Before I start, I want to say that I was lucky enough to have Michelle Adams (author of ‘Learn How to Build and Sell Niche Blogs’) help me back in August when I was really nervous about site flipping, and I’m really excited when I look back and think how far I’ve come. Though it wasn’t all in the form of a guide as it is now, it was the same valuable information that helped me to make a success of site flipping – and make ~$2000 from flipping on top of my other work in the month of December 2009. Carry on reading for my full review of Michelle’s new guide and membership forum.

Overview

Michelle herself has been involved in selling websites for a while now, and has sold many successful sites throughout 2009. She also runs a blog which I love to read as it’s full of great advice and she always lets her strong values ad ethics shine through.

‘Learn How to Build and Sell Niche Blogs’ is a 200+ page eBook aimed at those new to website building and selling (virtual real estate development), or those who know how to build blogs but want to know more about the possibilities of ‘flipping’ them for cash.

It’s not just an eBook though – you’ll also get free access into the VRED Vault: a support forum where you can receive personal support from Michelle and other members, as well as free downloads and extras.

The Price

Michelle has priced the guide and entry into the Vault at $57. This is great value considering I’ve seen how much time and effort Michelle puts into giving personal support, which you’d usually have to pay a lot more for.

Aside from the price of the book, the price of implementing what Michelle has to say can be as little as $8 for a domain name and $7 for your monthly hosting. However, once you get more experienced you may want to invest in premium themes, such as Woo Themes, to give your sites added value.

What’s Included in the eBook?

Module 1 – Location Location Location: All about choosing your niche, your domain and ideas.

Module 2 – Laying the Foundations: Everything you need to know about setting up hosting, cPanel, Wordpress, plugins and more. Many people will have some knowledge in this area, but this section makes the eBook accessible even to those without prior experience of building sites – there are plenty of screenshots to help you through!

Module 3 – Design Aspects: How to make your sites look great. This section is valuable even for people who already know how to set up sites, as Michelle knows what it takes to get sites looking the way buyers would expect.

Module 4 – Finishing Touches: All the extras (images, videos and so on) that will get more buyers interested in your site. These are the touches that I used to ignore, but Michelle helped me to realise how they can really make a huge difference to your success.

Module 5 – Develop or Sell: This will take you through the steps it takes to sell on Flippa (the top marketplace for website flipping) and help you to decide whether it would be worth developing your website further.

Module 6 – Handover: Transferring a blog is something I know a lot of people are worried about when it comes to buying and selling, though I can thankfully say that Michelle’s step by step guide has worked for me every time.

What I Like About ‘Learn How to Build and Sell Niche Blogs’

Step By Step Guide: What I really like about ‘Learn How to Build and Sell Niche Blogs’ is that it is an easy to follow, step by step guide for those who are scared of getting started with building sites and selling them to others.

Get Into the Mind of the Buyer: If you visit the sales page for the package, you’ll see my testimonial up there mentioning how much Michelle helped me get into the mind of the buyer: there is a difference between what you might want to create in a site, and what a buyer could be looking for in a site. On my first few flips Michelle was honest with me and noticed when I hadn’t bothered to add extra features, like videos, which really helped me to rectify those mistakes before the sites went on sale, and helped me to build up my reputation on Flippa as a seller who was serious about delivering value.

Learn From Experience: Michelle really practices what she preaches, and you can learn from her experience – she even uses her own sites as examples! This will help you to skip some of the learning stages and go straight to creating sites that people want to buy.

If You Get Stuck, Support is Right There: The Vault really is the icing on the cake for me! Michelle is regularly around replying to all kinds of topics, whether people are still daunted by the transfer or just want a critique on their first websites. I already knew how much she tries to go out of her way to help people, and this is evident in the Vault which, in my opinion, is worth the cost of the guide alone, if not more! This is a fantastic free bonus which really sealed the deal.

The Downsides

Some of the Information is Basic: Some of the information is designed for Newbies and might be considered basic. I, personally, already had experience building websites. If you’re in the same boat, just skip the technical set up section. The good news is that this doesn’t really impact the value since there’s loads of other valuable steps here, not to mention the Vault!

It Takes Work: This isn’t really a downside for me, but it could be for some people. If you want a book that’s going to make you money without working for it, you will be disappointed! When you’re new to flipping it can seem daunting, and the whole process can take a while for each site. But I have now streamlined everything I do and find it pretty quick to come up with ideas, get the site set up, get the content on there and make a sale.

Nothing is Guaranteed: Not all sites will sell first time, Michelle even emphasises this herself and is very realistic with her students. However, I can say from experience that there is a lot of money to be made as long as you’re willing to accept that you may need to relist or develop certain sites further.

My Conclusion

If you want to know whether this works, and whether Michelle is the real deal, the answer is yes! And, if you want proof, just check out my Flippa profile here.

All of what Michelle taught me back in August is in this guide, and more – especially when the Vault is there for you when you have any questions, concerns or ideas that you want feedback on.

‘Learn How to Build and Sell Niche Blogs’ is suitable for those who are fairly new either to building niche blogs, or selling niche blogs. However, I have noticed even more experienced flippers joining just for access to the Vault alone, which I can see is set to become a fantastic and supportive community of likeminded people.

I emphasise again that flipping takes work, but it’s so rewarding once that chunk of cash comes into your PayPal account! It’s excellent for some quick money or a long-term plan, and you can do it on your own schedule. Click here to visit Michelle’s guide now, or leave me a comment if you’d like to know anything else.

When you work at home, and read about ways of improving your work and your business, you tend to come across a lot about setting goals. Goals are an important way of constantly pushing forward to achieve what you want out of life. But if you don’t keep yourself accountable, what’s to stop you breaking those goals?

What Makes YOU Follow Something Through?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but I think a big mistake many of us make is in trying to be like someone else. There is always someone else who will get a million more things done than we do, using an amazing productivity system that we just have to emulate. But we all work in different ways, and we’re all working towards different ends – it takes time to realise what works for you specifically.

We all have different motivations that help us to complete our tasks. For many of us, it is simply a matter of personal achievement. In the long term, we want to earn money to do the things we want in life, but in the short term we want to end each day with a feeling that we haven’t wasted it. At least, that’s how I feel.

Make Yourself Accountable Each and Every Day

I have to find a way to keep myself accountable to make sure I follow through on tasks I set for myself. Working at home, with such an open schedule, presents a wonderful opportunity to get so much done, and it also presents a great opportunity to get absolutely nothing done at all. No boss is here to fire me if I don’t do the work, so I have to look towards other methods.

Personally, I choose to write out what I do each day. I already did this in forums I visit regularly, though not every day. So I decided to start a simple Blogger blog, where I just write every day what I’ve achieved. This is not as a way to make myself feel bad if I get nothing done, it’s to make myself feel better, and to encourage me to get more done the next day. It really works.

Even if nobody reads your blog, or your notebook or scrap of paper (nobody’s reading mine!), it still makes you feel as if you’re describing to someone what you’ve achieved each day, and I believe that’s very powerful when it comes to transforming your goals from something in the distant future, to something that you work to achieve every day.

What do you do to keep yourself accountable? Do you need to write it down every day, like me, or are you better at sticking to your goals without such regimented behaviour?

Since March has arrived so quickly already, I thought it was time to update on my niche website building challenge. I’ve made good progress, but there’s still a little work to go until I can say that these sites are complete.

What Were My Plans?

You can read more about my February niche website building plan by clicking here. In short, I was creating three different types of niche website based on three different programs: The Niche Blogger, XFactor Adsense Masters, and the $5 Dollar Formula.

The latter two of these can be done using either Wordpress or HTML sites, but I have used Wordpress for all and used an X Factor Adsense style template for them which I created using a program called Artisteer a few months ago. For the Niche Blogger style site, I used a clean looking three column free Wordpress theme.

The main difference between these sites is that the first (Niche Blogger) is designed to have more posts and a variety of marketing methods, whereas the latter two just have five pages and are marketed using articles only.

How Far Did I Get?

I’m pleased to say that I got very far with each of the three sites, on top of all the other work I had in February. I got 25 posts written for the Niche Blogger site, all of the 5 pages written for the $5 Formula site, and two pages written for my X Factor site so far (I started this last site late).

I have also done about half of the marketing for the $5 formula site and the Niche Blogger site, and just a couple of articles for my X Factor site.

What Did I Achieve?

In terms of money, each one of the sites has made a couple of pounds in Adsense only – not much! Though my X Factor site is so new it hasn’t even been indexed, so I’m quite glad it’s made something already.

I need to give my sites more time to start ranking for long tail keywords. In my experience, this can really boost traffic. However, I will also work on getting my sites up in the rankings for their main keyword – so far the two sites are both on page 4 which isn’t ideal, though since they are so new I expect them to shift around.

I also found that I like different things about the plans:

1. I like the fact that you can really get into the topic with the Niche Blogger, you feel like you have more content that really provides value. I think over time this will really pay off, but it does mean more work.
2. I like the idea behind the article marketing involved in $5 formula – it’s a lot of articles, but if it works it isn’t really so bad. I’ll have to wait and see!
3. I’ve enjoyed working on them all since they are very structured, and this helps me to fulfil my goal of not giving up this time around (I’ve given up on lots of things in the past).

Starting to Outsource

One thing that I also started during this project, in fact just a few days ago, was to outsource. I was finding it daunting having so much writing to do, so I thought I’d move along quicker if I invested some money. Of course this is a little risky, but I plan to earn a little extra cash this month to fund it through website flipping.

The two places I outsourced were:

• oDesk: I found this confusing at first, but after just a few hours I realised it’s a real gem! The great thing is there is only a minimum of $5 for a fixed price project, and you can create private projects to test out any potential writers before hiring them out for a bigger job. I have already found a great writer here, though I did get a lot of obviously bad writers applying to my work – you just need to weed them out. The main drawback is that I have to pay by credit card, and I get poor exchange rates from my bank when converting from USD to GBP.
• Elance: I found this even more confusing than oDesk, but I still think it’s worth signing up to just in case you find a gem of a writer. The thing I didn’t like is that the minimum job price is $50 and as far as I can tell there isn’t an easy way to get test articles, but I like the fact that you can pay by PayPal – I think I just need a little more experience, it’s definitely worth persevering.

I’ll probably post more about this as I learn more. As a quick side note – I’m only outsourcing to help me move forward quicker with my niche projects, I still write myself for clients that hire me.

What Are My Plans?

My sites haven’t achieved much so far, but that’s fine. They are just a few weeks old, and one isn’t even indexed yet. Plus the whole point of my plan is to see them through to the end. So I’m going to carry on working on them regardless of results at this stage. Once I’ve done all the marketing recommended in the guides, I’ll take a step back and think about whether it’s worth any extra marketing to get them going.

How did your February go? Did you set yourself any goals? Is 2010 still looking good?

If you follow this blog, you’ll see that I took time off the week before last. Yet I still didn’t get back into regular posting last week and, to be honest, I didn’t get back into my regular work either. Ironically, this is a post I’d wanted to write last week but never got around to – about the need to recover from time off, even when the time off itself was meant for that. And I have to warn you, even now my brain isn’t 100% in blogging mode!

Taking Real Time Off Is So Important

Before I went away I was worried about not having internet access when I was there. But once I got there, I was more worried by being tempted to pay for their Wi-Fi (luckily the fact that it was so expensive kept me away – mostly). Because I truly believe that it’s healthy just to be ‘disconnected’ for a while. I wasn’t completely disconnected from the world, I watched TV and so on, but it’s so liberating not to have to check emails every day. It’s a scary prospect, but one I need to try every once in a while.

Getting Back Into ‘Work Mode’

I’m pleased to say that for the whole week I only checked the internet once. However, that didn’t make it easy for me to get back into ‘work mode’ last Monday. Even just using the computer made my head feel weird, I guess I just wasn’t used to staring at a screen all day. I also found it extremely hard to get out of bed, and just wasn’t motivated by my work at all. You know, the post-holiday blues – even though I was only away for a week.

Finding Motivation Again

Before I went away, I had a schedule planned for what I’d do in the week after I got back. Needless to say, I didn’t really follow that schedule. It was pretty difficult for me, given my mindset.

The best way I found to get back into the swing of things again was to do something that really motivated me. Things that made me excited (of course, it would be ideal if all my work made me feel that way, but it doesn’t). So I focused on something I’d already had planned – my PLR website and free WSO (Warrior Forum special offer). It was so exciting doing something I’d never done before, and also to finally achieve my goal.

Did I get as much done as I’d hoped? No. And I’m still not completely back into the blogging or writing mode. But I decided I needed that flexibility, so I cut myself some slack and gave myself the freedom to pick and choose what to work on for that week. That is the beauty of working for yourself!

How do you recover from time off and get yourself motivated again?

PS. Unfortunately I didn’t spend my week off lying in a hammock in a tropical location like in the picture. I went up to the north of England, which was cold but lovely all the same.

Since I got back on Friday (yes I’ve been back for a while, just haven’t posted!) I’ve been meaning to write a post about how to ‘recover’ from time off.

But guess what? My brain has not been in gear and I just haven’t been able to get back into the swing of posting again. Not to mention the fact that I’ve been really busy with my new PLR site (Private Label Articles – basically website content that is purchased by several people). I’m sorry to be boring and have my first post back be about my new website, but I hope you’ll like it since a free gift is involved!

My New Venture

My website is designed to sell articles in niches that are in demand, but that aren’t the same old stuff that’s seen everywhere. So far I only have 8 packs for sale, but they are in a variety of niches – click here to check out my new site ‘Net PLR’.

My Free Offer!

Today I also launched my first ever WSO. This stands for ‘Warrior Special Offer’ and is basically a special deal that’s made available to members of the Warrior Internet Marketing Forum. I decided to give away two free PLR packs, one of which also includes keywords, as a way to show my writing as well as make a good impression on the forum. The gift includes:

• 5 articles on stretch marks promoting a specific affiliate program that you can change if necessary,
• Thorough keyword research to go with those stretch mark articles,
• 5 review articles for some of the bestselling electronics products on Amazon,
• A free guide on how to use PLR effectively (if you don’t know much about PLR, this will teach you).

The good news is you don’t need to be a member of that forum to take advantage – just click here to view my offer and then click the link inside it.

I’m really nervous about my first ever WSO, and about the whole project in general! But I hope you can put your free gift to good use, and please send me any feedback you might have.

I’ll hopefully get my brain back in gear soon to do some ‘proper’ posts and catch up on all of your blogs too!

~Ruth

Just a note to everyone that I’m away from today for the whole week. I am looking forward to no internet access (shock, horror!) so I won’t be replying to comments, or reading any blogs, or posting here for a while. Look forward to catching up when I get back!

If you read my recent post ‘Forgotten Systems for Making Money Online‘, you’ll see that I’m creating three niche websites this month. Part of the reason for this is to learn some lessons about the way I work, as well as to force myself to see something through until the end. One more thing it’s got me thinking about is the content that’s needed for these sites – the blog posts.

What People Want Vs. What Gets Them Clicking on Ads

Firstly, let me clarify: I’m not talking about content for sites like this, which obviously has to be well thought out (at least a little!) What I’m talking about is content on niche affiliate sites, such as the ones I’m making as part of my February challenge.

There are two main schools of thought on this: 1) You should write informative, useful content that fulfils the needs of what the searchers are looking for 2) You should simply write something that gets you showing up in the search engines then, once the searchers are there, they click out as fast as possible – preferably on your ads! Why? Because your site doesn’t give them what they want and they need to click further to find it.

The Ethics of Content Creation

It’s easy to get caught up with what is working for other people on the internet. This might be number 2 above. But does it really sit right with you? As someone who works to create content for others, believe me I’ve had all kinds of requests. But sometimes you just need to a set a limit on what’s right for you and stick to it.

I’m not saying I’ve never gone the route of number 2 (and let’s be clear, I would never write this way for clients). In fact, I’ve hired some dirt cheap writers myself, who obviously don’t speak English as a first language, and posted up what I would now recognise as garbage to my websites. Is filling the internet with junk ethical? Who knows – it’s up to you to decide. But personally I’ve decided that that’s not the way I want to continue.

The Benefits of Writing Helpful Content

Let’s be clear – the content that I write for my niche websites isn’t going to win me any awards. It isn’t groundbreaking, it’s simply informational, and it’s generally information that’s already available elsewhere. But I like to think that I’m now considering what I’m presenting and the way I’m presenting it to give searchers what they’re looking for. And there are quite a few types of helpful content:

• Entertaining posts,
• Personal views,
• Your own experience,
• Simply collating information that’s spread out around the ‘net,
• Posts that compare different options or different products to make decisions easier.

All of these will help the reader in some way. They will truly get value out of your website and, I like to think, your website will stick around longer as a result.

But, more than this, thinking about what’s helpful will get you into the mindset of your visitors, understanding what they need and hopefully setting you up for bigger rewards in the future.

My Experience So Far

As for learning which route is the best way to make money, I’m not so sure. So far I’ve done quite a lot of work on my three new niche sites, and the one I’m enjoying most is the Niche Blogger model – to build a much larger informational site than the other two models. With this site I really feel as though I have the freedom to provide more useful content, but on the other hand I can also see that it could take longer to see results. Perhaps I’ll come back to this in a couple of years and have a definitive answer! For now, though, I have a plan and I’m sticking to it.

What are your views of content creation, the ethics behind it, or the way it’s used to make money? Has one way worked better than the other to make you money online?

As part of my online career, nothing has challenged me more than the constant battle against procrastination. Though I’ve come to learn that productivity is a very personal issue – and we all work very differently – I thought I’d share with you the methods that have begun to work for me.

The Four Tricks I’ve Discovered to Help Me Beat Procrastination

1) Set a Timer: I use the Action Machine to do this, but you can actually use a simple kitchen timer. Set it for thirty minutes, and write a blog post in that time. Or set it for 90 minutes and do some serious work on one of your websites. Whatever it is, focus until the timer pings.

2) Block Unnecessary Distractions: This is a recent finding for me and I love it. I use an add-on called LeechBlock for Firefox that allows you to enter the websites you use to procrastinate (for me, that means Facebook, forums, YouTube and so on), then you set a time (e.g. an hour and a half) to block access to all of these. The best thing is you can’t just simply backtrack on your decision and unblock them again, so it forces you to get things done.

3) Start on the Most Important Tasks: I’m trying to get into the habit of writing down my three most important tasks for the day in my diary before I get started. I have the best days when I start working on them in the morning and get them out of the way first thing. That way, by lunchtime, I can usually say I’ve truly achieved something!

4) Limit Your Working Hours: I wrote about this in a post recently. By having a set limit as to when you want, or need, to finish, you’ll become more productive as you’ll avoid procrastination and just get things done – instead of always extending how much time you’ve got to get the job done.

So there you have it, four things that have become a winning combination for me. There are times when absolutely nothing will work, but generally I find that this is the way I work best.  Notice I haven’t even mentioned that I write a to-do list: that goes without saying!

So what works best for you? Do you disagree with my points, are you strict on yourself, or do you just go with the flow? What’s your number one productivity tip?

Earlier this week I posted my plans to follow three systems this month, and to follow them right through until the end without worrying too much about the instant results. Part of the reason why I chose to do this was something that one of my commenters, Jack, mentioned in his comment for that post: “the work you do now won’t necessarily impact you immediately in this line of work but it will pay dividends slowly. Prepare yourself mentally for that and just keep going. Think of your sites as seeds.”

This is something I’ve always struggled with. Even though I know it, logically, it makes it hard to know if anything you are doing right now is really worth it. However, the more I leave my older sites that I didn’t really do so well at the time, the more I see earnings increase simply because of their age. Just think what the results could have been if I’d followed them through fully?!

Seeing Systems Through ‘Til the End

The problem with worrying about seeing results straight away is that it can lead to you giving up on systems or ideas too easily. As a result, not following the system through fully could be the very thing that leads it to fail in the end, and causes you to move onto something else: it’s a vicious cycle.

This is part of the philosophy behind the Squidoo/ IPK challenge that Tiffany Dow is running in 2010, and which I’ve mentioned a few times before. It involves posting Squidoo product reviews, and doing one each week consistently, without always checking stats and waiting for earnings immediately. Over time, the idea is that they’ll get more power in  the search engines and, by Christmas, we’ll have many buyers viewing our lenses ready to buy products through our Amazon links.

Taking A Risk

This is also part of my philosophy behind the challenge I’ve set myself this February. I’ve got myself a step by step plan, and I’m going to reach the end of that plan before I stop. In many ways this is a risk – as one of my other commenters pointed out, it may not provide a great return on investment if I’m not seeing many earnings after six months despite putting in the effort. I am risking my time, and time is very valuable.

But in the long run, I don’t think I’ve got much to lose. After seeing my old sites, which had terrible keyword research, doing OK with age, I know I’ll get something out of this. I’m also looking at the bigger picture – having more than one income source, and ultimately learning enough to know what works for me and what doesn’t.

Do you find that you’re someone who always follows through until the end, or do you get worried like me and end up giving up to soon? Do you believe in this long term approach or think it’s too risky?

Happy February! Can you believe it’s February already? I’m sure many of us are feeling that time is going quickly. But it’s fine: a new month is always a great feeling, a new chance to challenge yourself and improve on what you’ve done before. I’m setting myself a new sort of challenge this February, one that will hopefully make up a little for a lack of action-taking in previous months.

How Many Systems Have You Bought and Never Followed?

I’m asking this question hoping I’m not the only one to have bought money-making guides and never to have followed them. It’s not that I think I was scammed or ripped off, it’s just that I didn’t take the action I needed to follow through and make them work for me.

In fact, I don’t even know how well some of these systems work. I’ve tried a lot of methods, but I wonder if I’ve actually ever followed something through as far as I truly can. This is something that I vow to change this year.

Testing Systems in February: My Plan

As a way of testing different money making systems – specifically niche blogs – I have purchased three domains, each of which will be based around a different system. The domains are all very closely related, meaning I’ll be able to stay focused when it comes to content creation.

1) The first site will be based on the Niche Blogger. This is a system used to create reasonably large sites that could end up becoming an authority in a reasonably tight niche. There are many different ways to monetize and market this kind of site. Because of the nature of the site, this will probably take longer to see results, but they could pay off bigger in the long term.

2) The next will be based on the XFactor Adsense Masters Course. This system is based on much smaller niche sites, with only a few pages of content, all monetized with Google Adsense. The marketing plan involves article marketing, though not too many articles. Yes I blogged about this in the past, and I am ashamed to say I never completed any of my sites! Not this time.

3) Lastly, I am going to use the 5 Dollar Formula for my third site. This is a completely free strategy similar to the XFactor approach in that the site is rather small. However, it uses a lot of article marketing, and the idea is that you can very quickly get your site earning 5 dollars a day (the guide says within just a week). I have been meaning to try this for a while, and a recent upgrade of the guide reminded me to get going.

My approach is very un-scientific, I know. There are so many factors at play determining whether a system will succeed – so if one does better than the rest, or one does worse, it doesn’t necessarily mean the system is at fault. It could be my keywords, it could be anything. But it will give me an idea of what works for me.

What If It Doesn’t Look Like It’s Working?

My biggest problem has always been giving up too quickly. I know you need patience in this line of business, so my aim for this challenge is to see each site through completely. That means no giving up if it seems like it isn’t working. After all, it will only cost me a little time. Number 1 will be time consuming, but number 2 and 3 won’t take too long and are really worth a go just to properly test them.

So, that’s my challenge in a nutshell. I believe I will have time to work on these three sites at the same time as my new PLR site (I mentioned this last Thursday) and active income projects.

Have you ever had more success when you decided to follow something through completely? How many guides have you got that you’ve never properly followed through? Aside from that, what are your goals for February?