even perusing the isles at Wal-Mart! If you’re stuck for niche ideas, take a look at Ebay Pulse. Just go to Ebay, click on “site map” (I believe it’s on the top right of the page), and then find Ebay Pulse on the list and click on it. Here you’ll be able to see the most popular searches on Ebay for various products. Pick a category and keep on clicking down into it to get some ideas. If it is a popular searched for item on Ebay, it should also be a popular item that is searched for on the web.
Another good thing to do is to take a look at how many of the items are actually selling. To do this you’ll want to click on Advanced Search, put in your niche keywords and check off the “completed listings” box. This will return a list of the items that have sold and not sold. You’ll want to make sure you see more GREEN than red. If there is a lot more red you may want to forgo this particular niche and move on to the next possible one.
I decided to do a search on Ebay for “dog training collar” (completed listings). Now, about 20 of the 50 or so ended auctions on the first page are GREEN. That’s almost 50% that have sold. Yes, I’d like to see a lot more green – but I still think this could be a good tiny niche. And there have been 3,500 listings – definitely plenty of products to promote.
So now you have a few tiny niche ideas go and visit the Google Keywords Tool. You can just do a search in google for it and it’ll be your first search result. Put in your first niche idea and take a look at the results you get.
I put in the term “dog training collar” which returned a “global monthly serach volume” of 60,000 – not bad – but I wonder what my competition would be for this niche on google. I open google.com in another tab/window and do a search for “dog training collar” in quotes and it returns around 130,000 results. That’s not too bad. But then I take a look at my competition for the niche. I check out the Page Rank of the first page of results. I have SeoQuake installed on my browser to automatically bring up site stats in google results. Add up all the Page Ranks, divide by 3 and the average PR comes out to be 3.3. I’m taking a look at the Page Rank so I can see how easy/hard it will be for me to break into the niche. 3.3 is in the middle – I honestly would prefer to find something in the 0-2 range.
So, it’s back to the Google Adwords Keyword tool I go and take a look at the keywords list it gave me. Perusing the list I see that “small dog training collar” gets around 1,600 searches a month – yes, it is much less than the 60,000 for “dog training collar” but I believe this could be the “tiny slice” of the pie that I’m looking for. Remember, I’d rather be the king of a tiny slice, than another minion competing for the whole pie.
Popping over to Google.com again, I do a search for “small dog trianing collar” and go through the same process…Results=1,870, Average PR=1.3 
I am liking this one. Some may think that it is too tiny of a niche, I think it is just right. Low competition, somewhat popular search, items that sell on Ebay – works for me. And, when you take a look at the estimated average “cost per click” in the google keyword tool results, it is $2.24 cents! If you drive traffic to your sites using Adsense, that $2.24 might not be so fabulous – BUT – if you look at it from the perspective of earning money by having google adsense ads on your site – cha-ching!
In my opinion, a tiny niche like “small dog training collar” is one that can be very successfull with the new Quality Click Pricing model on Ebay. Unfortunately, SmallDogTrainingCollar.com is already taken (not by me). I find it interesting, that site does not show up on the first page of search results for it’s key term. After poking around the site for a bit I see that is because it has virtually NO original written content. It is nothing more than a site with ads on it for individual products. It doesn’t give the visitor any info about dog collars at all. With the addition of a few good articles and a paragraph or two of content on each product page, this site could be a real winner.
SmallDogTrainingCollar.info and .net ARE available. You could get each of them for under $5 (with FREE private registration) over at my favorite place to purchase domain names – 1and1. And, by the way, I know everyone says you should stick with .com domain names. But, honestly, I’m earning money with my .info and .net domains so I don’t see any problem with using them. PLUS – they are 1/2 the price or less than the cost of a .com. If you can find a way to work the “info” or “net” part into the title of the site that helps with people not automatically typing in a .com. for instance…. Small Dog Training Collar INFO.
And I promised to tell you about the tool I now use (almost daily) to research tiny niches. This tool saves me HOURS upon hours of time. It brings in all sorts of nifty information into one awesome screen. It brings in the google keyword tool info, comeptition info…etc. PLUS with one click you can look up affiliate products for the item, find articles to use to promote the items and much more. And…here is the ABSOLUTE BEST PART….there is this magic little link to press to get the “SOC” – Strenght of Competition. In just a few seconds the “SOC” will be either red, yellow or green. GREEN means you have found what could very well be an AWESOME Tiny Niche to dominate It’s also useful for finding long-tail keywords to use on your site. Honestly, this tool does so much that I’m sure I haven’t used it to it’s full capabilities yet. Another cool feature is that you can save your searches and save selected results as projects. That is very useful for me when I, on a whim, have a tiny niche idea. I just pop open this tool, do a few quick searches and save them and they’re ready for me when I’m ready to tackle that niche. When I first started to use it there were a collection of videos I watched that showed how different people use this tool to quickly and easily find good Tiny Niches. You can watch those same videos for free by going here. By the way, this fabulous tool is called the Micro Niche Finder.
So that’s all I have to say about that. I hope this post helped you a bit in your hunt for good tiny niches. If you have any questions, please let me know – post ‘em in the comments section and I’ll respond ASAP.
To be successful with QCP you need to change your perceptions a bit. I can’t stress this enough – it is NO LONGER about just sending traffic to Ebay. The more drilled-down and targeted your site is, the higher earnings you can expect. In the past, I used to be concerned with putting up niche sites that only targeted very high ticket items so I would earn more per sale. I do have a few sites that focus on small-ticket items that sell for $20 and less. And I honestly was thinking of scrapping them. With this new QCP model, I see that they are now earning much more – it doesn’t make a difference anymore that the items are inexpensive. The selling price of an item is only now one piece of how Ebay determines your earnings.
As I posted previously, I am absolutely thrilled by the new QCP model on Ebay. Based on the preliminary sample QCP reports, I should see a 200-300% increase in my earnings when QCP kicks in for me in October. So, how so I have such high increases in earnings while others are complaining of dramatic decreases? Well, I’ll share with you what has worked for me…
Building tiny, targeted, niche sites. And I won’t even say “filled with quality content” – because, honestly, only a handful of my niche sites truly have good quality content on them at this point. I’m in the process of re-vamping several of them and adding that good quality content because I don’t like being the owner of wimpy sites.
Starting out with a bare bones niche site is one way to test the waters and truly see if you can get those all important visitors who will click through to Ebay. Still, you should have some decent content on your site when you launch it – but don’t spend hours upon hours on it until you know it’s a good niche. And now, with the new QCP, you need to send very high quality, targeted visitors to Ebay if you want to be successful. That is why the owners of tiny niche sites will reap the most benefits from Quality Click Pricing on Ebay. Once you have found a niche that has potential, then go back and beef up the site some more – add more content, publish articles, use social bookmarking sites and create videos.
This can open up a whole new world of niche sites to create. Doing a total 180 degree change on how you approach making money with the Ebay Partner Network will truly benefit you under the new QCP model.
Stay tuned for future posts about finding good tiny niches…
As you may know, Ebay decided to do a total re-vamp of their commission structure this fall. They are now rewarding affiliates via a pay-per-click pricing model based on the quality of the traffic you send to Ebay. If you are new to EPN then this new model started for you in September, existing affiliates will start in October.
Basically, it boils down to this…you have to send good, quality, targeted traffic to Ebay. You will get higher pay-outs if your site visitors purchase the item you recommended right away (or put a bid in on it). The old model that many affiliates followed of just sending any and all random traffic to Ebay will no longer fly.
On your EPN affiliate site you can see samples of what your commissions would look like for August and September of this year. This is especially helpful in choosing which current campaigns to beef up. I must say that I am ABSOLUETLY THRILLED at what my earnings will be under the new model. For the month of August, my sample QCP column shows a 228% increase in earnings as compared with the old model !! And August was actually one of my lower months for clicks/earnings – I chalk that up to August just being one of the slower sales months in general – many Ebay sellers even take all/part of the month off because they know it is one of the slowest sales months. For September so far, I have a 318% increase in earnings!
That is one heck of a raise! Sure beats the 3% “cost of living” raise that most folks don’t even get in their j-o-b paycheck.
Anyways, I wish that I didn’t have to wait until October for the changes to take effect. They’re keeping the same timeline for pay outs, so that first affiliate check/deposit for the new amount will not arrive until the end of November! That’s a long time to wait…but I am SOOO looking forward to it.
I know there are a lot of Ebay affiliates out there that aren’t thrilled with the QCP model. I’ve read things like “google adsense will pay me 50 cents a click, so why in the world would I stick with EPN”. That makes me wonder what kind of sites do they have up? My average EPC in the QCP sample report for August was 60 cents and I had several days of EPC’s over $1.00 ! To me that is pretty darn cool.
And the even coolest part is that the overwhelming majority of my EPN sites are just basic, bare bones, haven’t done a whole heck of a lot with ‘em – sites. And several of the sites don’t even promote high ticket items. But what they ARE doing is bringing Ebay quality, targeted traffic. My focus for the next several weeks is to beef up all of those sites – add more and better content, write articles to drive traffic…etc. and keep shooting for those $1.00+ clicks!
I remember “back-in-the-day” (early 2000’s LOL) when people where making money hand-over-fist by buying and selling domain names. I’ve always been REALLY bummed that I didn’t get in on that – I missed the boat. I even knew of a friend of a friend who started a small internet company, sold it within a few years and went on to purchase several acres and build his dream home and happily “retire” and he was just BARELY out of college! With this new Quality Click Pricing model at Ebay I finally feel as though I’m positioned in the right spot to truly benefit from it tremendously.
How do you feel about the new QCP at Ebay?
It has been almost a full month since I last blogged here! eeks!
One of the cardinal rules of having a blog is to post to it consistently (once a day, once a week…etc.).
Even though I haven’t posted anything in a while, I have no shortage of posts that I want to publish here. Every day I learn more and more about internet marketing and every day I am applying what I learn to various projects that I have going.
One thing I want to make sure I do on this blog is share with you internet marketing strategies that have truly worked for me – and also tell you about ones that I wasn’t as successful with.
In the past month I have been diving into many strategies and implementing them on a few sites. I have worked hard to stay focused on one project at a time and that has increased my success a lot.
In the coming days/weeks I will be posting about the Ebay Partner Network (EPN) and the changes that are occurring, building tiny niche sites, article marketing and, of course, using public domain content.
So stay tuned…
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