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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As you can see below, there’s plenty of space allowed for graphics to be incorporated into the posts and thumbnails on the home page for each. And depending on the theme, there’s also space for advertisements, either Google Adsense or 125×125 blocks. They have price packages to suit your needs and budget, too, ranging from branded single-use to non-branded multi-use.

I’m using one of these themes now (Triumph, see below). As I got into making the modifications I wanted, my journey could have been a little smoother had there been supporting documentation. At least in the theme I was using, there wasn’t a control panel to adjust certain features, but luckily, I had enough experience to find most of my way around.

But when I got stumped I either referred to their FAQs or submitted support tickets. The latter was the most effective, actually. They responded quickly and stayed with me until I accomplished what I set out to do. That is something rare you see these days, even with premium themes, so it was quite refreshing to know I had people to ask questions to.

WPNow is one to keep an eye on. More and more premium themes are coming out these days and it’s becoming harder and harder for theme designers to distinguish themselves from their competition. These guys seem to have no problem with that though.

Triumph

This theme is one I’m using on a phpBay site of mine. I really liked its layout, particularly the three modules you find on the front page. This made for a nice way to introduce my visitors to the three main categories I wanted them to visit. Plus, it offers space just below them for welcome text with even more links that lead deeper into the site.

Features:

• 2 column layout
• Adsense and widget ready
• threaded comments
• several templates
• five level dropdown menus

VintMint

• Adsense and widget ready
• multi dropdown menus
• several templates
• featured video space

Simplista

Features include:

• Adsense and widget ready
• several templates
• Javascript category menu
• Flickr photo stream

Elements

Features include:

• Adsense and widget ready
• several templates
• multi dropdown menus
• featured video space
• minimize/maximize sections

Bloom

Features include:

• 2 column layout
• Adsense and widget ready
• several templates
• five level dropdown menus

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

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

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

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

What exactly are we looking for?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When you build your store

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

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

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

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

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

Okay, good. Got that out of the way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve changed since then.

I’ve outsourced several writing projects over the past couple of months. Some were at a fixed price. And more recently I had people bid on a project. Here are some things about each that I wanted to share with you in case you’re thinking about outsourcing.

You get what you pay for.
Boy, ain’t that the truth! A few months ago, a writing service (which will remain nameless) was running an anniversary special: 250-word articles for $1 a piece or something like that. I thought to myself, “Cool, now I can really make some headway here and get all those articles I want written.”

I have three words for you friends: I…got…crap!

What I saved in getting them written, I ended up spending the value of my time in rewriting them. It’s just not worth it. So basically, I paid for the opportunity to edit somebody else’s work.

Don’t always go for the cheapest bid.
It’s quite interesting to see how much people will charge for a project. It’s tempting to see bargain basement prices, but like I said above, you get what you pay for. I go for the upper-middle range if everything else looks good to me. And if the service you’re using is worth anything, they’ll have a rating system for their bidders. This is a must! It’s even better when they show reviews from previous buyers. Look at these closely before you decide on the winning bid.

You need how long to finish?
Just as the bids are varied, so, too, are the delivery times. I’ve seen some bidders estimate 10 days while others can do it in 3 days — this is for the same project, mind you. So even though it would be great to get what you’re asking for sooner, avoid rushing into choosing the shortest duration based on that alone. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t trust them, but do what I did and contact the bidder to ask them to confirm their duration. Give them a chance to rethink their situation and review your requirements just to be sure they made the right choice.

Go for as high a quality as you can afford.
If you’re like me, you’re probably thinking, “Well, I’ve seen their samples and they’re not too bad. I can edit things here and there.” That’s true, but it’s in your best interest to minimize the time you would do this.

In my case, I wanted articles to use for a niche site I was building and then submit the rest to article directories. So I wanted to get them out there as soon as possible and have my site make me money. The more time you take to edit things, the longer it will be before you start seeing money coming in with whatever monetization method you’ve chosen.

Ask for samples of their work
This is crucial. The bidder may sound great in their sales pitch, but if they don’t have what it takes “under the hood”, then move on to the next one.

Communicate!
Trust me, speaking as a project manager (which is what I do by day), the number one reason something fails is because of a lack of communication. So get in touch with your bidder as soon as the deal is accepted and let them know you’re there to make things work. Give them what they need, when they need it, and be clear that you expect nothing less from them.

There are probably several of tips that I could have listed. Feel free to drop me a comment to tell me some of yours.

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

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

Profit in shipping containers

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

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

How would you profit from all this?

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

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

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

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

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

Why am I doing this?

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

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

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

But your network is only as good as the number (and quality) of those you connect with. You can do it the slow way, but truly getting to know someone first, then asking if they’d like to connect with you on LinkedIn (become your first degree). Nothing wrong with that, but it yields little results for the amount of effort you put into it.

Here are some ways that I have used to increase my number of first degree connections a lot faster.

1. Join groups
You’re more likely to connect with people who share the same interests as you do. There are tons of like-minded people out there waiting for you to join their group. Most people on LinkedIn configure their profiles to allow you to contact them and reference the association you have with the group you both belong to. So once you join a group, browse through the member list and determine who you would like to connect with. If need be, ask one of your first degree connections to help introduce you.

Groups worth joining: TopLinked, OpenNetworkers, LION500.

2. Post to discussions
Each group has discussions capabilities — like a forum. Be sure to check the rules of the group first, but chances are good that they’ll allow you to post to that forum asking for people to invite you. Conversely, look for people in that group who have already posted they’d be interested in connecting with other members.

3. Import your contacts
LinkedIn enables you to import your address book from Outlook, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, and a couple of others. Easy-to-follow instructions are included in the process. Once you’ve uploaded your list of contacts, you can then choose to invite any or all of them to connect. It’s all up to you.

I mentioned earlier that TopLinked is a group worth joining. They offer members (free of charge) a list of member email addresses specifically for the purposes of sending invitations to. If you want to be included on that list (thus saving you a lot of time), there’s a small and reasonable fee to pay. You can see your number of connections rocket into the 100s in just a couple of days using this method.

As always, use discretion when you choose to connect with people on LinkedIn. Not everybody is open to connecting with just anyone. Here are some tips you can follow when inviting people to connect with you:

• Be courteous and professional
• Personalize the invitation instead of using the templates LinkedIn gives you. This includes pointing out something you see as having in common with the person you’re sending the invitation to. (e.g., a past employer, something you both have on your profile, association with a group on LinkedIn, etc.)
• Check and double check your spelling and grammar.
• Always close the message with thanking them for their time.

I have written written a free report that includes many other tips for using LinkedIn. It’s a quick download.

Photo source: shlomaster

Ideas may pop up in our head days at a time, but because we’re not sitting down and trying to think of one, we draw a blank.

And, of course, there’s the problem of finding one you like, but discovering that it has already been registered as a name or domain name. I won’t focus on that here as that gets into legal matters, so I’m going to help you with the creation part of the process instead.

Make a list
Don’t get hung up on finding the perfect word when you first start out. Just contemplate words you like and jot them down. Is it a word that you’d like to include as part of the name? Or is it a word that evokes an image or emotion that you want to express? Consider other company/product names that you like as a benchmark.

Use a thesaurus
I know, it doesn’t sound “sexy”. Seriously though, this can be such an important step. When I came up with my online business name, StarFrost Media, I’d enter anything that would pop into my head and see if there was a better alternative and oftentimes, it would. I probably went off any a gazillion different directions, but that’s okay — my goal was to come up with some good brain food to help me narrow down to a decision. I don’t care what it is — on average, it’s a lot easier to make a decision on something that exists than it is to create something.

Use a name generator
Okay, you’ve racked your brain for ideas and you just don’t feel like you’re making progress. Maybe it’s time to use a name generator. There are all sorts of generators out there for names. Just like the thesaurus idea above, these can spark an idea you might not have considered otherwise. Again, it’s about exploration, finding what sounds and looks good. These may not find you the perfect name by themselves, but could definitely play a key role in getting you there. Here are a few sites to try: Random Business Name Generator, Web 2.0 Name Generator, SnapItNow.

Make a new spelling
This has to be done carefully because it could work against you right from the start, leaving visitors/consumers to move on without giving you a second thought. Being clever is fine, but in those critical moments when someone hear’s your company name, they can’t get hung up on “what does that mean?” Flickr, for example, by itself doesn’t conjure up a meaning, but when you visit their site it starts to make sense.

Make up a word or use one for a different purpose
Probably the hardest of them all, but it could really pay off. Some examples come to mind: Twitter (and all the derivatives we’ve seen), Google, Digg, etc. These meant something different back in the 20th century, but look at them now. Marketing plays a heavy hand in their success, so be prepared to promote hard.

What strategies work for you? Leave me a comment and share what it is you do to come up with names.

Do you find yourself searching for that “Open link in new tab” in your context menu? I use that all the time, but instead of hunting for it, all I do now is click on the link and drag it over the super-imposed box that I’ve designated as “open link in new tab”. Dragging anything on the page that you’re on engages the add-on, so it’s always right there when you need it.

The screenshot may be a little hard to read, but basically what you’re seeing is several light blue tiles each designated as a specific zone. Each zone represents something you want it to represent: the aforementioned link, search Google or any search engine, and just about any other link accessible in your menus.

All you Firefox users, install it now and be more productive.