Erich Stauffer

Author: Erich Stauffer

  • How to Identify a Micro-Niche

    How to find a profitable niche to start blogging about on your new mini-site

    In a previous post I wrote about how to monetize your blog, but I didn’t mention how to find a niche market to promote. There are many ‘rules’ about this, but while I may point out some, not all are going to apply. One rule you can keep in mind though is that 7 out of 8 attempts may fail. If you’re willing to seek against those kinds of odds, keep reading.

    When choosing a new micro-niche, there are three things to keep in mind:

    1. Competition for the keyword – when you do a Google search for your keywords, how many root, top-level domains show up in the top ten search results? It’s very hard to break into the pack when competing directly with a home page of an aged domain, but if the search results show deep page listings instead you’ve got a shot.

    2. The product – First of all, is there a product to promote? Goods are easier to sell, but some service industries like lawyers and business consultants can make more – much more. Second, what are the commissions on the product? You have to be comfortable with the commission level, which varies greatly between products, to Make sure it is worth your while.

    3. Traffic (Visitors) – Even if you have low competition and a great product, if no one is looking for it then you’re dead in the water. You want to have enough traffic to sustain your business and make it profitable, but to not be in competition with the bigger niche market. The sweet spot seems to be around 20,000 daily searches for a given set of keywords. You can find this info out using Google’s External Keyword Tool or Market Samurai.

    You want some competition. This is a sign that the micro-niche is profitable. You just don’t want TOO much competition.

    How to Start

    Knowing how to do the research is one thing, but what if you can’t think of anything to start with? What if you can’t think of any ideas to search for? Some advice I heard once was to browse a magazine aisle and look at the ads in the back. If vendors can afford to advertise there they must be making money and so you can too. Be careful not to chase a niche just because you like it. Do the research and be willing to say ‘no’ to yourself if it doesn’t pan out.

  • The Monetization Connection

    How to make money from a blog or mini-site

    Previously I wrote about blogging for profit, but didn’t go into detail about how to monetize the content. In other words, how do you make money from a blog?

    There are three primary ways to make money from a blog:

    1. Ads – this is the easiest, but lowest-paying form of revenue. However, it can be a good way to get started and prove viability. Popular ad networks include Google Adsense and Chitka. Ads like these are pay-per-click or PPC which means you get paid regardless of if the advertiser makes a sale.

    2. Affiliations – Affiliate ads are potentially more profitable, but require a well defined niche or else it is too hard to attract visitors that will actually buy the products you are promoting. Affiliate ads are pay-per-purchase or PPP, which means you only get paid when the merchant advertiser makes a sale.

    3. Direct selling – This is when you are directly selling something on your site that you are responsible for fulfilling. This has more potential for profit than affiliate advertising since you can make higher margins, but its more risky and you have to do fulfillment yourself. Examples of this can be anything from ebooks to beef jerky.

    4. (Bonus) Transform – the pinnacle of a website is when it can be converted into a book or television show. This means you have hit the big time, but its because your site has the two major ingredients listed below.

    What do all four of those revenue sources have in common?

    1. Original Content – some estimates say to post up to eight times a day. If you are just starting out, shoot for once a week, then move it up to once a day per blog.

    2. Visitors – Don’t stop writing content until you have at least 200 visitors a day (track with Google Analytics). If you already have 50 or more posts, but are lacking in traffic, start promoting your sites.

    Promotion

    The easiest way to promote your site, like with SEO, is to start with your site. Make sure you are linking to previous posts with appropriate keywords (I call this ‘threading the needle’, but its also known as ‘siloing’) and displaying navigation correctly. Visitors should be able to find more content they want to browse easily, but remember the goal is to monetize by either promoting other people’s goods and services or by selling something yourself so don’t get too carried away in internal self-promotion.

    Once you have fixed any issues on your site and made internal linking a habit, begin bookmarking your posts on social bookmarking sites like Reddit, Digg, and Delicious. After that is done, look to join a relevant forum to join and comment often. Soon you will be able to add a signature that will show up on all of your forum posts with backlinks to your site.

    If you do all of these things and you are still not successful, try a different micro-niche.

  • Blogtrepreneurs Blogging for Profit

    The Internet is a great unsettled land not unlike the discovery of a new world – and entrepreneurs everywhere are taking notice

    Entrepreneurs who blog for profit are sometimes called Blogtrepreneurs. Whether they come from a business background, an Internet marketing background, web design background, or are still in high school, anyone who can identity a niche (read: need) can turn content creation into revenue creation. In fact, that is exactly what I do everyday whether I’m actively working on a blog (or mini-site) or not. That is because blogging for profit is like a fly wheel. It takes a lot of energy to get it going (finding a niche, an appropriate domain, adding content, and promoting), but once the fly wheel is going it takes little effort to keep it going and you are free to start a new fly wheel, or blog.

    Niches

    Niches are segments of a market and are generally well covered. Micro-niches are segments of a niche and are generally covered less. This is where blogtrepreneurs can add value to the market by helping people find answers to what they are seeking in a nook of a market segment. For example, digital cameras are a market. SLR cameras are a niche of digital cameras and NIKON SLR cameras are a micro-niche of SLR cameras. A site about NIKON SLR cameras could sell it promote or educate about the cameras themselves and about all of their accessories. I have a blog about family photography that talks about different digital cameras and techniques for taking family pictures, for example. Identifying a micro-niche is not easy, but there are many sites out there that can help you identity how to find a niche.

    Domains

    Once you have a niche picked out, its time to secure a domain. There are still good domains to be had, but everyday there are less and less as more people gobble up the remaining ones. In the same way there is only so much land, there are only so many words and combinations of words, which is what adds to domains value over time. When choosing a domain you should include your primary keywords if at all possible. If you don’t know what your primary keywords are for your niche, stop and find out. There are plenty of sites with advice on how to choose the right keywords, which you should use  in your domain. Domains can be registered at registers like GoDaddy.com, but also at hosts like HostGator, 1and1, and BlueHost. I can recommend any of these.

    Content

    Once you have your domain registered with hosting, you’ll want to start adding content. One of the easiest ways to do this is to setup WordPress on your server. BlueHost makes it easy with SimpleScripts, but you can install it manually almost as easy at 1and1 and others. Once WordPress is installed, you can start adding posts, but where will you get the content? Think of writing content like writing a research paper. You can’t copy works, but you can quote and reference. Ultimately you wafted to add commentary and value to the material without plagiarising. You won’t get an F, but Google may not rank your site if it contains duplicate content so write your own. For my nook covers site I pieced together facts around the web to create something whole and new and its paid off.

    Promotion

    Now that you’ve created your content its time to promote your site. Promotion starts from within and that means finding a WordPress theme that is SEO ready it making it so. I’m not going to go into SEO here, but there are lots of sites that explain all about search engine optimization. The next step is creating backlinks, which are links back to your site from other, preferably relevant, sites. Think of backlinks as votes that Google uses to decide who it should rank first for a given set of keywords. Find relevant sites to create backlinks on by commenting or by adding to a forum discussion for example.  I was able to greatly increase my ereader accessories traffic by adding a link to it in a forum about ereaders.

    So do you think you have what it takes to be a blogtrepreneur? Don’t wait. The longer you do the more you delay getting paid and risk losing out on the perfect domain. Want more? Check out my other blog on how to make money online.

  • Why Are We So Obsessed With Lists?

    At one time in your life you’ve probably made a to-do list.  I still use them, but in the form of emailing myself.  But lists have expanded their scope lately as technology, as in the form of me using my email as a notebook proves, enables us to expand our love of making and using lists.

    Lists of Lists

    If you’ve ever shopped on Amazon.com, you may have noticed a book cover on the sidebar, with the heading, “Listmania.” This means that someone has included that book on a list of their favorites, and they posted that list to share with other Amazon customers. If you’ve ever used Apple’s iTunes you know that you can create playlists of songs and share them with other people. These are both examples of companies harnessing the power of people to help cross-promote products. Another term for this is crowdsourcing. Social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Reddit, or Digg rely on users to submit content, which are essentially lists of things people have found on the web.  Then other people come behind them and use them, vote up or down, or share more links.  People like making lists so much that they have even created books of lists of books to read, called ‘reading lists‘, but one site has gone as far as to make lists of reading lists. Yes, you heard right. People are obsessed with lists.

    Top 10 Lists

    Late Night with David Letterman probably has the most popular top 10 list, but there are many more examples and in different ranges from people obsessed with the top 500 albums of all time to the top 10 Twitter trends of 2010. Watch the following video made by Google on the top news stories of 2010:

  • A Day in the Life of a Business Analyst

    Boiling a business analyst’s primary functions down, you get the following:

    • conceptualize, visualize
    • troubleshoot, problem solve
    • research, mine data and reports
    • identify trends and patterns, predict
    • identify similarities and differences
    • interact with people, communicate
    • innovate and discover solutions to problems
    • create proof of concepts, write business cases
    • document procedures and implement solutions

    Here is a day in the life of a business analyst using some of these primary functions:

    Visualization, conceptualization, and problem solving approaches over a time have matured and are quite structured and repetitive (if done well). However, no matter how structured and repetitive your documents and processes are, the people you work with and report to will always be there to throw obstacles in your way – so expect it. The business analysts role is to confront these challenges everyday at work and constantly innovative to come up with a workable solution.

    A typical business analyst’s day usually contains complexity and challenges, which require an individual to conceptualize, design, research, and report on a variety of products and/or procedures. You may be presented with a question but no data, or data without a clearly defined question. An analysis cannot really start until both the question and the data set is clearly defined. I call this QDAR, which stands for:

    • Question
    • Data set
    • Analysis
    • Report / Revision

    This is similar to STAIR, which is:

    • State the problem
    • Define the Tools
    • Algorithm (procedure)
    • Implement
    • Revise

    Business analysts have to interact with people who have the data but are not ready to part with it for some reason. Maybe they are afraid of what you are going to do with it (such as use it against them) or maybe they feel like you are replacing them (“Hey, I’m the one who owns that data!”), so some social skills definitely come in handy.

    A lot of the time the work you are doing is up in your head. This means you may often look like you don’t have work to do. This is unavoidable, but some things you can do is to make active use of a white board and/or sheets of scrap paper on your desk as a way to look busy, but truly to make sure your ideas get down on paper.

    Some times you’ll lead projects even if you are not a project manager. This means you’ll have to collaboratively strategize, generate acceptability, and ownership. Getting all these people on the same platform and presenting the idea through their perspective while keeping everybody’s attention is one of the hardest parts and primarily what your function will be along with organization of the project.

    Before beginning any big endeavor you’ll want to create a sort of proof of concept (PoC) document. Don’t get too caught up in formalities here. This report is for you as much as your boss to help guide you through the project or task. You’re more than likely going to be working on more than one thing at a time and you’ll likely get pulled away long enough to forget your ideas about the initiative so get th plan down on paper while you can. Use the STAIR acronym if it helps. If there are Business Requirement Specifications (BRS), include those in the document too.

    Once the plan is in place, revised, and approved, it’s time to start implementing. Execution may be the easiest part, but sometimes is the hardest to do because its not analyzing, it’s work. If you’re making a system change, be sure and use change control processes, and when you are done, test, and review. Finally, report on the initiative, get feedback, and move on to your next assignment. You’ve just had a productive day!

  • Chrome OS is Finally Here, Sort Of

    Chrome OS is really cool until you find out that Chrome OS has to run on proprietary hardware.  What?

    As WebProNews said, “The biggest news in tech and business that wasn’t related to Wikileaks this week.”  On Google’s official blog, CEO, Eric Schmidt boldly announced that Chrome OS was “something computer scientists have been dreaming about for a very, very long time…The kind of magic that we could imagine 20 years ago, but couldn’t make real because we lacked the technology,”  and in an even grander tone predicted that, “In 20 years time, I’m certain that when we look back at history it will be clear that this was absolutely the right time to build these products, because they work—and they work at scale—I’m confident that they’ll go on to great success. Welcome to the latest chapter of an epic journey in computing. Welcome to Chrome OS.”

    Welcome to Chrome OS

    While Chrome OS is the ‘operating system in the cloud’, devices running it surprisingly don’t require that you’re always online. Most webapps are completely capable of running offline, but you always have the option of enabling a cellular data service that’s built-in to the device. Service is available from Verizon and you get 100MB of free data every month for two years. Similar to Apple iPad’s agreement with AT&T, there are no contracts for use and plans start at $10/month.

    Some standard apps include the normal Google faire (Google Reader for RSS, Google Maps, Google Talk, Gmail, Youtube, and the Chrome Store), but also NPR, the New York Times, and a Notepad program.  If Chrome OS Apps are anything like the ones currently available for the Chrome browser in the Chrome Web Store, some ‘apps’ may be no more than downloadable bookmarks (favorites for those IE users left in the crowd).

    Back to Business

    Microsoft may finally have to worry.  I say that specifically about the Citrix offering.  You know corporate buyers will love a simple OS that runs on lean (read: cheap) hardware and that will run Citrix desktop programs (virtual desktops, applications and business services on any device).  This is all possible due to the built-in

    Citrix Receiver, which allows organizations to manage the proliferation of new devices entering the workplace by providing secure, high-performance delivery of virtual desktops and Windows, web and SaaS applications on any user device.

    According to Citrix’s website, the receiver, “Gives today’s increasingly mobile workforce fast, simple and on – demand access to virtual desktops, enterprise applications and IT services from any device they choose by:

    • Enabling the delivery of business applications to any user on any device
    • Ensuring secure access and complete IT control and visibility
    • Allowing users simple, self-service access to Windows, web and SaaS applications”

    So will you use it? The real question is: why wouldn’t you?

  • Blogging for Profit

    How to Find a Profitable Micro-Niche to Market Online

    This is an article based on a similar article I wrote about traffic conversion in 2009. Using proven, repeatable techniques there is little risk and great rewards involved in blogging for profit. Peter Drucker in Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles writes, “Entrepreneurship, it is commonly believed, is enourmously risky…[but]…entrepreneurship should be the least risky rather than the most risky course,” because of how entrepreneurship, “by definition, shifts resources from areas of low productivity and yield to areas of higher productivity and yield.” Much work has already been done for us in the form of innovating processes and software tools, which eliminates risk. There are two key phases to the process:

    1. Research and Analysis – Identify a micro-niche inside a penetrable market that has profitable products that people are already selling.
    2. Marketing and Testing – Promote the products and test the results. If the traffic and/or conversions do not meet thresholds in a given time, start over.

    The rate of success with this method is anywhere between 1 in 6 to 1 in 10 and marketing and testing can take anywhere from 1 to 30 days. Success is defined as more money coming in than is going out each month and that includes all opportunity costs (time that could have been spent making money in other activities). Tracking is critical not only with the data of the results, but with the finances and time spent.

    Rules and Metrics of Phase 1 – Research and Analysis

    According to The Thirty Day Challenge (now called simply, “The Challenge“) micro-niches are identified as the #1 keyword receiving at least 80 clicks per day and websites containing that keyword being less than 30,000 globally. At least 3 keywords other keywords within the micro-niche with similar criteria must also be identified, if not, start over.

    The top 10 search results for the top 4 keywords has to be penetrable within the time allowed. Metrics to consider are:

    Test 1: If the competition has a young domain age, a low number of back-links, and does not exist in any of these directories, then the market is penetrable. If the opposite is true, stop and start over.

    Test 2: Check to see that related products are both available to be sold and are being sold by others. If either is not true, stop and start over.

    If both of those tests pass, then make sure the products are giving a referral amount that you deem acceptable. If not, stop and start over. You now have products in a penetrable micro-niche that are profitable to sell. Move on to Phase II – Marketing and Testing.

    Phase II – Marketing and Testing

    Begin by setting up a place to place your products. This is where your marketing efforts will point back to. It can be a Squidoo page, a Blogspot Blog, or WordPress running on your own domain.  If you are using Blogspot or WordPress, install Google Analytics to track traffic. If using Squidoo, there are tracking mechanisms built into the site. Once you have a place to put your products, begin writing copy (content) for the site. You will need to write the following:

    • ‘About’ and ‘Privacy’ pages – use keywords and talk about the product. A privacy policy is required by many advertisers and affiliate programs including Google Adsense.
    • Ad copy for the products – if using Market Samurai, there are built-in features for helping with this, but you can do it manually too.
    • Create posts (or pages) about the keyword subject matter within the micro-niche.
    • Next, begin to create backlinks to your site by placing links to the domain, the blog posts, and the the product pages on social bookmarking, social media, and in blog comments in your related market. Be sure to add links from .edu and .gov domains. You can search Google specifically for blogs on those domains manually, but you can do this semi-automatically with Market Samurai too.

    Track the incoming page hits on Google Analytics. Testing for viability can begin only after your product’s page is receiving at least 200 hits per day. If you are not getting 200 hits per day, then try these things first:

    • Increase the number of blog posts on and off the site using other services like hubpages and squidoo – then promote all of the new posts again.
    • Make sure you are promoting on at least 30 different sites for each post – you can use services like ping.fm or trafficbug to assist with this task.
    • Pay to have your site listed in the Yahoo! Directory.
    • Pay for Google Adwords or Bing (Microsoft) AdCenter.
    • Add pictures with descriptive text to get hits from search engine’s image searches like Google Image search.
    • Add video to Youtube with links and comment on other videos in your micro-niche.
    • Make sure you are posting to Twitter and Facebook regularly and engaging in conversation, not just promoting.

    If after 30 days or at your own set threshold, you are still not receiving 200 hits or more per day, your product is not viable. Quit and start over. You have just found one of your 6 to 10 failures. If you do have over 200 hits per day, but are not getting conversions, first try changing out your ad copy, images of the products, and/or placement of the two on the page. Refer to Dan Kennedy’s sales letter technique. If after changing all three of these variables and still your revenue is below your expenses, then start over. If not, you have a profitable business. Consider selling it for ten times it’s worth and starting over using Flippa.

  • Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles

    Peter Drucker in Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles wrote, “Entrepreneurship, it is commonly believed, is enourmously risky. And indeed, in such highly visible areas of innovation as high tech – micro-computers, for instance, or biogenetics – the casualy rate is high and the chances of success or even of survival seem to be quite low. But why should this be so? The entrepreneur, by definition, shifts resources from areas of low productivity and yield to areas of higher productivity and yield. Of course, there is a risk the entrepreneur may not succeed. But if even moderately successful, the returns should be more than adequate to offset whatever risk there might be. One should thus expect entrepreneurship to be considerably less risky than optimization. Indeed, nothing could be as risky as optimizing resources in areas where the proper and profitable course is innovation, that is, where the opportunities for innovation already exist. Theoretically, entrepreneurship should be the least risky rather than the most risky course.” This is the passage that inspired An Entrepreneurial Mind.

  • How to Build a Mini-Site Around a Micro-Niche in 10 Steps

    Mini-sites are web sites setup to cover very specific things (micro-niches) and are not usually updated, or at least not updated that often. A mini-site that is updated often stops being a mini-site and becomes a blog. Mini-sites usually answer a question, act as a guide, or help filter information to help searchers find answers about a particular micro-niche. A micro-niche is simply defined as a smaller, sub-section of a niche that together with other niches make up a market, which together with other markets make up an economy.

    Mini-sites provide value for both the visitor and the vendor. Sometimes it is hard to find what you need online because the niche is so small that no one has thought to gather the information together before into a micro-niche. When you do that in the form of a mini-site you add value to the visitor and in return get value in the form of ad clicks or affiliate purchases. Think of it as organizing the web into specialty areas that provide the content that search engines need and you see how building mini-sites can be a very noble endeavor.

    Below is a Checklist for How to Get Started Making Money Online in 10 Steps:

    1. Decide which Affiliate program you want to use (Clickbank, CommissionJunction, Paydotcom, Amazon, or LinkShare, for example) and register.  You may need to have a website first (chicken and egg, I know), but you can get a blog for free at Blogspot.com or Tumblr.com to get started.  If you already have a web site, make sure it has some content.
    2. Browse around their respective marketplace and look for 5-10 products which look interesting to you, but that are hard to find. For example, if you joined Amazon Associates, browse Amazon to find 5-10 products that interest you, but but that you could add more information to, group, or sort differently to help people find them easier.
    3. Use the Google Keyword Tool to find keywords (key phrases) that advertisers are purchasing which receive between 1,500 and 20,000 exact searches per month.  The difference between ‘exact’ and ‘broad’ is that exact has to occur in order as if in quotes, but broad can have the keyword out of order.  Run competition tests on each of the keywords you find. If there is a page or web site in Google ranking in the top 5 results with less than 100 backlinks, then it’s generally a good keyphrase to go for.  Otherwise, keep looking until you find some.
    4. Go to Bing and search for link:www.site.com –site www.site.com to view backlinks from other sites to that site (replace ‘site’ with the actual web address).  Google hides their backlinks, but you can find out more detailed information on your site by using Google’s Webmaster Tools.  However this doesn’t help while researching other people’s web sites. If your competition has more than 5 homepage results or more backlinks than you are willing to spend the time and money to compete with, then start over at the top of this checklist.
    5. Decide on a final keyword (just one) that you want to go with. If a lot of them are similar in statistics, just pick the one you know the most about and make this the title of your web site and home page.
    6. Purchase a domain that is very relevant to your keyword and/or includes your keyword(s).  A keyword-relevant domain with good content and backlinks will toast the competition based on Google’s current algorithm setup.
    7. Make sure your site has at least 4-5 pages of relevant, unique content with at least 400 words per page.  Add at least one picture to each page to help with promotion later and to get traffic from Google Image Search.
    8. Install Google Analytics so that you can track how many visitors your site is receiving and see where they are coming from.  This will help you measure success and help you decide when and if to change things up.
    9. Design or purchase a theme for your web site and install it.  This should be done after writing content because content is more important than design.  Let me repeat that.  Content is more important than design.  Yes, design can affect the helpfulness and value of your site, but it is far too easy to get caught up tweaking a web site for weeks before a single post has been written.  Don’t fall into this trap.  Save the design work for after the content and before the promotion period.
    10. Its time to promote your web site.  Submit to search engines, find relevant forums that contain signatures and get involved, find relevant blogs to comment on, and consider writing articles for submission to other web sites.  It’s all about creating backlinks to your site from areas relevant to your keywords.  Keep working on building backlinks until you rank in the top 5 results on Google and you are receiving at least 200 visitors per day.  Only then should you tweak your design to help increase revenue.

    Now go make some money online!