Yuri the Pig Farmer and the Sneaky Blog Trick

Ok, first things first.  In my previous post, I mentioned the comment I got by some guy claiming to be one Aaron Abber.  He was going to start a mentoring program, and was looking for mentorees (I doubt that’s a word, but I’ll use it anyway).  The strange thing was, he was offering his program for free.  I won’t go over the whole post again, you can read it just below if you want to.  My question was, is this legit?  Or was “Aaron” really the notorious Russian internet scam artist Yuri the pig farmer?  (whose picture I have managed to get for this blog.  I had to pull in a few favors from Interpol to do this.  The bureaucrats at Interpol didn’t tell me WHICH guy was Yuri though.  Damn bastard desk jockeys …)

Anyway, so far, this seems to be legit.  The first meeting is going to be this Monday at 7pm eastern time.  Aaron left a comment on the previous post.  He seems to have a sense of humor, which is a good thing.  This could be fun (or else old Yuri is a lot smarter than even I gave him credit for)

As far as the site I set up using niche inspector (to find the niche) and Xsite Pro (to actually build the thing), I signed up for an affiliate program today specializing in acne products.  The only problem though is that I need to fill out a W-9 form to be accepted, which is a United States Tax form.  I explained to the good people there that I’m a Canadian citizen, living in Canada, so is this really necessary?  Apparently, it is.  Speaking about bureaucrats, hello IRS.

As far as my sneaky trick to promote this site, well, it may not be that sneaky after all.  My plan was to set up a wordpress blog on a subdomain of www.acne-solution-products.com at www.acneproducts.acne-solution-tips.com.  I would then use the “10 day secret” wordpress plugin that Neil Shearing made to feed a merchants datafeed into this blog.  The way this works is that the blog is updated every 5 minutes automatically with product posts.  When this is done, search engine spiders absolutely swarm the site.  I thought this might help get the main site indexed that much faster.  However, although I have the blog up and running, I’m not sure how to set the cron job for the subdomain.  We’ll have to see.  I’m going to talk more about the 10 day secret in a future post (in fact, maybe I’ll do it tomorrow).

To our Success!

- Dave

A Mysterious Post … + a niche inspector website update

Well, I was able to get quite a bit done with the acne solutions website. Check it out at www.acne-solution-tips.com. You see how basic and clean the site looks? This was my intention from the beginning. One somewhat clever thing I did (at least I think so) is to create a glossary for the site. By doing this, I was able to create a lot of links on the pages back to the glossary. As these links are blue, they help blend the adsense ads that much more. Is this site done now? Not quite. Here’s what I need to do before I consider it finished and really let it go:

1. I want to add some affiliate links to it.
2. I’m going to add a subdomain to it. (this is where my sneaky idea comes in. I thought I was going to be able to do it today, but I just ran out of time. Tune in tomorrow)

Xsite Pro actually has some interesting ways of handling affiliate links. Like I said previously, Xsite Pro is web design software that was built with the internet marketer in mind. It is the reason I was able to put together this site so quickly. I’m not sure how it handles affiliates, though. I guess I’ll get to learn that tomorrow.

On another not, I received a mysterious note (well, a comment) on my blog yesterday. Here’s what it said:

David,

Thanks for stopping by and leaving a comment. Pretty sexy, huh?

Skeptical? Later today I’ll would be happy for you to sign up–free–for my $5,000.00 mentoring program. You might be surprised.

Your readers are welcome to sign up as well.

Look for the details this afternoon Eastern time at http://www.FullTiltBlogging.com

OK, so what is going on here? Well, I’m always checking out other blogs, looking for tips from other successful internet entrepreneurs. One of them was by a guy named Aaron Abber, who runs full tilt blogging. From his website, Aaron is quite successful, and is planning on starting up a mentoring program. There’s nothing really unusual about this, except that his program is going to be free. The only “catch” is that I have to 1) promote his blog on my blog (ok, done) 2) and contact 10 other people about his blog (I’ll do this tonight via e-mail). I’ll then be able to meet with him every Monday at 7 pm (eastern time, pacific? Not sure at this point) for some mentoring on internet business. (see his site for more detail)

Ok, so what’s REALLY the catch? From reading his sales letter, it seems that he is setting up 15 businesses of some sort. The mentoring is going to be partly made up of us helping him start these businesses up. At least, that’s what I suspect is going on. So, the question is, am I going to sign up? My answer is, why not? The way I see it, one of two things can happen:

1. I actually will learn a lot. Working on real projects is the best way to learn anyway. If I help build Aaron’s businesses, but I learn something in the process, that’s a fair exchange. What apprentice doesn’t need a mentor?
2. The whole thing is a scam and a waste of time. “Aaron” is in reality Yuri Scamniski, a Russian pig farmer and part time internet flim flam man. If this is the case, this should provide great fodder for future blog posts.

Tomorrow, I’ll update you on the progress with my acne website, including the potentially evil trick, as well as an Aaron Abber update (if that’s his real name …)

To our Success,

- Dave

Acne Solution Tips is live!(although not done) + more Galactica

Ok, first things first. Today I started to put up my newest site, based on niche inspector, at www.acne-solution-tips.com. The site is not finished yet by any means. However, if you take a look at it, you can you can get an idea of where I’m going with it. To create the site, I’m using a program called Xsite Pro. Xsite Pro is a great program that is designed with internet marketers in mind. I’ll have more to say about this program in a future post.

In my last post, I put forward some theories on what might be going on in Battlestar Galactica. I then received a comment from Sungoddess, explaining why my ideas were nuts and that I must be some kind of knucklehead (ok, she didn’t say that, but that’s what it felt like, lol). Now, I may very well be a knucklehead from time to time, but I think I’m on to something here with this third force. If you’re a BSG fan, you can read my reply to her at her blog here (I see she hasn’t replied yet to MY post on her website, lol).

Tomorrow, I’m hoping to mostly finish the acne-solution-tips website. Plus, I have an evil idea that may really help with it’s promotion. Stay tuned to learn what it is!

To our Success,

- Dave

Battlestar Galactica! (and a minor internet update …)

Last night I watched the 2nd episode this season of Battlestar Galactica. Is this a great show or what? Although it is a critical darling, it really deserves a wider audience than it’s gotten. I wonder if the Sci Fi channel had been doing a bit more with promotions using pictures like the above, it might have helped it get a wider audience. Who knows? Still, the retro picture above works for me J

On the other hand, maybe it’s a good thing that the show is ending now after 4 seasons. Galactica has a definite ending (finding Earth) and as the writer’s know when this is, they should be able to create some really tight shows. It won’t run the risk of what happened to “Lost” for awhile, where the various story arcs just meander all over the place.

Last nights episode was great. I loved seeing the inner workings of how the Cylons run things and how they perceive events. For example, the fact that the Cylon Raiders were basically thinking for themselves and not following orders. Further, that one of the remedy’s for this, proposed by the Dean Stockwell Cylon (His name escapes me. I’m a geek, but not an uber geek), was to basically lobotomize them. As Dean said, “I’m just the mechanic, fixing the engine” (or something like that). Do you see the irony here? He’s basically treating his own race like machines. It would seem that all pigs are not created equal in Cylon land.

The fact that the Raiders ceased their attack (in episode one) when one of the raiders realized that one of the five remaining “hidden” Cylons was on Galactica raises some interesting questions. One of them being just who built these human Cylons? How could they not know? The humans build the Cylons say 40 years ago. They then go off by themselves and get these 12 human Cylons made. However, the Cylons we see don’t know who 5 of them are. How can this be? Here’s a guess. Maybe there’s another alien race we have not even seen yet who have influenced the Cylons in some way. Perhaps these aliens created the human Cylons for some reason, but also planted the “hidden five” among the colonials. Maybe this third force has some grand plan for both races? This could also explain why the Cylons themselves don’t create more versions of themselves than just 12. They can’t do it by themselves. Moreover, this is why there so obsessed with biological reproduction to begin with.

Yikes, my mind is really wandering here. Another thought is that the fact the Cylon Raiders called off the attack upon scanning the hidden Cylon (Anders) helps us narrow down just who that 5th Cylon might be. It can’t be a pilot. So, cross Apollo and Starbuck off your list for possibly being the 5th Cylon. During any Colonial – Cylon fight, but especially during the big first attack in season one, the Cylons were always scanning the humans to shut their ships down. If they found the fifth hidden Cylon then, wouldn’t they have stopped the attack then? Just a thought.

Ok, enough about Galactica.

As far as the acne solution site goes, I registered a domain name today (www.acne-solution-tips.com) and I wrote a new article that I’ll use as the landing page for the site. Tomorrow, I should have a crude version of the website up, at least in some form. That’s it for now!

So Say We All,

- Dave

Dave, Baby Beth and a Niche Inspector update

This is a quick video of myself with my new niece Elisabeth. She was 8 pounds at birth, and is doing fine. Right now, she is like a cute little lump. She doesn’t even cry! (At least, not yet).

As far as the Niche Inspector goes that I’m working on, I finished going through the PLR Articles today. I think what I’m going to do is to write the landing page myself, which I’ll do tomorrow. At that point I will start to put the site up. I’m also going to use Google’s keyword tool to try and find some more keywords related to acne. If anything really stands out, I’ll create some content on these topics for the site. Google’s keyword tool can be found here: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. I’ll have more to say on this tomorrow.

That’s it for now!

To our success,

- Dave

Dancing with the Stars and Killer PLR Articles

Ok, so you’re probably wondering what Dancing with the Stars has to do with Niche Inspector, PLR Articles, or web design in general. Well, the answer is … absolutely nothing. I’ll discuss PLR articles in a moment, but the fact is that it is such a dreary dull subject, I need to talk about something else to liven up this post.

On last nights results show, Adam Carolla was voted off, and I was sorry to see him go. Aside from the tragedy of losing the gorgeous Julianne Hough, Adam was funny and it was always interesting to see what this decidedly non-dancer would do with the dance he was given that night. To me, Adam came off as the class clown who always got by by doing the bare minimum. In pioneer days he probably would have been eaten by a bear before he saw 20. Today, however, he can use those same (lack of) skills to forge a successful career in showbiz. Remember, he and Jimmy Kimmel created “The Man Show”, whose main idea was to have young women in bikinis bounce on trampolines. He actually made a living by doing this. God bless America.

Please don’t think I’m bashing him, I’m not. The point I’m trying to make is that after the first show, it seemed that he was really putting in the effort. Perhaps he didn’t want to let two time champion Julianne down, or maybe he was embarrassed by how well the deaf Marlee Matlin was doing. Regardless, he was working hard and seemed to be improving. I mean, Jerry Springer stayed on way longer than he should have a few seasons back, why not Adam? Anyone who can pull off a Paso Doble Dance on a unicycle is OK in my book. Oh well … At least Shannon is still in it …

OK, away from reality TV and back to reality. I’m working on the ACNE site, and I’m trying to use PLR Articles to do it. So far I’ve modified about 6 of them, with 7 more to go. At this point I think I’m beginning to sour on using Public Label Rights articles. I know some people like them, and the ones I’m using are not bad in quality. However, they’re just so dry, and to me they come across as being inauthentic. I think I would be better off just writing my own from scratch. For my next site, I think this is what I’ll do.

Tomorrow I’m going to work on finishing off those last few PLR Articles. I’ll probably post on something else as well, just to liven things up (maybe the video I promised of my niece, we’ll see).

To Our Success,

- Dave

PLR Articles – A Good Thing?

OK, this is going to be a fairly quick post, as I seem to have lost my internet connection from my apartment. I’m not sure what is going on with Telus. The problem appears to be on their end though. I’m going to wait till tomorrow. If it’s not working then, I guess I’ll have to give them a call. I’m currently writing this from my laptop in a coffee shop, rather than my beloved Mac. It works, but it’s not ideal.

Anyway, with the Niche inspector thing, I’m pretty sure I’m going to try creating a quick and dirty site using the keywords “acne solution”. I have no great interest in acne, but Myleena’s philosophy is that this shouldn’t matter. Find a niche, exploit it as quickly as possible, then move on to the next one. OK, let’s do this one then.

Now, the problem is that I have no great interest in (or experience with, thank-goodness) acne. So, what do I do? For this site, I’m going to try and using something called Private Label Rights articles. These are articles that you can buy online cheaply, and modify them however you want. There are two problems with PLR articles, however:

1) They can be very poor in quality

2) Other people may be using the same articles that you are. If this is the case, you may get smacked down for using duplicate content by Google.

Now, the articles I purchased were from http://www.niche-content-packages.com/. I’ve heard that these are high quality PLR articles. We’ll see. I’m planning on give these articles a quick and dirty rewrite, inserting the phrase “acne solution” where I can. This will form the basis for my site.

Looking at the articles, they are not bad quality wise. Still, I’m wondering if I wouldn’t be better off just heading off to the Vancouver Public Library and writing them myself. I’m not really sure at this point. Time will reveal all, I suppose.

Tomorrow I’m planning on a) getting my regular internet connection working b) work on these PLR articles, and c) hopefully, see my new niece again.

To Our Success,

- Dave

Breakfast at Sophie’s and More Niche Inspector

This morning, I met some of my friends (Tristan, Stephanie, Crazy Brian, and “Phil”) for breakfast at Sophie’s, which is a fairly popular restaurant in Vancouver.  Sophie’s is the kind of family restaurant where the food is tasty, reasonably priced, and there’s all kinds of crazy crap on the walls.  I had their lumberjack breakfast, which was good, along with a chocolate milkshake.  I know it’s not a regular thing to have a milkshake with breakfast, but I’d heard the milkshakes were really good, so there you go.  On my milkshake scale, I’d give it a 4 out of 5.  The shake itself was great, but I don’t think they gave me enough for the $5.50 I paid, hence the point off.  Still, I do recommend it.

Enough about Sophie’s.  In this post, I am continuing to use Niche Inspector in an attempt to find a viable niche to build a site around.  Check the previous post for more information on how I’m conducting my search and why.

Anyway, the next term I put into Niche Inspector was ACNE.  One keyword phrase that stood out for me was

ACNE PRODUCT

Searches: 10979
Google: 311000
Google ads: 51
Broad Match CPC $3.62-$4.52

This looks pretty good so far.  Looking it up in Google, I see the a lot of URL’s do not have “ACNE PRODUCT” in their URL.  One of the highest ranked sites is http://www.acne-treatment-answers.com/acne-product.html.  Looking at this site in yahoo site inspector, we find that it has 1 page, 544 back links.  Most of the back links seem to come the site itself, and not other sites, which is interesting.  Further, looking at the site in the wayback machine, we see that it was only set up in the year 2005.  Hmmmmm.

The other Niche Phrase that I found for ACNE was

ACNE SOLUTON

Searches: 5754
Google: 369000
Google ads: 54
Broad Match CPC $6.56-$8.20

Looking up this phrase in Google, I see that a lot of URL’s do not have “ACNE SOLUTION” in their URL (although they are all related to skin and acne care).  The third highest ranked site for this search term is http://www.acneway.com.  Here, we find that this site has 128 pages and 11,557 back links.  The wayback machine tells us this site was set up in 2006.

Maybe something can be done with ACNE?  One question I have is that if I’m optimizing a site for “ACNE PRODUCT”, how preferable is it to have “www.acneproduct.com”, as opposed to “www.acnestuff/acneproduct.com” ?  I suspect that having ACNE PRODUCT right at the root of the domain would be much more valuable, but who knows?

Tomorrow is shaping up to be a big day, as my sister I having a baby.  I’m going to be an Uncle again.  I’ll try a post a picture of baby Beth (or Veronica, which is the other name possibility) if I’m able.

To Our Success!

- Dave

Flat Stomachs and Niche Inspector Niches

In my last post, I outlined how one of the first websites I created at www.businesssoftwareresource.com failed to generate the $10 a day in adsense revenue I was looking for.  However, despite its failure, it did provide me with some interesting clues as to how I might be able to use Niche Inspector to create a site that will work.  What did I learn for next time?  Well, let’s see …

1. First of all, whatever Niche I choose will have to have more than 1800 searches per month.  This is simply not enough traffic to make it worthwhile.  I’m going to want something that is greater than 6000, I think.
2. I’ll be looking for niches with adwords bids in the $3 to $8 dollar range.
3. I’m going to check and see what the competition is for the niche that I select.  Ideally, it would be nice to be on the first page, but I’d be willing to drop to the second, if need be.
4. For the design of the site, I’m going to want to really blend the adsense links in with the general links.  When I created www.businesssoftwareresource, I tried to do this.  If you check out the site, you’ll see that the menus on the top, right, and bottom look very similar to the links on the left.  However, I think I can do better.  Check out this site : http://www.flatstomachtips.com/ .  I didn’t create this site, but I think it’s a great example of how an adsense site should be created.  Notice how she has links within her text to other areas of her site?  This matches the blue google ad links within her site.  I think it works really well.  I’m very curious as to how well she’s doing with it.

Ok, based on the above, let’s fire up Niche Inspector and analyze it in an effort to find a profitable niche for me.  The first one I’m going to try is VENICE.  Traveling is popular, and Venice is as good as any.  When I perform this search, the only keyword phrase that really stands out is Venice Hotel.  Here’s the breakdown:

Searches: 6564
Google: 474,000
Google ads: 18
Broad Match CPC $3.10 – $3.87

Well, this actually looks promising.  Plus, I bet I could find some affiliate deals with it.  Let’s look it up in Google to scope out the competition.

When I look up Venice Hotel in Google, the first thing I notice is that most of the sites are very related to my targeted keyword, which is “Venice Hotel”.  The only exception to this is www.venetian.com, which is a Las Vegas Hotel.  Ideally, it would be great if sites came up that were not really related to Venice Hotels at all.  However, as it is obvious that Hotels and Travel are popular, this is not surprising.

Next, let’s try and determine the authority of these sites in order to determine what it would take to beat them.  To do this, I’m going to use Yahoo! Site Explorer, which you can find at :

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com

I’m going to type in one of the results that appear towards the bottom of the list.  This is

http://www.hotelinvenice.com/

According to Site Explorer, this site has 86 indexed pages.  Hmmmm, this actually isn’t too bad, I suspect.  I’ve seen some sites with 100,000+ indexed pages.  Again, I’m new to this, but this doesn’t look too bad.  Next, let’s check out the number of back links, which is 1,823.  This is also quite a low number, I think.  I’ve seen some sites with back links in the 19100 range.  Numbers don’t account for everything, however.  There is also the quality of those links.  Most of the links here come from other hotels, so they are related to the content.  This makes them high quality (no blogger account spamming here).

Another thing to look at is the age of the website itself.  Terrible 10 year old websites can often outrank well designed, content rich websites 1 year old websites.  Website age is very important.  To find this out, I like to use this SEO for firefox tool.  You can download it here:

http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html

By clicking on it when you’re looking at google search results, a whole bunch of valuable information is displayed.  For Age, we are taken to the Internet Wayback Machine (see my previous post on this, John Chow and the Amazing Internet Wayback machine).  From here, we learn that this page has been in operation since 2000, which is a long time in Internet terms.

Ok, so what does all of this mean?  I suspect I could create a pretty good site for Venice.  I bet it would perform better than my business software resource site.  However, ideally I would like to find a niche in which I think I could get on the first page for whatever keyword phrase I’m basing my site on.  For Venice Hotels, this might be difficult.  I would be hoping that people would find my site based on search phrases other than “Venice Hotel”.  I’m going to file “Venice Hotel” away for now, and keep looking.  Let’s see what else is out there …

In my next blog post, I intend to explore a few more potential adsense niches.  How will these compare to “Venice Hotels”?  Tune in tomorrow to find out.  Also, if you have any comments on the above based on your experience, I’d love to hear from you.

To Our Success,

- Dave

My First Adventure With Niche Inspector – Part Two!

Ok, here’s part 2 of my first (and so far only) attempt to create a $10 a day from google adsense website.

Once I decided to create a website based around Business Intelligence Software, the next thing I needed was content.  I decided I wanted to create close to 50 pages of original content, all of them optimized for the phrase “business intelligence software”.  When I say that each page would be optimized for this phrase, I mean that this phrase would make up between 2-3% of the content of that particular page.  This is apparently the optimum amount for any particular keyword phrase.  Anymore is considered keyword stuffing.  If you want to check out the keyword density for any web pages you’ve created, this is the best tool I’ve found so far:

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/

Anyway, creating all of this content was a bit of a pain.  As a subject, Business Intelligence Software is about as dry as you can imagine, plus writing close to 50 pages of content about it was not an easy task.  Nonetheless, I’d made the commitment, and after a month of steady work, I had my content ready to go and I put the website together.  So, what were the results?

Well, not that great.  This site has been up for 4 months now, and it has earned me a grand total of $35.59 in that time frame.  Not quite what I was looking for, was it?  Here’s what I’ve learned from the creation of this site, as well as some other points:

- When you see CPC rates higher between $15-$30, beware!  Most likely, the people who pay these extremely high rates only run their ads for google search results, not the content network.  I remember when I got the first adsense click for businessintelligencesoftware.  You know how much I made?  17 cents!  LOL, that’s a long way from $15, isn’t it?  In her free report, Myleena even makes this point, although I apparently missed it.
- Despite this, there were a couple of days where this site did generate $10 in revenue.  I’m not sure why this happened, but it did.  However, the problem is that 99.99% of the time, this site generates nothing.
- When I first put up the site, I did get some positive feedback from users of Business Intelligence Software, saying that they did intend to write reviews, comments, etc.  However, it never happened (well, it happened once) and after the first 2 days these comments dried up.
- Despite the fact that I optimized the site for the keyword phrase “business intelligence software”, I can’t find my site anywhere in google if I search for “businesss intelligence software”.  The problem here is that the sites that come up for this search are real authority sites (like IBM, for example), and there’s a lot of them.  Next time, I’m going to be much more aware of the competition for any phrase I focus on.
- Despite the fact that I’m next to nowheresville for “business intelligence software”, this site does get natural, organic search results from google.  But like Myleena says, it’s for search phrases that I never considered.  For example, “+birt + sas” and “in-memory associative technology”

So, all in all, I would chalk up my experience with my Business Intelligence Software site as a definite learning experience.  Although painful, I did learn a lot by creating it.  In my next post, I’m going to explain how I’m planning on using the lessons learned above to create a better battle plan for my next site.

To Our Success,

- Dave

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