I’ve seen humor sites of varying quality during my travels across the Net, ranging in quality from hilarious to “I wish I hadn’t come here”. The ones that do well are those that can appeal to the sense of humor of their target niche, and there are quite a few success stories. The Onion, Failblog, and Cracked.com all come to mind as successful repeat traffic magnets because of their styles of humor. Heck, The Onion even had its own movie.

If you want to start a humor site and make money, here are a few options I’ve seen before:

• A full-blown blog: Technically, this would be the generic content site strategy for humor. However, if you go this route, blogging platforms make content management so much easier than direct alterations to HTML code. That’s why I recommend a blogging platform for the content approach to humor. Failblog (a video blog) uses this format, and even has its own YouTube channel.


• A web comic: I see the occasional web comic on the front page of Digg, so they do generate traffic. Again, they’re of varying quality from “Ugh” to “Cool”. If you can draw comics, you might want to consider this route.


• Jokes in the email: Yes, you can use humor to list build. Granted, the jokes I get from my last sign-up are miserable, but that doesn’t mean you won’t make someone laugh if you’re good at comedy. Building your income stream this way is just like any other type of email marketing.

If you can do it, humor is a great niche. Vulgar humor isn’t so great, because its so ubiquitous its really doesn’t stand out. However, the ability to humor people to real laughter over and over again is a sure-fire traffic magnet, and something you should consider to leverage a talent for comedy into money making online.

The same is true for finding a profitable niche market; there is no hidden secret to that either. The process is actually quite simple and in this post, I’m going to give you the basics of niche research. Follow this simple niche finding guide and you shouldn’t have any trouble finding a profitable niche for you to focus your internet marketing efforts on.

The first step in the process of picking a money making niche is to just find something. It can be anything, it really doesn’t matter what it is as long as you find a starting point. Think of things that you or your friends are interested in, or stuff that you often see being sold online. If you can’t think of anything just go to eBay and check out what the hot selling items are there.

After you find a possible niche go to the Google Keyword Tool and check the niche to see how many searches there are for the main keyword phrase related to it. Chances are you’ll get a large list of related keywords from the search. It will show you how often each one is searched for every month on average.

After you have the keyword list, go through each of them one by one and plug them into the actual Google search engine to see how many competing sites there are. Use quotes around the keyword phrase so you only get sites with exact matches. Since there will probably be a lot of keywords you don’t have to check them all, just several of the main ones.

Now, let’s say a keyword phrase gets an average of 1000 monthly searches and you found there are 10,000 competing sites. There’s a simple formula you can plug these figures into and get the Keyword Efficiency Index (KEI). The formula is (monthly searches / competing sites) X monthly searches. If the KEI is 100 or greater the niche is typically considered to have profit potential. In our example it would be (1000/10,000)X1000 = 100, so it that niche is a potential money maker.

Finally, you need to find out if there are any products being sold in that niche and any Adwords campaigns being shown for the keywords. If there are, this is more evidence that the niche could be profitable because most people won’t take the time to create a product or pay for ads if there’s no money in the niche. But even if there aren’t any products or ads it could just mean that you found a completely untapped niche. The potential still exists that it’s a money making niche, however it’s not likely that you are the first to find it, so you might need to do more research if that ends up happening.

As you can now see, niche research is not very complicated and there aren’t any hidden secrets to it. Anyone with basic computer skills can find a profitable niche if they really want to. It basically boils down to finding out what people are searching for, seeing how much competition there is, and figuring out if products exist within the niche. If everything looks good, the money making potential is probably there.

No, I’m not kidding, it really is that simple!

In my previous posts on finding the right niche to market to I said that it is much easier to build a business by sticking with one niche market that you LOVE.

While this is true, this assumes that you can find something you are passionate about.

What if you can’t find a niche market that you are passionate about?

What if there is no money in the niche markets you enjoy the most?

I have not seen these questions answered by many people. The first time I saw this answered was when I was doing religious study, but I have also seen it answered by a few business people.

So, what is the answer?

First, let’s take a quick look back at my 7 step niche finding system:

1. Make A List Of Your Passions

2. Make A List Of Things You Do Well

3. Merge The First Two Lists

4. Choose Your Favorite 3-5 Niches

5. Determine The Traffic Potential

6. Determine The Money Making Potential

7. Make Sure You Have Time For The Niche

If none of the niches that you are passionate about look profitable, then skip step 1 (1. Make A List Of Your Passions). At the end you will have a list of niches that you are good at and that make money. If none of the niches that you are good at (or have knowledge about) are niches that you can make money in (which is possible, but unlikely), then you need to skip steps1-4. Which means all you are left doing is finding profitable niches (steps 5-7).

After completing steps 5 through 7 you now have a profitable niche to target. That’s what you do when you can’t find a good niche in areas that you are passionate about.

“What about the passion? Aren’t you going to have a problem staying in this niche if you don’t have passion for it?”

That is the million dollar question… and despite what I may have said in the past the million dollar answer is that you need to…

Love the niche that you choose! Be passionate about the niche you choose!

Loving what you do is a choice. You can choose to love any niche. This may go against many of the things you have heard in the past, but it is an extremely important principle to learn. This is so important I am going to repeat it in big bold letters:

You don’t have to be passionate about a niche to make money online. However, you need to become passionate about everything you do in that niche (marketing, writing about it, etc.). You need to be passionate about what you are doing to make it easier to stick with it long term. And that passion is a choice. You can choose to love what you are doing, or you can choose to hate it. The decision is yours. When you choose to love what you are doing, then you will be much more likely to create the online business of your dreams.

• How to use YouTube to bring traffic to your website


• How to create and edit your own viral videos


• Ways to make a video viral


• Video software tools to use


• and much more.

You can check out his post by clicking here.

After Ryan’s latest post, Chris asked:

How do you advise a person to get started in mini-site marketing? Do you know of any good resources, or is this something that a person would have to find on thier own?

I decided to write a list of resources, but then realized I am too ill to do so. So, I am doing something different! I am going to start the ball rolling with one recommendation and let YOU give your recommendations. Feel free to include affiliate links as long as you really believe in the program.

Here’s my recommendation…

Jim Edwards “Mini-Site” Creator Home Study Course
Jim’s course gives you step-by-step, click-by-click mechanical “how to” steps for setting up money-making niche mini-sites. This particular program is aimed at people who don’t have the money to hire a webmaster and/or lack the technical know-how to create professional mini-sites.

What do you recommend?

UPDATE: Just to be clear I am looking for ANY resources on making niche mini sites. This includes how to pick the niche, marketing, product creation, etc.

In the previous post in my getting started series we talked about the importance of knowing what you want. In this post we are going to discuss how to pick the right niche for your online business.

A while back I wrote about how to pick the right niche for your blog. The same process can be used to pick the right niche for your online business. Here is a quick outline of the steps you need to take (you can read all the details here):

1. Make A List Of Your Passions

2. Make A List Of Things You Do Well

3. Merge The First Two Lists

4. Choose Your Favorite 3-5 Niches

5. Determine The Traffic Potential

6. Determine The Money Making Potential

7. Make Sure You Have Time For The Niche

The Most Important Things To Remember When Choosing The Right Niche For Your Online Business

You should choose a niche in a target market that you CAN and WANT to spend a LONG time serving. While you can have online success by going from one niche to another and you can have online success by creating products in niches that you are not passionate about it is much easier to build a business by sticking with one niche market that you LOVE and catering to that target market. I am going to say that again , because it is SO important:

It is much easier to build a business by sticking with one niche market that you LOVE and catering to that target market.

To help target the right niche, you need to decide who your ideal customer is. You can do this by answering the following question:

Who will I enjoy serving?

Target your online business for a niche you would LOVE to serve (click here to read a previous post I wrote about the importance of choosing your customer first).

You want your online business to be enjoyable and easy. One of the best ways to do that is stick with a niche you are passionate about.

If you REALLY want to make big money online AND enjoy it, then do what you LOVE.

WordPress is a good CMS that makes it easy to add/edit content on your site and I planned on talking about using it to create niche sites at some point. Also, the Stompernet trial had some really nice video lessons on using WordPress to set up niche sites. Anyway, click here to download the free ebook. It is definitely worth checking out!

What can you sell with an ebook?

• Traditional text: It still sells well, especially when you pair it up with useful and interesting illustrations that help make your point.


• Videos: These are growing in popularity. Instead of just writing an ebook, you can make videos that your customers can download or watch over the Net. But, if you want a video product, produce it to a higher quality than you find on YouTube. People are paying you for it after all.


• Audio: You can make audio training you can listen to over the Internet. However, if your skills are best taught with some demonstration, use video instead.

You already know what you know, so why not make extra money from it? Even if you don’t want to sell proprietary information that could rob you of a competitive advantage, there’s still plenty of market for the basics. So if you want to add to your bottom line, consider spinning off a profitable training product.

LOT OF POKEMON CARDS THAT MY KIDS TRIED TO SNEAK BY ME
In this ad on ebay, a mom with her hands full tells a great story to sell some pokemon cards. I love this story! It is funny and makes you want to read every last word. Because the ad was so witty it has become quite viral. The person who wrote the ad, also has a blog at http://mom2my6pack.blogspot.com/ which is getting TONS of new traffic. Not only that, but she got over $100 for something that would have cost about $3. You can learn a lot from this story, be sure to check it out.

Google Proxy Hacking: How A Third Party Can Remove Your Site From Google SERPs
Dan Thies writes about a Google hack that really needs to be fixed. Black hat SEO gurus can use it to remove your site from the SERPs, just like they did to Brad Fallon’s wedding favors site last year.

Summer Slowdown Myth
Alice Seba says we should ask the question “Is it your market or you who is slowing down?” Very interesting post. I personally have not seen a slow down in traffic this summer, but I have had a slowdown in comments.

How To Launch A Membership Site – Part 4: Content and Pricing
Yaro continues his membership site series with part 4 – “Content and Pricing”. In part 4 Yaro discusses how to choose the right price for your membership site. He also discusses what type of content to provide to your members and how to provide it.

How To Launch A Membership Site – Part 5: Triggers
In part 5 of Yaro’s series, he covers pyscological triggers. I like his disclaimer at the start of the start article, because the idea of using triggers to make people buy is a hard one for me to come to grips with ethically. Ultimately, the money we earn is directly or indirectly a result of advertising that uses phsycological triggers to get us to buy. Love it or hate it that’s just the way things are.

How Not Knowing Something Makes You More Of An Expert
Very good read about what makes you an expert in your niche.

Will The FTC Investigate Google & Matt Cutts For Paid Links?
Andy Beard takes an interesting look at Google’s stand on paid links. I don’t think the FTC will ever attack Matt Cutts for the lack of disclosure on his blog. If he worked for Microsoft it might be a different story…

This World – This Next Activity Map
This Next is a new social shopping site. What is really cool is the activity map (see link above). You can actually watch people buy stuff in real time. It shows what people are buying and where they are buying it from. Very cool! Found via Jack Humphrey.

Defeating Self-Limiting Thoughts
Chris Garrett wrote a nice post about staying confident and positive by removing negative thoughts. If you want to have long term success online, you need to stay positive.

WEB USERS NOW SPEND HALF THEIR TIME VISITING CONTENT, FAR OUTPACING TIME SPENT WITH SEARCH, COMMUNICATIONS AND COMMERCE
Very interesting study showing changes in the way people are using the Internet. How can you use this to your advantage?

That’s it for this week’s Internet marketing tips from around the web.

The first step to get solid traffic to your blog is to choose the right niche.

There is no surefire way to pick a profitable niche. Even professional bloggers admit that they sometimes choose a niche that doesn’t get enough traffic or make enough money to make it worthwhile. So don’t worry if the first blog you start flops. Just try again. Perserverance is the key to success.

Here are 7 simple steps to choosing a niche that is right for you:

1. Make A List Of Your Passions
Write down all the things you are passionate about. If you aren’t passionate about the topic you write about, it will show! Passion is one of the biggest keys to keeping people interested in your blog (yourself included). This is the most important step in choosing a niche. If you don’t follow any of the other steps in this post, make sure you write about something you are passionate about.

Here is an example of what your list of passions might look like:

1. Basketball
2. Playing Video Games
3. Officiating Tennis Matches
4. Internet Marketing
5. American Idol
6. Reality TV
7. Being a Good Parent
8. Model Rocketry
9. UFOs
10. Bird watching
11. Carpentry
12. Ridding the world of Ants
13. ...

2. Make A List Of Things You Do Well
Write down all the things you do well. It is advisable to ask other people for input on this. Find out what other people think you are good at. They might mention things you haven’t thought of. You might also show the final list to your friends and family to get further input on the list.

An example list of things you do well might look like this:

1. Basketball
2. Officiating Tennis Matches
3. Cooking
4. Teaching
5. Running Marathons
6. Open Heart Surgery
7. Being a Good Parent
8. Model Rocketry
9. Calculus
10. Bird watching
11. Sailing
12. ...

3. Merge The First Two Lists
Take the lists you made in steps 1 and 2. Write down all the things that are in both list 1 and list 2. This will give you a good idea of things you can blog about as an expert. However, you don’t have to be an expert to blog about something. If you are really passionate about something, but aren’t good at it or are just learning about it, you can still blog about that topic from the perspective of someone trying to improve in that area.

For Example, if we merge the example lists from step 1 and step 2 the list would look like this:

1. Basketball
2. Officiating Tennis Matches
3. Being a Good Parent
4. Model Rocketry
5. Bird watching
..

4. Choose Your Favorite 3-5 Niches
Out of the list you compiled from step 3 (above), which ones are you MOST interested in blogging about? It doesn’t matter if other people write about it. It doesn’t matter if it’s extremley competitive. Just write down the top 3-5 things that YOU want to blog about. It’s okay if you are down to 1 niche at this point, but 3-5 would be better.

NOTE: At this point you have at least one niche you could start writing about. However, if you want to make money from your blog, you need to do more research.

From our example, let’s say that you would want to blog about the following three things from your merged list:

1. Basketball
2. Being a Good Parent
3. Bird watching

5. Determine The Traffic Potential
There are a lot of ways to do keyword research and determine the traffic potential for a niche. To simplify things, you aren’t going to worry about competition, you are only going to concern yourself with demand.

Go the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool (which seems to be working again). Type in the primary keyword(s) for the niches you selected in step 4. Then you will come up with a list of keyword phrases and their search numbers for last month on Yahoo owned Search Engines.

Note: If Overture doesn’t work, try the free wordtracker keyword tool.

In my opinion, you really want to see more than 10,000 searches a month on Overture for the main keyword, otherwise it’s going to be really hard to get decent traffic to your blog.

Let’s go back to the example and turn your list into a primary keyword list, with a list of the Search Engine traffic. It would now look like this:

1. Basketball – 37845
2. Parenting – 33457
3. Bird watching – 5500

At this point, you might think that bird watching was out of the picture, but what if you wanted to write about birds, in general? What if you wanted to write about your favorite bird, the hummingbird (which had 17354 searches last month)? It is still possible to get a lot of traffic to a bird watching blog, but for the purpose of this post I am just covering a quick and easy method to analyze the potential traffic. You can expand your traffic analysis by looking at other related keywords if you like.

6. Determine The Blog’s Money Making Potential
Common sense might suggest to you that there are products to be sold to people looking for each of the things in our example, but is there a way to be sure?

Here is a quick and easy method you can use to help determine a blog’s money making potential. Go to Google or Yahoo and do a search for your primary keywords. The more advertisers you see paying for sponsored results (PPC) the better. If you don’t see anyone bidding on those keywords then it may be more difficult to monetize your blog but not necessarily impossible.

The sponsored results are the ads that show on Google and Yahoo at the very top and the right hand side of the Search Engine results, under the title “Sponsored Links” on Google and “Sponsor Results” on Yahoo.

So, for our example, I went to Yahoo and did searches for each keyword and wrote down the number of ads I saw:

1. Basketball – 10
2. Parenting – 10
3. Bird watching – 10

From our quick test, it looks like all three niches are capable of being monetized. Sometimes you will type in a word, and there won’t be any sponsored results. For instance, go over to Yahoo or Google and type in “underwater basket weaving”. When I tried it, there were no paid ads on either Search Engine. That is probably a good sign that there isn’t much money to be made in the underwater basket weaving market.

7. Make Sure You Have Time For The Niche
Is the topic so broad that you just don’t have time to blog about it yourself? For instance, if you choose basketball as your niche, do you really have enough time to cover ALL basketball news on your blog? If not, then you either need to:

A. Start a group blog with enough other people to cover the topic.
B. Narrow the focus of your blog. In our example, maybe basketball is too broad for you to cover. If so, you might choose to cover your favorite basketball team or write about funny basketball moments, etc.

There you have it, 7 steps to choosing a niche for your blog.

What does this have to do with choosing a niche?

I can write posts way ahead of time on this blog and save them for a rainy day. But on many of our blogs this is not possible.

For instance, my wife Jill has a blog about American Idol. Last week they started narrowing down the top 24. It was three nights in a row of American Idol! Wednesday night, Jill was feeling really ill and just couldn’t write her normal review of the show, so she wrote this post explaining that she would write the review in the morning. Unfortunately, she was way too ill to write the review until a couple of hours before the airing of the first elimination round of American Idol Thursday night.

It would not have helped her at all to have a post saved about how much she liked Taylor Hicks new album, because it wasn’t what people were coming to her blog for on Wednesday night.

If you have a blog that covers the news it is much harder to take time off, unless you have a group blog.

When choosing the niche for your blog, it’s important to evaluate whether or not you want to be able to take a week off without losing momentum. This can be accomplished either by having a group blog (something I am considering for several of our blogs, including this one) OR by having a blog that is NOT closely tied into current events.

Whenever I get bored with a website or blog, I stop visiting it.

One of my BIGGEST goals in 2007 and beyond is to be remarkable, and to NOT BE BORING!

You should make it one of your goals too! Stop being boring! Nobody cares about boring websites except their owners. Just stop it!

Be remarkable, Be exciting, Be interesting, Be unique, Be everything you want to be, but…

DON’T BE BORING!

Are Headlines Tangling Your Readers?

Don’t Be The Best… Be The First!

Thinking outside of the box

What ProBloggers Can Learn from TechCrunch 20

Google Stops Google Bombs

Campaign to Reduce Wikipedia’s PageRank to Zero via (jazzcatseo)

In 2006 there were a lot of excellent business related blog posts. However, at the end of 2006 Anik Signal (aff) posted what I considered to be the best blog post of 2006. If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend you go check it out. In fact, I highly recommend that you read it more than once.

A few months ago, I purchased a new Internet Marketing course called “Instant Web Profits System” by Dan Lok. Dan has created a niche for himself in copywriting as “The Website Conversion Expert”.

For starters, I get a really good vibe from Dan Lok. His staff has always given prompt answers to my questions and they were always very upbeat and positive. Dan strikes as me as someone whose truly desires to help people make money online.

As for “Instant Web Profits Systems“, I wanted to start by letting you know what this course is not:

• It is not a course on blogging


• 
  It is not a course on making money with Adsense
• It is not a course on Affiliate Marketing


• 
  It is not a course on making money without raising a finger

The purpose of this course is to reveal how to increase the online sales of your products and/or services.

I SO wish I had this product when I was starting out. I know it would have made a HUGE difference in the success of the first product I created.

The one thing I don’t like about the course is Dan’s occasional use of colorful language. However, many times in the course it did help him get across the importance of the message he was conveying.

For the most part, it is NOT a step by step guide. With one exception…

The step by step CD that gives you the 11 steps for creating a winning sales letter. I can see how following the 11 steps that Dan reveals in this course can produce an awesome sales letter. I will certainly follow them the next time I need to create a sales letter.

There is a lot of excellent business and Internet Marketing advice in the audio CDs, much of which you can use even as an affiliate marketer or blogger.

What is included in the Instant Web Profit System?

It includes:

• 4 audio CDs that reveal 101 Ways To Make Your Website SELL Like Crazy!
• 2 audio CDs that reveal How To Avoid The Deadly Mistakes That Can KILL Your Online Business!
• 1 audio CD that reveals 11 Steps To Creating Killer Web Copy!
• 8 CD Roms that show Dan Lok making over other people’s website sales letters (this was my personal favorite part of the package).
• 6 Audio CDs with uncensored Interviews with some of the world’s top Internet Marketing experts!
• Plus a 1-hour “private” mentoring session with Dan Lok.

While Dan covers many topics in this package, the topics that are hit the hardest are copywriting and website conversion. This product shows you how to write better copy and how to convert your visitors into customers.

My favorite part of the product is the 8 CDs that contain video of Dan transforming underperforming sales letters into sales letters that sell. I found these videos to be worth the price of the whole package. I have seen free videos on these topics that don’t come anywhere near the quality and depth that these videos go into. I strongly recommend them to anyone who wants to learn how to sell a product or service.

The audio CDs were sprinkled with some Internet Marketing advice that I haven’t heard too many people talk about outside of products that you have to pay for. Here are some (not all) of the main topics discussed in the audio CDs:

List Building
Negotiating
Increasing Website Traffic
Ezine Creation
Joint Ventures
Copywriting
Writing Ads
Website Conversion
ebook Authoring
and more!

This a solid product, that I believe will really help you convert your visitors into customers. It is an excellent product if you have a product or service to sell. Go sign up for his free newsletter by clicking here and you can learn more about Instant Web Profits System and Dan’s other products.

Tags:

conversion improve sales improving conversion rates conversion rate online conversion rate

1. What are the top 5 sites that I own that are easiest to get traffic too?
2. What are the top 5 sites that I own that make the most money per visitor?
3. What are the top 5 sites that I own that I enjoy working on the most?

I am not going to go into details on my lists, except to say that there were two sites that I own that fit into all three categories (this blog wasn’t one of them). This blog was on 2 of the 3 lists. It didn’t make the first list, because I find it much easier to grow traffic on most of my other sites and blogs. It can be done, but it is much more difficult and time consuming.

Anyway, I thought I would share that with you, because it might be helpful to make lists like these if you have multiple websites. It might also be helpful when choosing a niche for your next website.

If you were using these lists for choosing a new niche you might instead ask the questions:

1. Which niche site will be easiest to get traffic too?
2. Which niche site will make the most money per visitor?
3. Which niche site will I enjoy working on the most?

Asking and answering questions like these area a great way to help you reach your goals faster, not only in business, but in other areas of your life.

However, I think the title is misleading. Obviously, Internet Marketing is NOT dead. If it were then Mike would be quitting and he is not.

There is a ton of money to be made on the net with all kinds of sites (blogs, wikis, forums, download sites, affiliate marketing, Adsense, ebooks, services, copywriting, seo, web design, software, games, membership sites, Internet Marketing, drop shipping, etc). There are all kinds of statistics out there about how fast the Internet is growing and how much money consumers will spend on the net.

So if you are trying to make money online, don’t worry. There is plenty of money to be made on the web and just like Google Adsense, Internet Marketing is NOT DEAD!

I just wanted to make sure I was clear about that.

That said, “The Death of Internet Marketing” is still a good read.

WOW!

There was a section of the book (starting on page 39) that provided one of those “ah ha” moments for me. What’s great is that my wife Jill recently gave me a bunch of ideas that fit right into what Mike talks about in that section. Jill sure is blessed with a good head on her shoulders.

Anyway, suffice it to say that I really, really, like the book.

“The Death of Internet Marketing” is well worth the read, even if you aren’t planning on making money from it. Some of the concepts that Mike talks about really hit home for me.

Have you read it yet?

If not, you can download it by clicking here.

Then come back here and let me know what you think of it.

I have been putting this off for at least 6 months, but it didn’t take long at all to set up. Jill bought the wordpress template for their blog from template monster. It’s really nice and professional looking. We were originally going to try a free template, but we stumbled across the paid templates and decided to go with one of them. I made a few changes to it and have a few more changes left to make.

I think in the long term it will be a really good blog for Jill and Laura, because using natrual products is something they both have a big interest in. Also, they are both very passionate about using natural products, so their passion will show up in their blog posts.

Another good thing about their new blog is that it is a more focused niche than Natural Family News, which I think will make it easier for them to get regular readers.

Also, it should not be too hard for them to establish some initial traffic to the site. So many of our friends are also into natural products, which will give them some good word of mouth traffic to the blog. Plus, Jill and Laura already have a small community built up with their Natural Family News blog, most of whom will be interested in their new blog as well.

The last thing I wanted to say about their new blog is that at this point it is monetized with Adsense only, but once it is established they may find other ways to monetize it.

One thing that really jumped off the pages so far for me is when Rich says:

Just like you wouldn’t decide that you want
to get married, and go find the most
desperate person and propose – you shouldn’t
decide you wanted to start a business and
find the most desperate market and set
up shop…

Go check it out and let me know what you think of it.