Here we are with another Monday Tips posts.  These aren’t strictly tips today but 3 things you should know that might change the way you do business. As with all good things I’ll save the best until last and trust me you will want to see that.

The first thing you need to know is that Amazon have changed their TOS and they are now stopping anyone from using PPC to drive traffic to Amazon sales pages.  In the space of a few minutes people who have built their business on this model are without an income unless they have been sensible and diversified.

On the other hand those of us who use article marketing are possibily looking at an increase in income over the coming months.

The email they sent out says…

“After careful review of how we are investing our advertising resources, we have made the decision to no longer pay referral fees to Associates who send users to www.amazon.com, www.amazon.ca, or www.endless.com through keyword bidding and other paid search on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines, and their extended search networks. If you’re not sure if this change affects you, please visit this page for FAQs.”

The second this thats worth know is all about Twollars 

Twollars is an online currency set up for twitter users , the idea is to help charities raise income. How it works is as follows. If someone makes an interesting tweet or makes a useful tweet, you can give them some of your twollars  (50 free with every account) . They can then pass these on to companies who will sponsor a charity and match Twollars for Dollars.  So for example if Sony wanted to attract twitter users they could agree to give $1 for ever twollar donated at their site.  Everyone wins.  The Company, The Charity and Twitter users.

Twollars is the idea of a very good friend of mine  Eiso Kant who I’ve know for as long as I’ve been marketing online. He was the programmer behind RSSG and several of my early sites.  At 18 years of age he is one of the most farsighted internet Entrprenures that i’ve ever met.  Check out twollars and send me some if you like it!!

Now for the big one.

One of the problems we all have is keeping people on our sites long enough, with google measuring how long people stay on your site as one indicator of the value of your site the longer people stay the better.

Let me now introduct Apture to you.  Apture is a plugin that does some awesome stuff That will keep people on your site. I am still working out a way to monetize it , videos will be one method and i am sure that I can think of some more over the next few days. So lets have a quick look at apture in action. 

In front of the highlighted words below you’ll see some symbols click on them to see what i’ve linked to..You can then click on related links within the boxes that come up for more info.

My Name Is Mark Thompson and I am The Author of WordPress Goldmine 

Now imagine the potential of this at the moment you can link to videos, documents, sites like techcrunch twitter scribd etc with no doubt more to come…lets hope ezinearticles are one such addition. Using Videos and sales pages and you could have a great way to make money online.

As With Twollars this really could herald the start of something big.

Check out apture today at www.apture.com

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