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.

The book I am speaking of is Power Linking by Jack Humphrey who now has a book called Social Power Linking. But he also has a free one called the Authority Blackbook, but I digress. Power Linking is an awesome book if a little outdated. One of the type’s of sites just showing on the internet scene were search engine services. These sites would create private search engines for your site, but host them on their domain.

Some of these search engine providers had built quite a ranking with Google. By linking to the results of your queries and the sitemaps of your sites on these sites, you could instantly notify Google of this mass of backlinks to your site.

I stopped using the method mainly because of other options. But I guess the method is just as valid as any. I was running a search for authority sites the other day and found that the tactic is still alive and well and is used my many high traffic sites.

Why do I call it a tactic? Because Google won’t find these links naturally. Someone had to link to the pages. And I figure, if the big guys do it, why not?

I was using SEO Elite. One of the most useful functions is finding authority sites. You type in a keyword. It finds high ranking sites and then analyzes the sites that link to those high ranking sites. It’s amazing. You discover sometimes like 20% of the high ranking sites with a link from the same authority site. And this is how I discovered that the query tactic was still alive and well. And it counted. I had just seen the results.

The Authority Link Via Query Tactic

In fact, for off-site SEO, SEO Elite is probably the only tool you need. By using it, you discover the linking tactics that won’t be written about in blogs and on forums for months, before everyone else does.

The key to this tactic is linking to high ranking domains that somehow reference your site, but do not have a directory of any type. With a directory, the search engines would naturally find the link. But since the only way to find the reference to your site is through a search, you must search first and then link to the results page.

I discovered a post the describes a way of getting seven of these links. This generator builds the links for you. Mine I pasted below:

• URL Trends
• Whois.net
• Domain Tools
• About Us Wiki
• Quick Whois
• iWebTools
• Dawjee.com

To tell you the truth I am not sure how valuable these links are. I just know they appeared for other sites and any links can’t hurt you, they can only be devalued to the point they have no effect. So for the time spent, not an issue.

Black Hat

But since having like sites link yours counts more than any random site, it is good to have a tool like SEO Elite. I did research for one site and found out that the EPA web site has a 404 referrer page. The page is just a list of the last referrers that received a 404 error. It is not a .com, not a .edu, but a .gov.  And it really depends on how black hat you want to be, if you use this type of information or not.

Staying in Your Niche

But not all this information from SEO Elite is just fodder for black hat SEO’s. Some of it just good information to have. It cuts out the B.S. of which links are more valuable. Yes, having 10,000 links to your site is great. But wouldn’t it be better to start with the 100 links that pack 50% of the linking power of the whole list combined.

The same search turned up a lot of forums, blogs and niche directories that I never would have run into if I had followed just a generic linking campaign, the one size fits all of submitting to directories, article marketing, and other methods that can be applied to any site.

Any way you attain an edge is the way to go. While others are using link building tactics that they learned in a two year old ebook or from a blog post, tools like SEO Elite give you access to real time tactics. The link magic that the ebooks and blog posts are written about, before everyone knows.

The way you speak and the way you write about subjects is unique. At least, it should be. While other newbie affiliate marketers are looking for the newest niche and hunting down keywords that people are using, you can just write the way you speak.

A few years ago, that’s what I was doing. Looking for niches that no one else was promoting. Was I interested in the products I was trying to sell. Nope. Did I make some sales? Yes, but it was hard work. The niches were so small that I had to work with a lot of different products. I had to do keyword research on subjects that had little to do with what I was interested in, so I didn’t know when the keywords were the wrong ones to use.

Something I could promote, lessons on programming PHP. Why? Because I do it. I learned it from books and online. But I wanted to learn specific things, like how to scrape news site or how to build auto responder software. I searched for concrete lessons on doing these things and other similar things. My concrete lessons, I mean down to earth. Tutorials that would show me how to do something specific and useful in the real world. I found plenty of lessons on how to write something that would print "Hello World."

But when I went to Google and looked for ways to do this, I used the words I speak with. I didn’t use programmer speak. So I didn’t find the lessons until later on, by accident, because I was using the wrong words. But they weren’t the wrong words. If someone had written a tutorial with the words I spoke with I would have found it.

And if you speak and write in lay terms about a complex subject, you can reap the benefits of traffic. Because in a world of internet users, you are bound to find someone who is looking for the specific words you used to explain a subject, even if they aren’t the most common. Trust your own voice.

And I will give you one tip of finding subjects like this, where your unique searches can help you beat the niche finding blues. Use your Google Search History. If you use Google as a search engine, sign up for an account, so that it will save your search history. I did back in 2005. Every now and then I check through it. What I look for? A bunch of searches in a row on a similar subject. It meant I was looking for something and not finding it. Which also means that there may be other people out there doing this.

When I got my new laptop with Vista on it, I looked for tutorials on how to install Apache webserver on it, because I was having issues. I didn’t find all the info I was looking for in one place, so I wrote an article. That article is still ranked high in Google. When I was trying to understand how to replace the weatherstrip on an Andersen sliding door for my dayjob at All About Doors and Windows, I didn’t find anything that was easy to understand even in books, let alone online. So I went to work, figured it out and wrote the article because I knew that others had to be looking for the info. The article is ranked right under the Andersen website in Google.

So another tip, keep notes whenever you are looking for info that is hard to find. And use your family and friends. Ask them about the last time they gave up looking for something.

But what if you don’t have a Google Search History or friends and family. Then head on over to Yahoo Answers and browse around for a while in the topics you have knowledge of. Yes, those are actual questions that people ask because they couldn’t find the answer. Some are so simple.

And this is why a niche is not necessary. What is necessary is forward momentum. Getting started just for the sake of starting. Show yourself that you mean action and affiliate marketing is not just fodder for a bunch of new daydreams about where you can be five years from now. Make the dream a reality. Start.

I know that I just told you to start and a have yet to mention methods. That’s because I am building a list. I want a complete list of methods. Show all options available. But this will give you a start on creating a list of topics that you have knowledge of.

I have also added a forum on this site, for specific questions that I am missing in my posts.