If you want to reduce the amount of time it takes to find a profitable niche you could do no worse than to take a look at the example set by big business.

Have you ever noticed that when a new Wal Mart opens up in a new area they are quickly followed by smaller stores. or when McDonalds opens up soon after you’ll find a new Wendy’s close by. When Starbucks open up what happens? Smaller coffee stores spring up in the area. Why do you think this is?

The market leaders spend a lot of time and money on researching new locations. Do the smaller stores do the same research? Of course not they  just follow along behind the big guys , why spend money on research when Maccy D’s have already done it for you.

It’s the same in internet marketing if you want a short cut to a niche then look at what the big guys are doing. The ideal place to do this is at article sites like Ezinearticles and Articlebase. The first thing you need to do is to identify the big guys in each niche.

You’ll notice the 2 key words in that sentence are “each niche”If you look at the guys who have published most articles overall you’ll find a lot of information but it won’t actually help you too much in most cases. However if you go into each niche you can follow a link find out who are the top writers with the most articles in that niche.

I tend to look at the guys lower down the list rather than the top ones this is mainly because I’ve found they will be targeting different niches where as the top one will be targeting a single niche. It’s these multiple niche models that appeal to me more.

The expensive PPC analysis software that is being promoted at the moment works by assuming that if someone spends money on PPC ads for a long time then the ads are profitable. We will assume the same …

…If someone spends the time and money to write over 50 articles in a niche then it’s profitable for them. You then just need to look at their business model and improve it.  Improving on most article marketing is suprisingly easy as most article marketers make simple mistakes, I looked at over 100 articles researching this blog post and I estimate over 75% of them could have been improved in one way or another.

I hope you enjoyed the return of the Monday tip.

If you are interested in learning more about Advanced Article Marketing this months project in Wordpress Goldmine will be of interest to you. Following the success of the February Project (over $70 income from the site in the first 2 weeks)I’ll be creating a series of daily videos showing Advanced Article Marketing tips including a method that I am testing that is currently getting a very high clickthrough rate.

This weeks tips concern Google and using some of Google’s many free tools to help in your marketing efforts. Lets start with google reader www.reader.google.com. This is an rss reader that works in a similar fashion to gmail, you add feeds and it constantly updates and tells you about news items of interest. I use this to keep an eye on Niches I am publishing articles in on ezinearticles. This way i can rapidly spot new products and that are being promoted and popular keywords .I also use it to track various expert authors to find what niches they are now tackling. Unlike many Rss readers Google reader is organised and easy to find the content you want.

The next google tool on the list is Google Alerts. www.google.com/alerts.  With google alerts you add a search term and then you’ll get an email from google when there are any updates on the topic.  I set Google alerts to email me every day, so for example if I have a website all about Blue Widgets, I’ll enter the search term into alerts and then every day i get all the latest news on it which make it really easy for me to update my site and keep it up to date. Don’t underestimate just how valuable this can be in some niches.

For the final tool I was going to feature the google external keyword tool but there has been enough talked about it in recent weeks, I think it’’s safe to say if you aren’t using it you to find keywords and domain names you are missing out. So I’ll look at a tool that is not really a tool at all it’s where all the new google tools are being developed. Google labs , www.labs.google.comhave details of many of the tools they are developing or have developed and released you’ll be surprised what you’ll find here, pay special attention to the “graduates of the lab” section on the right hand side.

If you have been reading my tips for the past few weeks you’ll have seen that I like to feature products that are free or at the very least very good value. Today i just want to finish off by mentioning something that is released today by someone who I really do have a lot of respect for Chris Rempel, who like me likes good value. Chris is releasing VIP Essentials today which is a complete package of Templates,Themes, Reports and Guides to help you create an affiliate income. Unlike some recent releases this isn’t going to cost you a few mortgage repayments , In fact it’s probably going to cost you less than a good pizza. Check out Vip Essentials For more details

I’ve got 2 tips for you today and both are pretty much common sense, both have also had a big impact on how much income I generate,

Tip 1 is to plan your day out and use the time you have in the most effective way. For example today I wanted to build 2 new sites and try a new self hosted salesletter for a product I am promoting that is converting really badly. There was pretty much 8 hours solid work there, so first thing this morning I checked my email then turned it off. I also shut down skype, and yahoo messenger. I had no interuptions and finished all the 3 tasks in the allotted time. It doesn’t matter if you have 1 hour or 8 hours to work on your sites. Just make sure you use every minute without being distracted.

Tip 2 is about planning long term. I talk to so many people who build a site and get discouraged when it isn’t earning $100 a day in a few weeks. I try to build sites with an eye on what they will be doing 4 to 6 months ahead. If they make money next month great, thats a bonus. If after 3 or 4 months a site isn’t performing how I like i’ll re-do the the promotion and get some more article written for it. The sites I built today are designed to be earning a good income by christmas, this is even though I know that I can submit articles tomorrow and make immediate sales . Start to think and plan long term, it takes a lot of pressure off and you’ll stop getting disheartened if a site doesn’t perform immediatly. Plan to build and promote 1 site a week and not see any income for 4 months, everything you then make is a nice bonus.

I have several sites that rank in the top 5 in google for keywords that have lots of competition without me actually targetting that specific keyword. How do I do that? Actually it’s very easy all you need to do is to find domain names that consists of those keywords.

Here is an example of a domain name I found today the whole process took about 3 minutes.

First pick your niche for this I am going to pretend that I am selling a course on “How To Play Piano”

Go to the Google External Keyword Tool (just search for that term) and enter the keyword we are looking for which in this case is “How to Play piano” at this pooint search without synonyms this will give you a list of arouns 80 keyword phrases , add them all to the selected keywords box on the right then download them as a text file , you’ll find the link to do this at the end of the selected keywords box.

Next copy everything in the text file and use a bulk domain checking tool like the one at godaddy or the one at moniker.com this will return you a list of available domains. In the returned list I found lots of good domain names one in particular stood out “Howtolearnthepiano.com” this has about 480 searches per month and “how To Learn The Piano” has only 18 competing sites.

If I can rank one of these types of domain name at #3 in google when there are 11,000 competing sites then you can get #1 with that phrase. I haven’t registered the Piano domain, so good luck getting it! There are hundreds of thousands of domains like this available and i guarantee they will outperform the Piano-courses101.com style of domain name.

Finally today I want to mention 2 new products that 2 members of The Income Academy have created.

You’ll not have seen anything like this before and both products are incredibly useful if you want to keep on top of your blog building or promotion. They are both in prelaunch so are the cheapest they will ever be…check them out.

For the newbie blog builder..
Step By step wordpress : http://www.stepbystepwordpress.com/prelaunch.html

Need traffic??

http://www.stepbystepwordpresstraffic.com/prelaunch.html

Once again it’s great to see our members taking action … Good luck

It’s monday so it’s time for another tip. I thought today i’d concentrate on website promotion.  In particular planning the promotion of your site so that you get the best possible return for the time you put in.

When most people promote their sites they will submit them to lots of socialbookmarking sites, distribute articles, create hubpages and maybe a squidoo lens. All in the space of a few hours then move onto the next project. This is not how you should do it. Google and the other search engines like link building to look natural to achieve that you should take you time with promotion and build it slowly.

This doesn’t mean that your site can’t generate lots of visitors in the first week or two it just means that you have to be sensible in the type of promotion you do at the start.

There are 2 types of promotion that you do, link building and visitor attraction. mass article submission and socialbookmarking will generally get you backlinks. Ezinearticles, hubpages, squidoo and certain social media sites will get you visitors.  Guess what you should focus on to start with??

I hope you answered visitor attraction!

The first stage of promotion of any site should be aimed at getting visitors to your site this means submitting articles to ezinearticles with the right keywords, right title and right summary to attract readers and a good conclusion and resource box which get a 20-30% clickthrough rate.  Creating a Hubpage and/or a squidoo lens. Using Digg or Stumbleupon. look at most niches and you’ll find an ezinearticle, a hubpage and a maybe a squidoo lens towards the top of the rankings.

If you do this right there is no reason why you can’t attract hundreds of visitors to your site in the first few weeks.

Once you have traffic then start to use link building promotion methods to generate backlinks…Naturally