Whether or not you have your own domain, sooner or later you’re going to have the need for a hosted blog platform to create more backlinks.
Webories, the web directories web site, has two articles on hosted blog publishing services* (“Top 5 Hosted Blog Publishing Services” and “Top 5 Hosted Micro-Blogging Publishing Services”) that I would like to add to with my top 5 ‘quick and dirty’ hosted blog publishing services. Some of these are new to me, but they come recommended by The Challenge, which I also recommend for anyone starting out making money online.
*A blog publishing service is inherently hosted by someone else who manages the server, its software, and its settings. It’s a kind of software-as-a-service, or SAAS thing. Blog platforms, on the other hand, is blogging software that you host on your own server or hosting company’s server. You manage the software and its settings. A good example is the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. WordPress.com is a blog publishing service while WordPress.org is a blog platform. They both use the same software – the difference is in who maintains it: you or them.
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:
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:
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:
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.
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:
Now go make some money online!
Hate the Game, Not the Player
I set out to create a new “Home” brand of technology consulting so that I could offer Indianapolis computer repair in homes without damaging the brand I was establishing with business customers. I came up with “Professional Technology Consulting at Home,” but the domain was taken so I started looking around and trying different keywords. I found that “codageek.com – The last geek you’ll ever need,” was available, but I kept looking. I eventually stumbled upon “geekhand.com” after looking up synonyms for ‘friendly’ (handy).
I liked “Geek Hand” enough to consider grabbing it, but I wanted to do a little bit of research on the name and domain first. I found that it had been used prior by another person for personal use and had since been abandoned. I liked that there were already a lot of backlinks to it from other sites, but because much of the links were from sites about gaming, I wondered if it was the right fit for my in-home computer repair business product I was developing for Indianapolis business consulting firm, Watershawl, Inc., where I was CEO. It seemed like it might be better off as a part of my blog network at Cost Publishing Media Group as a board game micro-site.
I went ahead and picked up the domain, setup WordPress, the theme, the plugins, and the SEO. I created a logo for it which consisted of a 0 and 1 which has both game and binary code meanings. I used this logo as a background on Twitter and as it’s icon. By the way, I don’t hardly purchase domains unless the username is also available on Twitter. In this case, both were available and I took that as a sign before purchasing the domain. While all of this setup is going on I’m thinking about content and products to sell or promote. I did a quick search on Amazon and determine that board games, video games, and card games would be my primary products with the “news” of the site being centered around the geek culture of movies, television, and conventions like Comic-Con.
To promote the site automatically I did two things: I setup a Tumblr account to pull in WordPress posts automatically push tweets out to Twitter and a Facebook page to push out to Twitter anything I post there. So I only really have to post in WordPress, then copy the link to the post to Facebook to post on what is now the ‘Settler’s League’ page there in order to have coverage to Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter all at once. Sometimes I’ll bounce those around on my Facebook wall and on other Twitter accounts I manage for different brands.
The next step was to add content and put the promotional procedure into place, which I did. I had a minor problem with links overflowing in the footer, but a quick CSS tweak fixed that. I have a WordPress theme that I use as a base for most of my Cost Pub sites. I also make custom WordPress themes and do web design and SEO for the Indianapolis area using Watershawl’s Growmotion marketing where we Growmote web sites–first we build them then we promote them; don’t just promote your business, grow your business with Growmotion.
Update: I have since converted Geek Hand into more of it’s original role of personal computer repair, but with a slant towards mobile phones – a play on the ‘hand’ in the title. Here’s the link to the new Geek Hand Facebook page in case you’re interested and a link to Settler’s League’s home page.