Niche Research Tools: Finding Hot Topics for Blog Posts

I’ve told you before that I like to use auto-pilot sites and blogs to bring in passive income. I’ve gotten a lot of questions about how I find great niches to attack with these auto-pilot sites. I addressed these questions in the auto-pilot group, and I thought I’d mention them to you because they can be used in conjunction with keyword research to find hot blog topics to post about. Hot topics with low competition equals traffic to your blog!

Before I mention these free research tools, if you have any interest in earning passive income from auto-pilot sites, you’ll want to check out the auto-pilot members group (and claim two free case study e-books).

Believe me when I tell you that finding a good niche isn’t easy, but it very much becomes second nature after you do it for a few months. You begin to notice patterns here and there, which lead to hunches, and those hunches can then be validated pretty easily. Provided you know how to validate them.

So here are some of the free online services I use to validate my niche research. Using these services will alert you to what people are searching for today, and if you can tie what they want to one of your new blog posts, you can capitalize on this extra search traffic.

So here they are, in no particular order:

Yahoo! Buzz
———–
http://buzzlog.buzz.yahoo.com/overall/

The Lycos 50
————
http://50.lycos.com/

Google Trends
————-
http://google.com/trends

Trendhunter Popular List
————————
http://www.trendhunter.com/popular

AOL Hot Searches
—————-
http://hotsearches.aol.com/

eBay Pulse
———-
http://pulse.ebay.com/

current.com’s Google Current
—————————-
http://current.com/topics/76253632_google_current?sort=currentness

Barnes & Noble Bestseller List
——————————
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/bestsellers/top100.asp

You probably noticed a pattern in the above, which should point to another success factor that you should try to address with your niche research: find a hot niche, attack it quickly, and generate traffic ASAP. That’s how you capture search traffic and Page Rank. Provided that your blog is seeded with content and you’re using the Google XML Sitemap plug-in, your new posts should be ranking in Google’s index very quickly.

Ingenious Way to Target a Niche

I’m sure you’ve noticed that this group is very tightly focused around blogging: specifically, learning to blog for six figures, redirecting traffic to blogs, and monetizing blogs. I rarely step outside this framework.

Until today. You probably realize by now that I’m a fan of multiple income streams. And I like to remain current on breaking developments in all of the industries I follow. That means that I end up following a lot of clunkers and dogs, because 95 percent of new developments are just noise. But that makes finding the truly memorable and outstanding programs all the SWEETER.

I’ve found two of those memorable programs.

Desperate Buyers Only

In one of the best-written e-books I’ve ever read, Alexis Dawes completely changed how I view niche and auto-pilot income. The concepts are so incredibly simple, yet effective, I’m actually embarrassed that I didn’t think of them myself.

Alexis will show you how to target an insanely narrow niche, and still make great money from it. There’s always been a balance. I use keyword analysis to help me find good, profitable niches. But one of the determinants of profitability is search traffic. Desperate Buyers Only allows you to target niches with less traffic, and therefore less competition, but still make great profits by increasing the conversion rate and profitability per visitor.

Simple, ingenious, and I’m so glad I found it. Check it out for yourself — I think you’ll be impressed.

1% M.O.L.B Wealth Formula

Alex Edevane really turned me around with this product. I ALWAYS go into these types of programs rather cynically, looking for holes. I just can’t stand all of the ridiculous claims, screenshots of income statements, or pictures of cars and mansions. After all, it’s just another affiliate program.

But Alex can back up his claims with a program that works — provided you work it. This is a solid blueprint for success, and while I think the content can be improved a great deal, I also feel that this is the single best way to get started in affiliate marketing today. Just like Blogging in Action is the best path to a six-figure blog, 1% M.O.L.B. is the best path to starting an affiliate marketing career.

Check out the proof yourself!

If you decide to use either of these programs, please shoot me a quick note to let me know what you think and how it’s working out for you. I’d love to compare notes. Who knows, maybe we can give each other a leg up!

Additional Passive Income Streams Through Blogging

About a month ago, I shared with you the secret of auto-pilot income, and how you can quickly create passive streams of income with a piece of free software. If you don’t remember that software,
you can refresh your memory here.

Although I use it extensively, some others avoid it because of its complexity. It’s not that it’s difficult to use — it’s actually an easy, wizard-based program — but it’s hard to perfect. If you are interested in creating streams of passive income, but are looking for a simpler solution, continue reading for some great options to help you pay the bills while your long-term blogs gain a toehold in the blogosphere.

Niches in a Box

The most comprehensive package in this group, Niches in a Box is a COMPLETE niche package, including a full niche site, templates, a blog, 52 blog posts, hundreds of PLR articles, and an e-book that you can sell. These sites are hit or miss — I have some that perform very well and some that perform poorly for the same effort. It includes an installer, and you can have a niche canvased in one day with this package.

Niche Video Site Builder

Made by the same people who make Niches in a Box, the Niche Video Site Builder is a very easy and fast way to get a niche video site online. What I’ve been finding that works is creating a “video” subdomain or subfolder in another niche web site, and adding value with You Tube videos. My stats show more repeat visitors this way, and it also helps for promotion purposes. Quick and painless, but revenue has been less than exciting. I’ve also been experimenting with my own video site software creation tool, but I’m not ready to reveal that just yet.

Niche Elite

Made by the same folks who make Keyword Elite and SEO Elite, Niche Elite is another complete Niche package, but this one IS TERRIBLE. No source files are included, making editing difficult (the whole
point of PLR), and if you ever cancel your subscription, they demand a fee for you to continue using the product that you already purchased.

Niche Mania

I’ve been using Niche Mania more and more over the past few months because it works. The site designs are less than stellar, but the PLR articles are very good quality, and the kicker is that distribution is incredibly limited to just a handful of people. Spend five minutes rewriting each article, add your own video with Niche Video Site Builder, add some content of your own, and you have a powerful, unique niche site. Really good stuff, and the proprietor is friendly and responsive. Unfortunately, this site has seen a lot of changes lately, and it seems to be getting more and more unreliable each time I login.

Build a Niche

Build a Niche is a unique entrant in that it interfaces with eBay, along with contextual advertising programs of your choosing. It has an amazing amount of flexibility for how simple it is to use. Login to your control panel, and follow the buttons from left to right, and follow the large numbers on each page. Voila! Site complete. Build a Niche is the easiest niche package to get started with, so it’s ideal for newcomers to VRE or page building.

Conclusion

The bottom line is don’t let any difficulties with software or tactics keep you from building your auto-pilot empire. Persevere, continue creating and populating your long-term blog, and try your hand with different programs. They all carry trial periods or money back guarantees, so give them a shot to see if they’re more to your liking.

The Smart Money in Hot Dogs

A hot dog vendor in the street makes a few cents every time he sells a hot dog. But look at what he’s had to do to make that few cents:

• buy a cart
• secure a location
• stock the cart
• stand out there day after day, working 6 to 12 hours a day.

Now, somebody somewhere set up the deal that sold the hot dogs to the wholesaler who then sold them to the vendor. Even though the broker did very little actual work, he made as much money as the
hot dog vendor.

(Actually, he probably made a lot more money, since he has no overhead.) Doesn’t seem fair, does it?

Yet in almost any business, there are those who do most of the work and make a little of the money, and those who do very little work, and make most of the money.

Ebay is no different.

If you sell stuff on Ebay, you’ve got to get the stuff to sell, photograph it, list it, deal with customers, HOPE that you make a profit when the auction closes, pack the stuff, ship the stuff, and pay Ebay exorbitant fees for the privilege of doing all this work.

But there are people out there who are making money on YOUR auctions! You’ve never met these people. You don’t know who they are or even where in the world they are . . . but they’re there. And they’re not doing ANY of the work you’re doing. They’re simply sending people to Ebay to buy your stuff. And they get paid very well for doing this.

Do you want to be the one doing all the work and getting a little bit of money? Or the one doing a little bit of work and making far more money? So a quick recap on Build a Niche Stores:

#1. It’s A Proven Money Making Concept

These sites WORK. My most valuable properties all have Ebay content on them.

#2. The software is Incredibly Under-Priced

For a one time fee of LESS than a hundred bucks, you get the website builder software, an unlimited domain license, nine easily customizable template layouts, a user manual, access to the member area, and free updates for LIFE.

#3. The eBay Affiliate Opportunity Is Huge

No other affiliate opportunity combines this vast of a product inventory with such an established brand name, coupled with Ebay’s outstanding affiliate commissions. The credibility is unparalleled and the potential is limitless.

#4. It Builds Real Search Engine Friendly Websites

You can build websites that are as professional looking, as content rich, and as search engine friendly as any other website building platform on the Internet, only your sites will have a built in means of making money from Day 1.

#5. You Can Build As Large A Website Portfolio As You Like

You pay a small one time fee and then you can build as large a portfolio as you like. Want just one store? 10 stores? A hundred stores? It’s completely up to you, and you will never have to pay another software fee, no matter how many stores you end up building!

Check it out for yourself. Review the testimonials. See the sites that real customers have built. You’ll be happy that you did. I haven’t talked to a SINGLE person who didn’t love the concept AND execution of these stores.

Try this: make a TWO-WEEK COMMITMENT to yourself. Get the software and build a store a day until two weeks is up. Then follow my traffic blueprint to market your stores. Then it’s only a matter of time!

How to Make Money On Ebay Without Listing or Shipping Anything

Yes, you can make money on Ebay without listing any products, dealing with customers or packaging and shipping. And no, we’re not talking about drop shipping, either.

Ebay has a MONSTER affiliate program that pays in the millions, and getting a piece of the action for yourself is easier than you think.

Build a Niche Stores is offering simple to use software that allows you to create unlimited Ebay affiliate stores of your own. You create the stores with a few clicks of your mouse, customize them any way you like, and earn money three ways: Affiliate Commissions For Ebay Purchases, Affiliate Commissions For New Active eBay Members, Supplementary Advertisements such as AdSense, Clickbank, etc.

These sites are professional looking, easy to build, and are constantly updated with new auctions in the niches of your choosing.

You can check out sample sites, testimonials and details here.

Since I first wrote about Build a Niche Stores yesterday, several of you have grabbed the software. Congratulations and good for you! These stores work wonderfully solo, and pairing them with a niche
for cross promotion is very effective.

I also received several others questions via e-mail that I’d like to share with you.

Q. “How do I determine which Ebay products to put in my store?”

A. Build A Niche Stores do this for you, based on the niche (or category) you choose for your store. You choose the niche, and the products are automatically placed on your site. Your job is to shuffle up and refine existing Ebay content to serve your niche.

Q. “Do the product links automatically contain my eBay affiliate ID? I’m worried about getting paid properly.”

A. Yes. Once you input your eBay affiliate ID into the setup area of your admin panel, all of the links to eBay from your store will automatically contain your eBay affiliate ID. It’s completely no fuss and hands-off.

Q. “I’ve never built a website in my life. Can I still use Build a Niche Store?”

A. Yes. Actually, this is the EASIEST package I’ve ever seen. Even the newest Internet entrepreneur can build, install and customize their own stores with BANS. No programming knowledge is needed. Plus, you can always get help on the members forum if you should you need it. And the forum is great — one of the most supportive I’ve ever seen.

Q. “How long does it take to build a niche store?”

A. My first store took a day to get a polished, professional look. All of my other stores took around 4 hours or so. Of course, I spend more time than most making mine look good. In reality, you can build a simple store in 10 minutes if you wanted to.

Q. Is Build A Niche Store search engine friendly?

A. Yes! Your affiliate stores are prime candidates for free search engine traffic because:

• They’re keyword rich: All of the keyword rich content that makes up your stores’ product listings is readable by the search engines. For example, if your niche is snowboards, each listing on the page
  will contain the word “snowboard.” Keyword density through the roof!
• They have fresh updated content: Your stores’ products (which is also your content) are updated automatically as items are sold and new items are added to the eBay marketplace. This means your store is getting fresh content 24 hours a day.
• Your websites have search engine friendly URL’s.
• Targeted title, meta & header tags are automatically generated for every page inside your store.

Q. “Does Build A Niche Store come with instructions?”

A. Yes. You get a comprehensive 72 page User’s Manual that shows you step by step how to build and develop your stores, even if you’re completely inexperienced with anything even remotely technical.

If you’re making money with Ebay by selling products, you’ve got to find the products, list the products, deal with customers, hope that you make money on the products, package the products, ship the
products, and pay exorbitant fees to Ebay for the privilege of doing all this work.

or . . .

You can grab a copy of Build a Niche Store . . .build AS MANY sites as you like . . .and have Ebay PAY YOU while you do far LESS work and make far MORE money than if you were selling products on Ebay.

Wow. Talk about a no-brainer! Get in while the gettin’ is still good.

Doing Easy Business with a Giant

Okay, you already know that EBAY is HUGE, selling nearly 100 million products at any given time. But did you know that Ebay has an affiliate program?

And that there is a TURN-KEY, super simple, mind-blowingly EASY way to tap into that affiliate program and earn hundreds or thousands per month, every month?

Frankly, I didn’t have a CLUE until late 2007, and what I’ve learned has shocked me. Before I tell you why, let me tell you what I’m talking about.

I use Build a Niche software to build UNLIMITED stores that can earn a good income on both new sign-ups to Ebay, and on ALL purchases made within 7 days of a person visiting any one of my stores. Building a store couldn’t be easier. Even my wife, God bless her, who has trouble using a web browser, has built several stores!

What I LOVE about these stores is that I connect them to my VRE sites and piggyback off of the search traffic that each brings to promote the other! It works like a charm. Okay, what I really like is that by doing that I earn even more money.

With these stores, I choose one or more target categories related to my niche, and it spits out a professional, fully functional, search engine friendly website. I can go to the control panel and refine my categories, add descriptions, and make it my own. A good store — I’m talking professional, polished, and stocked — takes under one day to setup.

That means my only job is to get traffic there and let it do the rest. As your traffic increases, your site will generate more and more money for you in THREE different ways:

1. Affiliate Commissions For Ebay Purchases: If your customers buy ANYTHING (even items NOT in your store) from eBay within 7 days of visiting your store, you earn between 20% and 75% of the revenue
that eBay makes from the sale.

2. Affiliate Commissions For New Active eBay Members: If a new referral of yours registers as an eBay member and either makes a bid or purchases an item within 30 days, you earn a new member bonus of between $25 and $35.

3. Supplementary Advertisements: Not everyone who visits your site will purchase Ebay items, but you can still make money from them with Supplementary Advertisements such as Google AdSense, Commission Junction, LinkShare and ClickBank.

Now the thing that SHOCKED me about these stores is the money I earned from them. When I logged into my affiliate account after one week of promotion and saw my clicks and revenue, my jaw dropped.
These stores are magnets for buyers because the eBay brand is SOOO strong and because the selection for even the tiniest niche is incredible.

After just three months of operation, my single most profitable VRE site is a Build a Niche store. And it’s solo. My other big performers are attached to my Hyper VRE sites.

I know what you’re thinking . . .

“If something like this makes it so easy to build and profit from a store, it should cost a fortune.”

You’re right, it should.

Oddly enough, though, it doesn’t.

The price for UNLIMITED stores of your choosing is less than what it would cost to hire a rookie website builder to build a one page website for you! This is truly amazing.

Be sure and check out the many examples of stores that ordinary people have created using BANS. They’re some of the most professional looking sites I’ve seen in some time.

Yes, I know I get too excited about this stuff sometimes, but the reality is this: I’ve worked from my home office for the past six years. I’ve seen my kids grow up, I work when I want, how I want, and I do business with whom I want. I have time to spend with my wife, and time to participate in all of my hobbies. I love it.

And it’s these kinds of tools that have enabled that lifestyle for me. So forgive my excitement!

Niches: The Keys to the Vault

Several days ago we talked a little bit about Micro Niche Finder, the cool tool that let’s you find the highest converting traffic for the least amount of money. But I forgot to mention the movies.

Guess I should have, since they answer many of the questions I’ve received.

Q. How does Micro Niche Finder locate the best keyword phrases for me?

A. When you type in a search term, Micro Niche Finder is going to find all of the related terms and display those, along with the number of times they’re searched for, and the number of sites that appear in the results pages for those terms.

Look for the video titled “Profit Stream #1, Create Simple Little One Page Articles to Promote Affiliate Products that Pay You Commissions.”

Q. How does Micro Niche Finder create AdSense pages for me?

A. Amazingly, with very little work on your part! Look for the video titled “Profit Stream #2, Create AdSense Content Pages that Pay You Residual Ad Revenue.”

You’ll be blown away by what you see. Imagine if you had a few hundred of these pages up, paying you month after month. THAT’S exactly what we’re trying to accomplish in this group. I’m about halfway there, with still a lot of work left to go.

Bottom line, regardless of how you’re making money online, with Micro Niche Finder you’ll have access to the exact information you need to bring highly targeted traffic to your site(s) at the lowest possible cost.

Plus, with Micro Niche Finder you can add numerous additional income streams to your money-making arsenal.

You already know why finding niches is important — you’re looking for topics that have high search traffic with low competition, allowing you to swoop in an dominate the search rankings. When all is said and done, it really boils down to . . . money.

Popular keyword phrases with little competition are sooooo easy to make money with!

Check out the videos that show Micro Niche Finder in action and watch what it can do for you, your traffic, your conversion rates, and your wallet.

Here are a few of the specifics to wrap your head around:

• Discover numerous super-profitable niche markets that marketers are overlooking.
• Find the most profitable affiliate programs for your niche. (I love this one — excellent complement to Hyper VRE)
• Easily find related keywords that have a higher profit potential than your initial keyword phrase.
• Create articles to promote affiliate programs for more income.
• Create Adsense content pages, eBay feeder pages, and Squidoo lenses for more income.
• Create private label rights packages for niches, and sell the rights to other marketers. This, by the way, is a great model that you can capitalize on in almost any market. Find a trend, and rather than attacking that trend, provide support or a framework for the people who are attacking that trend. It works!

If you’re mining for gold, you can settle for a pick, shovel, and a pan. Or you can get a machine that breaks up the rock for you, sorts it, and hands you the gold. They both work. One will give you specks of gold. The other will find you entire veins of gold.

Micro Niche Finder is that gold mining machine.

All right, that was cheesy. But you see my point. These are the kids of things that separate those of us who can earn a living with auto-pilot income, and those who only wish that they could.

Every Profitable Site Does This - Do You?

Before moving on again, I wanted to address niches one more time, simply because they and keyword analysis should form the core of your targeting strategy.

That means that in order to be successful:

• You must choose the right niche
• You must know how much search traffic and competition there is for a niche
• You must PRECISELY target the keywords to use to optimize your sites

Put it this way: if you choose the right niche, and then follow my traffic plan, you WILL profit. If you choose the wrong niche, you could spend hundreds of hours in promotion and never make more than
a few dollars.

You MUST choose the right niche. You MUST choose the right keywords.

In the keyword membership group, we talk about keyword topics in depth, and show you many different ways you can use them in your long-term blogs and your auto-pilot sites — or with no sites at all!

Divert and Convert

Every single site on the Internet that makes money does two things well . . .

They divert and they convert.

First, they divert traffic from one location to another. The first location could be almost anywhere, the second location is to the property making the money.

Second, they convert that diverted traffic into profit. Maybe it’s by selling products, selling clicks, or creating leads.

Doesn’t matter. The point is, step two isn’t that hard. Step one can be a freaking killer!

Suppose you want to make money generating leads for credit card companies. Discover, for example, pays $40 for every new card member you send their way. Sounds good, until you do a Google search for “credit card” and realize there are 56 MILLION sites in the results.

Ugghhh.

Kind of hard to compete, wouldn’t you say?

But Discover gives a 5% cashback bonus on gas purchases. And when you do a search for “credit card gas rewards” you get 56 results. Much better. Now you can not only compete, you can make money.

No matter what kind of marketing you do, it stands to reason that if you target overlooked, under-the-radar keyword phrases, you’ll divert more traffic and convert more of that traffic into profits.

Finding the Right Niches

So, how do you FIND these overlooked, under-the-radar keyword phrases?

Keyword analysis, yes. And by using a niche finder. Niche finders help you uncover untapped niche markets and completely dominate them in Google. You can find new keywords related to your base keyword that are more profitable than the keywords you’re using now.

You can rank higher in the search engines, thus bringing in more traffic. The traffic you get will be more TARGETED, thus converting at a higher rate. And if you use Google Adwords, you will pay LESS for more highly targeted and better converting traffic!

I used a niche finder to scout my latest auto-pilot site, and I’m the ONLY AdWords advertiser for it! I’m getting three-cent clicks on keywords that are converting like mad. Thank you Micro Niche Finder!

The Importance of Choosing Your Blog’s Niche

Although this topic generates a lot of questions, I debated for some time over whether to base your first tip on it. You see, it’s not sexy, but it’s so important that I think it would be a disservice to you not to discuss it in more depth. So fight through it, you’ll be glad that you did!

Choosing a Niche

Many bloggers will tell you that there are two schools of thought for choosing a niche: 1) Choose a niche you are passionate about or 2) Choose a niche that you can monetize. I disagree entirely with this line of thought. What it really comes down to is long-term gain vs. short-term gain.

Short Term Gain

If you choose a niche that you can monetize, you will probably focus on some hot keywords, regardless of your experience in that field. But lacking passion or knowledge, you’ll end up slapping some free articles on the blog in the hopes that you’ll earn a fat AdSense paycheck. At least, that’s what the get-rich-quick set will tell you.

In reality, after you exit the Google sandbox, you emerge with poor search rankings thanks to your duplicate content, but you still manage to muster some AdSense scraps. Get some automated blogging software, and repeat this process for a few hundred niches, and you can earn a living. These types of blogs are referred to as “splogs” (spam blogs).

While this was a viable, albeit shady, way to leverage blogs a few years ago, changes in the Google search algorithm have made it all but impossible to earn more than a few dollars a day using this method. Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop people from selling blogging programs based on this strategy, and many people still eat them up.

Long Term Gain

If you choose a niche you are passionate about, you concern yourself with content and writing for your readers first, and monetization second. Rather than capturing idle searchers, you are attracting loyal readers. Once your readers find you, they subscribe to your feed and come back time and time again to help you build your community.

Generating traffic is hard work, but it comes much more naturally when readers connect with you as an author. If you are properly niched down, you will dramatically improve your contextual advertising payments, and you gain referred sales from any programs you put in front of your reader base. You attract people who are like you after all, so when you recommend something to them, it’s because you like it, so chances are that they will also like it.

It takes longer to build this type of blog and gain the trust of your readers, but the potential gain is much higher. True six-figure bloggers write about something they are passionate about; or they at least hire writers who are passionate about the subject. Maximizing the long-term profitability of your blog is what we’re primarily concerned with in Blogging in Action.

How to Choose a Niche

My advice will always be to start a blog about a passion or topic of interest. You will never maintain interest posting about a topic just because it’s a profitable one; even if you can do it, your readers will know the difference. Plus it’s a bit disingenuous, don’t you think? If your passions happen to be in profitable niches, then great. You’ll have more competition, but the potential reward can be even higher.

Sample Niches

Another question that pops up frequently is the exclusivity of your niche. To help you define your niche, here are some samples:

• ART is not a niche. DIGITAL FRACTAL PATTERNS is a niche.
• GADGETS is not a niche. QUIRKY CUBICLE TOYS is a niche.
• ANIMATION is not a niche. CLASSIC DISNEY CELLS is a niche.
• CONSUMER ELECTRONICS is not a niche. HOME-BUILT WAR ROBOTS is a niche.

It’s very unlikely that you can choose too narrow a niche. There were over 1.5 billion users online as of late 2007; regardless of how narrow you think your niche is, chances are there are tens of thousands of people out there who are completely aligned with your niche. That’s tens of thousands of readers who can generate clicks and purchase products on your behalf. Now that’s opportunity!

If you’re really worried about it, though, enter a niche into Google’s keyword tool and see what kind of search traffic and competition there is. Remember, this tool is used for Pay Per Click advertising, so the competition represents Pay-per-click competition, not total search competition.

The importance of choosing your niche can’t be overestimated. All of your future efforts will flow from this decision, and it is the single largest factor in determining the relevancy of your blog, which is directly related to your search engine rankings, your blog traffic, and your profitability from monetization efforts.

Take some time to make a good decision. If you can’t decide on just one, begin writing content for several niches. It won’t take long to determine which subject you can write about more effectively and which subject your readers identify with the most.

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