The first is to sign up with a hosting company as an affiliate and promote the company. When someone opens a hosting account with them you get a commission. That is the simplest way to profit from this niche. If you get a reasonably number of sign-ups per month you can generate a sizable income. It helps if the company you are promoting has a great track record. That doesn’t mean they have to be “complaint-free”. Check out forums that discuss web hosting and see what people are saying. If most of the comments are positive then that is a good sign. Of course, not everyone will have something positive to say so when you encounter a negative comment, consider whether it is a “show-stopper” or merely a minor issue.

The second way to profit from the niche is to actually sell web hosting yourself. Many hosting companies provide this option. In most cases they are completely in the background so you can develop your own branding. The technology is sufficiently mature that you can quite easily host typical sites without having to be a “geek”. If there are questions from your customers that you can’t answer the hosting company is usually only too happy to give you the answer so you can satisfy your customer.

This second scenario can work out very profitable for you if you also offer website design services (whether you do it your self or outsource it) or if you set up niche websites to sell. When you sell the website you can offer free hosting for 6 or 12 months and then charge a monthly fee. If that monthly fee is what you are paying your hosting provider, then you only need to be hosting a few sites yourself to generate a comfortable monthly income.

One of the better hosting companies, IMHO, is Hostgator. I have used them for a number of my sites for a couple of years now and have found them to be very good. Of course, they are not the only company or the oldest, but they do provide good service and their pricing is very reasonable. Check them out and decide for yourself.

Just want the Report, not the report on the Report? Click Here to Read The Perpetual Traffic Report

Anyway once I started into it I found that it was not what I was expecting and there was a lot of good information in it. Do you know what part of the search results page gets the highest percentage of clicks? Neither did I until I read this.

On top of this there is some good information on the three factors Google uses to rank your page and how you can improve those rankings.  Sure, Google isn’t the only search engine in town but it gets the lions share of traffic so if you can capitalize on that isn’t it worth it? Especially if it doesn’t cost you anything.

Also, unlike so many other “reports” out there, the Perpetual Traffic Report lets you know up front that there is some work involved in increasing the ranking of your site and driving traffic to it. The thing is, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to do it and the report lays out the steps you need to follow to achieve increased traffic.  In fact, I found this so useful I am applying these techniques to some of my other sites that have gone a little quiet lately (largely because they have been neglested, I have to admit.)

Anyway I’d recommend you get your own copy of the Perpetual Traffic Report and see whether you agree with my assessment of it.

Click Here to Get The Perpetual Traffic Report Now

Further, the sheer number of competing pages is not the sole indicator of the level of competition. Pages which have the keyword phrase as part of the text on the page will not be as strong a competitor to you as a page which has it in the URL. This and a myriad other factors can make determining the level of competition (and consequenlty the likely chance of being profitable in the niche) a time consuming process. As well as the total number of pages, you need to look at the source of competing pages (eg, how many are from  .gov, or .edu domains), whether the keyword is in the URL, the page Title, the number of backlinks to the site, etc, etc. Each of these factors then needs to be given a weighting so that you have some way of quantifying each of the phrases you are considering so that you can use the keywords with the best chance of ranking well.

One way of doing this is to set up a spreadsheet with columns for the keywords and each of the factors you are considering. Using readily available and free tools (including Google) you can get figures for each of these factors. You then plug them into the spreadsheet and hopefully come up with the most profitable keyword phrases. This is the cheapest way to do it if you only consider the dollars. However it does take a lot of time – and time is money. If you could get the results quicker you could be in that market quicker and making money quicker.

If you are not adverse to spending some money to get access to a product that automates the process, you should have a look at the Niche Blueprint course. Even if you don’t use anything else from the course, there is a great tool in Module 2 called Keyword Blueprint that makes the keyword research almost painless as it is so quick and easy to use. For each keyword it uses Google to get related keywords and the number of searches on those keywords. It also gives a rough indication of the value of the keyword. You can then select the keywords you are interested in and get it to evaluate them. It will return a score based on all of the factors mentioned above and more. The score allows you to choose keywords that have the best chance of ranking hiugh in search engine results.

You can drill down on any keyword to find other related phrases and the tool ensures that keywords are not repeated in the results so you don’t have to waste time making sure you have unique keywrds. Once you have decided on the keywords you want to use you can copy and paste them into a spreadsheet or notepad to use them.

As I said, this tool can save you so much time it is worth the cost of the course just in itself and it’s a one-off payment. It’s well worth investigating further.

Click Here To Visit The Niche Blueprint Site and Get Access To Keyword Blueprint.

Click Here To See The Video Showing These Techniques

1. Using IMEye with Adsense

If you want to run Adsense ads on a website you can ask IMeye to give you keyword phrases where, for example,

• Monthly search volume is greater than 15,000
• Competing pages < 50,000
• Intitle competing pages < 10,000
• No exact domains exist in the top 10 SERPS
• No youtube videos in the top 10 SERPS
• No Squidoo lenses in the top 10 SERPS
• No Hubpages in the top 10 SERPS
• No Blogspot sites in the top 10 SERPS
• Adwords high bid estimate > $5.00

Finding the keywords that meet these criteria will quickly allow you to build up adsense sites on exact match domains and quickly get them ranked.  Since they  have high Adwords bids they’ll have high payouts to you from Google Adsense.

Just get an exact domain, throw up some articles and adsense ads, do some link building, rinse and repeat and you can build an incredible autopilot Adsense income in this way.

2. Zero in on Super Profitable e-Commerce niches

The very profitable e-Commerce sites all have one thing in common: They were NOT the first ones to sell something online in that niche!

The odds of finding something profitable to sell online that NO ONE else is selling are close to zero. Sure, every niche has to start somewhere but you will have to spend time and possibly money developing the niche. If you want a quick return on your investment  you are better off going with established niches.

If you can find niches where people already make money, but where you can use your Internet marketing expertise to compete aggressively that’s all good. IMeye can direct you straight to these opportunities.

In this instance, you can ask IMeye to give you keyword phrases where:

• The Monthly search volume is greater than 15,000
• The Competing pages < 500,000
• Intitle competing pages < 50,000
• Physical goods ARE being sold for this keyword

This will give you keyword phrases that get enough traffic that you’re able to compete on them with SEO, and where people are already selling goods. You would then get in there and take over the market.

Alternatively, if you don’t have the patience for SEO and want to use Google Adwords to drive traffic immediately, you could ask IMeye to give you keyword phrases where:

• Monthly search volume is greater than 150,000
• Adwords CPC’s are < $0.20
• Physical goods ARE being sold for this keyword

These queries would find cheap clicks where there’s enough volume to get 100 visitors per day or so and where others are selling goods online. The idea would be to swoop in there and take over!

What about increasing Affiliate marketing revenue and finding new opportunities?

3. Using IMEye to Improve SEO

You could ask IMeye to give you keyword phrases where:

• Monthly search volume is Greater than 15,000
• Competing pages < 500,000
• Intitle competing pages < 50,000

You would take a look at those results and then sort them in descending order of search volume. There are bound to be some nuggets that will stand out there.

Let’s say you want to find some cheap click opportunities. You could ask IMeye to give you keyword phrases where:

• Monthly search volume is Greater than 150,000
• Adwords “cheap click” CPC < .20

You would then take those results and sort them in ascending order of CPC. You’ll find VAST sources of untapped traffic that you could use for any number of affiliate marketing projects!

4. Marketing a particular Clickbank product through SEO ?

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to cherry pick the competitions’ keywords for Clickbank products by asking IMeye to give you keyword phrases where:

• Others have used the keyword phrase to market the CB product you’re interested in (e.g. Fatloss4idiots)
• The Monthly search volume is Greater than 15,000
• Competing pages < 500,000
• Intitle competing pages < 50,000

You can then sort them by anything you like and key right in on the best ones that have the most volume and least competition.

5. Using IMEye to Promote CPA Offers?

You can do the same for affiliate offer categories by asking IMeye to give you keyword phrases where:

• Others have used the keyword phrase to market the category you’re after (e.g. Acne)
• Monthly search volume is Greater than 150,000
• Adwords “cheap click” CPC < .15

You’re now looking at proven keywords that have enough volume and are cheap enough for you to buy traffic and make money with – simple as that.

And that’s just the beginning!

Click Here To Watch The Video Showing These IMEye Techniques

There is so much more to IMeye and so many other ways that you could use this tool. Trying to put a document together with all its uses would be like trying to document all the uses of a hammer!

But hopefully this gives you a great idea of how flexible, complete, and incredibly powerful this tool will be and how easy it could be used to dramatically increase your subscribers’ online revenue.

I’m not sure how long the offer will be available so you should check it out now. There is a special deal where you can try it out for yourself to see how useful it will be to you.

Click Here To Take Advantage of The Special IMEye Offer

• You start off with an initial (or “seed”) keyword
• The tool finds as many related keywords as it can (while you wait…)
• You sift through the results  to identify the keywords that are worth further analysis
• The keywords you select then have to be looked at manually to determine level of competition, cost etc

If you are lucky you find some keywords that you can use.

I think you’d agree this approach is time-consuming and if not done right, can end up wasting a lot of money if you are running PPC campaigns.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was another way? Well now there is!

Tim Godfrey and Steven Clayton (who many of you will know from their incredibly successful Niche Blueprint and Commission Blueprint products) have developed a tool that is soon to revolutionise keyword research.

The tool is called IMEye – and it is not like any keyword tool you have seen before. For a start here are all the things you DON’T have to do!

• You don’t need seed keywords.
• You don’t have to wade through 80-90% of the keywords that are garbage.
• You don’t have  to wait around while the tool trundles through its analysis.
• You don’t need to look at keywords that are obviously too expensive to use for PPC.
• You don’t need to see keywords that are too competitive to make quick progress with SEO.

With IMEye, you don’t find the keywords – they find you!

Click Here To Visit The Official IMEye Web Site!

It almost sounds too good to be true but there is a lot of technology underlying the product. Tim and Steve have spent over $100,000 and employed up to 100 people to make this a reality.

So how does it work?

IMeye uses a proprietary method of gathering the BEST keywords out there, does all the analysis and research on them (before you even start searching!) …and then stores them in a HUGE database ready for your use.

Already there are over 1,000,000 keywords in the database and tens of thousands being added each day. Their aim is not to have the largest database of keywords but to have a database of keywords that are useful. After all there is no point having a keyword in the database that has zero searches!

Each keyword has stored with it:

• Number of searches
• Number of competing pages in Google
• Number of “intitle” competing pages in Google
• Number of words in the keyword phrase
• 2 Adwords bid estimates: the highest one, and a “cheapest click” one
• The top 10 web sites in the Google search engine rankings
• The adwords ads that are running
• Which Clickbank products have been promoted using this keyword phrase
• Which affiliate offer categories have been promoted using this keyword phrase

There is a lot more including various flags as to whether physical products are being sold for the keyword.

Nothing else comes close. Having this information instantly available allows you to rapidly determine profitable niches and the keywords to use to target those niche markets.

It’s well worth having a look at.

Click Here To Visit The Official IMEye Web Site!

If you read the previous post you have probably got a number of ideas for potential niches. Now you need to decide which ones to work with. Here are 5 steps to help you get started.

1.  It helps if you have some interest in the niche you are considering as this will motivate you to work on it. Choose a general industry that interests you, such as health, weight loss, dating, shopping, etc. Yes, these are broad but you’re going to whittle them down to specific niches you can target.

2.  Ask yourself what sub-markets exist within the industry you chose. For example, weight loss might have the sub-markets of people who want to lose weight through diet, people who want to lose weight through exercise, or people who want to lose weight with little or no effort.

3.  Choose a product to promote that falls into one of these sub-markets.

4.  Keep whittling things down by asking yourself what type of people might be interested in the product you’re promoting. For example, people who want to lose weight through diet may want to do so for swimsuit season, to prepare for a wedding or high school reunion, because their doctor told them they had to, etc.  These are your potential niche markets.

5.  Find which one of these niche markets is the hottest by entering the keywords you think would be associated with it into Google. Do not use single word keywords here because they are much too broad and it will be next to impossible to compete. Surround the keywords with quotes ( a phrase search). When you get your search results returned to you, look for results with less than 10,000 organic pages returned, but with three or more paid ads on the right-hand side of the page. These are hot markets with little competition, and you should promote them.

Remember, as I mentioned earlier, you can profit from more than one niche market at a time. Set up several campaigns to keep a steady flow of money coming in.

In future posts I’ll be going into this in more detail. Cheers

1. Magazines
   Go into a newsagent and have a look at the magazines that are on sale. If the magazine has been in publication for a number of years, the chances are there is a solid niche. Another source of ideas is to browse through magazines and see what the articles and advertisements are about.
2. Your Hobbies and Interests
   These can sometimes be good niches because you are more likely to be consistent when the work involves something you enjoy
3. Things you are an expert in
   You might have some skill or knowledge that could be the basis of a niche market. Do your family or friends often ask your assistance, advice or opinion on something?
4. Newspapers
   What is in the news? What ads are being run?
5. Amazon
   Check out what the best sellers are on Amazon. You can also see what magazines they list.
6. Ebay
   You can check what is on offer and what is selling (completed auctions). Additionally the ebay pulse lists the 10 most popular search terms.
7. Forums
   If you belong to any forum, you may find some questions or topics of problems keep occurring. These might be potential niches.
8. Yahoo Answers
   As with forums, maybe there are some recurring questions that could provide an idea for a niche.
9. Google Groups
   Each group shares a common interest so there may be many niches here.
10. Subscribe to Niche Idea emails
    There are many websites where you can sign up to receive a daily or weekly email with a suggestion for a niche.

These are jsut a few suggestions. If you choose to subscribe to emailed niches, one of the better ones, in my opinion, is Daily Niche Idea. Not only do you get a good suggestion for a niche but you get articles you can use and suggested products. Best of all it’s free.

Click Here To Visit Daily Niche Idea

As I mentioned in my previous post, many affiliate marketers who are just starting out choose to focus their efforts on broad categories, such as clothes or jewelry or money making products. However, there is so much competition in these broad categories that it’s easy for your efforts to get lost. Further, when potential customers do internet searches for broad terms like these, they’re usually in the very early stages of their purchase cycle. In other words, people usually do lots of research on products before they buy, narrowing down their search words each time to be more and more specific, until they find exactly what they want. You want to catch people at the end of their buying cycle, when they know what they want and are ready to purchase it.

The more specific you can get with your market focus, the better chance you’ll have of attracting buyers. So, instead of focusing on “wedding dresses,” focus on a very narrow market, like “modest wedding dresses” or “spring wedding dresses.” It will be easier for your marketing efforts to stand out when you use niches like these, and your chances of making a sale will be much higher.

It’s also best if you can find niche markets that have a lot of hungry buyers. In fact, the more desperate the buyers, the better your chances will be of selling to them. Finding hot niche markets with ready buyers isn’t difficult. All it takes is some basic research. Scan the headlines of magazines and see what themes develop among the article titles. Chances are, these are the topics people are interested in. Then, search the Internet for information about these topics, using narrow search terms. If you get lots of results returned to you, including paid ads, then you’ve found a hot niche.

There are two ways of looking at or defining a niche or niche market. The first way is to consider it as a specific subset of a broader market.  For example, the broad market might be “golf players”. Within that market there may be niches such as “women golf players”, “left handed golf players” etc.

The second way of defining a niche is to say that it is a group of people who share the same problem. This is, I think, a better way of looking at things because when you look at the niche that way, you then consider how you can help them solve their problem. The only way to make money reliably in the long term is to help people.

A niche can be as broad or narrow as you want. The earlier example of golf players could be considered a niche in itself although it is a fairly broad one. When you are considering niches you need to keep in mind how targetted you want that niche to be.

Most people start off thinking that a broad niche is better because it appeals to more people. While that is true, a broad niche is also much harder to  focus your efforts on. Your advertising (website, printed brochures, print and online ads etc) needs to appeal to all the possible people that fall within your target niche.

So, if your niche was golf players, you would be trying to appeal to men and women, left- and right-handed players, beginning and experienced, etc. Obviously, this is impossible to achieve. Not to mention that your product (or solution) range would be very large to try and satisfy the different requirement for each of these people.

On the other hand, if you decided to focus on left-handed women golf players it is much easier to write ad and web copy to appeal to that segment. And, your product range will be specific to that segment. Sure, the target audience is very much reduced but having a more precise solution or product offering and more appropriate advertising means you are not competing against fewer people and your niche should be profitable – provided you do the other things right.

Now, I’m not saying you should start marketing to that niche. There is a number of other steps you need to take to evaluate the likely profitability of any niche before you invest time and money into developing it.

I’ll be discussing these other steps in subsequent posts.

Cheers

–M

Like me, you have probably bought lots of ebooks and other things all claiming to show you how to make millions from niche markets and you’ve been disappointed. My aim on this site is to provide real value and I will be discussing free and paid tools or products that can help. Even though I may earn a commission on a product if you purchase through my affiliate link, I am NOT going to suggest any product that is not useful and effective because I don’t want my name associated with low-grade products.

I will be starting with some basics, so if you are already familiar with the initial material please bear with me. I just want to make sure everyone has a common grounding.

If you have comments, suggestions on things to cover or anything else, I’d love to hear from you.

Stay tuned.

Michael