The problem is with the options. There are just too many. If you look at the post I wrote just the other day, you will see why. I listed over a hundred ways to promote your blog. Do they all work? Yes. To some extent. But when you are faced with a list like that, at least when I am, I freeze. Too many options gives you no clear place to start. And I promise, that list is only a start. I have used some of the methods and know what has worked for me. And some of the methods are based on your blog as a whole while others focus on posts. And some methods are good to use when you start a blog and others will only work after your blog has at least a little bit of a presence online.

But that is just promotion methods. Have you chosen a niche yet? How about an affiliate program or products to promote? Add these two variables to the mix and you have even a bigger mess. How do you solve this?

First you need to know what you want to write about. Can you write about it? Are you an expert? Do you have enough material for the niche? Now you don’t have to be an expert. I happen to think that one of the best times to start a blog is when you are learning something new.

If you are learning SEO, keep a blog about what you have learned each day. Try some SEO software. Write about it too. Not one post. Try to find out everything it can do and start listing things. If each item on your list can be it’s own article, then write an article about each topic. Take screenshots and use them in your post (and upload the photos you use to flickr instead of your own server. It can only help spread your network further). Take screencasts of you using the software for one post and then post your video wherever you can. Even simple niches can contain lot’s of material for posts.

That didn’t help much either. I just made every option a little more tempting. If any niche is worthy of creating a blog about, there is no narrowing down with that last paragraph. I am no help. You see, I look wide and far for options, techniques and methods. The problem with that: eventually you have to chart your course and actually do the work.

Just do it. Okay, I lifted that from Nike. But it applies to so many things including affiliate marketing. You know what you can write about whether you admit it to yourself or not. Don’t worry about products to promote. They are out there. Just choose your topic.

And I will let you in on a little secret about the methods you use to promote your niche blog. Gurus and experts play favorites. They also have comfort zones. They also are prejudiced. I have lurked and traveled in a lot of marketing niches online. For the most part, the email newsletter expert knows nothing about Adwords, the pay-per-click expert knows nothing about SEO and the article marketing expert knows nothing about social media marketing. And when someone doesn’t know how to do something, they tend to devalue it’s worth. Now I am not talking about all the experts or any specific experts. I am speaking generally. But just take everything you hear and read with a grain of salt, including this post.

Zemanta recently added a feature for adding your own feed sources to the pool of feeds it uses to pull related content from. This can mean a lot to a niche blog. I was thinking a Zemanta account for each niche blog you have and then there are the follow possibilities:

Trackbacks from DoFollow Blogs

You can build a list of blogs that are in the same niche your blog is in and link back to them with each post.

Any trackback may get you notice from the blogger you are linking to. But it may be good to check if the blog accepts trackbacks. Some don’t. You can also get some link juice if you find dofollow blogs to link back to. One good way is to use Fast Blog Finder. Another is to use one of the dofollow search engines online and grab the feeds of blogs that you find.

Get Linked To

See the reblog button at the end of this post. I will have to test to see how many people will actually use the button.

Linking to Your Affiliate Products

• You could create one category on your blog that contains all of your products and use the feed of that category in Zemanta.
• You could build a site out that will import your affiliate products and produces feeds and add those feeds to Zemanta.
• You could find a service that provides feeds of affiliate products and add those.
• You can use Zemanta’s built-in ability to link to Amazon products with your affiliate link.

I will be exploring this further in future posts.

The software never stays long because I don’t like mystery programs hanging out taking up space. I have set a rule. All of the software I use must fit on my desktop and taskbar. I see those all the time. I hardly use the start menu and anything there will most likely be lost forever. I will forget I have it and download the same software again.

I had downloaded the Niche Browser in the past in one of my download and install manias and forget about it. Just the other day Jason Moffat announced a new version of his niche browser. So I had to download it. I knew he had something good before. I just did not have the time to learn it. But now, it may be a good fit with the niche blogs I am building.

I have been playing with it for a little bit. There are so many tools here that all you really need to research a topic is this tool. Enter your keyword or phrase and anything you want to know about it is a click away: Multiple search engines, Multiple blog searches, Multiple bookmark sites, multiple picture sites, multiple video sites, multiple answer sites, multiple keyword tools, etc.

And I was happening to read a post about basing a blog on Google Trends and I thought, this is the perfect tool for that also. Just follow the instructions there and use the niche browser to bring ideas and research to you. Then write a post.

And since I even need to learn the in’s and out’s of doing this, I added a video I found below.

I have three places that I put shortcuts on my computer:

1. The taskbar
2. The desktop
3. The start menu

The number indicates how much I plan on using the software. After playing with it for less than a day, the Niche Browser is on my taskbar.

Niche Browser Research Instructions

Update: This product is crap. You can read the rest of the post for a laugh or two. I wrote it as I purchased. It is a massive CB mall type site, quickly whipped together. Every template is filled with Latin filler. Don’t know why you need so many files. The only difference between each is the url of the site. This was probably done to bloat the size of the package to make think it’s a deal. For the most part the layouts were decent, but just give me one of each and I will fill in the url. The links to the bonuses are broken. I figured out the urls though. No instructions. Not even a read me file. Just a mass of files to take up space. Shit, I keep updating this update. The WordPress themes aren’t even themes. Just one file. God damn.

My landing pages look average for the most part. I created them myself. And there is a limit on what you can do yourself. If you have browsed the Clickbank marketplace a bit, you have probably run into one or two or maybe even a buttload of products that you know are just not going to make it big. Who knows if the product is good? I am just not going to buy it because the sales page looks like crap.

Don’t judge a book by it’s cover. The only reason that phrase is repeated so often is that everyone does it, a lot. If you are trying to sell something, you can’t exactly tell the customer to not judge a product by it’s cover. He is investing money. He judged your sales page the instant he landed on it. And if it looks half-assed, then he will assume that your products are half-assed.

Well, today I ran into a product that had me itching to open up my wallet. That’s the truth. If you have read this blog for a while, you know I don’t pull punches. I have ranked high in the past for the names of major Clickbank products, only to say that they are crap. The product is Ajax Landing Pages.

Face it, the internet keeps moving. A year ago, a run of the mill landing page would do. A few years before that, you could have slopped up a few words and clip art and made some sales. But now, you are competing against some good looking landing pages. Buying a pack of these may not be in the budget for those starting out, but when you start making money, it might save a lot of time creating your own or a lot of money having custom pages done.

And that’s what Ajax Landing Pages gives to you, awesome looking landing pages. How do I know? I got the smaller pack.

The $95 pack comes with a combination of 160,000 Clickbank product landing pages with twenty themes and twenty matching WordPress themes. Did this fall in my lap or what? With the plan I have of combining niche blogging with PPC, this is the perfect compliment and why I am writing the post even before I go buy the product. They come with opt-in forms on the side to build your list and

And if you can’t afford that right now, you can buy the $27 pack with 24,000 landing pages and all the WordPress themes. That’s what I did just for a peek.

Will I be buying the bigger pack? Probably, when I need that many landing pages. If these work out, then the sales alone should pay for the bigger one. And then you can count on another post. First I gotta unzip the damn things. But, you know. I have to prime the pump. And hitting a product from a few different angles with a few different posts on this blog can only help with good old Google. This is going to be a hard one. The product name is generic meant to rank for the generic phrase, unlike a product named "CB Killer Landing Pages" or something more Clickbankish.

I was right in the middle of figuring out how to make custom pages for landing pages on WordPress and I found one free theme here. It has custom exit pages and landing pages. So I even give you all a "free" out. I understand making money on a shoestring. It’s how I started. Free, cheap, or cheaper, your choice. But take a look at Ajax Landing Pages and free may not be an option.

There are plenty of systems out there. The problem with systems is that they tend to get you in a rut. I have talked a lot about promoting Clickbank products with Adwords. There are many ebooks available on the subject. The problem is that most of them take one technique and expand it to the point it is a system with no regards to any other possible technique that may have a synergistic effect.

Use only exact match keywords. Content bids are worthless. Content bids are a gold mine. Building landing pages is a waste of time. Not using landing pages means you’re missing out. I have heard them all. The key is to take each suggestion with a grain of salt and test for yourself. If someone thinks that the method they use is the next best thing since money fell out of the sky and filled your driveway, then they probably have something worth learning, but not to the exclusion of other methods. Because the guy using the other method is saying the same thing about his techniques.

I say listen to them all. Instead of following in a guru’s footsteps, spend enough time learning the method, take from it what you need and move on to another. It beats getting stuck in a system that may change due to changes at Google, too many competitors or many other factors. I guess my point is that a system is a tool and you want as many tools as you can fit in your toolbox.

Google Adwords Quality Score

There are many factors that contribute to how much you will end up paying for a specific click. Clickthrough rate is one of them and we will get to that in other posts. But there is one big one that will effect your cost per click before you even start getting clicks and that is the Adwords Quality Score. Now, I am not going to go into detail on this one. Instead I will refer you to a few other blogs:

• The Adwords Quality Score - Startup hustle goes through a few of the broad factors that effect the quality rating that Google Adwords will give your compaigns. The one I am mainly concerned with in this post in the landing page.
• Page Loading Speed Does Adwords Quality Score – It’s new factor, but it counts. If your page loads slow, you pay more.
• How to Change Your Landing Page for Better Quality Scores – Now we’re getting somewhere. On to the blogs section.

A Niche Blogging Plan

This is a blog. Obviously, I must know a little bit about blogging. And lately I have been working up a blueprint for launching a new one. Then I will be writing posts here explaining each step. This is a work in progress, so I may make good moves, I may make bad ones, but you will know them all. I currently do make money online, albeit a little haphazardly. By that I mean, I have daily plans of action but everything is not organized as well as I would want it. I jumped into a indepth study of blogging while publishing two site that actually could be called "blogs". I have other WordPress sites, but they are static for the most part, mini-sites.

What I want to do this time is use other niche blog plans as a starting point and then max them out with knowledge I have with a special added twist at the end. First a few blueprints:

• DoshDosh’s Niche Blog MasterPlan - This is one of the first I ran into and my starting point. Read up. DoshDosh has a heavily trafficked blog.
• An Introduction to Keyword Sniping – I will be using aspects of this one, but we won’t be going for ad clicks. We will be after commissions of up to 75%.
• The 90 Day Challenge – Just found this one. Haven’t had time to read the 400 page book, but I did take a look at the spreadsheet. You will have 12 blogs by day 66. The goal: $100/month. Our goal is bigger, but the process may be slower. I believe in squeezing all I can out of a site. I am shooting for $100/day from one site. It’s very possible. The only thing I am completely unsure of is the timeline. We will know that at the end, this being the first time I set myself up to do this.
• My Brainstorming on a Niche Blog Network – This is where is started. And this is the mindmap I have been working on.

I could go on, but those basically cover it. We will not be looking at the social aspects of blogging until later. That is the icing on the cake. It will bring in more sales. We are going to try to cover all the bases and see what this does to the profit from one single domain.

Niche Blog + PPC

Now were talking. You’ve built a blog that gets traffic from search engines and has subscribers. Why not through a little bit of advertising in the mix? I have yet to try this exact combo, to tell you the truth, but it’s what any ecommerce site that wants to make more sales does. I run one for a day job. I can pick from thousands of profitable keywords because of tracking. If I am on page 2 of the natural results, I can make myself page 1 with Adwords with proven words.

You may rank in the search engines for certain keywords. There will be many long tail keywords among the mix that keyword tools just do not pick up. These can be harvested for use in PPC campaigns. In the same way, using broad matches in Adwords will enable you to capture long tail keywords with your statistics software. These can be used in SEO to increase ranking for lesser known keywords.

With the right type of tracking in place, you can take your ROI calculations down to specific keywords. This will allow you to remove words that just don’t produce.

If you build a blog with natural ranking, your Quality Score with have to reflect this. You will get a lower cost per click because your site will have some natural ranking. This is much better than having a fly by night landing page. I has also heard that having separate domains in the display and destination url can lower your Quality Score. So sending hits directly to the vendor through an affiliate link or even through a tracking service may also raise your cost per click.

So those two benefit wrap up in a pretty nice package that I will be fully exploring, evolving, and testing.

On The Road Map

This is a rough draft of how I plan to pull this off. There will be updates in this plan as I go and when I am done, I hope to have a pretty nice outline down.

• The Blog: Profit-ware.com
• The Topic: Making Money from Ebay. It is not exactly a niche. There are many, many ways to make money from Ebay from being a seller to being an affiliate. I should have a better domain name, but I think I can make that up with the history of the site. It used to be a site about making money on Ebay back in the day and has a PageRank of 4. The PageRank gives me a huge running start. Don’t get me wrong. But I am here to make money too. So I figured I might as well use my assets.
• Find some products to promote related to Ebay. At first I will do a search in Clickbank. I will find a few products and write some reviews of them. I am not sure now whether I will make these pages or posts. I am not sure pages can send pings and I want the extra links that can give. I think I will start with ten and build from there. These reviews will be a menu on the sidebar. Later, as I do more research, I will pick up other products to promote from other companies and I will drop unprofitable links once sales start coming in.
• With each of the products above, I will build a set of terms for the Alinks plugin so that the product pages get plenty of varied anchor text.
• I will set a schedule for submitting the site as a whole to different and various sites, documenting each campaign here.
• After I write each post, I will tweak everything from the headline to the slug and use the new and improved Google Adwords keyword tool to get an overview of terms I will be trying to target. Not much time spent here. Just enough. Then I will seek links to each and every post whenever I can. I like to call this embedding a site in the internet. Each page will have links from multiple domains.
• I will be using a set outline to write articles so that I can write them faster. I will be lenient with the article blueprint.

So that’s the plan for now. Each step will have a post. When I see missing parts of the outline, I will add them, do them, and then write about them here. I guess I could have written an ebook and sold it for $49.95, but I needed material for this blog. Damn the luck.