Mikael Rieck

I’ve recently bought a page at the Million Dollar Wiki site because I wanted to see whether it was possible to make some money from it. The purchase price for a page is $100 and that will get you a page this will not only get a fair amount of publicity through viral marketing but you’ll own it for at least 15 years.

Professional bloggers like John Chow and Shoemoney have bought pages as well and that was the tipping point for me. These guys seem to know what they are doing and I am pretty sure that if done correctly I’ll be able to get a decent amount of traffic to my page.

However I would really like to ask for your help. If you’re reading this blog I would appreciate it if you would give me a link from either your blog or any other site you might own with the anchor text of “Baby Boy Names”. As you might have guessed I bought the page Baby Boy Names for one single reason: TRAFFIC.

If you have ever used WordTracker for your keyword research you know that they do not exaggerate their statistics. I have often found them to be way less than I am actually seeing from the visitors that hit my sites. Using other keyword research tools I found figures of 2-3 million monthly visitors where WordTracker only shows around 70,000 visitors. If it’s possible to get just 10% of 2 million visitors to my site I would really have to give it some effort in order to not profit from it.

What will I do for you in return? I’ve not going to promise any prizes but I promise to give you a link from this blog to a site of your choice. Please submit a comment to this post if you have linked to my Baby Boy Names page containing:

1) A link to the page that is linking to it and

2) Anchor text and link to the page that you want me to mention here on the blog.

I would like to use my last words of this post to thank all of you who decide to help me try to accomplish this. I’ll need all the help I can get so feel free to post ideas and comments that will help me reach my goal.

Thanks.

Mikael Blogging, Making Money

Now because things have been extremely busy around here I haven’t written any posts since my post where I compared John Chow’s BlogRush stats to mine. But yesterday I got an email from PayPal that TLA had sent me some money and I was literally stunned. Why?

Because I had totally forgot that I had installed their little plugin adding TLA text ads to the blog. I haven’t had anyone want to buy links on my site and therefore this came as a pleasant surprise. Now it wasn’t large figures but money that you do not expect is always a lot more fun than those you do expect.

So why this post? Well, I just wanted those of you that, like me, have fairly new blogs know that money can be made from TLA even though you still don’t have a PageRank.

Click here to signup

Mikael Making Money

Welcome to Step #6 in building your niche website. So far you have learned to Find Profitable Keywords, Find the Right Domain Name, Setup Cheap Hosting, Pointing Your DNS to Your Hosting Account and Setting up Your Niche Site from a Provided Template.

Now we want to get your site indexed and the fastest way to do this is to build links to it. Don’t waste time submitting it to search engines. When I first linked to the site I have created called HorseTrailerUniverse it got indexed within 24 hours because of that ONE link from my blog. It can’t get much easier than that.

One of the best ways I know of to slowly build some ranking is to have any older sites you have link to the new one. It doesn’t have to be forever and most often a timeframe of one month will do just fine. That will create some initial spidering. Even websites with a PR3 or PR4 will do.

In the meantime you have time to start building some external links to your site. One of the most effective ways I know of is to start writing a few articles and submitting them to article directories like EzineArticles.com. By writing just 2-3 good lengthy (500-600 words) articles with 1-2 links back to your site you will start to see some traffic within that first month.

Now you need to remember that this is not some “get rich fast scheme” and you might as well start out by accepting that you won’t seen many result until after a few months. All you need to focus on is to create content related to the good keywords that you found and then build links and links and links.

Besides submitting articles you should try to attract some links from sites within your niche. If you’re into “fly fishing” you might try to attract links from other “outdoor sites” or even other sites about “fly fishing”. If you can get a one way links that will benefit you the most but reciprocal links will also work (swapping links).

Remember to use your keywords in the anchor text of the link and direct it to the subpage for that particular keyword. If you have picked your keywords right you will not need that many links to get some fair rankings.

I order for me to show you the progress of the site I have created and to give you some inspiration I’ve only linked to the site from this blog +  one PR3 site + added one article to EzineArticles and that is it. Over the next couple of weeks I will provide you with updates about what I have done (and will be doing) and how my stats are. Your job is to then transfer that to the niche you have chosen for yourself.

As you can see from my statistics the site has been operational since August 28th which is about 20 days. I haven’t done any other promotion of the site and yet it shows 44 visits. I assume that about 20 of those are my own (even though I have tried to eliminate them through an IP block).

Besides that I have just tested where I rank for some of my main keywords and it looks really good but I’ll save the details for my next post where I’ll talk much more about building links and adding content.

Mikael Making Money

Read the previous steps here:
Step1
Step2
Step3
Step4

Now I have created two website templates that you can use or you can create your own. Both ways will work just fine. You can download the niche website template here.

The picture to your right shows the files included in the zip file. You will notice that there are all the files you will need but you will have to make some changes to fit your chosen niche.

I’ve created a brown template and a white template (see in folder called “white”).

You will need to create a header to suit your niche, add niche keyword pages, add your content, change affiliate pictures and of course change the htm files where necessary. Now I won’t go into all the details on how to do that because that would simply take to long. If you don’t know how to do graphics or you don’t know how to write html, try asking friends and family for help. If you don’t know anybody that will be able to help you then you might need to A) Learn it yourself or B) Hire someone to do it for you.

This is what the site looks like without any changes to it:

You will find Photoshop PSD files for both the header and the affiliate product in the zip file. Not that you’ll need it. How many modifications you want to do is up to you and from now on I will not spend that much time on building the site as I will on promoting the site to make it rank better in the search engines and to attract traffic to it.

After modifying the template this is what I came up with. The sites still needs some adjustments and some additions of text but other than that it is almost finished. Besides spending time on getting traffic I will also spend some time testing the performance of the site and try to improve upon it.

As you can see I haven’t found any good affiliate products yet but I will add them as soon as I find them.

In the next article I will discuss how you can start building links and generating traffic to your site.

Mikael Making Money

I would like to start by apologizing for not posting this post sooner but now it is here. This is actually part four in my little niche website test. Here is what I’ve covered so far:

• Finding Profitable Keywords without Paying for Software Tools
• Finding a memorable domain that will help your ranking
• Setting Up Cheap Hosting For Niche Websites
• How to Setup a NamesCheap Domain on Hostgator – this is what you’re reading

Pointing the DNS to HostGator
Now that you have your domain from NameCheap and your hosting account from Hostgator, you will need to login to your NameCheap account to change your DNS settings. You will need the DNS information you got from the HostGator Welcome email when you bought the account. You DNS information should look something like ns1.hostgator.com.

In your NameCheap account click Manage Domains and then click the domain you want to change the DNS for. Your will see a left side menu that looks something like the picture on the right.

Now the picture is taken from my account but you will have something that looks similar to the one called “Transfer DNS Back to US”.

After clicking on that link you can enter the DNS addresses you got from your welcome email. Normally the transfer is extremely fast and my experience is that it is almost instantly. But you might have to wait for 24 hours.

Adding the Domain to Hostgator
This step will only be required if you are adding an additional domain to your HostGator account. If you only have the primary one you bought with the account then you can skip this step.

You will need to login to your HostGator account. This is done by going to www.yourdomain.com/cpanel (change “yourdomain” to your actual domain and when you are asked for a username and password you must enter the ones that were sent to you by HostGator.

You will see a panel similar to this and you will need to click the Addon Domains button.

Now all you need to do is enter New Domain Name, Username/directory/subdomain Name and Password. Then click “Add Domain”and you are done.

The next step will be to create the site and that is the fun part. Stay tuned for the next part where you will need to know some html to move on.

Mikael Making Money

Reading Adie’s post over at NetBusinessBlog let me to a script that I expect to be a valuable tool in the future of my blog.

With the name of CrazyEgg you’ll find a tool that comes in both a free and a paid version. I’ve just signed up for the free version as it lets you track up to 4 pages and 5,000 monthly visitors and that should be sufficient to see whether it will do what I expect it to.

The first reason that I have implemented it on my blog is that I really like graphs and statistics but secondly (and more importantly) this tool will help me track the movement of the blog visitors and thereby help me improve the layout. It will also help me place ads where they are most likely to be clicked and thereby helping me make more money. Will this tool be worth it? How can it not be as it is free, takes 3 minutes to implement and runs smoothly

I’ve always liked “free” and now I have a tool that will improve my earnings and therefore pay for itself in advance and I don’t even need to upgrade until I need it. I’ll be posting some updates once the tool has been running for some time.

Mikael Making Money, Tools

So now we have learned how to find good keywords and we have learned how to pick a good domain so the next thing I will show you is where to setup a hosting account that is cheap but will suit our purpose perfectly.

There are hundreds if not thousands of webhosts available and you will find that there are a handful of them that are reliable and trustworthy while there are many more that aren’t.

The host I have chosen to work with is the one called Hostgator where you are able to host unlimited domains for as little as $10 per month. This might be an expense the first month or two but after that we should see and nice profit from our sites.

In order for you to be able to have multiple domains you need to choose the Baby Croc solution. I won’t go into details about how to sign up for this because the help files at Hostgator are really good.

So now you have a good set of keywords, a great domain name and hosting to build a niche website on. This covers the basics and we’re now going to create a site using a free website template. But before I’ll show you have to do this please go sign up for an Adsense account if you haven’t already done so:

Sign up for Google Adsense

Mikael Making Money

In my hunt for MFA (Made for Adsense) links showing up in the Adsense ads showing on my sites I came across Britt’s Blog where she talked about a cool tool called Adsense Sandbox. The tool will help you determine what Adsense ads will be shown on your site and that can help you find those MFA sites only earning you $0.01 per click.

The way to spot a MFA site is simply by visiting every single URL (enter them manually into your browser – DO NOT click your own ads).

If the site looks like a MFA site, then simply go to you Google Adsense Account, click the menu “Adsense Setup” and then click “Competitive Ad Filter”. Then enter the URLs in the text box and click “save”. That will remove those URLs from the Adsense ads showing on your site.

Mikael Making Money

I hope you have read my post about finding a good keyword for your niche Adsense website as this article will begin where the other one left off. I trust that you have followed my advice and have found a few good keywords with good R/S ratios and with a fair amount of searches.

As I mentioned earlier I hated doing things that could be automated and I have therefore bought the keyword tool called KeywordElite made by Brad Callen. I won’t go into details about the tool in this series of articles as this is meant for all of you that are just starting out and don’t want to invest any money upfront.

In the initial analysis we found that the keyword HORSE wasn’t a good keyword as competition was rather high and it would take to much initial effort to start ranking highly for that keyword. I’ve therefore investigated the niche a little further using KeywordElite and I found a niche that looks interesting and I believe that we might be able to obtain a fair ranking rather quickly and thereby start making some initial Adsense income.

The niche is Horse Trailers and what I found was a few good keywords that I’ll start to build the niche site around. Here are some stats for you:

 
The stats above are found using the “allintitle” search feature in Google. What you’ll see is that we have absolutely amazing R/S numbers as well as KEI numbers. Besides that you will see that the amount of searches per month is more than 58,000 from those four keywords alone. If we’re able to obtain a #1 ranking in Google for those keywords we’ll have enough traffic to really make money off the site.

In the column showing you the Adwords CPC (a feature available in KeywordElite) you can see that the amount advertisers pay per click is rather limited. This means that we can’t expect to make much per Adsense click but the numbers can make up for that plus we’ll look into other options than Adsense to make money off the site once we see the traffic coming in.

Now the next thing we’ll need to do is find a domain name (preferably a dot com) for our site and the best thing will be if we can manage to find a site with our main keyword (horse trailer) in it as well as a name that will be easy to remember for our visitors.

You might be thinking: “does it really matter whether our visitors can remember our URL when we’re planning to attract traffic through search engines?). Yes that will be important and for more reasons than one:

1. If the site really starts to take off we might want to make it into a larger scale business and not “just” a niche site making money off Adsense. You will be glad that you took the time to prepare if that happens.

2. If you search for “horse trailer” in Google and number 1 ranking site has an URL called www.1234horseXYZ.com while number 2 ranking site is called www.horsetrailer.com, which one would you click first? Statistics show that people will click the URL that they believe is the most professional site and therefore you’ll need to find a professional looking domain name.

3. Repeat visitors can make up for much more than the initial first time visitors and why settle for 58,000 visitors if you could have 100,000 or 150,000 instead?

To find a suitable domain we have several options and there are a lot of websites that will help us find interesting domain names. The sites I always use are these:

DomainTools

If you have a list of keywords you can enter them in DomainTools search facility and it will instantly tell you whether the domain is available or not. The list of keywords will have to be with hyphens or without spaces. You could try testing: Horsetrailer, Horse-trailer, Usedhorsetrailer, Used-horse-trailer etc.

The tool will help you search .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz and .us domains for availability. I always recommend sticking with .com or .net domains as they seem more serious.

DomainsBot

If you don’t have a list of keywords or you are out of ideas and need help then DomainsBot will give you some ideas for other domain names. I rarely end up using the suggestions it provides but I always get inspired and usually come up with one on my own. The tool can really be a great help and it’s really fast.

What I normally do is to test the most obvious domains and in this case it would be horsetrailer.com and horsetrailers.com. Both are already taken but that is normally always the case.

Second thing I do depends a little on the niche I am working with but I usually test domains with the following words in either the beginning or the end of the URL:

- pro
- world
- land
- universe
- elite
- instant
- cheap
- review

In this case I found that the domain www.HorseTrailerUniverse.com was free and I went and bought it. If you visit the site you will see that I have already started putting up the site but that it is still a work in progress. The site has not been indexed yet and the first external link to the site is the one I just mentioned.

Where to shop for domains

I always by my domains at www.namecheap.com and they are about $8 per domain per year. That is dirt cheap and we’ll easily make up for those costs with our Adsense income.

Try searching the net for coupons for namecheap domains. The normal prize is $8.88 but you will always be able to find a coupon that will give you a domain for less than $8.

You don’t have to use namecheap and there are lots and lots of places to purchase domains but I just find it to be the best that I have dealt with.

In the next article I’ll show you where you can find good cheap hosting and how to setup the domain to that hosting account.

Mikael Making Money

Over at NetBusinessBlog, the author Dee Barizo has setup a post about a 3-step business building method. It seems that not all readers agree with the process and I have to agree that I would flip the process around which is actually what I’m going to show you in a step-by-step way in the new guide that I have just posted the first step in. For more information on how to setup a niche website please visit the post.

Let me know what you think. Is Dee right in the 3-step approach or are things turned upside down?

Mikael Making Money

I’m sure you have come across sites selling software packages that will help you find profitable keywords to use in your Adsense or Adwords campaigns.  You’ll even find sites that have bought the software for themselves and have started making money by selling keyword lists generated by the software.  Both methods can be great and will definitely save you a lot of time in the MOST ESSENTIAL part of creating Adsense websites or finding Adwords keywords to use in your campaigns.

I will focus on finding profitable keywords to use when generating profitable niche websites making money by using Google Adsense. Be aware that this guide will guide you through every step in the process without the use of software tools that you will have to pay for. You can find profitable keywords by using the free online tools that are available (if you are on a tight budget). It will however require a lot of time and effort without the paid tools.

When I have guided you through this step by step process I’ll show you how to setup a website that starts generating Adsense income in a reasonable time and how you’ll be able to grow that income. But first things first and finding the right keywords are the single most important step in the process.

Free Wordtracker Keyword Tool
You will need to start out by putting together a list of keywords that you want to investigate. You can start out by writing down a list of interest that you have like: Gardening, Football, Cooking, Cars, Fashion etc. or you can visit a News site like CNN.com or NYtimes.com and look for interesting relevant topics.

Next you go to http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ and start doing your keyword research. In this example we’ll use the main topic “Horse”.

The numbers you see down the left hand side represents the number of searches for the keyword in the previous month. Typically you can’t really count on Wordtrackers’s numbers and from my experience you will need to multiply these numbers by a factor between 2 and 4.

The numbers in the Search column we’ll call “Searches”. So the keyword “Horse” was searched 17,571 times last month.

Next, we’ll need to check out the competition as you will find that there are many highly searched keywords that have fierce competition and we’ll have a hard time trying to make money using Adsense to start with if we target those keywords. What we are searching for are keywords that have a fair amount of searches and a low competition so we’ll have a change at obtaining a good rank and thereby get our amount of the visitors to our site.

We’ll start by going to Google and search for “Horse”.

As you can see there are 138 million websites listed for the search term “Horse”. Now that sure is a lot of competition. Now there is a way to see what websites are actually targeting this keyword and which sites only mentions it somewhere in their text.

What we’ll do is to see what websites have the keyword in the Title of their webpage as webmasters promoting products or services within a specific topic will often have the keyword somewhere in the title tag of the page. What we’ll do is enter the special search command in Google “allintitle:Horse”.

As you can see the numbers are now reduced a lot and you’ll find that there are actually only 6,790,000 pages competing for that phrase. Now that seems like a more reasonable amount to compete with but it is still a litte to high, but we’ll use it as an example.

Now let us call this number for “Results”. With these two numbers we’re now able to calculate the factor called R/S ratio which in plain English is a measure of the demand for a product (or the keyword). If we take our example the ratio would be 6,790,000 (Results) divided by 17,571 (Searches) or

6,790,000/17,571= 386.43

In my experience a ratio of 386 isn’t good and we’ll be better off finding another keyword to target. The lower the number the more likely it’ll be for you to be able to generate a profit from it. At the same time you will have to find a keyword with enough monthly searches to drive some decent traffic to your site.

Now go through all the keywords you have on your list to see if anyone of those will do the trick. I know that you might end up saying that it is really hard work and you’re absolutely right.    That is exactly why people use software solutions to do the job for them.

Now I’ve used a piece of software called KeywordElite to find a keyword that would be worth targeting. Now you might find it strange that I’ll tell you what the specific keyword is but one of the things that I have always hated was for internet marketers to tell me what to do but never show a true live example using a “good keyword”.

The reason that they normally don’t tell you is obvious because there will be people that’ll pick up the idea (keyword) and go for it. In return that will only make it harder for the marketer to prove his point but I’m willing to take that risk. 

Now the keyword that we’ll be targeting will be given to you in the next session where I will show you how to find a suitable domain name for our niche site. A good domain name (preferably with your keyword in it) can be extremely difficult to find. Good dot com domains are almost all taken and we might settle for a “dot net” or a “dot info” domain. Both will do fine for this little venture though.

Until the next article I encourage you to try to find a few good keywords with low R/S ratios so you will be able to grab a good domain name once the next article is posted.

Mikael Making Money