The Smart Passive Income Blog

The Secret To Success Comes in Purple

Pat — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 07:57:42 +0000

One of my favorite books of all time is Purple Cow, by Seth Godin.

In it, Seth describes that the key to success is to find a way to stand out – to be the purple cow in a field of monochrome Holsteins. (A Holstein is a breed of cow. I looked it up.)

Seth’s description really resonates with me because looking back at my entrepreneurial journey, that’s exactly what I’ve always done – I have always purposely tried to stand out from the crowd.

In fact, you may be reading this post today because there was something I did, or something on my blog that one day made you think that it was different from the hundreds of thousands of other blogs talking about entrepreneurship and making money online.

Here are some examples of how I purposely try to stand out from the crowd:

I write detailed income reports every month, revealing exactly how much money I make online (down to the penny), as well as where it all came from.
I customized the design of my blog.
I send follow-up emails to my newsletter that are pure content – no hype or selling.
I try to respond to every comment made on the blog, as much as I can.
I blog about my failures and struggles as much as I do about my wins and successes.
I admit I’m not crazy rich, or even rich at all.
I not afraid to tell my story.

Based on some the above, you might be thinking to yourself, “Pat, you’re not the only one to do that.” or “Pat, that’s not original.”

My response to that is that the whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts. In other words, your business or blog is a total package, and your total package, your brand, must be unique.

The One Thing We All Have To Help Us Stand Out From The Crowd

There’s one thing that you have, one thing that you possess right now that is so unique, no one else in the world has it. If you can harness this and utilize it for your own blog or business, nothing can stop you.

What is it?

It’s you.

Nobody in this world is just like you. No one has shared the exact same experiences, has the exact same tastes and understands the world just like you, so don’t be afraid to be yourself sometimes. This is why your story is important too.

What Are 3 Things You Are Doing to Stand Out From the Crowd? (And a Free Book!)

In the comment section below, I’d like for you to describe 3 things that you’re doing that helps your business or blog stand out from the crowd.

Hopefully this mind exercise will be thought provoking and help you remind yourself why you’re business or blog is unique, or help you realize that you need to do something to stop blending in.

I will send two copies Purple Cow (audio book) to two random commenters. Winners will be contacted via email and announced on my Facebook page on Sunday.

So again, what are 3 things that you’re doing to stand out from the crowd?

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The Secret To Success Comes in Purple

The Secret of Cutting Through the Noise and Getting More People to Click on Your Links

Pat — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 07:05:44 +0000

This is a guest post by James Tayo of Entrepreneur Blog’r.

One day I was shopping for groceries and as I walked through the magazine section, I was stopped in my tracks. A title on one of the magazines had caught my eye and it read “One Wedding secret Prince Charles must take to his grave”. I just had to stop to pick it up to find out what they were on about. If you live in the UK, you always are interested in some crazy thing the royal family does. This moment reminded me of how powerful a great headline can be.

The Power of a Headline.

In a previous post, Pat explained why an incomplete headline will help you get more traffic to your blog and this post is a follow up to expand on that idea. In the age of social media and millions of other blogs competing for your audiences attention, it has become a noisy world out there. Today it is not who shouts the loudest that gets the most attention but who shouts the smartest. Especially if you are a new blogger, you could write all the great content you want, but to get that content read, you need to have a great headline that pulls people in from the RSS readers, Twitter or wherever you may be promoting it.

How to Learn to Write Great Headlines

Writing great headlines is not hard at all, you just need to know what works, the psychology behind why it works and put that into practice.

In this post, I am going to share a great resource with you. It’s from the marketing guru, Jay Abraham and it is called, The 100 Greatest Headlines ever written. I will choose 3 of those headlines to analyse and show why those headline work so that you can be able to craft your own super headlines. I will also give you alternative headlines I could have used for this post.

The Secret of Making People Like You

This is first one one the list. This headline clearly wants to convey how you can achieve a specific result, in this case, getting people to like you. Highlighting a benefit a reader will get from reading your content is an effective way of getting that person to click over. The other component that makes this headline even more powerful is “The Secret”. We all want to know what our competition doesn’t, so that we can have an edge over them. In this case people want to click over and find out what it is that isn’t common knowledge and will make people like them.

Let’s see how I could have swiped this concept to create an alternative headline for this post. A good title for this post could have been, The secret of cutting through the noise and getting more people to click on your links on Twitter.

A Little Mistake That Cost a Farmer $3,000 a year

As Jay Abraham noted under that title, “People will fight much harder to avoid losing something they already own than to gain something of greater value that they do not own”. This title will draw you in because you would like to know what mistake the farmer made so you don’t end up making the same. Also, the word “little” is trying to convey the message that the mistake was avoidable but it still cost the farmer $3,000. This title like all the other titles in this post plays on the curiosity angle. You only want to give away so much information in the title to arouse that curiosity so the person reading it will want to find out more.

Swiping from this title, I could have titled this post. A Little Mistake that cost a Blogger half of his Subscribers.

Why some People Almost Always Make Money in the Stock Market

This title is best used when you address a problem that most people have but only a small section of the community seem to be able to have a solution for. In this case, it is making money
on the stock market. It is widely known that only about 10% of investors gain from the stock market and the other 90% are the ones funding these gains. The element of credibility also comes into play with the words “some” and “almost”. It acknowledges that not everyone will be able to find the solution they are seeking but when they do find it, their chances of success are greatly increased because it “almost always” works.

A good title for this post could have been, Why some Probloggers always get tons of traffic from Twitter.

I’m sure you now recognize the power of a headline and how these headlines work behind the scenes to make you take action. Your headlines are the entry points to your content, most people coming over to your blog will see your headline first, the more people you can convert into coming over to your site, the more you will convert later into subscribers, clients, customers or whatever you want them to be later on.

I have a challenge for you, can you think of a headline for this post that is better than the 3 I have illustrated here? Please leave a comment and let me know.

James Tayo shares tips on how you can become a successful entrepreneur at Entrepreneur Blog’r. On his blog you can find out how you can kick start a profitable business online by building an email list of prospects and turn them into raving fans.

How to Find Your Google Keyword SERPs Ranking

Pat — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 07:05:31 +0000

As many of you know, I’ve been doing my best to keep you up to date on the latest going-ons with my niche site challenge with Tyrone Shum. To make things easier for you, I recently created a niche site duel hub that will list all of the posts surrounding this challenge, from all of the competitors’ blogs.

Currently, it’s just me, Tyrone Shum and Mark Mason, but I’m happy to add anyone else’s case studies to the list who may be participating in this challenge too. All I ask is that you do not hide your niche and url in your reports, since the purpose of this challenge is to be as transparent as possible so our audiences can learn as much as they can.

If you’re participating, just contact me with a link to your first report and I’ll add it to the hub.

This post isn’t an official niche site duel update, but I am happy to say that as of 10:30pm PST on August 29th, I am currently ranked #186 in Google for my target keyword.

I definitely still have a long way to go to reach the first page, but for a brand new, one-week old site and 46,000 competing webpages, that’s not bad at all, and I expect to quickly climb much higher.

I’ll go over my exact strategy, in detail, in the next niche site duel update, but today, I wanted to share with you how you can track your website’s rank in the search engines for your target keywords.

It can be tough, especially right when you’re starting a new site, to know where you are on the radar. You don’t want to spend time flipping through each page of Google to find your site.

That’s why I recommend using one of the three methods I show you in the video below:

(Watch 3 Cool Ways to Find Your Google Keyword Search Engine Ranking (SERPs) on YouTube)

Items Mentioned in This Video:

Hopefully, we’ll all get to a point where we’re all sitting in the number 1 position for our target keyword, in which case, these techniques wouldn’t be necessary. But until then, I hope you find these techniques useful.

Thanks for your support!

Cheers!

Are YouTube Videos and Podcasting Worth the Effort?

Pat — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 08:47:45 +0000

Last year, I made a conscious decision to turn my growing Smart Passive Income blog into the Smart Passive Income brand.

I knew nothing about “branding” at the time, except that I knew that successful brands utilized all different mediums to reach their audience. Stick to one medium, and you’ll limit your reach to only those who use that medium.

That’s why you see major brands on television and on the radio (and everywhere else it seems), or why you see many of the top bloggers syndicate and expand their written content with videos and podcasts too.

I wanted to do the same, and that’s why I have my YouTube Channel, and most recently, my Podcast.

So is it worth all the effort?

Before I get into the numbers, I can easily say that the experience alone was worth it.

I know how to do a lot more now than I could a year ago, such as properly setting up an optimizing a video, capturing screen recordings, speaking on the microphone with confidence, optimizing YouTube and iTunes as search engines, getting my podcast feed approved and ranked in iTunes, etc.

Beyond the experience (and what you’re probably more interested in) are the results.

Did I get in front of people who may have never seen me otherwise?

Did I get traffic flowing back to the blog?

Did I get new subscribers?

Let’s explore…

Did I Get In Front of People Who may Have Never Seen Me Otherwise?

Yes. Absolutely!

Many people don’t actually use written content as their primary source of information. (GASP!)

Many people prefer to listen or watch videos to absorb information, and they stick to that medium no matter what. There could be are a ton of people out there who are in your target audience. The trick is to produce content in the way that they want to get it.

Since starting my YouTube Channel on September 26, 2009, I’ve accumulated a total of 93,515 total views. Of that total, 21,622 were found via the search engines in YouTube and Google combined. Obviously, there may be some overlap between the two and between people who have already connected with me before, but these are really impressive numbers as far as people searching for certain pieces of information and ending up watching a video that I uploaded.

And here’s an email someone just sent me a few days ago:

And the podcast? Well, I don’t have any concrete numbers because iTunes is terrible at reporting (i.e. they don’t), but I do have a few more messages. And remember, the first session was published a little over a month ago:

Again, the purpose of this is to show you that you can reach more people by expanding out of your blog and into the realm of audio and video.

Oh, and I almost forgot! This is something I’m really proud of.

In the overall business section of iTunes, I was ranked the top #8 podcast, right next to Suze Orman, Jim Cramer, the Wall Street Journal, and Dave Ramsey – right in the front where everyone could see. I know for sure that I was put in front of the eyes of people who would not have found me otherwise:

Thanks to all of you for your support to help make that happen.

Did I Get Traffic Flowing Back to the Blog?

Yes.

Here is a screenshot of Google Analytics showing the numbers coming from YouTube:

Although YouTube is not my top referring site, it does show some pretty decent numbers, at 2,660 clicks from YouTube since I began. These are coming from the links I put in the description of my videos only. Of course, I could have gotten more if I had made more videos, but with only 18 videos live at the moment, I think that’s pretty good.

From the podcast, again, it’s tougher to track traffic flow. But, I did notice quite a large influx of traffic coming around the same time I started going live with the show:

I can’t say for sure that all of that traffic was coming from listeners, but I’m almost certain that it helped.

Did I Get New Subscribers?

Yes!

On YouTube, I’ll be the first one to say that I’m not doing a very good job promoting my eBook and my newsletter. When I started on YouTube last year, I did not have a newsletter or eBook to promote, so I should follow my own advice and get on that right away.

I learned my lesson, however, and applied a very basic strategy to earn new subscribers through my podcast right from the start.

I purchased a domain at ebooksthesmartway.com, and I mention that domain on my show as an easy way to get people to come to my landing page where I promote my free eBook and newsletter. This is in lieu of saying something that is less memorable, such as: “Please visit smartpassiveincome dot com slash ebooks dash the dash smart dash way.”

Ever since starting the podcast, I have noticed a higher average of new daily subscribers.

Before the podcast, I was averaging about 15-20 new subscribers per day.

After the podcast, I am now seeing numbers between 25 and 50 new subscribers per day.

So is it worth all the effort?

Totally.

If anyone were to ask me: “Pat, what can I do to grow my blog?”, I would be really confident in saying that expanding your blog into video and/or podcasting is a great place to start.

By limiting yourself to your blog, you’re ultimately limiting your success.

Of course, you’ll want to make sure you use the best practices for expanding onto other mediums. I’m still getting familiar with Podcasting, so I can’t suggest what to do just yet, but I’m sure you’ll find these posts I wrote about YouTube helpful:

Thanks again for your support, and have a great weekend!

Cheers!

Niche Site Duel 003 – How to Setup a Niche Site: Before You Add Content

Pat — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 08:00:13 +0000

There are hundreds of different ways to setup a niche website – you know this, but I’ll outline my process for you below because it’s easy to follow and it doesn’t require much know-how. If you have anything to add, I’m sure the people here who are unfamiliar with this process will appreciate your insight in the comment section.

1. Setting Up The Blog

For my niche site challenge, I’ll be using a WordPress blog with a domain and hosting from Bluehost.com.

In the past, niche sites were almost always static sites, and blogs were just a way to keep your friends informed about the shenanigans from last weekend’s party. They weren’t given much in terms of priority and ranking in Google’s search engine algorithm.

Now, as I’m sure you’ll know, blogs can rank high – really high.

Why?

Well, I don’t know the exact answer, but it’s probably because blogs have a better site structure and coding, promote conversation and interaction, and are usually straight to the point containing the most important, relevant keywords.

Whatever the case may be, this works in our favor because a blog is really easy to setup, and you don’t need to know anything about html, css or any of that stuff to get started.

There are many blogging platforms out there you could choose from, such as Blogger, Typepad & Moveable Type, however WordPress is the most popular. All of my websites, even static websites, are run on the WordPress platform.

Please note that there’s a WordPress.com and a WordPress.org.

The .com is where you can setup your blog for free. You don’t need to pay for anything, and you can have a blog up and running in no time. However, your website name will always have the word “wordpress” in it, such as smartpassiveincome.wordpress.com, which decreases it’s authority in the search engines. Also, you are limited to what you can do with your wordpress hosted site.

The .org is where you can download WordPress to put on your own hosted domain. There is an installation process that can hold some people back, which is why I recommend using a hosting service like Bluehost.com because you can get your domain and hosting cheap, and simply click one button to install WordPress on your site. It literally takes 4 minutes (I know because I timed it), and you can watch this YouTube video if you’re looking for step by step instructions about how to set that up.

2. Plugins

For the rest of this tutorial, I won’t be going step by step through how to install plugins, how to install a theme, etc. Most of that is self-explanatory within the wordpress control panel itself, but if you do have any specific questions please don’t hesitate to ask here in the comment section, or just contact me privately instead.

As far as plugins are concerned, I install the following 4 plugins immediately after WordPress is loaded:

All in One SEO Pack
Google XML Sitemaps
Easy Privacy Policy
Google Analyticator

Then, I configure each of the ones that need configuring:

All in One SEO Pack

This plugin is the most important plugin you can install because from it, the search engines will look for information about your site. The plugin overrides all of your normal wordpress settings for your blog title, tagline, etc.

As you know from my previous niche site duel entry, I’ve decided my research led me to tackle the Security Guard Training niche, and pick up security guard training hq dot com. The exact match .com domain was not available, but it was for sale for $35,000.

Ugh, no thanks.

HQ on the end sounds kind of cool anyways for this niche, since headquarters is a term used in the industry already.

Moving on, it’s important that I properly setup my All in One SEO Pack plugin to be optimized for my niche.

Side note: I’ll do my best not to use the domain name I purchased, or even mention my niche so as not to skew any of the search engine results and numbers. It’s going to be impossible for me to keep my niche site 100% clean of non-related visitors and some incoming links, but that’s the price I pay when being totally transparent and sharing everything with you in this challenge. I hope that makes sense!

Here’s what I have:

Home Title: This is the title that will be shown at the top of your browser on your homepage and in the bright blue letters on the Google Search Engine Results Page (SERPs). I have included my keyword twice for more oomph (title and then tagline), but you have to be careful here because using your keyword too much will penalize your site.

I like to use the rule of 2 max. 2 max in your title, and 2 max in your description.

Home Description: This is the paragraph that gets shown underneath your blue link on the SERPs. Many people don’t use this plugin and fail to set this up, which leaves their description totally weird looking, sometimes containing random excerpts from their websites.

Be descriptive here, and be sure to include your primary keyphrase once again. I also used a secondary keyword that is related to the industry (protection services) as well here, just to give it a little bit more relevance to the

Both of the above (title and description) are what people see in the SERPs, so you can have more of an impact (i.e. get more traffic) by not only optimizing for keywords, but optimizing to catch people’s attention too. Sometimes, a #3 ranking site will have more traffic than a #2, simply because the copy is better.

My copy changes from time to time, so what you see in Google now may be different than what you see above.

Home Keywords: Keywords in the meta data (background of your site) are less important nowadays. The weight has been taken heavily off of them since a lot of people would just insert unrelated keywords into their meta data and rank for keywords they shouldn’t. Still, you should put in your primary keyphrase first, followed by any secondary keyphrases related to your niche which you know are being searched for.

Google XML Sitemaps

This super important plugin helps create a certain file that is used by Google’s bots that crawl your site and it’s content, for proper indexing in their system.

Once you activate it, it’s ready to go – you don’t need to do anything further.

Easy Privacy Policy

This is a cool plugin that automatically creates a page on your blog that suits the needs of Google as far as a privacy policy on your site goes. Sites without them get docked, which is why you see them on most high ranking sites. You can see mine at the bottom of my blog here too.

The plugin will put a link to your privacy policy in the navigation of your blog. For those of you who don’t want that there, you can use a plugin called Exclude Pages to stop it from showing up there. I usually do this and link to it manually within the footer.php file.

Not totally necessary – just something I like to do.

Google Analyticator

This plugin helps me hook up my site to my Google Analytics account so that I can see all of the traffic and keyword data I need to see right on my wordpress Admin panel. There are a bunch of advanced options that go along with it, but I don’t mess around with that stuff at this point.

Before setting up this plugin, you’ll need a Google Analytics account. Then, follow the instructions on the plugin settings page to get everything configured properly.

3. The Theme

The theme of your website (the look of it, which can easily be swapped for another look), is really easy to setup.

I’ve changed the theme on this blog (Smart Passive Income) 4 or 5 times before I finally ended up with one I liked, but what’s nice is that there are a million and one themes available to you (both free and paid), so there’s bound to be one that suits your needs.

For my niche site, I found an awesome free theme, SimpleFolio that works for what I’m trying to do at the moment. It has a number of features that a lot of paid themes include, which is cool.

It’s not a theme, however, that you can get in WordPress’ free theme directory. So, you’ll have to visit the link above, download the zip file, extract it, and plop the folder into the …wp-content/themes/ folder in your site. Then, it will show up as a theme you have installed on your blog, and all you have to do is activate it to make it live.

If you purchase a premium theme from a site like WooThemes, you’ll have to use the same method to get it onto your site.

Here’s a screenshot of my niche site up and running with the SimpleFolio theme:

You can see some of the content on there already, and in fact as I write this post, I see that my page has actually already been indexed by Google. Not ranked, just indexed, which means they know it’s there. I’ll go over how that happened in the next post.

Right now, the look of the theme isn’t actually that important, since no one is going to visit the site until it’s on the first page of Google, which is my top priority. What’s important now is that the content I publish is categorized, tagged and optimized for my keyphrase, and that I’m sending backlinks to the site (again, I will discuss this process in a later post).

Monetization?

Many people have been asking me what my plan for monetization is, since I’m not starting with a product keyword as I normally do. This is something that I thought about before deciding to tackle this niche, which is something everyone doing niche sites should think about before they start building a site.

There are training manuals available that I could be an affiliate for, but I’m looking more toward the online training courses that are required as part of the process to become a security guard. There are a bunch of them, and I’ll have to contact the site owners to work out a deal of some sorts (which is exactly what I did with my site at GreenExamAcademy), but that won’t happen until I have some leverage and traffic in this niche. Until then, I will probably and strategically sprinkle the site with adsense, since I know the cost-per-click is rather high, at $2.32 per click.

Again, I started GreenExamAcademy.com the same way, using Adsense, and what’s cool is that I can actually see what ads are popping up on my site and contact those companies directly for advertising and affiliate opportunities.

Niche Site Content

For the purposes of this challenge, I’m writing all of the content myself.

You can (and in some cases, probably should) hire and outsource people to create the content for you, but I like to write, and since this is a topic I’m actually interested about (since it came from my 777 passions-problems-fears niche selection method), I know I’ll be able to produce content that people are looking for.

Because I know nothing about this niche, I’m in the same shoes as those who will actually use my site. Because of this, I think I’ll know exactly what people want to know and how to present it to them.

I’ll talk more about what I do with the content in one of the next Niche Site Duel posts, but just to give you an idea about how I come up with the content, I simply create a list of questions, concerns and topics that I could possibly write about and go from there.

Some come from common sense, some are based on further related keyword research, and some are generated from research with competing websites.

Cool Resource: You can use this Keyword Questions Tool to find out what types of questions people are typing into search engines related to your niche. I wouldn’t look too hard at the numbers next to the questions, but you can get some good ideas about what kind of content people want to know about. Here’s a screenshot below:

Based off all that, here is a screenshot of a Google Doc that has a few of the posts that I will be researching and writing about:

So Far, I’ve Spent…

Setting up the domain and hosting, the WordPress blog, configuring the plugins and uploading the theme took a total of about 1 hour.

Doing the research required for the content topics for the site, maybe another 1 hour or so.

Each blog post I’ve written so far (shown in red in the screenshot above), has taken about 30 minutes to 1 hour each, so maybe a total of 4 additional hours.

Total Hours = 6 hours.

I could stop with the blog posts I’ve already written and just work on building backlinks, but I really want to go hardcore in this niche which is why you’re seeing a lot more than 4 or 5 blog posts, and why some of them aren’t totally related to the training aspect of this industry. I want the site to look natural (which it will be), because that’s what works best.

As far as cost, all I have paid for up to this point was the domain and hosting package, which runs at $6.95 a month from Bluehost.

Total Cost = $6.95.

Not bad!

Anyways, this post is rather long, so I’ll finish up and get back to work. Remember, it’s all about working hard now, so you can reap the benefits later.

Tyrone, my challenger in this duel, has selected his niche, but I think he may be switching it up too because of some further research done on his initial selection. I’ll do my best to link to his updates as much as I can. It’s difficult to coordinate perfectly because of our time zone difference (he’s in Austrailia, I’m in California), but we are trying to coordinate everything for you as much as possible.

Thanks again for your support, and I wish you all the best. Cheers!

SPI 004 : 5 Powerful Ways to Create Profitable Passive Income Products

Pat — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 07:05:25 +0000

In this session of The Smart Passive Income Podcast, I go over 5 powerful ways that you can create profitable passive income products. There’s a ton of info out there about what kinds of products you can make (i.e. eBooks, membership websites, etc.), but there isn’t much about the creative methods that you can easily create them, which is why I’m excited to share these methods with you today.

I guarantee that after you listen to this, you’ll probably have a ton of ideas about what you can do and you should be well on your way to creating some kind of passive income info product.

Enjoy!

Right click here to download the MP3

Items Mentioned in this Session:

GreenExamAcademy.com
Darren Rowse’s 31 Days to Build a Better Blog (on the blog)
Darren Rowse’s 31 Days to Build a Better Blog (the eBook)
Smashwords.com
Ebooks the Smart Way
Market Samurai
WP-Wishlist WordPress Plugin
Subscribers Magnet

Transcript:

SPI 004 : 5 Powerful Ways to Create Profitable Passive Income Products

Oops. The Niche I Selected is Bad, and Here’s Why

Pat — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 08:05:40 +0000

Before anything, I want to say this:

I’m not an expert at niche sites. Tyrone Shum, my challenger for this little competition, is not an expert either. We’re both fairly brand new to the niche site scene, so we’re going to make mistakes. The reason why we’re making this challenge public is to show you what those mistakes are, so you don’t do them yourself.

I just wanted to make that clear here in the beginning stages of our duel.

Now that I’ve said that, I’ve already made a mistake that I’m happy to share with you, because there’s a big lesson that goes along with it.

The niche I had originally selected for the competition, cop training (as shown in this niche selection process post), is not a good niche to get into. The process I used to get to that point was good – that’s the way most people would say it should be done, however I got all wide-eyed and excited when I saw the initial numbers and an open domain name, that I failed to do the further research required to make sure it was actually a good niche.

To sum it all up, the traffic and search numbers I saw for cop training were skewed because there are other terms that have the words cop training that are being searched for too. Usually, this is always the case and is totally fine because those other terms are terms related to that niche, however in my case, I was very unfortunate because those other keywords were totally unrelated.

It turns out, there’s this UFC fighter named Mirko Cro Cop, who also has his own training regiment. So, when I saw the numbers for “cop training” in Market Samurai, I was actually seeing search numbers and traffic for “Cro Cop Training”, and “Mirko Cro Cop Training” too.

Totally unfortunate, but it happened, and it can happen to you too. So the big lesson here is that when you find good keywords that meet your criteria, don’t stop there. Perform further research and figure out the other phrases that people are searching for that include those keywords that you want to target.

Here is a video I made for you that shows exactly what happened, why I didn’t catch this in the first place, and how you can use Market Samurai to see what those other terms are so you don’t make the same mistake:

Watch Oops, the Niche I Selected is Bad, and Here’s Why on YouTube.

(A special thanks to Christian, who commented on the last post and brought this to my attention.)

So now, I’m targeting a new niche, which has numbers that look much better than cop training did. Here are some screenshots from Market Samurai for my new niche, Security Guard Training, which I found using the same initial keyword theme, police training.

SEO Competition

Traffic and Search

Broad Match

Exact Match (this shows numbers based on people searching for the exact keyword phrase, nothing more)

As you can see, cop training dropped off a lot, while security guard training still has a large number of people searching and clicking through for that exact term daily.

There are more competing pages, but because there’s a little bit more room in the top 10 in Google, the number of competing pages doesn’t really matter.

I’m actually glad this whole ordeal happened, not just because I feel like I have a better niche in my hands now, but because hopefully you learned something from it.

I did, and I’m glad I didn’t create an entire site around cop training, only to find out later that this is the reason why no one was interested in it.

Now I’m a little behind in the competition – Tyrone already has his site up with some content on it (thanks to his outsourcing team), but I’m confident I can catch up, even though it’s just me.

I’ve already contacted Bluehost and they kindly allowed me to cancel by initial purchase of CopTraining.net and pickup a new domain for Security Guard Training that isn’t an exact match, but it’s close. I’ll reveal that in the next installment.

I already have the blog up and running, and I’m tweaking the theme right now. For the process of how to setup a blog and get a theme on it, you can watch this video I made about how to setup a WordPress Blog in Less than 4 Minutes:

p.s. I created this video almost exactly 1 year ago, and it’s amazing to listen to how much I’ve improved on the microphone since then. If you’ve listened to my podcasts, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Cheers, and thanks for your support!

Niche Site Duel 002 – Finding a Profitable Niche: My Process Revealed

Pat — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 13:15:55 +0000

Who needs mixed martial arts or the World Cup when you’ve got a friendly Niche Site Competition to get your adrenaline pumping?

After announcing Monday that fellow blogger and good friend of mine, Tyrone Shum, challenged me to a Niche Site Competition, the response has been amazing. I didn’t expect this many people to get excited about it, and it actually makes me want to do something more than a tiny little product niche site, which I had originally planned. I want bigger results – something comparable to the results I had with my site at GreenExamAcademy.com.

I’ve done it before – and I know I can do it again.

After reading all of the comments, both here at SPI and on Tyrone’s blog, one thing is clear – everyone knows that I’m at a huge disadvantage because I’ve chosen to do a lot of the work on my own. Tyrone has a dedicated team that has actually selected his niche for him (based on criteria that Tyrone created for market research, which I’m pretty sure he’ll share with you) and they’ve already started building his site too.

It’s clear that the right move is to actually outsource certain aspects of your niche site.

I know this.

The cost of the work done by others can come back in profits faster, since things are moving more quickly. However, not all of us have the resources (or the patience) to find a reliable team of people to work for us, which is why I’m going to do a lot of the things on my own. If I do end up outsourcing anything, it will be on a per task basis, and I’ll show you which tasks those are and the process for finding people to do that for me.

You don’t need a full time team working for you to succeed, and hopefully I can prove that to you. Then at least when you do outsource something, you can point your own virtual assistants to my tutorials, or know what your VA should (or should not) be doing.

Finding a Profitable Niche

I spent a good three straight hours doing some market research before I narrowed down my niche. To me, this is the most important part of the process, and can mean the difference between a site that makes money, and one that doesn’t.

Here is an overview of the process I used, which was highly influenced by Glen’s interview in the Third Session of the Smart Passive Income Podcast. I will get into detail about each step later in this post:

I came up with a list of 7 passions, 7 problems and 7 fears, making sure to stay away from anything that deals with making money online. (Side note: I once won $1,024 on a Blazing 7s slot machine, so I consider 777 to be a lucky number of mine. Hey – nobody said superstition doesn’t play a role in internet marketing.)
From that list of 21, I selected my top 10 potential markets.
I did keyword research for each of those markets, hoping to find any related terms that fit my criteria, which I will share in detail below.
If any related keywords stood out to me, I immediately checked to see if the domain name matching the keyword 100% was available. If the exact match was not 100% available, I moved on to another related term, or another market.

Let’s break it down.

Passions, Problems and Fears

I was originally going to do a tiny product niche site, with a keyword and domain name that matches the product of choice 100%. These are the type of niche sites that I’ve been doing lately, and they seem to work. I started with researching the product first, and then comes the keyword research behind it.

The reason I’m steering away from a specific product niche site now is because the earning potential is far less than targeting an actual market, and because this is a competition I want to bring out the big guns. By targeting a market that involves a passion, problem and/or fear that I or someone I know has, I can be sure I’ll be interested in it enough to put forth the extra effort needed for it to become a potentially high profit site.

Here is a screenshot of a mindmap of my 777:

From this list, I narrowed down the list to a top 10, just based on what interested me the most. I knew I could always go back to this list if for some reason the top 10 didn’t work out in the keyword research or domain selection phase.

Here is my top 10:

Keyword Research

Now it’s time to figure out if these markets are something that other people are interested in too. On top of that, we need to know whether or not there are any related keyword terms that have a somewhat high search volume, and relatively low competition. This gives us the best chance of getting on the first page of Google, while still seeing enough traffic to do something worthy.

Remember, it’s all about getting on the first page of Google.

Like I mentioned in my Market Samurai webinar, there are ways to do all of this research for free, but Market Samurai (free trial) makes the process a whole lot faster and easier for me. What took me 3 hours may have taken me 3 days.

Instead of doing a whole number of screenshots, I decided to capture this video that summarizes how I did my research and how I landed on my niche:

(watch Selecting a Niche Market – Pat vs. Tyrone Niche Site Challenge on YouTube)

So there you have it! I’ve selected my niche (if you didn’t watch the video, it’s “Cop Training”) and I was able to pick up an exact matching .net domain.

Note: because Tyrone and I are revealing our niches, we’ll do our best not to skew the numbers because we’re reporting our results on our blogs. This is why you won’t see us link directly to the site.

Again, thanks to Market Samurai, I was able to find a niche with a relatively low amount of competition, and a relatively high number of searches and potential traffic. You don’t need it in order to find a good niche to get into, it just helps speed things up a bit.

I’m excited to see what happens next! If I didn’t say so already, best of luck to Tyrone and everyone else who is participating along with us.

Cheers!

What do you think about the niche I’m getting into?

Niche Site Duel: I’ve Been Challenged…and I Accept

Pat — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 08:36:37 +0000

My recent minor success with niche sites (as shown in my latest monthly report) caught the attention of fellow blogger, Tyrone Shum. The other day, he sent me this message on my Facebook page:

I’m always up for a little friendly competition, so I accepted Tyrone’s challenge.

Both Tyrone and I are going to document and report our progress on building a profitable niche site from scratch. We’re going to give you front row seats in our little competition, revealing exactly how we select a potentially profitable niche (which we’ll reveal to you), how we build a website around that market, how we send traffic to that site, and finally how we begin to earn an income form it.

The Rule

Yes…rule – singular.

There is only one rule in our little challenge, and that is: we will not use paid advertising to generate traffic. All traffic to our sites will be from natural search engine traffic, or referrals.

That’s it. Everything else is wide open, so you’ll see a wide array of strategies and tactics being used throughout this challenge.

A Tale of Two Strategies

Tyrone and I chatted the other day to knock out the details of our little competition, and what’s neat is that we found out that we’re both approaching niche sites in a totally different way. This is great because you’ll get an insider look at two completely different strategies, so we can all see how they perform against each other.

We’ll get into more detail about our strategies as we go along, but in short, Tyrone will be focusing on generating leads to an email list in his niche of choice. He’ll be using that email list to engage with his traffic and eventually offer some kind of related product as an affiliate.

What I like about Tyrone’s strategy is that he’s sort of building a mini authority site, a site that helps him build relationships with people so he can hit them up with an offer later. What I really like about this strategy is that since his prospects are on an email list, he can continue to tap into that list as it grows. There is potential for major, major growth with this kind of site, but it may take a lot of time to build a list and get to a point where he can begin to earn money from it.

We’ll just have to wait and see.

My strategy, which I’ve been seeing a bit of success with thus far, boils down to this:

Find a niche and build a site.
Get traffic.
Traffic clicks on affiliate links or ads strategically placed on the site.
Make money.

This type of mini-site does not spend time building a relationship with it’s traffic. In fact, the whole point of getting people on the site is to get them off as quickly as possible, either through ads or an affiliate link.

What’s nice about this strategy is that it doesn’t take much time to setup, and theoretically it doesn’t take quite as much time to earn money from it as well – if done correctly. In addition, the process can easily be copied over and over again in other niches.

Style

If you know Tyrone or ever visited his blog, you know that he’s really into using videos – he uses them in almost every single post. I’m sure he’ll be using videos as a primary strategy in his niche sites as well.

I like to write, so I’ll be using the power of my keyboard to drive traffic and sales, although I may throw in some videos of my own as well for search engine optimization purposes.

Getting Things Done

We agreed that outsourcing would be allowed.

Tyrone is a master outsourcer with many resources readily available, so he’ll walk you through how working with full time VAs is like to get things done.

I, on the other hand, do not have any full time VAs, and I only hire VAs on a task by task, or project by project basis. For the sake of this challenge and so you can get the most out of it, I will be doing my best to do as much of the work as possible on my own, since we know a lot of you may not have the money or resources available to hire a VA just yet.

If I do utilize outsourcing for anything, it will be in the most economical way possible.

The Goal

We decided to create this challenge and make it public so you will hopefully learn something – both from what we find that works and what doesn’t. Also, we want to use this publicity as a way to hold ourselves accountable for making this work, because if it does, we’ll both see another addition to our passive income portfolio.

This way, everybody wins.

As far as a “finish line”, we haven’t come up with a certain dollar amount, but we might come up with one later.

Of course, we have a number of progress goals along the way before we actually get to anything involving an income, and we’ll make sure to let you know when these things happen, and how they happen:

finding a potentially profitable niche
building a site
getting traffic

Reports

We’ll do our best to report as much information to you as possible.

We’ll at least do one progress report a month, although I might report more often, since my particular strategy moves pretty fast in the beginning.

We’re going to track our traffic and numbers using Google Analytics, and we’ll try our best to show you some of the graphs and charts coming directly from our statistics.

Do You Want to Participate?

After Tyrone challenged me on Facebook, a number of my followers asked me if it was okay if they joined in on the fun too.

My answer is – of course!

I only ask you that if you do participate in this challenge with us that you do your best to document your progress like we do, with as much detail as possible, so we can all share our information with each other. If you have a blog, that would be the perfect spot. If not, then maybe using a site like InfoBarrel.com would work, and you could make a little money on the side too.

If you’re interested, just leave a comment below about it.

The Next Step

The first thing I have to do is find a profitable niche to go after. In the next post, I’ll walk you through the process of how I choose one.

I hope you’re as stoked as I am about this!

And Tyrone, if you’re reading this…BRING IT!

8 Tips for Bloggers From an Advertising Book

Pat — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 08:41:25 +0000

As I was cleaning the house today, I found a book that I had purchased a couple of years ago, called The Little Blue Book of Advertising: 52 Small Ideas That Can Make a Big Difference.

I don’t really know why I had purchased it. I was still working my 9 to 5 job, and it’s a book that’s mainly geared toward those in advertising.

I was in architecture.

Sadly, I never had the chance to read it, but when I was flipping through the pages today, I randomly opened up to page 205, which was a chapter entitled: 43. Blogs – Still Lots of Learning to be Done.

Since I have a blog, I was interested and read on.

The point behind this chapter was that all companies should utilize blogs because it’s a great way for them to speak directly to their customers, and let their customers speak directly back.

I agree.

In the chapter, the authors give us 8 blogging tips, which are actually quite good and what I wanted to share with you today:

1. Know your target audience. Don’t try to be all for all.

A couple of key points here:

First, is that you need a target audience. If your answer to the question “Who do you want to read your blog?” is “Everybody!” – then you have some major rethinking to do. You will be more successful (and have an easier time) catering to a specific, target audience.

I like to use the shoe store analogy. At the malls here in San Diego, you can see up to 5 or 6 different shoe stores in the same mall. There’s a walking shoe store, a running shoe store, a sandal place, casual/hip shoes, and even stores that sell stilettos and crazy 4-inch wedges with goldfish in them.

Each of these stores sell a specific type of shoe, to cater to a specific type of customer. A customer who is looking for running shoes will most likely visit the running shoe store, because that is their specialty. This is how the little guys can compete with the big guys – specialty.

Secondly, you must know your target audience. What are their likes and dislikes? Where do they come from, and where do they go? What do they love or hate? The list of things to know about your audience goes on and on, and the more you know about them, the easier it will be for you to specialize for them.

2. Keep your communication clear and concise.

In my opinion, this not only applies to the words that you write on your blog, but the design and structure of your blog as well.

Is it easy to navigate through your blog? Are you communicating through the design exactly what you want new visitors to do? (i.e., subscribe to a newsletter, click on a banner ad, purchase a product, etc.)

The book goes a lot into utilizing white space, and “less is more” when it comes to print ads, but the same applies to our blogs too.

3. No hype. Tell it like it is. Hype will read dishonest to a substantial number of readers. Don’t get trashed because of over-exuberance.

I really wish all internet marketers read this tip, because there is way too much hype out there right now.

That’s why I try to keep the hype as far away as possible here on the Smart Passive Income Blog, and when I do promote things, it’s usually backed up by hard numbers or case studies from my own experience, so there really isn’t any need for hype at all.

What you see is what you get, and no one get’s let down in the way that hype can let you down in the end.

4. Tell the truth or don’t write anything.

Especially now with how connected everyone is, any lies or deceit can spread like wildfire, and it only takes a moment to make everything you’ve worked hard for crumble like a month old cookie. As the book mentions, “…everybody is a knowledgeable critic with worldwide exposure”.

On the flip side, if you provide awesome content on your blog – again, “…everybody is a knowledable critic with worldwide exposure”, which can work in your favor.

5. Answer all comments as quickly as possible. The good, the bad, the ugly; but especially the bad and the ugly.

For large companies, responding quickly is a must. For the entrepreneurial blogger, answering every comment is important (see 5 Reasons Why You Should Respond to Every Comment), but it doesn’t have to be done quite as quickly.

As far as addressing the bad and the ugly – I think that’s extremely important. Often times, those are the ones we want to avoid answering because we don’t want to stir things up, but if you can respond politely, and even go above and beyond in your response, you may change some minds and get others to support you too.

A great example of someone who does this is Gary Vaynerchuk, who actually responds to any bad reviews made about his books on Amazon.com. He goes above and beyond, offering to speak to them over the phone to clear up any misunderstandings. This is what really impressed me about him and led me to purchase his life-changing book, Crush It!

6. Be upfront about who your sponsor/investor is.

This is mainly geared toward the big companies, but again – this just reiterates the importance of being totally honest.

7. Keep your eyes and ears open in the world of blogging. It is changing and will continue to change at a breakneck pace.

We have to always be aware of what’s happening – not only in the world of blogging, with the advances in technologies and services that can help us improve how we blog, but also of what’s happening in our niches – the trends and opportunities that arise each and every day to help us improve what we blog about too.

Those who are more aware will be far ahead of the game.

8. Good luck!

I like how they put this “tip” in here, because there’s a little bit of luck involved in creating a successful blog. But, like I always say, the harder you work, the luckier you become, and how much luck you end up having is totally up to you.

And lastly, the authors leave us with some final words about utilizing blogs, not included in their 8 tips:

“…Monitor the community for new product idea, refinements, and improvements. Use the knowledge you gain from these free-flowing focus groups to stay ahead of the consumer curve.”

These are very wise words. I had never thought of a blog as a focus group before, but that’s a great way of thinking about it, especially if you want to one day start to earn an income from it.

So which of these tips resonates with you the most?