Hey folks! I figured it was time for me to blow the dust off this old blog of mine and let everyone know a couple of things.

First, I’m still here! If memory serves, I think I’ve said that before when I had a long dry spell between posts. I guess my attempt at continuing with that momentum kind of dwindled, but my heart never left.

What have I been up to? I’ve mainly been focusing on brushing up my niche marketing skills — creating a handful of niche blogs and promoting them. I’ve been keeping up with the latest tools and advice on several blogs I have on my must-read list. At the same time I’ve been continuing writing reviews on my review blog. Over time, you can make some decent money doing reviews, which is why I’ve kept it up while I reinvest that income into other endeavors.

The second thing I want to bring to your attention is that a good friend of mine, Mark Mason of Masonworld, has a contest where three winners will receive copies of Jonathan Leger’s latest Internet marketing creation: Instant Article Factory.

Mark Mason is one of the few people I trust in the IM world. He provides information that helps people like you and me who have a day job and a strong interest in IM at night. When he says a product or service does what it’s supposed to, I take him at his word and I haven’t been disappointed.

So what is this thing called Instant Article Factory? Simply put, it’s the quickest way to create an article. Seriously. If you watch Jonathan’s demonstration video, you’ll see how he creates a 300+ word article in under 5 minutes! You have a selection of article templates to start with. All you have to do is choose one, enter a few fields of information and click the “Create Article” button. This tool also supports spinning, which multiplies the benefits several times over.

If you’re into article marketing like I am, then you need to consider all your options that give you an advantage over your competition as well as make you as productive as possible.

Check out Mark Mason’s site to enter his contest. You just might be a winner!

Remember me? Yep, I’m still here.

It has been WAY too long since I’ve posted here on MeAndMyDrum, but I haven’t been sitting on my thumbs the whole time. I’ve been busy developing niche websites and increasing my affiliate sales. More on that for future posts, but right now I wanted to break my silence by informing you of a great opportunity to learn from a successful Internet marketer that you should not miss.

I’ve told you before about Josh Spaulding. He’s so good at what he does that he doesn’t have the traditional day job. Nope, his income is all coming from his online efforts. And he wants to help you do the same.

He will be closing his doors tomorrow, October 14, to his successful Coaching With Josh forum for good. This is not some marketing tactic devised to get you to buy into his community. He’s one of the very few people I trust online, so when he says he’s going to close the doors for good, he means it. But that doesn’t mean he’s shutting down the community. He’s just going to make this a private community and no longer accept new members.

What this means to you is that you’ll have direct access to an experienced Internet marketer. Additionally, you can brainstorm with all the other members (including myself) who want to be successful online. I’ve been a member for over 1.5 years and I can honestly say Josh and other members have helped me expand my knowledge that I use to help me create income online everyday.

If you use this link and this coupon code (099AF877AD), you’ll be just a click away from tapping into a wealth of information found in the 18,000+ forum posts. I’m NOT into hype! It sounds this good because it truly is. And to make the deal sweeter, Josh gives free membership to members who make 500 posts. That means that by the end of this year — maybe even sooner — you could be getting all this for FREE!

In my last post, I showed you how you could breathe new life into low-paying CPC keywords, but also had low search competition. In that post, I had suggested building an eBay store on a domain that you own. But there was something else that I wanted to show you that could help maximize your profits with such a store.

Let’s say you’re looking for men’s watches in Google’s Keyword Tool. The CPCs are pretty low, at least, they’re too low for me if I were thinking of creating a site for the sole purpose of generating Adsense income. But the search levels look pretty good (see image below; click to enlarge). You’ll notice the one I highlighted in yellow.

Now copy and paste that keyword phrase, “breitling mens watches”, into the search form on eBay and do it under “All Categories”. You get a lot of results, don’t you? Let’s narrow that down a bit.

You’ll need an eBay account to do the following (it’s free).

• Click the “Completed Listings” in the left sidebar.
• Next, click on one of the selections in the Location section of the left sidebar. For our purposes, click on “US Only”.

What exactly are we looking for?

Okay, that narrows it down a bit, but it’s still a lot to go through. Plus, and more importantly, it’s not showing us what we’re hunting for, which is the prices in green off to the right. Green means the product has been sold; red means it wasn’t. In short, the more green we see on the screen, the more green we get in our pocket when making a sale on our blog. Follow me so far? Good.

Just for grins, click on the “Luxury” link in the “Type” section of the left sidebar. As of this writing, it shows that there are 173 products within that subcategory.

Ahhh, that’s better! See those green price tags? And they’re quite hefty, wouldn’t you say? The bigger the final sale, the bigger our commission, so let’s scroll down some more to get a feel for things.

Okay, so there are definitely more items that have not sold (noted by the red), than ones that have (the green ones). But I wouldn’t get too discouraged by this because of the final sales figures. At those prices, you could make a decent commission on just a few sales per week.

As you go through the completed listings, take note of the titles of the products that have been sold. Are there any name brands that you can spot? Maybe you can tell which brands are selling more than others. Or perhaps there’s another descriptor there that you can detect pattern in. Those are the things you want to pick up on. Why? Because that’s how you’re going to refine the products you put on your eBay store.

I should make it clear that I’m NOT talking about creating a store on eBay. Instead, this is about you creating your very own eBay store on your very own domain name using the products I suggested in my previous post (BANS or phpBay Pro). These tools give you the ability to filter out products you don’t want and end up with a narrowly defined product line — the kind that sells! And how do we know they sell? Because we just narrowed our search on eBay as described above.

We’re not through doing our research though, so go back and filter on other subcategories. Instead of filtering on “Luxury”, try something else like “Quartz”. How does the green on the screen look for that one? Do you see any patterns that would indicate a profitable niche?

When you build your store

Regardless of which product you use to build your store, you’ll want to structure it in such a way to that makes it intuitive to the user. So just like we narrowed our search in the example above, build your categories from the top down — large to small.

So if you noted during your research that sales are high in the “luxury” subcategory, maybe go one step further and break that down by brand names or prices. Then start again with another subcategory and work your way down from there. Not all subcategories need to be broken down. Just use your common sense and think of how a user might shop.

The key is to make it easy for them to find what they want. Giving them the same information in more ways than one could help solve that.

When you’re researching keywords to build your niche site for the purposes of making money with Google Adsense, it’s important to find keywords with a high cost-per-click (CPC) and relatively low search volume (low competition). This is the low-hanging fruit that I’ve outlined recently.

But what if the CPC stinks, but the search volume looks ideal? Do you build the site anyway and hope for the best? Well, you could, but you might make more money with what I’m about to tell you. Before I get to that, here’s a disclaimer:

If you are pregnant, thinking of becoming pregnant, or know someone who is pregnant, then inform your spouse immediately. Success may result if this information is used properly. If you experience profit for more than four hours, then seek the counsel of a financial adviser and invest responsibly. Dizziness may occur if you spin in place really, really fast. Do not operate heavy machinery after taking this advice because, well, this information has nothing to do with educating you on that.

Okay, good. Got that out of the way.

There have been many times when I’ve found keywords that fit this scenario. I tend to avoid CPCs lower than, say, $1.75. Not all the time; it could be lower or higher, and that could be based on my overall feel of the niche I’m researching or if it’s late at night and I’m just too darn tired to care.

But in either case, my eye naturally gravitates to the upward end of the spectrum and your’s should, too. We need to find a way to maximize our profits while minimizing our efforts.

So what can you do to boost your profits with these keywords?

If the niche interests you, but Adsense doesn’t seem to be the way to go, then why not build an eBay store using something like BANS or phpBay Pro? The money you’d make would then come from commissions made off sales or new customer signups. It’s like giving all that information you’ve collected a second chance, which can be very rewarding.

But don’t setup shop just yet! There’s more you need to know that could help maximize your profits even more. Details for that will be in my next post.

In the meantime, I’d like to direct your attention to a buddy of mine, Mark Mason. He’s put together a video on Josh Spaudling’s amazingly popular report called the $5 Mini-Site Formula. Both the video and report are free, btw. The video will explain in detail the process I use when building niche sites and profiting from them.

I love the thrill of the hunt — hunting for money making niches, that is.

Finding that corner of the web that has the potential to make me money is pretty cool. There are no guarantees, of course, but if you’re following someone like Josh Spaulding, your chances have increased.

By utilizing the techniques he outlines in his very popular $5 Mini-Site Formula (that’s a free report, btw), he demonstrates how to locate the low-hanging fruit of the Internet and turning it into profit. I’ve done that here in the form of free downloadable research to get you started.

Profit in shipping containers

Below is a screenshot of some keywords I found using Google’s Keyword tool and Josh’s techniques:

I’ll explain what you’re seeing here in future posts, but until then I really want to encourage you to download Josh’s free report to understand the mechanics of what you’re seeing here. In short, this is definitely a market I’d tap into.

How would you profit from all this?

By creating a blog specifically for this niche, putting some Adsense ads on it, and promoting it through the use of article marketing, you can lay the groundwork for visitors to not only learn from your content, but to click on your ads and putting cash in your pocket!

Those numbers in the far right column tell you roughly how many times those keywords are being searched for on a monthly basis. The CPC column (second from the left) is not what you’ll earn per click. Rather, it’s what an advertiser would expect to pay if they were bidding on those terms. But that means you get a cut of it, of course. So the higher the CPC the more money you make when people click on a related ad.

Here’s some more work I’ve already done for you — available domain names that match the niche:

BUY-SHIPPING-CONTAINER.COM
CLEANING-CONTAINER.COM
CLEANINGCONTAINER.COM
CONTAINER-BOXES.COM
CONTAINER-PRICES.COM
SHIPPING-CONTAINER-SALES.COM
SHIPPING-CONTAINERS-OVERSEAS.COM
SHIPPINGCONTAINERSOVERSEAS.COM
SPECIMEN-CONTAINER.COM
SPECIMEN-TRANSPORT.COM
SPECIMENCONTAINER.COM
STEEL-SHIPPING-CONTAINER.COM
STEEL-SHIPPING-CONTAINERS.COM
STEEL-STORAGE-CONTAINER.COM
STEELSHIPPINGCONTAINER.COM
STORAGE-CONTAINERS-FOR-SALE.COM
TUBE-CONTAINER.COM
USED-SHIPPING-CONTAINER.COM
USED-SHIPPING-CONTAINERS-FOR-SALE.COM

Here are the keywords in a text file for you to download: keywords.

Why am I doing this?

A number of reasons. By showing you what works, I hope to remove some of the mystery and intimidation that some of you may have with creating your own niche site. Hey, I’ve been there, too, but honestly, it’s not as hard as you think.

Second, I want you to get to know Josh. He’s one of the very few people who has held my attention for a while now. I’ve mentioned here before that I drop Internet marketers/gurus like a hot potato if they lose my trust or annoy me. Josh has never done that and I look forward to his advice each and every time.

If you like this kind of post, please tell me by leaving me a comment below. I have other batches of even higher paying niches if you’re interested.

Let’s say you’re at an auto dealership looking to buy your next car. The salesperson tells you about the features of one particular model you’ve had your eye on for a while. The color, the features, the price — everything about it is just what you’ve been looking for. But then the salesperson says that he gets a commission off the sale.

Do you turn around and walk off the lot? No, you wouldn’t because you need that car and you know that the salesperson has to make their money somehow.

Now, what if we take this scenario and apply it to something we buy online from an affiliate marketer promoting a product? She tells you all about the bells and whistles “product X” has to offer. It sounds great! You decide to buy it, but you read on to find out that she gets a cut of the purchase.

Do you feel any different than you did in the car scenario above? In my opinion, you shouldn’t.

This is something I’ve seen others do from time to time. In fact, I’ve probably done it myself. From the perspective of the marketer, I surmise that she feels she’s not being completely honest unless she exposes the fact that she’s getting a cut of the transaction. But wouldn’t you agree that stating such a fact most likely works against the marketer more than it helps?

In some cases, the marketer offers both an affiliate link AND a non-affiliate link, leaving it to the buyer to decide whether they, the buyer, should get a commission. Why do such a thing? Of course, we want to assume the marketer is being truthful in her description of what “product X” can do. But as buyers we need to research as much as we can to protect ourselves, no matter if it’s a car or a software package, right?

“But Mark, sometimes marketers aren’t truthful about the products they promote and are only interested in making a sale.”

I absolutely agree with you! The same goes for car salesmen. We want to trust them. They should be truthful. But as we all know, there are a lot of scam artists out there, peddling the latest solution to whatever ails us, especially from the MMO crowd. So it’s “buyer beware” at all times, online or off.

What do you think? Is there such a thing as too much disclosure? Leave me a comment to discuss.

No matter what industry you’re in, no matter what you’re doing in that industry, communication is so important to getting things done. The message could be verbal or visual, doesn’t make any difference. Without the exchange of information, we’d be bumps on a log.

Sometimes, though, that communication can be something as simple as a “thank you”, but have a major positive impact on someone. Think of all the times you’ve held the door open for a stranger and they just walked right on through without acknowledging your act of kindness. Call me old fashioned, but I sometimes say “You’re welcome” to see if that snaps them out of their world for a few seconds.

Now let’s place that in an online setting, a place where it’s so easy to ignore someone and drop our usual standard of common courtesy. Ah, but you’ve no doubt seen those autoresponders for when you leave a comment on someone’s post and getting an automated email thank you for doing so. Or opted in to someone’s mailing list and received and automated response thanking you, too.

Did you know you can do that with Twitter after someone follows you? Yep, it’s called TweetLater. It’s free and once you set it up, you can add your own personal message that will be sent to the person that just followed you. This could be a thank you, a link to your blog, and maybe — if appropriate — you could link them to your product or service. This last part is something you have to be very careful with as it may turn off some people on the spot.

And that’s not all TweetLater does. You can automatically follow people who follow you, schedule tweets for future delivery, and create keyword alerts. Are you interested in what a certain “sammich man” has to say? If you narrow it down to a keyword, you can be notified when that word is used in one of his tweets.

For those of you who have followed me on Twitter (thank you!). I hope you have see the autoresponder in action. Sure, it’s automated, but it’s still a nice way of letting people know you’ve taken the time to let people know they exist and have done something you appreciate.

I received an email today from Pepperjam about an affiliate who sells pillows. That got me to thinking about what that niche looked like so I decided to run it through the “drum machine” to see what I’d find. The results were pretty cool, but instead of keeping it for myself I thought I’d share it with you and let you run with it.

First, I went to Google’s Keyword Tool and searched on “pillow”. I added the CPC column and sorted on it in descending order. I usually look for keywords or keyword phrases that have a respectable search volume, are not too competitive, and have an average CPC (cost per click) that’s worth going for. Of course, the higher the CPC the better, but my threshold usually sits around above a dollar and change.

Here’s a sample of what I found:

So we have “mattress pillow” with an average search volume of 74,000 and CPC of $3.15. Now, that doesn’t mean that you are definitely going to get $3.15 each time someone clicks on a Google Adsense ad, but it’s a good indication.

I then took that keyword phrase and ran it through Market Samurai (one of the prizes I’m giving away in my contest) to see what it had to say about “mattress pillow”. The steps I take in determining a niche evolves constantly, but for now, if Market Samurai tells me that something isn’t worth going for, then I typically just let the keyword go and search for something else.

Well, this time Market Samurai told me in its own way that the phrase “mattress pillow” might actually have potential. See below:

The image above is a portion of a screenshot using the SEO Competition screen. It tells me the backlinks and PR of sites that rank for the keyword phrase I’m researching. For those of you who don’t have Market Samurai, I can tell you that green colored cells are good or “less challenging to dominate”, amber cells are slightly less than good, and red ones are indicators that you have a lot of work ahead of you if you choose to tackle that keyword. In other words, it’s probably not a good idea to spend your time on something that has a red cell.

Well, as you can see, there’s a lot of green cells for this one. So if it were me, I would decide to either write a post that’s rich with the phrase “mattress pillow” and its ilk or I might even register a domain with that as the name or something similar and build it to contain other related keywords. You know, your basic search engine magnet.

What a year it has been for affiliate marketing, wouldn’t you say? Never have I seen so many opportunities to make money online than I have this year.

One opportunity that I’ve come across is a company called Motive Interactive. For publishers and advertisers, this service I think shows a lot of what is being sought after: exposure and sales for advertisers, and attractive commissions for bloggers.

After signing up with them, the first thing I noticed was how simple their interface was to use (more on this later). Very straight forward. You’re immediately given a graphic demonstrating your account’s activity as well as given the ability to add your campaigns on the same page for an overall review.

But here’s where the good stuff comes into play. When you’re ready to join a merchant’s program, you just click on the “Offers” link and you’re taken to a page divided into several tabs: All, New, Hot, and Exclusive. This way you can easily narrow your focus on what you’re interested in most. After a while you may find that going through all merchants to be a bit cumbersome or familiar, so that’s when you click on one of the other three tabs to dig a little deeper and not have to sift through a lot of other offers you’ve already seen.

Like most other affiliate programs, Motive Interactive has its share of merchants you can join and be accepted immediately while others require an approval process. Also like others you’ll find programs that have to do with products and services like health and dating services. So lots to choose from. Once you are approved, the program is moved into your “My offers” category for quick access.

You also get your own representative to assist you in your efforts. Luke, my rep, quickly approved my application and my request to join a couple of merchant programs. If you’re using AIM, you’ll be happy to find a link in your account that will connect you with your rep via IM or email. Very handy.

I think they could improve on space you have to work with after logging in. Don’t get me wrong — it’s not a major thing, but I think a few simple tweaks here and there would make better use of the space. I get a slightly crowded feeling when I am having to scroll around when there’s extra space that could be put to better use. This would particularly come in handy when previewing the creatives for programs you’ve already joined. But on the plus side, all that information is fast to load, so while I’m deciding whether or not I want to join a merchant’s program, I can easily see what I have to work with and how it can be put to use.

A couple of other suggestions for improvements (and it may be that I just haven’t read or looked hard enough):

• Make it clearer as to which form is the right one to signup on. As a publisher there are two signup forms: display and performance. Why the split? Why not one form for publishers and one for advertisers?
• Finding a place to generate an affiliate link for Motive Interactive itself must be somewhere, but I couldn’t find it anywhere in my account.

They do have a higher default payment threshold than I’ve seen elsewhere ($100), but you might try asking if they can reduce that for earlier payouts. All in all, I think Motive Interactive is definitely something you should look into. There’s no shortage of programs to promote. Perhaps you have a spot on your blog to advertise something they have or have an email list you could promote to. I’m going to be giving them a shot and I hope you will too.

I’ve seen so many emails from Internet marketers lately that seem to be written for 6-year-olds. It got me to wondering if that’s what it really takes to get someone to take action on something.

You know the ones, they go something like this:

Oh my gosh, I am SO sorry for doing this to you, but that email I sent you yesterday had “this” price instead of “that” price. So I’m going to make it up to you by giving you a discount.

This is a super secret website that I’ve passed out to only a handful of people. It contains my most prized secrets. My friends were telling me I was crazy for doing this.

If my competitors found out about this, they’d surely steal my business, so if I give you a ridiculously low discount now, I might be able to head them off.

Gosh darnit, if that server didn’t act up again. So many people emailed me telling me they couldn’t access the order form, blah blah blah.”

Is it me, or do these sound like carefully crafted scripts, ploys that have been engineered to lull their audience into believing they’re getting a deal? Am I the only one who gets mad over this?

What troubles me is this is how these guys are making their money rather than just coming out with the truth like Josh Spaulding, Mark Mason or Clayton Makepeace.

I want out as an Internet marketer!

Or at least I would if I didn’t want to prove these pretenders wrong so much. But that’s not the real reason. I’m doing it because I want to succeed…the right way.

I’ve heard it takes something like seven times for a person to hear/read a message before they actually buy what’s being sold to them, or something like that. I think I recall that correctly. Geesh, seven times? I guess I’m one of those people who can make a quicker decision about something long before I reach message number seven.

These are things I’ve learned so far about Internet marketing:

• If you have to make up a reason to contact your readers, then don’t. It’s as simple as that.
• If you don’t have trust, you will NEVER make it anywhere, online or off.
• Unless you have something profound to say, some new information to deliver, then resist the urge to email your audience every day hashing out the same old message with a new veneer on it.

What are your thoughts on this?