So in this short article I’ll share 3 proven methods. I’ve used all of them in selecting my niche. All 3 methods can be carried out in a few minutes. A very simple methods.

Here there are:

Hobbies

We have hobbies.   We know and understand our hobbies in and out. We know the subject very well. So the possibility of making wrong statement or blog entries is very minimal. We also dont need to learn a new subject. But the most important part of it,  we enjoy doing it.  This is very important when we just starting  up.

Why?

Simply we are still new in the internet marketing.  In most cases we wont be making money right away. We need to spend lot of time and money in tweaking the system and campaigns. Since we are working in something that we love,  we can still enjoy the work even though we still struggling with the money part. We dont feel the struggle as much. The chances of success is lot much higher.

I’m sharing based on my personal experience. I’ve one website that is based on my hobby. It is one of the best performing site. Till this day I still enjoy working and updating the site. Isn’t that wonderful?

However using this approach, we need to determine the “profitability” of the niche before we can proceed further. There are many interesting niche that has no or less profitability.  Regardless of your efforts, the possibility of success in such niche is almost non-existance.

EBay  pulse

Most of us know eBay  very well.  We buy or sell almost anything at eBay. Surprisingly not many are aware that eBay  can also be used as a good research tool.  eBay  can tell us right away is “hot items” in the market.

Simply go to pulse.eBay .com.  At this site eBay  share with us what are the hottest selling items.  This is the current trend. With millions of users, data from eBay  definitely can be used as an accurate measurement.

Here is the snap shot from eBay  pulse.  Click on the categories menu if you want to dig further.  eBay will show us the top 10 items in the categories. There is no detail statistic. But that will be good enough for our purposes.

Finding HOT items from ebay

Niche from eBay  pulse will definitely be very useful if we intend to sell or promote (affiliate) physical items. Like selling at auction sites or promoting Amazon’s affiliate. However it can also be used as a measuring gauge for relevant digital products.

cbengine

Majority of marketers love working with clickbank.  Mainly due to its big profit margin and wide range of available products.

Specifically for clickbank,  we can use cbengine.com.  On the right hand side of the website,  there is a menu where we can find top selling products at clickbank.  Just select the correct category and cbengine will list out all the top selling products.  For our purposes there is no need to purchase the pro membership.  The basic data shown by cbengine is more than sufficient.

Find your niche through cbengine

There you have it.  3 simple yet proven methods. I really hope this posting help you select your niche.

Just for clarification, keywords are word or phrase that internet users use when searching for information. Some call keywords with a combination of 3 or more words as “long tail keywords”.

There are many ways of finding the keywords. None are perfect.  However the one we going to discuss today is widely used by internet marketers.

Here are the steps :

Step 1 : Brainstorming

First we need to have a niche.  Niche in its simple form is just a specific topic that we want to talk or write about. Something like golf or fishing.

Then we need to do a brainstorming. Find out all possible associated words that fit with our niche. You might want to use thesaurus for this part.

Ok now let’s visit freekeywords.wordtracker.com and enter our keyword.

Wordtracker will list out 100 keywords that related to our niche.

In the above example we are using “marriage” keyword. And here is the out come.

Step 2: Selecting Long Tail Keywords

In the second step, we need to select potential and relevant keywords.

pickup keywords that related to our niche.

Note that the number given by wordtracker indicate the number of searches for that particular words. Bigger number indicate a good keywords as more people are searching for that particular keywords. So our odd is better.

Now all we need to do is to go through the list and pick only keywords that related to our niche. Select 10-20 potential keywords and put them in a spreadsheet. For our purposes we are looking for keywords that have more than 10 searches per day.

If you don’t have Excel you might want to consider open office package.  Its free.

Now we are ready for the next step.

Step 3: Finding Competition

In the third step we want to find out competition for our keywords. We want to target for keywords with less competition. Less competition means the keywords are easier to target.

There is no special tools for this step.  What we need is the good old google.com.

Do search all of our keywords. Make sure we put them in quotation. This tells Google that we are looking for the whole phrase, not just a portion of it.

Once we hit the search button, Google will list out all site that contain the phrase. What we are interested is the number on the top-right hand side of the screen. I’ve marked with number “2” in the following snap shot. Record all finding in our spreadsheet.

Now we are ready for the final stage.

Step 4: Evaluation

Our final step is evaluation.  We want to find out keywords that are easy to be dominated.

In a simple term we are looking for keywords that are high in searh number but low in competition.  For this posting purposes, we only talk about these two factors.  Even though there are few other consideration that we need to think about.

For article marketing purposes, we are looking for the following characteristics:

• more than 10 times search daily
• less than 50,000 competition.

In our marriage example we have 4 winners.

• marriage compatibility test
• free marriage compatibility tests
• marriage records free
• 100 questions before marriage

That’s it. Nothing fancy. We are ready to rock.

Till next time.

In this posting I’ll share the over view of article marketing, before going into the details the coming articles.  Later I’ll cover in detail about keywords, article writing, article submission and optimization.

Ok, what exactly is the article marketing?

In simple term, article marketing is a way of getting visitor to our website through search engine and articles. Here is a simple illustration how our articles bring in potential customers to our websites or affiliate pages.

When someone is looking for something, most likely he will be using search engine like Google or Yahoo.  For illustration purposes we assume that the search engine (SE) will list out our articles as one of the search result. Of course its all depending mainly on the keyword relevancy and how the SE perceive our articles. We’ll discuss more on this in the coming posting.  Assuming the potential customer click the articles links.  The visitor will be presented with our articles. Of course for marketing purposes we’ve included links to our websites or our affiliate page in the articles.

If we’ve created enough excitement and interest in the article the potential customers might follow the given links. The final landing page can be anything. Most cases article marketers will direct their visitors to the sales page of an affiliate program.

The article marketing system is very simple.  There is no mystery in the process. The success mainly depending on the quality of our articles as well as the numbers of  articles that we churn out.

The number of articles plays a big part in article marketing.  The more you have the better. In an ideal case the numbers of visitors that we get from the article is proportional with the number of articles that we’ve submitted.

Let me know if you need further detail information.  Till then see you in the next post about keyword search.

Unfortunately there are cost involve if you want to install and use Microsoft office package.  If you are a budding IM and tight on budget you might want to consider alternative.

Welcome to OpenOffice. OpenOffice package is not much different from Microsoft office package. In fact if you are familiar with window based application, then you will not find much difficulty in adapting yourself.  Best of all the OpenOffice package is FREE.

Find out more Openoffice.

The method is very simple. However you need to have access to your hosting as the php files need to be placed somewhere in your hosting. Here is how.

In a text editor, type the following codes. Make sure you replace the url with the correct url.

<?php
header( ‘Location: http://www.myaffiliate.com/index.html’ ) ;
?>

now just save the file as index.php or any file name with php extension.

There are two possible approaches. One is to create a directory and use index.php. So when our visitor visits the directory he will be directed to the correct url. We just need to direct our visitor to the directory. There is no need to include the index.php. index.php is the default file that our browser will look for.

http://www.mysite.com/myurl

Alternatively we can name the php codes with different file name. So what we need to do is to point our link to the php file. Just like in the following example

http://www.mysite.com/myurl.php

Our valued customers will not see any of the original urls. The redirection will be fast and quick.

Hope you like the short tutorial.

I’m a big fan of wordpress (wp). It is one of the best blogging platform out there. wp is very flexible and easy to manage. In fact most of my websites are based on wp.

You might want to consider GoCodes if you are using wp. GoCodes helps you hide your urls and give your sites a cleaner look. Lets get started.

1. Download GoCodes and install the plugin. I presume you are familiar with wp plugin installation. Let me know if you need any help. eMail me.

2. Once activated just go to “settings” menu and select GoCodes

3. Then you will be presented with the GoCodes setting. There are two type of setting that you can do. “URL Trigger” is a special folder where Gocodes handles all the redirect. The default value is “go”. You may change the value to any value that you like. But it cannot be left blank. “recommended” and “sites” are two good example. At the bottom there is “No follow” selection. No follow is one of an important SEO elements. However for now we just leave it alone.

4. Next we need to set our urls. Just click on the GoCodes at the “tools” menu. There are two parts that you need to complete. First one is the “Redirection key”. This is the word that we want to use for our new url. Just use any single word. In the example below I’m using “affiliate1″. In addition we need to provide the actual url. This is one of the GoCodes beauty. You can change the destination url anytime, as required.

5. Now we are ready to go. When ever we need to use the url just call for the new url we just created. In this example the new url will be “http://www.noorazman.com/go/affiliate1″ Our visitor will only see that url, nothing more. whenever he click on that url the program will redirect to the actual url which is “http://www.affiliate1.com/myaffiliateid” in the above example.

That it. Very simple plugin.

I’ve used various FTP (mostly freeware) programs. They do works but with minor weakness here and there. Especially with the connection stability.

Few months back I downloaded Filezilla. Honestly I’m very satisfied with its performance. Connection is stable and the program is very easy to use. FileZilla is released under General Public License (GNU). Meaning it is free.

Have a look at FileZilla

1. Internet marketing is easy

Undoubtedly this the biggest mistake majority of newbies make. People always think doing internet marketing is simple. You only need to spend just few minutes a day. And tons of money will roll in day and night non stop. Really hope that is true, but the reality can be harsh. We do need to spend our time, money and effort before we can reap the profit.

Fortunately internet marketing have many advantages. Making it very attractive if you interested in generating income from home. Lot of major advantages that is. I’ve addressed it here.

There are good reason why majority of newbies having this wrong preconception. One of the major contributor is no other than “get rich quick” scheme. There are tons of this ads around. Without realizing it people start thinking that doing online business is so easy. All you need to do is have one of the “magic” system and you are ready to go. No knowledge needed and easy to maintain (if not maintenance free).

As human being we always wanted to have an easy system. It just our human nature and nothing wrong with that.

2. Don’t bother to purchase own domain and hosting

Seriously lot of beginners pay the price for this mistake. People are too afraid putting some investment for their online. Obviously they are not serious about their business. Some simply are not confident with the effort. More like trial and error sort of approach.

As an alternative they use the free blog or free hosting. If you are using free blog your chances of loosing your valuable assets (you website ) is very high. A slight mistake your privilege will be revoked and you will be out of business in an instance. Just consider how much time you spend on the site. Consider your time and money for the website development plus your marketing effort. Is it really worth it?

Having your own domain in the long run will give you the credibility. Your valuable visitors feel more confident when visiting your site. This definitely will have impact to your conversion rate.

The cost of ownership for your own domain and hosting is very minimal. Cost for a domain currently is less than $10 for a year. They are not that expensive. Hosting cost also is very minimal. You can purchase shared hosting for less than $10 a month. Hostgator for example offer various packages that can meet our requirement and needs. In most of the packages we can host more than one domain. We can host various domains in a single hosting. Different domain for different purposes.
3. Wrong business model

There are two major business models: service and product based. Product based model can be further divided into 2 major subcategories ; physical and non physical items.

We wont go into the details of the business model. But what I want to highlight is that we need to start with a business model that we are good at. Or at least we are familiar with. If we are good in graphic design, obviously offering our services is the most logical. You don’t need to spend time learning graphic softwares. You can focus your energy and attention on marketing. By doing that you already win half of the battle.

There are lot of uncertainties when we start our business. Starting with a business model that we are good at allow us to pay more attention on improving the business rather learning the rope at the same time. Our changes of survival will definitely be higher.

Hopefully by highlighting these mistake we can make the most important step : take action.

Majority will just pick any username that he/she think is suitable. Here are some common username :- myaffiliate, johnaffiliate and maryinternetincome.

Majority of internet users know that the person behind the username will benefit something if he/she click the link. As a normal human being he/she might gives a second though. We hate others benefit from our action. Naturally he/she feels more comfortable with less obvious affiliate username like “reviewpage”. It just a human nature.

So do a careful consideration when choosing an affiliate username.

So how do we select a username ? any specific consideration ?

Here are some pointers that can help us:-

1. Chose a name that does not reflect any affiliate activities. Never put “affiliate” word or anything similar in the username. This is a big RED light.
2. choose something that can disguise your affiliate works ie. Review, view. These word disguise your affiliate activities. Our potential buyers will not be alarmed because of the username.

However there are affiliate owners that are using software that hide all affiliate username. For this case, it does not really matter how is you username look like. I’ll blog about that part later. Unfortunately majority of the affiliate programs are still using the old system, displaying the affiliate name at the end of the url. So to be on the safe side, do consider your affiliate username.