Heres a few to get you started!

Jason Fried Quote

Paul Graham Quote

Guy Kawasaki Quote

David Allen Quote

Mark Zuckerberg quote

and by far my favourite- from Randy Pausch and his last lecture!

Randy Pausch quote

I made a joke about selling a kidney, he replied back that it could be an option with the current economic downturn deepening. So i thought to myself, i wonder if any body on line actually searches to sell a kidney, would anybody be that desperate that they would contemplate selling a kidney so here is what I found…

I went over to Google to see how many searches there was for people interested in selling a kidney! I was astonished that there was 20,234 searches for sell kidney and related search terms globally in the month of August. Check my results in the image below.

I went on then to find what services where being offered online, someone has bought the domain SellAkidney.com but its just a landing page for a domain registrar.

But wait, all is not lost, some googling led me to sellkidney.com which offers between $70k-$80k. The website lists as its links- “buy a brain” and also “buy eyes”.

Askmen.com has the number one spot for the keyword- sell a kidney- it lists that selling a kidney in the US is illegal, but im sure that wont stop our world of 20k surfers trying to!

Although I found this humorous to start with, as I dug deeper into the world of Google results, i found the sad story of a salesman who was riddled with debt and tried to sell his kidney online for £24,000GBP (or $30k USD) obviously he didn’t find the same website I did. He was jailed- his story is here- http://folo.me/k06y

Today I am going to share with you the secret behind my livelihood and how I can live with little work. Some people dream of having a passive income where they can live a full live, discovering new hobbies and travel the world yet not have to worry about being chained down to a nine to five job.

As you read through this you may be shocked at how I have achieved my passive income and what impact it has had on my life. This book outlines he exact steps involved in the process of generating the passive income and also links to the tools that I use.

What is my secret, well, you are reading it. This book may seem expensive but this is how I have created a passive income, I wrote this book on my laptop while sitting in an airport and on a plane while I was travelling to meet a friend in England. Writing ebooks is how I have created an income that generates over $80,000 in sales a year.

If you have ever read Tim Ferriss’ book titled “The four hour work week”, this explains how he lives his live of a globe trotting traveller living in many different countries through the course of the year learning martial arts in Asia, salsa dancing in Buenos Aries or firing guns in Slovakia. This has been the inspiration behind this book and other projects that has allowed me to become a better person from having more time for learning new and interesting things to embracing new technologies which i use to promote networking between business in my local community with the aim of economic development.

About me

At the time of writing this i am 23 and currently residing in Ireland. I have spent many years gathering skills and learning new technologies with the aim of creating a livelihood in a way that would allow me to live a fuller life instead of being a wage slave working shifts in McDonald’s for minimum wage, yes i did do this and personally i believe everyone should do this, its not until you are a slave to your job living from pay check to pay check that you realise the need for something better and hopefully this guide shows you how to enjoy what you work at but work at what you enjoy!

I started to program at around the age of 15 when i asked my parents for Visual basic as a Christmas present, yes, you can spot the geeks early, but around this time i was learning how the Internet worked and how html pages were built. I never stop learning and i think this is very important if you want to enjoy life. If you think school is the finish of your education your quite wrong. All the skills that i talk about in this book have been accumulated from years of building different websites, learning to program from tutorials and books but also talking to other webmasters and business folk who have shared interests. I have worked with items such as web hosting and domains right through to treadmills and audio systems, all sold using the techniques in this book. But i have also worked selling large amount of adult content, so hopefully as you read through this, you will absorb some of my knowledge that i have accumulated.

What you will learn!

The list that follows will show what information is shared in the following chapters.

1. The secret and business model
2. Inspiration in writing
3. Software to use
4. Finding the domain
5. Finding hosting
6. The promotion process
7. Sales text and designing the page
8. Paypal & Setting up the IPN
9. Marketing
10. PPC

Lets get started!

1. The secret and the business model!

So how do we got about getting that much desired passive income, Writing. Some people have a natural gift, the ability to talk about anything, i am not one of those people but yes i am able to write about almost anything and have perfected this ability from writing about endless websites that i haven’t even visited. The business model is nothing revolutionary, we will not be bending the curve or anything like that, we are just adjusting a model which has been around for centuries- We write a book and we sell that book online. There is no paper involved though, we will email the book to the Surfer once we have collected there payment. Unlike m any companies that exist online, we will have a price! Many companies work hard to publish great content online and yet they give it away for free through an ad supported website, sometimes this works but for us i don’t think it will work. As you work through this ebook, you will learn how to gather ideas, with these ideas you will find software to write the ebook, setup the website and then a paypal account to collect payments for your great work!

2. Inspiration in writing

What to write about? there are millions of things to write about.. really! Just use your imagination and think about it. The best books to write to sell online are not novels but how-to guides or aggregated data.
What are examples of these guides? Well, think about it, you bought this book with the ambition of generating some sort of second income or passive income to allow yourself to get more from life. There are many examples out there of how-to guides, people will always need help to quit smoking, find new ways to meet hot chicks/guys, build self confidence, loose weight and even new ways to cook chinese food.

The other examples of great ebooks to write are aggregated data, whatd o i mean by these? People are always looking useful services or useful information. An example is a drop shipper, many people sell items online but never hold the stock, they rely on wholesalers who take the postage details from the online store and fulfil the order on behalf of the store often with the stores branding included. People will pay big money, often well over $200 to find the best list of drop shippers. Another example would be if your a webmaster, simple collection of useful php scripts in a pdf to do different things can often be effective.

If your stuck, look through amazon bestsellers lists in self help books or guides, even buy a few and read them, familiarise yourself with an area and discuss this in your ebook.

Here are some example titles

Learn to speed read.
Pass your driving exam
Quit smoking in 7 days
Number one in google the easy way
Spanish vocabulary in easy steps
Confidence for the shy
Improving your online revenue
101 Nail art designs
Fix any DIY disaster
Monetise your hobby

therefore what do you you need in order to write a great piece? a decent camera helps to add a bit of color to you ebook and may convey your message a bit better. If you need diagrams drawn there are plenty of talented artists listing their services on http://www.elance.com

3. Software to use

In order to write a book and transfer all the ideas from your head down onto something more concrete you will need to word process your book, of course you can draw up a rough draft of your ebook on paper first using the old fashioned way and then type it up.

There are many different packages to use today and i am going to list them in order of my personal preference.

Google docs
http://docs.google.com

Google is driving forward with emerging technologies and being able to edit documents on “the cloud” is the future. Google docs provides you with a free word processor that you can use through your browser without installing any extra software. Also the benefit here is that you will be able to edit and write the same documents anywhere with an Internet connection and browser. I wrote this document on there and it may not have every feature that Microsoft Word would have but its probably my favourite

Open office
http://www.openoffice.org

This is one of the most popular free software packages in use today. Its open source and free to use, unlike Google Docs it installs on the desktop of all major operating systems including Windows, Linux and Mac OSX. I drew up quite a few documents using open office and regularly use its spreadsheet package to work out some sales projections.

Microsoft Office
http://office.microsoft.com

Microsoft office is undoubtedly the most used office package around the world and is used by many organisations. I was taught in school how to word process with it and how to build databases with its Access package. there is no doubt that its one of the best packages on the market but it does come with a hefty price tag compared to the other two. A lot of the features included in the Office package will not be required by someone who is just writing an ebook.

4. Finding the domain

To setup your online presence, you will need a domain name which relates to your subject area. Take your subject matter and write down related areas and then go to GoDaddy and check for your domain availability. If your struggling think of adding some words to it, if your selling nail art design patterns, think along the lines of NailArtMadeEasy.com, QuitSmokingIn30Days.com, DrivingExamsMadeEasy.com or PHPScriptsForWebmasters.com all these domains are just what i thought of while writing this article and they probably are registered but I am just trying to let you have an idea of how i go about registering a domain.

If your really stuck i have listed some resources i use when i cant think of a good domain.

NameBoy.com
I have been using this service for years, just put in your subject matters into the form fields and the softweare will come up with a few suggestions, of course you dont have to use the site to register your domains as there are cheaper alternatives out there.

DomainsBot.com
A useful service not as good as the other two services i have listed here but it has some benefit.

MakeWords.com
This is an excellent service which allows you to type in words and then configure search criteria to match what you are looking for and then the website returns a list of suggested domains. I use mainly this service and namesboy.com to suggest my domains

And finally to register my domains i use namecheap.com which have domains for under $9 and provide and easy to use service and control panel for domain management. There are many other domain registrars out there and by far the most popular would be GoDaddy who are the largest in the world.

5. Finding Hosting

Hosting is essential, with your domain now purchased you need to get yourself somewhere to put up your pages. This can wait until we discuss what text to put on your page and how to go about building the pages. But some of the essential things you will need are php enabled Web hosting and a mysql database always comes in handle. if you dont know what these are i’ll discuss them later on.

The kind of package you will need shouldnt be more than $10 on a shred hosting server, you dont be requiring more than 10GB of data transfer to get you started and testing and depending on the size of your ebook you wont need more than 100MB of disk space. Having a control panel such as cpanel or directadmin will make the administration of your hosting a lot easier and is essential for the novice. As i mentioned, in order to process your payments and deliver your ebook you will need PHP enabled hosting as

cyberwurx.com
I have used cyberwurx for years without any problems, they always have excellent uptimes and keep me informed of any planned downtimes.

GoDaddy.com
not only offer domain registration but also offer fully featured webhosting at competitive prices.

LunarPages.com
Lunarpages have also been around a while and host many websites, they offer packages from as low as $4.95 and include PHP.

This link here is a tutorial on how to match your domain with your hosting package, you need your web hosts name servers which a web host will provide. This tutorial is based on using namecheap.com as you domain registrar- http://tutorials.ausweb.com.au/web/Tutorials/Domain-Names/Update-your-DNS-at-NameCheap.com/

6. The promotion process

Now that you have got yourself sorted with a domain and hosting wer’re going to build a website which will serve as your storefront for which you will sell your ebook but before we start talking about how to design and layout your page im going to share the promotion process. One of the revolutionary things that the web has done is take the guesswork out of advertising, no longer do you place and advert in your local newspaper or magazine promoting your little store and hope that a certain percentage of the readers will be interested enough to visit. The Pay per Click model has been around for a few years and works very well, if you dont understand how this works, its quite simple. Google allows you to advertise alongside their regular search results. If someone searchs for “how to quit smoking” you can advertise your ebook along side but only pay for the people who actually visit your website.

So the process we will be using to promote your ebook

1. Setup website
2. setup Google adwords (there are others and i will list them but the process is pretty much the same so no need to go through them all)
3. Surfer searches on google for the interest that match your advert
4. Surfer clicks on your advert
5. Surfer visits your website
6. Surfer likes what they see and purchase your product
7. Ebook is emailed to them

7.Sales text and landing page design

The design of landing pages is a craft, many large organisations spend massive marketing budgets to advertise but yet fall at the final hurdle of converting web traffic into sales. Some landing pages fail because of a cluttered page with too many options. A good landing page should have a clear call to action. Reducing the amount of choices on a page and dont present too much detail too early on in the process. A cluttered web page will lead your surfer to move onto the next competitor.

Delivering benefits is key to writing good sales text. Dont write about the features of your ebook, write about how the customer will benefit from purchasing the product. Features can be listed but you should try and tie them in with a benefit.

If your selling an ebook “Downloadable copy” is a feature but “Save time with an instant downloadable copy” would be a benefit.

You should be thinking what is the minimum information that your require from the Surfer to complete the process. Why collect the persons address and name if you just require and email address to send a copy of the ebook? Collecting information later on instead of on your landing page will mean a better Surfer experience.

Remember when designing a landing page that a surfer has a short attention span and delivering a cluttered design displaying too much information or options will lead the surfer to leave the page and looking for something that’s easier to handle. People don’t like reading online, you should have the main point in a headline and then the detail listed in sub headlines or paragraphs underneath. Writing a paragraph about your ebook is harder to read tan bullet points. if you look at the page your purchased this ebook from you will see a landing page at its best. Cutting text out can increase the white space on your page but making your text as easy to read as possible will increase your conversions.

Remember, you must deliver context in in your landing pages, when some clicks on your advert or is referred to your website for dog grooming techniques and your page is setup to sell cat food, you wont covert, this is quite a macro example, its actually the micro level is what will cause you problems, the little differences that you may not realise. One of the techniques i would use is to include the price, if people think they are getting it for free and then they see that you have a price you will loose some of your surfers but if they know from your ad that there is a price connected with your product they wont click on the ad and therefore you wont have to pay for that surfer who wouldn’t have converted anyway.

Google has launched an excellent tool which will allow you to adjust the design of you landing pages, its the google website optimizer which allows you test different landing page designs to see which will convert better.

My technique is quite simple, i simply create a table in an HTML document with dreamweaver that is centered and has a width of 75%, has two columns which has a width of 60/40% with a border of zero and then create 3 rows, in each of the left rows will be my sales text written out in bullet points, while on the right there will be buttons to purchase my ebook, carrying the logo of paypal as a badge of merit, giving your service creditability.

Below is a first iteration i used as my landing page from my PPC campaign, it may have been the one you purchased this ebook from but after some testing it also may not. I regularly change my pages to try and create the best converting pages. Conversion rates are some time as high as 20% on some of my pages and i do try “every trick in the book” to reduce the time it takes to read the landing page, using images as visual shortcuts. Having an image of an ebook with your book title on the cover will instantly reduce the read time of your web page. I do this. you can get this done for you on a service like elance.com but there are plenty of adobe photoshop tutorials online to do this, if you have the software do a google for an ebook cover tutorial- i even found an action and a tutorial which can be found here

This image shows my landing Page, easy to read bullets points with an image of an ebook and the paypal button, both catch the eye immediate, reduce the noise has major advantages in PPC advertising.

8. Paypal and setting up the IPN

Initially i had planned on using php and mysql to set up the payment process but i actually realised how much work this would take when i sat down to do it. Therefore i switched to using a service at E-Junkie.com which for a small fee of $5/month will automate the process for you. And if you use the coupon EASYE-JUNKIE you will get 67 days free to match up with the 7 days you get free anyways. Setting up the product is pretty straightforward therefore i dont need to discuss it.

9. Marketing

As discussed earlier, the main way I’m going to teach you how to promote your ebook is through Pay per click advertising but here are some pointers on getting natural organic traffic from search engines.

The first thing to do is take a look at your subject area, what words are associated with that area? What kind of traffic are these (key)words are getting traffic in google and other search engines? What is the competition for these keywords? I use the term keywords, if you don’t know, keywords are the associated words with a subject area that a surfer will punch into google or yahoo or bing and get the results they are hoping for.

The analysis process for this is broken down to.

1. Find associated words with your subject area
2. Use the google keyword tool located here to establish how many hits your keywords are getting.
3. Use this information judge the potential for your product, if you think that there wont be enough potential, find more general keywords, the google keyword tool lists similar keywords for you.

An example would be, if a user is searching for how the rivers are fishing in Ireland for salmon before they making the trip so they might type into google, “fishing reports Ireland” yields 250 searches every month.

This may not be enough for your product, but often fishing reports are more specific to a certain river, but we can generalise to fishing reports as people who are interested in fishing may just be prepared to read about fishing.

This yields much higher search volume with a global search volume for search terms “fishing reports” and “fishing report” 651,000 searches globally in google alone. With this method of research, you are taking the guesswork out of what keywords to target and what you should expect from being number one in google.

There is three things that will help you when getting a decent listed in google, knowing which keywords to target, where to place them on your page and then building back links based on these search terms. I will tell you, these methods will help you get a decent listed but you cant rely on them to get the exact listing you want, being listed as number one in google is tough to do on a keyword with little competition and almost impossible on a keyword with a lot of competition which has been established for a long time.

Build yourself a list of maybe 5 or 6 good keywords or search terms with a size-able amount of search volume that will provide you with enough traffic to turn a profit on. So with this list the next step is to find places to link from, i suggest building several free blogs or free websites on free web hosts. There is a technique called the link wheel where you use free hosts to build back-links to you website. Basically the structure of the links will form a wheel.

Every one of the “free” hosts where you build a website or submit a link to links to your website but it also links to the next one on the list. Then every page is bookmarked and pinged.

Web 2.0
Properties

Squidoo.com
Hubpages.com
Quizilla.com
Zimbio.com
Wetpaint.com
Weebly.com
Wikidot.com
Twine.com
Docstoc.com
Knol.google.com
Slideshare.net
Scribd.com
Esnips.com
Blinkweb.com
Ehow.com

Blogging

Blogger.com
Wordpress.com
Livejournal.com
Vox.com
Tumblr.com
Clearblogs.com
Blog.com
Thoughts.com
Blogster.com

Video Sharing

Youtube.com
Dailymotion.com
Video.yahoo.com
Vids.myspace.com
Metacafe.com
Blip.tv
Veoh.com
Vimeo.com
Revver.com

Google Tools

Adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Google.com/trends
Google.com/insights/search
Google.com/alerts
Google.com/products

Bookmarking

Digg.com
Delicious.com
Propeller.com
Reddit.com
Technorati.com
Diigo.com
Jumptags.com
Mylinkvault.com
Faves.com

The procedure for building your link wheel

1. First we must write a short article, maybe 200-300 words on squidoo.com related to your subject area
2. Link this article to your website using one of the search terms that your are targeting as the text of the link.
3. Create another article on a different article website such as hubpages.com and link this article to your website as before with the search term you are targeting as your link text
4. With this first article on squidoo now link to your website, link it to the next article on hubpages
5. Continue creating articles on the other websites listed above until you have maybe 6-10 articles created which all link to your central website
6. Continue the link structure where you link from your hubpages article to the next article you have created and then link this article to your next one.
7. Once you are happy with the amount of articles you have link your final one to the first one you created on squidoo, finally completing the circle.
8. If you visualise this, every article you created links in the form of a circle while linking to your central website. The central links form the spokes of a wheel while the outer links form the rim of a wheel.
9. Bookmark all your articles with digg.com, delicious.com, reddit.com and so on. This step will get your links into Google and build up your back links to your website.
10. Of course you can have 6 articles wheels and then create a completely different set of articles and form a completely different link circle.

This diagram shows you visually how a link wheel works. Everything links centrally and to the next website

This a tried and tested method of building back links and targeting your search terms with nothing more than a bit of time.

10. PPC

Now that we have covered a bit about search engine marketing, we can use the same techniques to research the search terms you want to target with your pay per click advertising. PPC is the easiest method of advertising online, the best thing about it is that its measurable. You can see exactly how many people view your adverts and how many click through, then from here you can use your own scripts to manage conversion rates. Adwords and google optimiser do have a few features that let you manage your conversions.

So what is PPC? google revolutionised the way how people advertise online. Instead of paying per impressions like the old method where you paid a certain amount of money per thousand advert views, google took the guess work away and you pay per click, of course the amount you pay per click varies on the keywords. From the list of keywords that you have derived in the previous chapter we can now pay to drive traffic to your web page.

Firstly i target the keywords no one else uses, in other words the $0.05 or £0.04(GBP) search terms, i spend hours finding the keywords that convert the best. So to get started you need to sign up with google adwords which can be found at google.com/adwords

Once you sign up were going to setup a campaign to use with your new site. So once you get logged into your google adwords account click on the campaign tab at the top of the screen, the next screen will list all your campaigns and whether or not they are active. Now click on the new campaign button.

Campaign options

General
Give your campaign a name, such as ebook, you can be more descriptive as your more than likely going to have multiple campaigns.

Audience
Now choose English speaking if your targeting an English speaking audience, next i choose countries that are developed English speaking countries, such as USA, Canada, Australia, Ireland and the UK. But for the time being i am just going to target the USA as my pricing structure is listed in dollars, i will setup different pages for each countries relevant to their local currency and exchange rates.

Networks, devices and extensions
Next this important, as search traffic is rated the best traffic and this is the only traffic i target in my campaigns, you will be able to get lower bids with other sources of traffic but in my experience its best to avoid these sources, but again its up to yourself, you may be able to convert this traffic better.

Bidding and budget
Its best tryout a small budget first of $10 or less and see how it goes before investing more into your advertising campaigns. With $10 per day you will be able to judge if you need to rethink your search term selection or redesign your landing pages.

Other options
I haven’t listed the other options, maybe you would like to include demographic information in your selection such as males over 40? or females over the age of 21? You can schedule when to start the campaign and how long it may run for. These options are again, up to yourself, i don’t limiting my targeting by age or sex as i only target keywords that i know will attract the demographic i have in mind.

Creating a new ad group

The next thing to do is create the ad group, this is where you come with your best sales text to entice that surfer to click on your ad but don’t promise too much to the surfer, your ad must match what you expect them to do on the website and also match what the website offers to the surfer- this is key to maximising PPC advertising.

Name this ad group
Simple pick your name for the ad, this is to distinguish different ad groups and how they perform.

Create an ad
This is where you enter the text that will make up the ad, some words are restricted and cant be used such as swear words and trademarks, but if you selling a specific product usually they will not be restricted. Usually i go away from the computer and sit and brainstorm each line. The headline is used to grab the surfer and the text underneath will then define different details of what you are offering. well thought out text can make the difference between click through rates (ctr), sales and conversions.

So take your time on this and don’t rush into just creating something quickly because you want the most effective adverts being displayed and clicked for the money your are spending.

Keywords
This is the same method we used for researching search volume on specific keywords, but this time we are using the internal google adwords tool, my tip here is to use the external tool to generate a list of keywords you want to bid on as the external tool is easier to generate real information on the potential amount of clicks you will get, this tool lets you generate a text file of the keywords you want to use anyway. The key to is to make sure you include the “Estimated Avg CPC”, this will give you a guide to how much traffic you can get for the least cost. i never spend more than 10 cents on a click, i spend most of my time finding the most productive keywords.

Placements
Since we are targeting search only we don’t need to worry about this.

Ad group default bids
This is up to you but just for now i leave my search bid at $0.10 and zero for the content placements

This is now you campaign setup and your ads running.

Adwords tips

* Create lots of ad groups that link to different pages and setup with the conversion tracking tools that google includes with its adwords packages! Try different landing page designs mixed with different ad groups and keywords. Constantly playing with them will open your eyes to what sells and what doesn’t!
* If you have a price, try including it in the ad! To see what happens your CTR and and conversions
* If you not making sales, your targeting the wrong keywords/people with the wrong product
* If your making sales and not making profit you may be targeting too many keywords, work out which ones are not converting and delete them.
* Target General keywords with general ad text! Specific keywords with specific ad text!

Trial and error! What works for me may not work for you. Learning your product and your strengths is what will make your PPC most effective!

Conclusion

well that should be it. you should be well on your way to making a passive income now! Any questions, feel free to comment below

I have written and ebook! yes, how to work from home with a passive income- can be found here- work from home It shows you the procedures that i have used to create a passive income.

Next thing o my list i have been dabbling with or just starting to dabbble with is the CPA idea. cost per aquisition or lead! Its a pretty new concept to me i have seen some of them while playing games on facebook like mafia wars and farm town but never new what to do or where they came from so i started a little campaign on adwords to see what the returns would be like. no traffic so far! maybe i could use a link wheel..

Yes another seo/sem phenomenen is the link wheel. Where you get 6-10 web properties such as in the list below and create a page on each which carries both links to you central hub which your tryin to promote and also the next one on the list. of course your last one will link to the first post you made effectively making a circle structure and the links to your hub from each of the properties will form the spokes of the wheel. The circle forms the outer bit of the wheel.

Web 2.0
Properties

Squidoo.com
Hubpages.com
Quizilla.com
Zimbio.com
Wetpaint.com
Weebly.com
Wikidot.com
Twine.com
Docstoc.com
Knol.google.com
Slideshare.net
Scribd.com
Esnips.com
Blinkweb.com
Ehow.com

Blogging

Blogger.com
Wordpress.com
Livejournal.com
Vox.com
Tumblr.com
Clearblogs.com
Blog.com
Thoughts.com
Blogster.com

The business model
How will I make money from this, of course the website will be 100% free and run as an ad supported website, the website will be limited to over 18’s which means people with money to spend and access to credit cards, research has shown that the major social networks are finding it hard to convert their website traffic into a revenue source, but the problem with these social networks such as bebo, facebook and myspace is that most of the profiles are junk teenage profiles with little or no spending power as they done own credit or debit cards therefore they will fall into less demographics that advertisers are targeting. Of course targeting kids and teenagers has been a massive business for many years but for the creation of leads online am not so sure.
Adsense is the business model I will be choosing, of course this means keeping a tight grip on what content will be displayed on the website, meaning non nude profiles only, any naked or pornographic pictures must be removed or I will be breaking the google terms of service. Once the site does race to a level that I never thought was possible advertisers will come looking for me, well that is the hope anyway. Like other websites I will not be dabbling in the sex finding market, this will be a fun and almost family friendly website, I’ll leave the nympho matching to a host of advertiser who I will test individually and see what the returns are like.
Adsense is supposed to be advertisements for content, this limiteds what we can sell on other pages as the content on dating website can be seen to be just the profiles and the search/listings page, we also have signup pages, about us pages, terms of service pages etc etc, other advertisers allow you to display their ads on these pages so it will be a mixture of both adsense and others which I have signed up for.
The website
The website I am going to use is custom built in CakePHP. There are tones of websites out there offering to sell you the best dating script with the most features but I’m a believer in KISS which stands for keep it simple stupid. Having a bloated website with every feature you could think of will mean the user gets caught up in pages and pages of information when really they just want to find someone to have fun with and maybe an intimate relationship with.
The first feature I have built is to do with the login and logout procedures, I read over a few tutorials on access control in cake and found one that seemed simple and which I could build on at a later date which is very important. The next item I done was to define what columns I would need in the database, I looked round other dating sites for what information people searched for and I drew up a list of 15 things, I included these along with a column for the login/email/password plus a column for a biography. These items are listed below.
Hair color
Height
Religion
Star sign
Do you have children
Do you want children
Do you drink?
Do you do drugs?
Do you own a car
Marital status
Education level
Job
What are you seeking?
What are you seeking the person for

The next part of the website that I built was the messaging system which is just like memo between to people or a private messages where they can arrange meet ups and dates. Next item on the list was the views page where I listed every one of the people in the target age range by county, as the site grows I hopefully will create a very advanced search which will allow people to really target the partners that they are looking for.

Future features

Some of the features I would like to include in the future but just don’t have the time at the minute would be things like personality tests which all the major dating websites have, I don’t believe in them personally but am sure they are just for fun.

Another feature which I would build using AJAX to allow in the browser chatting with no need for flash or a java download would be live chat with the other people that you are involved with on the website, this would not be a major features as a lot of people still prefer to use their ICQ, MSN, Jabber and yahoo instant messengers

Some of the web2 stuff would be great to interact with like using twitter from your account to have replies coming from texts or status updates.

Without over doing it there is a lot of things you can do with the website. But doing this on your is difficult and thats where other sites are lacking.

Promotion of the website

So I have my shiny new dating website online, what do I do with it and where do I go from here? Search engine optimization will always be a key part to any website but targeting the major dating keywords will be pointless if my website is based in Ireland, therefore my main keyword will be irish dating with Irish singles, dating Ireland and a few others. Building the back links will be an important thing, finding places which will link to website will always be difficult as its pretty much every man for himself and linking to other websites would be seen as helping the competition.

Adwords will be my main source of advertising and the great thing about this is that you can direct every surfer you get from adwords straight onto your registration page and with a great registration page my signup rate will fly through the roof.

Targeting keywords on adwords will be difficult as I’m not willing pay more than $0.05 a click limited me to certain keywords, but my test is going to be the towns and villages of Ireland! Im going to target every villages and town that I now off, I might even get a map out and target every place on the map. Filtering the traffic will be done through the ad, everyone’s up for a bit of a fling especially the Irish and hitting the registration pages straight away will show this, plus we can target by country which is a great feature which targets the ads based on the surfers IP address.

When getting $0.05 a click and spending a hundred dollars this works out at 2000 clicks onto the website and with an optimistic conversion rate of 25clicks:1signup this means I will have 80 members for every 100 dollars spent which isn’t great but will give me instant recognition and will be aided by my own SEO work and offline promotion

But this does mean with and Adwords campaign at 25 clicks per signup would mean our cost per acquisition would be $1.25 and you have to realize will we be able to make $1.25 back from each user? This is a tough decision to go with! But really without a few major ads in local newspapers I cant see any other option

I recently joined hubpages.com just to see what the hype was about and seen that some people have put in requests for certain hubs to be written and one request was how to attract the highest paying keywords, therefore I sat down and spent time writing a short article on how to attract the highest paying keywords. I thought I would extend this article by giving some more background information and that’s where this article came from.

Firstly you have to know your subject matter, if your selling something that is a very competitive niche online, this will give you better standing.

Firstly you have to find your niche; this can be extracted from your subject. For example if you blog about vacations and holidays then you can use these as your keywords. If you sell movie stuff like posters then this could be your keywords.

General niche

But what if you have no niche, you have to think what the users on your website would be interested in, would they click on links ads for loans or insurance? Would they click on affiliate programs? If you think they will I will explain how to get these ads to be displayed on your page.

Top paying niches

Think about which kind of employees get the biggest bonus’s in the world. Of course it’s going to be in the finance sector, the people who deal shares for a living and who sell insurance options and manage the hedge funds. Why am i asking you this, well of course financial products are going to be some of the higher paying niches online. Where ever you can generate a high return for your money invested in advertising is where you generally going to find the biggest paying niches.

Niches and keywords

If you have your niche picked it’s time to research some of the keywords, since I mentioned that finance will always give you the higher paying keywords. How about a loan? We will be using a Google tool, which I actually would happily pay for because of the amount of information you get from it is very useful.

The Google keyword tool

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

The Google keyword tool is used to help people who pay for the ads find keywords which they think will help promote their product, gives them information on how many people search for specific key terms, suggests other key terms and related key terms, and most importantly for us, tells use the CPC for the term.

What is CPC

CPC stands for cost per click, this is the price for which an advertiser must pay for their ad to be displayed by Google, some are $0.05 and some are a lot higher $30+. Of course we will never get these highest paying keywords as Google keeps a percentage for itself, but the main reason that we as webmaster won’t achieve these kinds of high paying CPC is that the number listed on these pages are for search and content. Content is what Adsense is for us, that’s the ads that you display on your page., less advertisers use the content but there is still enough to keep us in the money.

High paying keywords-

Since I’m going to use loans as an example here, go ahead to the link above and type loan into the Google keyword tool.

This is a snapshot of the higher paying keywords related to the term loan. With secured loans coming in a whopping $38.01 a click, well worth aiming for this. Try this yourself with the niche that you have for your website, find a list of keywords that you think you can aim for, be imaginative to get higher paying keywords as you may not realise what keywords are related to your subject for example- take this blog for example- web mastering is a concerned with a lot of subjects- registering domains? Finding hosting? Making money online? Adsense? Adwords? With just these subjects i can show you 50 different key terms that pull in over $8 a click

Domains

Hosting

Adsense

This is just an example of the high paying keywords that can be associated with a subject. So how do we get these displayed in our ad code?

Getting the high paying ads displayed

You must use these key terms all over your page, if you’re running a general niche you have to realise that if your site is about, say, furniture do people really want to click on that high paying holiday insurance key term based ad? If you think it’s alright, here’s how.

There is many opportunities’ that you can use, first we will work from top down, and the first item on your page is usually the title, pick your high paying keyword that maybe does fit in with your niche and add it to the title. For example, my title, if I was running my web mastering blog i could have it something like this

“Webmaster info on domain names, managed hosting, Google Adsense and much more.”

These are targeted to three different high paying key terms. The next item if you want to get specific is too have a post or page with a title that matches the content, as an example we would take the domain key term and take the next in the list down an add it as a title.

“Finding Available domain names”

If I was aiming for these terms I would then write an article on different ways to find available domain names and list different suggestion tools and places you can check availability. The next place you can include a key term is the first line of your paragraph, I would take the next from the list, even if it doesn’t make grammatical sense, it doesn’t matter most surfers skim read and extract the vital bits and will skill the first few words if they don’t make sense.

“Purchase domain name, so how do we purchase a domain name and where would be the best place to purchases a domain name? I will show you now…..”

This is me aiming at the top three paying key terms related to domain names, the last way you can use key terms is to write articles with the different key terms placed throughout the article.

If your using a service that lets you tag your posts or content such as i am with wordpress i include the top ten keywords for the niche that relates most to my content, this isnt just aiming for the higher paying ads but also will allow you to pull hits from google search engine as usually these are the more highly searched words in Google, if you look at this article, the top 10 paying key terms are used as tags.

The difficulties

Finally to conclude, there is some difficulties that may arise when trying to aim for the big keywords, mainly to do with user generated content such as forum based websites and comments in your blog.

Forums are always hard to target for the higher paying ads without annoy the users as with longer threads, the more your users write the more Google will pick up on their content. This is the same with comments, if you allow your users to comment on your articles, unless your articles take up the majority of the page and comments are short Google will aim the ads based on the comments.

The hardest way to aim for high paying keywords is if your page is niche with little competition, the more competitive your niche is, the higher paying the ads will be. AS I mentioned earlier if your website isn’t in a competitive niche you have to be creative with the key terms that you will be aiming for, every website has key terms that will pay more than $0.05 its just being creative to find them.

namecheap coupon : REDROSES

So what about backlinks? some people say content is king, this is only about 20% of the true story, when trying to make money online its more about how popular an article is than how great an article is. Alright, a shit article will get you know where but how much of google is actually spam? Even spam articles will be listed above you in google that make no sense and are irrevelant but you know what, they have more backlinks and listed higher!

So how do you get more backlinks, it is difficult when your working in an area with no established webmaster or pro blogger community such as uk finance No one will ever link to your blog about finance unless you carry indepth finance articles and since im not an economist it is difficult to find links. So how do you get to number one in google for some terms? Backlinks.. and how do you get them? Blog! Yes have a domain with your main finance or whatever blog running on it and then link from free hosts. Of course you will have to create meaningful content and a lot of it. i would guess a hundred backlinks to your blog will be a start! thats one hundred articles. Is this a lot of work? yes it is but dont be worried, many free blog and hub sites allow you to run your own adsense on their page while they take a cut.

So who do i use? There are hundreds out there online but some of the better ones are listed below.

Squidoo is the child of seth godin where you can create “lens” which are just pages with some extra features

HubPages is similar to squidoo, both allow you to create pages showing off your content and allow you to link to your pages and affiliates.

blogger.com is  googles blog website which is just a normal blog and allows you to create many blogs and articles which can help you promote your affiliates and your main blog

Twitter.com if you have a lot of friends on twitter then you can use this to promote your websites and build up backlinks.

Wordpress.com A hosted wordpress site, just like installing on your server with slightly less control but worth it.

Gather.com is slightly different but you can post and share your thoughts

Creating meaningful content on these sites and link them to similar posts on your blog will always warant more click throughs and better search ranking.  So consider then rather than just creating spam blogs. its easy to make money online, making a lot is the hard bit!

Remember you wont make money promote items at £3 as your basic commission is 5% of the sale, which means you will have to sell a lot of items at £3 in order to turn a nice profit. The way i do it is to search for an item over £200 which will leave you £10 commission but you have to remember that your cost of promoting the items.

Our Product will be the Carl Lewis Motorised Treadmill – MOTC99

Once you have your item selected the next step in the process is to use the google keyword tool to get an idea of what the competition is like, type in motc99 into the google adwords keyword tool and you should get a list like the one pictured below.

Searching for keywords

This image may slightly differ from the one that you where presented with as i have included the average CPC column to give an idea of what competition is on the keywords. But this looks good, now take a few of the keywords and see how many ads are down the right hand side for the each of the keyword terms. If amazon is one, you should move on and not include this in your campaign, as once a surfer sees amazon, they will more than likely click it over your domain.

Now its time for your landing page, i try to include as much information about the product and the images of amazon, i like to include amazon buttons and one or two customer reviews to fill the page but it is definite that the page is just there with the purpose of getting the surfer to click through to the amazon page.

Once you have your destination page designed with plenty of links to amazon and loads of sales text its time to get your campaign up and running. Upload your landing page to your web-host and lets get keyword hunting. log in into your AdWords account and got to campaign summary and click on the link to start a new campaign. Name your campaign appropriately, I’m calling mine treadmill and since I’m targeting surfers in the UK, I’m setting the language as English and the target ted location as United Kingdom.

Next for the Ad itself, remember your targeting customers interested in this treadmill that you have researched your keywords on. So i ten to include the name of the product or the product numbers, in AdWords ToS you are limited from using registered trademarks, so take this into consideration when selecting the text for the ad. The next bit is where you get creative and get use your imagination. These two lines are what will hook your surfer in to clicking on your ad and not the others, this is vital when working with the expensive keywords where there are 30 people advertising the same product.

Once you have your Sales text put in and your links included. make sure everything looks right then time for the keyword. I’m not going to be that creative here, i just downloaded the keywords that where suggested by the keyword tool, i stuck these in and then went on and set my daily budget and maximum cpc. The keywords i selected where-

Keywords
carl lewis motc99
lewis motc99
carl lewis motc99 treadmill
lewis motc99 treadmill
motc99 treadmill
carl lewis motc99 motorised
carl lewis motorised treadmill motc99
lewis motc99 motorised
lewis motc99 motorised treadmill
motc99 motorised
motorised treadmill motc99
motc99
carl lewis fitness motc99
fitness motc99
lewis fitness motc99
carl lewis motc99 review
lewis motc99 review
motc99 review
motc99 carl
motc99 reviews
For the CPC i always set it at $0.10 and ignore the content. This allows you to go and check what price will give you maximum exposure, you can change these later once the campaign is running. Selecting your daily budget and your max CPC is critical, in order to turn a profit on this you have to balance how much yu are willing to spend compared to how much you are willing to spend. What i do is i let the campaign run for a week and if i have spent more on advertising than  the potential commission i will change the bids, drop them down or just trash the whole campaign.

Click to save your campaign and then that’s it! let it run… Check your stats daily, and don’t invest any more than you can afford to loose. $50 dollars is more than enough to test out this system with keywords costing no more than $0.10.

Any questions, just leave me a comment and i will get back to you.

Unfortunately a l0t of the programs that you deal with on commission junction and similar sites have people operating paid search programs through cpc/ppc and they dont allow you to promote on certain keywords and this just makes your job harder but luckily enough, if you know what your doing it will be easy enough.

But once i do get a few more programs i will start to build hardlinks and submit the blog to more places and hopefully the big bucks adsense and commision from sales will be coming my way.

This was just a short update in case you where wondering why i had not posted about the uk finance blog.