Making money online is most often done when you focus on a niche. You might have several areas of expertise or focus instead of just one and this is OK provided that you really learn your stuff and focus on getting knowledgeable in that area. Research and perseverance will ensure you’re maximising your profit earning potential. A niche will do better for you because you can get knowledgeable about a subject and your website will be better understood by the search engines who want to know how to categorise your site. Here are three tools to help you make the most of your efforts.
Keyword research is really important in any niche and doing a bit of research can help you find popular and profitable niches. There are all kinds of tools online that are free and available for a fee that can help you learn about the popular online categories and keywords to focus on.
The above links can help you learn more about what’s being searched for so you can decide where to focus your efforts.
Using tools to help you discover what people are looking and what types of searches are being done for a particular category help you learn to work those keywords into your content so that you’ll get picked up by the search engines for your targeted key phrases and increase your chances of getting clicks or making sales.
Do you utilise E-Zine Articles to sell a product or increase your SEO and make more money? You can also use it to fill your site with content as well. Many people either reprint these articles on their sites or use them to inspire content of their own.
Here is some practical advice about using this service. A lot of people already know what constitutes scraping and plagiarism but for many who are new to using this service, these practical tips can be helpful.
The articles are free to use as long as you adhere to the terms and conditions indicated by the website. This includes leaving everything in the resource box in tact. Do make sure you are crediting the original author by linking as well otherwise it is considered site scraping and plagiarism and could cost you with your site hosting and your affiliate status with companies like Google.
If you use an article to come up with ideas for your own content articles, be sure you’re not just rewriting a single article as this is plagiarism. Rewriting PLR articles is ok because you have bought the rights to alter that content. If you are simply taking ideas from article directories and promoting them as yours this is wrong. This doesn’t mean you can’t use the site to inspire ideas and take several articles and use them for research to come up with your own original article. Just be careful and consider using a tool like Copyscape to be sure you’re not inadvertently plagiarising.
Feel free to post your articles on this service. You can use it for your own marketing efforts and it helps build search engine rankings when you benefit from the resource box to target your desired key words and phrases.
Finding a niche to profit from online isn’t difficult in terms of finding available options. If you look, you’ll see all sorts of subjects that are paying high profits. Some of the popular ones include health, technology, weight loss, hobbies and marketing. If you haven’t yet decided which subject you want to dabble in for blogging or affiliate marketing, here are a few tricks and tips:
Are you passionate about a subject? Is there something you could endlessly learn about? If so, this might be a good niche for you because the more time you spend researching, learning and developing a niche the better your chances of attaining success and fulfillment.
Look at what’s out there. There are countless lists available talking about the most profitable niches. Read up on them and drill down until you pick a favourite.
Lookat free keyword search tools and see what you find in the news, on sites like Technorati which will make the tags for the most popular comments the biggest, Google Trends and Alexa which will give you a good inclindation of what people want to know about.
After you’ve decided on a starting point, you’ll find loads of information through websites and blogs and to get information delivered right to your e-mail box, consider using a tool like Google Alerts to send you messages about new information in that niche. We’ll talk some more about Google Alerts tomorrow.
StumbleUpon.com provides a rather addicting and symbiotic social bookmarking service that you can use to find websites and do some shameless self-promotion as well. The Stumbleupon toolbar sits out of the way on your browser and whenever you need it, it can entertain you or help your online business with the click of your mouse. It’s a great tool with extensive capabilities. Here’s a glimpse into it:
The internet is a neverending entertainment zone. You might have several areas of interest you browse and StumbleUpon knows what you want. How? When you set up your profile, you define the types of sites you want to see. It could be blogs, food or health or internet marketing or internet tools or photography or another area you like to see.
When you hit the Stumble button, it’ll show you sites in your category. You can vote for a thumbs up or a thumbs down and the tool decides whether you’d like to see more of those types of sites (based on the categories in the listing) or not. The more thumbs up, the more often people will be shown that page.
Social bookmarking is something that can definitely help you get relevant traffic and search engine positions. When you use this tool to give a thumbs up to your own site, you have a great chance of getting some traffic to your website. By using relevant tags and categories people who want to see what you have on your site are more likely to see it. They can give it a thumbs up or down as well.
If you follow friends on this tool, you can also see what they like and browse their favourites. They can browse yours as well. There are some great tools and options worth exploring on this social marketing tool.
In summary, this is one of my favourite tools for bookmarking for myself as well as finding interesting content. Actually, it can be downright addictive!
