How do You ‘Sell’ Your Blog?

am no stranger (nor are you, probably) to how the wider media sometimes depicts bloggers: as closeted wannabees who add to the rise of ‘faux journalism’. Books are currently being published on the subject.

This could understandably contribute to any beginner blogger’s self-consciousness; especially those who are staring at their ad revenue reports, wondering if any money is every going to start showing up.

I used to be bashful when I talked about my blog. Not anymore. Why should I be? I’m proud of it. I’m proud of what it catalogues; thoughts, my goals, even my ambitions.

No doubt you feel the same about yours, too. But any hint of shyness, or pause, when you talk of your blog is hardly going to attract readers. Or advertisers.

Recently, I migrated from Blogger to Wordpress; a rather stressful time for me, for I was deathly afraid that over a year’s worth of work and effort would somehow evaporate into nothingness (luckily, it didn’t). I had several reasons for the change; the main ones being I was a little tired of the limits of Blogger, and I wanted a purer control of my own writing and ‘brand’, for lack of a better word.

When I discussed my plans with non-bloggers, they all asked me “Why?” Why change? Why bother? What’s the difference?
I replied, “I just felt like it was time. It didn’t feel comfortable anymore.”

Granted, this was rather a drastic change. It needn’t be. Standard templates only need to be tweaked slightly to give yourself the opportunity to individualise (and hence ‘validate’) your blogging status. This mightn’t be important to some people; for others it just might be the chance to assert their creative will, and this newly found confidence can lead them on to loftier plans.

And sometimes stamping your own blogging status begins with how you speak about blogging in the first place.

Here’s my challenge:
Put your blog’s URL as part of your signature in your email (if you haven’t already).
Mention it in conversations.
Enter blog carnivals.
Do what you can (short of spamming, naturally!) to spread the word of your blog.
What are you waiting for?
Help sell your blog to the world. Isn’t it worth it?

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How to Get Your Blog to 100,000 Visitors and Beyond

I’ve had a lot of requests to detail how I got 100,000 visitors (now past 150k as I write this) to Free Money Finance. While the topic is not clearly in the subject area of personal finances, it can be part of how you increase your income (and thus improve your net worth), so I’ll cover it. Plus, this will serve to help out other bloggers as well as remind me of what else I need to do to grow this blog. If this isn’t your cup of tea, simply ignore these posts. I post frequently enough that a new, money-related post is not far behind this one.
I’ll over this topic in a series of “steps”, each one presenting a simple, unique step I took to get to 100,000 visitors. I’ll also try to keep the steps in the order I did them, though several happened simultaneously, so that won’t be easy.
That said, here we go.

Step 1 to getting to 100,000 visitors and beyond: Pick the right topic.

This might seem to be a simple step (and maybe even counter blogging — can’t I just blog about what I want?), but it’s critical. To me, the right topic is one that:
You’re passionate about — If you’re not passionate about it, you won’t post regularly, you’ll lose interest, and your readers will be able to tell your heart isn’t really in it (and they’ll go away). If you are, your readers will identify with you and get to “love” your personality. And they’ll come back. And tell their friends to stop by.
You’re knowledgeable about — You don’t have to be an expert on the topic, but you need to know more than most people to get a lot of people to your site. Otherwise, why would they stop by (or come back)?
Is it popular — Let’s face it, if you want to write about the exercise habits of your hamster, not many people are likely to visit your blog. You have to have a topic that many, many people want to read about if you want to get to 100k. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t write about your hamster (or anything else a large group wouldn’t want to read about). If you blog for your own pleasure, then go for it — make Hammy a star. But if you want to get to 100,000 visitors, you need a topic (like personal finances) that many people what to know more about.
Watch out for the rest of FMF’s series later in the week at Free Money Finance.

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26 Steps to 15,000 visitors a day

The following will build a successful site in 1 years time via Google alone. It can be done faster if you are a real go getter, or everyones favorite: a self starter.

A) Prep Work:
Prep work and begin building content. Yep, long before the domain name is settled on, start putting together notes to build at least a 100 page site. That's just for openers. That's 100 pages of "real content", as opposed to link pages, resource pages, about/copyright/tos...etc fluff pages.

B) Domain name:
Easily brandable. You want "google.com" and not "mykeyword.com". Keyword domains are out - branding and name recognition are in - big time in. The value of keywords in a domain name have never been less to se's. Learn the lesson of "goto.com" becomes "Overture.com" and why they did it. It's one of the powerful gut check calls I've ever seen on the internet. That took resolve and nerve to blow away several years of branding. (that's a whole 'nuther article, but learn the lesson as it applies to all of us).
[via search engine world]

C) Site Design:
The simpler the better. Rule of thumb: text content should out weight the html content. The pages should validate and be usable in everything from Lynx to leading edge browsers. eg: keep it close to html 3.2 if you can. Spiders are not to the point they really like eating html 4.0 and the mess that it can bring. Stay away from heavy: flash, dom, java, java script. Go external with scripting languages if you must have them - there is little reason to have them that I can see - they will rarely help a site and stand to hurt it greatly due to many factors most people don't appreciate (search engines distaste for js is just one of them).Arrange the site in a logical manner with directory names hitting the top keywords you wish to hit.You can also go the other route and just throw everything in root (this is rather controversial, but it's been producing good long term results across many engines).Don't clutter and don't spam your site with frivolous links like "best viewed" or other counter like junk. Keep it clean and professional to the best of your ability.
Learn the lesson of Google itself - simple is retro cool - simple is what surfers want.
Speed isn't everything, it's almost the only thing. Your site should respond almost instantly to a request. If you get into even 3-4 seconds delay until "something happens" in the browser, you are in long term trouble. That 3-4 seconds response time may vary for site destined to live in other countries than your native one. The site should respond locally within 3-4 seconds (max) to any request. Longer than that, and you'll lose 10% of your audience for every second. That 10% could be the difference between success and not.

D) Page Size:
The smaller the better. Keep it under 15k if you can. The smaller the better. Keep it under 12k if you can. The smaller the better. Keep it under 10k if you can - I trust you are getting the idea here. Over 5k and under 10k. Ya - that bites - it's tough to do, but it works. It works for search engines, and it works for surfers. Remember, 80% of your surfers will be at 56k or even less.

E) Content:
Build one page of content and put online per day at 200-500 words. If you aren't sure what you need for content, start with the Overture keyword suggestor and find the core set of keywords for your topic area. Those are your subject starters.

F) Density, position, yada, yada, yada...
Simple, old fashioned, seo from the ground up.Use the keyword once in title, once in description tag, once in a heading, once in the url, once in bold, once in italic, once high on the page, and hit the density between 5 and 20% (don't fret about it). Use good sentences and speel check it ;-) Spell checking is becoming important as se's are moving to auto correction during searches. There is no longer a reason to look like you can't spell (unless you really are phonetically challenged).

G) Outbound Links:
From every page, link to one or two high ranking sites under that particular keyword. Use your keyword in the link text (this is ultra important for the future).

H) Cross links:
<1>(cross links are links WITHIN the same site)Link to on topic quality content across your site. If a page is about food, then make sure it links it to the apples and veggies page. Specifically with Google, on topic cross linking is very important for sharing your pr value across your site. You do NOT want an "all star" page that out performs the rest of your site. You want 50 pages that produce 1 referral each a day and do NOT want 1 page that produces 50 referrals a day. If you do find one page that drastically out produces the rest of the site with Google, you need to off load some of that pr value to other pages by cross linking heavily. It's the old share the wealth thing.

I) Put it Online:
Don't go with virtual hosting - go with a stand alone ip.Make sure the site is "crawlable" by a spider. All pages should be linked to more than one other page on your site, and not more than 2 levels deep from root. Link the topic vertically as much as possible back to root. A menu that is present on every page should link to your sites main "topic index" pages (the doorways and logical navigation system down into real content).Don't put it online before you have a quality site to put online. It's worse to put a "nothing" site online, than no site at all. You want it flushed out from the start.
Go for a listing in the ODP. If you have the budget, then submit to Looksmart and Yahoo. If you don't have the budget, then try for a freebie on Yahoo (don't hold your breath).

J) Submit:
Submit the root to: Google, Fast, Altavista, WiseNut, (write Teoma), DirectHit, and Hotbot. Now comes the hard part - forget about submissions for the next six months. That's right - submit and forget.

K) Logging and Tracking:
Get a quality logger/tracker that can do justice to inbound referrals based on log files (don't use a lame graphic counter - you need the real deal). If your host doesn't support referrers, then back up and get a new host. You can't run a modern site without full referrals available 24x7x365 in real time.

L) Spiderlings:
Watch for spiders from se's. Make sure those that are crawling the full site, can do so easily. If not, double check your linking system (use standard hrefs) to make sure the spider found it's way throughout the site. Don't fret if it takes two spiderings to get your whole site done by Google or Fast. Other se's are pot luck and doubtful that you will be added at all if not within 6 months.

M) Topic directories:
Almost every keyword sector has an authority hub on it's topic. Go submit within the guidelines.

N) Links:
Look around your keyword sector in Googles version of the ODP. (this is best done AFTER getting an odp listing - or two). Find sites that have links pages or freely exchange links. Simply request a swap. Put a page of on topic, in context links up your self as a collection spot.Don't freak if you can't get people to swap links - move on. Try to swap links with one fresh site a day. A simple personal email is enough. Stay low key about it and don't worry if site Z won't link with you - they will - eventually they will.

O) Content:
One page of quality content per day. Timely, topical articles are always the best. Try to stay away from to much "bloggin" type personal stuff and look more for "article" topics that a general audience will like. Hone your writing skills and read up on the right style of "web speak" that tends to work with the fast and furious web crowd.
Lots of text breaks - short sentences - lots of dashes - something that reads quickly.
Most web users don't actually read, they scan. This is why it is so important to keep low key pages today. People see a huge overblown page by random, and a portion of them will hit the back button before trying to decipher it. They've got better things to do that waste 15 seconds (a stretch) at understanding your whiz bang flash menu system. Because some big support site can run flashed out motorhead pages, that is no indication that you can. You don't have the pull factor they do.
Use headers, and bold standout text liberally on your pages as logical separators. I call them scanner stoppers where the eye will logically come to rest on the page.

P) Gimmicks:
Stay far away from any "fades of the day" or anything that appears spammy, unethical, or tricky. Plant yourself firmly on the high ground in the middle of the road.

Q) Link backs:
When YOU receive requests for links, check the site out before linking back with them. Check them through Google and their pr value. Look for directory listings. Don't link back to junk just because they asked. Make sure it is a site similar to yours and on topic.

R) Rounding out the offerings:
Use options such as Email-a-friend, forums, and mailing lists to round out your sites offerings. Hit the top forums in your market and read, read, read until your eyes hurt you read so much.Stay away from "affiliate fades" that insert content on to your site.

S) Beware of Flyer and Brochure Syndrome:
If you have an ecom site or online version of bricks and mortar, be careful not to turn your site into a brochure. These don't work at all. Think about what people want. They aren't coming to your site to view "your content", they are coming to your site looking for "their content". Talk as little about your products and yourself as possible in articles (raise eyebrows...yes, I know).

T) Build one page of content per day:
Head back to the Overture suggestion tool to get ideas for fresh pages.

U) Study those logs:
After 30-60 days you will start to see a few referrals from places you've gotten listed. Look for the keywords people are using. See any bizarre combinations? Why are people using those to find your site? If there is something you have over looked, then build a page around that topic. Retro engineer your site to feed the search engine what it wants.If your site is about "oranges", but your referrals are all about "orange citrus fruit", then you can get busy building articles around "citrus" and "fruit" instead of the generic "oranges".The search engines will tell you exactly what they want to be fed - listen closely, there is gold in referral logs, it's just a matter of panning for it.

V) Timely Topics:
Nothing breeds success like success. Stay abreast of developments in your keyword sector. If big site "Z" is coming out with product "A" at the end of the year, then build a page and have it ready in October so that search engines get it by December. eg: go look at all the Xbox and XP sites in Google right now - those are sites that were on the ball last summer.

W) Friends and Family:
Networking is critical to the success of a site. This is where all that time you spend in forums will pay off. pssst: Here's the catch-22 about forums: lurking is almost useless. The value of a forum is in the interaction with your fellow colleagues and cohorts. You learn long term by the interaction - not by just reading.Networking will pay off in link backs, tips, email exchanges, and in general put you "in the loop" of your keyword sector.Take Giacomos first post in the other thread mentioned above - he could have lurked, read, made his judgements, learned, and went off to write up his thesis. However, the step forward and the interaction has probably taught him far more about what he is concerned with than if you would have read the forums front to back. In the process he met some people that may in turn be useful resources in the future.

X) Notes, Notes, Notes:
If you build one page per day, you will find that brain storm like inspiration will hit you in the head at some magic point. Whether it is in the shower (dry off first), driving down the road (please pull over), or just parked at your desk, write it down! 10 minutes of work later, you will have forgotten all about that great idea you just had. Write it down, and get detailed about what you are thinking. When the inspirational juices are no longer flowing, come back to those content ideas. It sounds simple, but it's a life saver when the ideas stop coming.

Y) Submission check at six months:
Walk back through your submissions and see if you got listed in all the search engines you submitted to after six months. If not, then resubmit and forget again. Try those freebie directories again too.

Z) Build one page of quality content per day:
Starting to see a theme here? Google loves content, lots of quality content. Broad based over a wide range of keywords. At the end of a years time, you should have around 400 pages of content. That will get you good placement under a wide range of keywords, generate recip links, and overall position your site to stand on it's own two feet.
Do those 26 things, and I guarantee you that in ones years time you will call your site a success. It will be drawing between 500 and 2000 referrals a day from search engines. If you build a good site with an average of 4 to 5 pages per user, you should be in the 10-15k page views per day range in one years time. What you do with that traffic is up to you, but that is more than enough to "do something" with.

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How to Choose a Niche Topic for your Blog

The approach I’ve taken to build a business around blogging has been to build multiple blogs around niche topics. I describe the reasons for this in my post One Blog Many Categories or Many Blogs? but I regularly am asked about how I choose my niche topics to blog about. In this post I’d like to outline a few questions that I tend to ask myself when considering a new topic. I hope it helps:

Are You Interested in the Topic?
A friend of mine explained it this way recently:
“Probably the best place to start thinking about what your blog should be about is to consider what YOU are about.”
Perhaps that’s a slightly awkward way of saying start by identifying your own interests, passions and energy levels for topics. While it might be tempting to start blogs based on what other people are interested in or what makes commercial sense there is little logic in starting a blog on a topic that you have no interest in. There are two main reasons for this.
Firstly if you want to grow a popular and well respected blog it can take considerable time and you’ll be needing to take a long term approach to building it up. As a result it’s well worth asking yourself ‘can I see myself still writing on this topic in 12 months time?’ If you can’t I’d suggest finding another topic.
The second reason is that you readers will quickly discern if you are passionate about your topic or not. Blogs that are dry and passionless don’t tend to grow - it makes sense really as no one wants to read something that the author doesn’t really believe in.

Is the Topic Popular?
While the blogger’s interest is important it’s not enough on it’s own to build a popular blog. Another crucial ingredient is that people WANT to read information on the topic you’re writing on. The law of Supply and Demand is what most business students are taught in their first semester of of studying economics and it comes into play here also. You might be interested in your topic but unless others are also you’ll always have an uphill battle in building a highly read blog.
Of course keep in mind that you are writing in a medium with a global audience of many millions and as a result you don’t need a topic that everyone is searching, just one that some people are searching for because even it’s something that even a small percentage of people have an active interest in it can be a lucrative area.

Is the Topic one that is growing or shrinking?
Also keep in mind that popular topics change over time. Obviously it’s great to get on a topic before it becomes big rather than when it’s on the decline. This is not easy to do of course but predict the next big thing that people will be searching for and you could be onto a winner.
Get in the habit of being on the lookout for what people are into. I constantly ask myself ‘what will people be searching the web for in 6 to 12 months?’
Keep an eye on what people are into and what the latest trends are. Do this online but also keep an eye on TV, magazines, the papers and even the conversations you have with friends.

What competition is there?
One of the traps that some bloggers get sucked into when choosing a topic is to go for the most popular topics with no regard for the competition that they might face in those markets. The chances are if you have identified a niche that you think is ‘hot’ at the moment that someone else will have also. It’s demand and supply coming into play again - for any level of demand for information on a topic there will only be a certain number of sources of that information that will be needed on that topic.
The web is becoming a more and more cluttered place and sometimes it feels that there are no niches that are left open to blog about. While this is true in some of the more popular topics - remember that you don’t have to go for the topic that everyone is searching for. In fact sometimes it’s some of the less popular topics that have little or no competition that are the best earners.
I have one friend who after years of attempting to do well writing about gadgets swapped to ‘ride on lawn mowers’ (a topic he’d been researching for a purchase he was making). He was amazed to find that after just a couple of months of writing on his new topic that it was doing significantly more traffic (and making quite a bit more) than his gadget websites ever had.
As I’ve said many times before on this blog - become a big fish in a small pond rather than a small fish in a big pond.

What is the competition neglecting?
This is a great question that is obviously related to the last one on number of competition. It attempts to find ‘gaps’ that are not yet filled. While your competition might have the advantage of an established audience, you have the advantage of flexibility and can position your blog very quickly to fill a gap in the niche that you might observe - in doing so you create a sub-niche within the larger topic.

Will you have enough Content?
One of the key features of successful blogs is that have the ability to continue to come up with fresh content on their topic for long periods of time. Conversely, one of the things that kills many blogs is that their authors run out of things to say.
Answering the question regarding whether there is enough content can be done on two levels:
1. Do YOU have enough content within YOU as an author? This really comes back to the question we asked above about your passion, interests and energy for the topic (so I’ll leave it at that).
2. Do you have access to enough other sources of content and inspiration? There are many web based tools around these days that can help you in coming up with content. Some places to check out on your topic to see what news is about include Google News, Topix, Yahoo! News, Bloglines, Technorati and Blog Pulse (among others).

Are there Income Streams on the Topic?
Not everyone will need to ask this question if their intention is not to build a blog that has an entrepreneurial edge to it but as this blog is on the topic of making money from blogs I’ll address it.
If you are interested in earning an income from blogging you will need to also factor in some investigation of whether the topic that you’ve chosen has any obvious potential income streams. As I’ve written previously, there are many ways of earning money from blogs - however the problem is that not every topic is going to be suitable for every potential income stream. For example, contextual ad programs like AdSense and YPN work really well for some topics but hardly earn anything from others (you might like to read my post on finding high paying ads on AdSense to explore this topic). Similarly some blogs do fantastically out of affiliate programs (the key is to find affiliate programs that match your topic closely) and others are better suited to impression based ads (those with high traffic levels).

Choose a Niche
At this point it’s time to choose a topic for your blog. It’s probably unlikely that you’ll find the perfect topic on all of the fronts above. While it’d be great to find a topic that you’re passionate about that just happens to have massive demand and no competition - but the reality is that most topics topics that you come up with will have at least one weakness to them. Don’t let this get you down - there comes a time when you just need to make a decision and start blogging. The key is being aware of what the weakness is so that you can work to overcome it.

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What is blog?

So what is a Blog anyway?
It’s a good question to ask at the beginning of a Blogging for Beginners Series as it is a question I am asked every week.
There are a number of ways I could answer this question ranging from the broad to the highly technical.

Here are a few definitions from other much wiser people on the ‘what is a blog?’ question to get us started (and once you’ve seen what they have to say on the topic I’ll share my own thoughts):
‘A weblog is a hierarchy of text, images, media objects and data, arranged chronologically, that can be viewed in an HTML browser.’ Source

‘A frequent, chronological publication of personal thoughts and Web links.’ Source

‘From “Web log.” A blog is basically a journal that is available on the web. The activity of updating a blog is “blogging” and someone who keeps a blog is a “blogger.”‘ Source

‘A weblog is kind of a continual tour, with a human guide who you get to know. There are many guides to choose from, each develops an audience, and there’s also comraderie and politics between the people who run weblogs, they point to each other, in all kinds of structures, graphs, loops, etc.’ Source

‘A blog is basically a journal that is available on the web. The activity of updating a blog is “blogging” and someone who keeps a blog is a “blogger.” Blogs are typically updated daily using software that allows people with little or no technical background to update and maintain the blog. Postings on a blog are almost always arranged in cronological order with the most recent additions featured most prominantly.’ Source

‘A blog is a website in which items are posted on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order. The term blog is a shortened form of weblog or web log. Authoring a blog, maintaining a blog or adding an article to an existing blog is called “blogging”. Individual articles on a blog are called “blog posts,” “posts” or “entries”. A person who posts these entries is called a “blogger”. A blog comprises text, hypertext, images, and links (to other web pages and to video, audio and other files). Blogs use a conversational style of documentation. Often blogs focus on a particular “area of interest”, such as Washington, D.C.’s political goings-on. Some blogs discuss personal experiences.’ Source.

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The 5 fool-proof strategies to promote your mini-sites.

Promoting your mini-site doesn't have to be expensive and cumbersome. As a matter of fact, if you stick to these 5 strategies you'll get more than enough traffic to your mini-site to create a pretty healthy income.

Here are the 5 strategies I use:

Strategy #1.- Place classifieds in high-circulation ezines.
This simple but highly effective strategy can easily jump-start your business the very same day the classified is run. Ezine ads (when crafted properly) can bring in large ammounts of pre-qualified traffic to your mini-site... and using the killer mini-site formula you learned from this course, you'll be converting a large percentage of those visitors into paying customers.

The trick is finding high-circulation ezines that target your niche. An invaluable resource I use for this task is Jerome Chapman's TopEzineAds.com. If you've never heard of his site, visit it right now. Of course, his service costs a little bit, and you can do your ezine research on your own when starting out... but trust me, the price is well worth the time you'll save by using it.

Strategy #2.- Start an affiliate program
Starting an affiliate program is another great way to generate thousands of hits to your mini-site. And the great news is that you don't *need* to have your own merchant account to do it anymore... you may use a third party processing system like iBill.com or ClickBank.com and still be able to do it.

You need to keep in mind one thing. If the product or service you are offering from your mini-site has a high price (Usually $100 is a high price for mini-sites), you can offer a 40-60% commission for it... however, if your product has a low price within the range of $20-$40, you'll need to offer affiliates an ever higher commission payout -- you'll earn big money trough the volume of sales you'll generate and your program will be very popular. A good but not very used practice is to open up your affiliate program to your paying customers only... it's up to you to decide wether this would work with your mini-site.

The script I use to handle my affiliate programs is called "The Ultimate Affiliate". It is an excellent script developed by Steve Miles and I'm very happy with it... You can find more information about it at www.groundbreak.com.

Strategy #3.- Give away a freebie
Giving away freebies is one of the most effective ways you can make your visitors come back to your mini-site. The best freebies are special reports or booklets that provide useful information to the user... and contain links back to your site of course.

Giving freebies away can benefit you, but there are smarter tacticts for giving away free stuff. Here are the four that I like the most:

• Start your own newsletter and offer the freebie to new subscribers. This gives you a chance to contact your prospects any time you wish and make announcements of your other products.
• Use one of those "Tell a friend" scripts and ask them to tell two or three friends before getting the booklet. Using this technique may cause your traffic to explode exponentially.
• Get them to bookmark (or even better, to create a shortcut) to your site in exchange for your freebie. This is done with an *excellent* product I just found out exists called "See you again shortcuts". Visit their site now and sign up for a free trial... you'll soon see why this will soon become a well-known killer strategy.
• Ask them to enter their email address and use it to send them your autoresponder sequence... this will raise your sales a lot.

Strategy #4.- Join and participate in discussion groups
In my opinion this is one of the most underestimated traffic-building strategies ever. When you join and participate in forums and discussion groups related to the niche topic, you are in the eyes of *everyone* who reads that group.

Just one good post with your signature file is all it takes to make hundreds of prospects interested in your site. Plus you've got to remember two things:
1) Forums are composed by hundreds, sometimes even thousands of individuals, but only a few of them participate... be one of the top percentage to take advantage of this interesting tactic.

2) Once you post your thoughts, your posting will remain there for months... so any newcomers to that group will still be able to read it. I can't think of any other advertising method that lasts so long online.

Strategy #5.- Create joint ventures
Find any online businesses that target your same niche but don't compete with you directly and talk to them. Create a venture where you are going to promote their products to your customer list and have them do the same for yours. Both parties can track each other's ads and see how profitable this kind of venture is.

The real power behind joint ventures is a personalized and honest refferal. You will tell your customers how the products of XYZ company have helped you out and offer them a few tips on how to use their products better. When a recommendation is personal and honest, people tend to pay much more attention... don't sell to your prospects... just tell them about it.

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Where to host your mini-sites

There are literally thousands of hosting companies out there. Some are good some are bad. And a crucial element is finding a good hosting company that fits our purpose: Hosting mini-sites and getting all the features we need (and want) while keeping our operation costs low.

The search for the perfect web hosting company is over for me. I've found the one that fits right into my needs. It's called ThirdSphere Hosting

I know that sounded like a shameless promotion. Well, yes it is. But for a good reason... it really *is* the company I would recommend you to hire to host all your mini-sites and I'm going to tell you which features are the ones that made me choose it over the other hosting companies.

1) They allow unlimited subdomain names that point to different directories. This means that you can purchase only one domain name and rent their services for only $25 bucks a month and host an unlimited number of mini-sites inside your domain... each pointing to a different directory!

Here's an example. Imagine you purchase the domain bonsai.com You could host these and each will be a different mini-site:
* HowToRaiseA.bonsai.com
* WhereToBuyA.bonsai.com
* TrimmingTechniques.bonsai.com

Can you imagine the money you'll save by getting one good domain name and fitting all your mini-sites in there? Of course you can have multiple domain names... but this is an extremely nice feature to start out with. Plus it helps a lot when trying to rank yourself in the search engines...

2) They provide you with 500 megabytes of disk space which is more than you'll ever need when hosting mini-sites. The average mini-site takes up only 150Kb (plus whatever your infoproduct takes)... so you'll literally have space for as many as you want to put up.

3) They give you a list of incredible infoproducts for you to sell. These products are hot sellers. I'm already selling a cool extra $1,200 per month just for opening a mini-site for each of their products... Those are earnings aside from my other online businesses.

As a suggestion. If you plan to do the same and open up mini-sites for each of their products, don't use their default salesletter. Create a new one with the information I've just given you... be original and you shall succeed.

4) Everything is managed from a pretty neat web interface, so you can literally run your business from *anywhere* in the world (including internet cafes).

5) They have tons of features that are sold elsewhere like: autoresponders, mailing list managers, password protected directories, web statistics, a shopping cart, they also have a great affiliates program...

You know what? I'm gonna stop now and let you take a look at their featuresby yourself. Click here to visit them now. Once you've done that, take a look at the "Discounts" section of this special report... I have a little something in store for you that you'll simply love!.

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Selling other people's products

Affiliate marketing has turned to be one of the most effective ways for content-driven sites to generate revenue without directly offering a product to it's visitors. It is only trough banners, endorsing texts and articles that the content site mentions the products he likes and uses. You can do the same with your mini-sites.

This type of marketing has an advantage for all of the three sides involved. It creates more opportunities for merchants to generate web sales, for affiliate sites to generate a lot of revenue and for consumers a way to find information about the products they want and need without being sold "in their face".

How does it work?
With Affiliate Marketing, a merchant recruits content sites to partner with them as affiliates in exchange for commissions. The merchant provides their advertising banners and links to their affiliates and assigns a commission for each click-through to their site, subscription to their service (a lead), or purchase of their products that is generated from the links.

Affiliates place the tracking code for these ads into their Web pages. Whenever a visitor to the affiliate's site uses these links to generate a click-through, lead, or sale for the merchant, that transaction is tracked online. If a product or service is purchased, the customer pays the merchant directly, and the affiliate is paid a commission for that transaction.

Why affiliate marketing works like a charm
Thousands of people all around the world would like to have an e-commerce enabled website. But most of them don't have the time, patience or will to go through the hassle of creating an exclusive product from scratch, learning every single detail there is to know about online advertising and e-commerce and then setting up a website to sell it.

Busy people like you and I have a very good alternative and opportunity in the affiliate business. Because you still can have a great website with as much content as you want and make tons of sales from it without having to go trough the hassle of building your own products. Plus most of the products you can sell from affiliate programs already have a proven sales record, they are high-quality products that people are already looking for.

It's all about the passion!
Affiliate marketing, just like any other type of selling is about the passion you feel for the topic you are building your website around. If you want to be truly successful with the affiliate programs you offer, you need to build a passion for your field (niche). The #1 mistake that most affiliate sites make is to think that they are selling products. It simply doesn't work that way... you don't want to sell products, you want to entertain them and you want to build a website that tells people about your passions, your interests and the things you like, you want to give them valuable information about the topic your site evolves around and then weave into that content and endorsement for a product or service that you like and use.

You want your visitors to know that you are just trying to give them good information about the topic that interests them (else they wouldn't be at your site in the first place). And if you feel a real passion for that topic, this will reflect in your writing... and if it does, people will perceive that passion and will be excited about it, and it will translate into sales for you.Writing about a product or service in the editorial content of your website is called writing an advertorial (this comes from the combination of the words "ad" and "editorial".

How to write a good advertorial.
Mass media channels like TV, radio, magazines and newspapers endorse products and services in their editorial content all the time. Creating a good advertorial is easy, all you really need to do is talk about a topic you like giving people all the information you know about that specific topic and weaving in a few words about a product or service that has helped you achieve in your area of interest.

Imagine that you know a lot about how to grow bonsai trees. You can easily set up a *great* website with all the information you have, giving specifics about how or why you grow your bonsai trees in a certain manner. You can also have information about the kind of clippers you use to trim your bonsai trees and why you use them, you can also tell your visitors about the top three books that have given you the most valuable information about bonsais.You can start a newsletter that gives out free tips and tricks about bonsai growing (we'll talk about this a bit later in this report).

That sounds like a great site to visit if you're into bonsai-growing doesn't it? When people find a site like this, they bookmark it and come back... they find this site useful and entertaining. Now let's imagine a second site. A site that's full of banner ads and graphics that are trying to sell some bonsai trimming clippers. Which of the two sites above do you think will get the most sales (even if they are both affiliate sites)?

You are absolutely right. The site with all the bonsai information will make the most sales. This takes us to the #2 mistake that most affiliate websites make: Building a mall.

Malls are an excellent idea in the brick and mortar world. They give you a practical way to shop by placing a lot of stores together in a single building... this way, you don't have to drive all around your town to look for a certain product. But it works a lot different on the internet! Here you don't have to drive all around to get to a certain place... everything is just a few mouse clicks away!

If you find yourself at a website that doesn't have anything of value to you, and it's just packed with banners trying to sell you everything under the sun: from shoes to computers to practical jokes... you just click the "Back" of your browser and you are gone from there. You wouldn't buy a thing in there would you? But for some strange reason, people think you will and they keep building sites like these.

That is exactly what you should not fall into! You want to sign in to only three or four affiliate programs that are related to your topic of interest and build a website that endorses those products.

Tips for building a good advertorial mini-site.
The first thing you need to learn is to work within your site. Advertorials don't look like they were coming from an outside source - like a banner ad (which is why banner advertising doesn't work). Banners and outside sources *sell* and people don't like being sold... at least not from a site like yours. If they feel like they are being sold, they will click the back button and you'll have lost them forever.

An advertorial is not a salesletter, don't fall into this trap either. A good advertorial is good information that encourages your visitors on something that you feel a real passion for. You want to fit the affiliate program (the ad) into the context of what you're doing. If you don't you're going to sound just like every other affiliate site out there... the ones that don't make any money! And you don't want your site in this category do you?

There is a good rule of thumb for balancing your advertorial website: The 80-20 rule. This means that the content of your website should be at least 80% of valuable information and just 20% (or less) of sales content. This is not an exact rule, but if you follow it, your site will never be out of balance and fall into the ugly-online-mall category.

How to choose which affiliate programs to join.
A great rule of thumb is: People don't buy from an affiliate site, they buy from you! If you create good will in your visitors, they will trust you and from that trust is where sales are really made. Are you beginning to see the true importance of your website? Your trust is on the line!

Not everyone does this, but my suggestion is that when you are thinking about what programs to join and what products to endorse is... only tell people about products you trust and use. That way, you can really tell them about the product on a firsthand experience.

If you don't do it this way, you could be advertising a really cheesy product that doesn't work. Do this and your image will go down and the trust that you have built will be lost. I'm pretty sure you know that trust is something that you can only earn once.

A good advertorial site "focuses" on building trust, giving out good information and talking about great products. And it does it in a me-to-you, no-hype, straightforward manner. If you grasp and understand this concept, you've won half of the affiliate battle! Here it goes again (just in case you didn't get it the first time):

People don't buy from an affiliate site, they buy from you!

Now that you know that your business is built on trust, let's talk about how to build that trust from your visitors and how to keep them as friends and turn them into customers. The real secret of doing this is...

Build your own prospect list!
Remember I mentioned this in the bonsai site example? Having an in-house opt-in list is one of the most valuable assets any business can have. You want to start your own list by offering a free ezine or a newsletter... you want to have your visitor's names and e-mail addresses so you can communicate with them constantly and build your trust slowly.

Some people try to do this by offering a free report that will be sent to the visitor with an autoresponder. This works sometimes, but you don't want the permission to contact visitors only once... you want a full permission to speak with them and become their friend.

Only trough frequent contact with your list is that you will earn their trust. Giving them good information will make them see you as an expert on the subject and this will earn you their trust. Once they trust you as an expert a good percentage of those opt-ins will feel comfortable enough to buy the products you recommend (You are the expert after all).

And if you keep giving them good information and treating them good as your customers, they will repeat-buy the products and services you endorse. And that's where the real value of your business is.

When a user first visits your website she will scan through it for 8-15 seconds. And if your site caught her attention she will stay an average of only 3 to 5 minutes in total... that's not a lot of time you know? Certainly not enough time to earn someone's trust and sell her something.

It is crucial that you get their permission and their e-mail address so you can follow up with them and build credibility. A good way to encourage them to do this is by giving them a freebie (like an e-book or a special report). You should tell them that if they want the free stuff they will get both - the e-book and a free subscription to your newsletter.

Once you have them in the list, contact themperiodically to stay fresh in their minds.

Can you see the value of a good list? Your opt-in list is worth gold! If I was to be shut down today and could keep just one thing of my business, I wouldn't keep my site or my product, I'd keep my list! Having it with me can help me start a new business tomorrow and make money with it almost instantly. You can not replace the trust of people with *anything*!

The best product I've found so far to develop and manage an opt-in list is a cgi script called "Subscribe-Me" by CGI ScriptCenter (Click here to go to their site- a new window will pop up). This script creates a "Subscribe/Unsubscribe" form in your website and manages all the user handling automatically; it also allows you to send e-mail to your lists in text and html formats and all this is done via a very friendly web-interface.

Once you start developing your own opt-in list, you should always remember something: Give users good value and useful information. Many list owners fall into the mistake of sending only sales messages to their subscribers.

Sales! Sales! SALES! That's all they can think of. Remember that it's their trust you want, not their money. When (and only then) you've earned their trust it is that they'll feel comfortable enough to buy from you... not before.

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Creating your own infoproduct to sell

It is a known fact that more than an impressive 90% of all purchases people make are motivated by impulse. People make quick decisions to buy based on the benefits and solutions offered by the particular product or service they're interested in.

This information is vital when you are thinking about creating a killer mini-site. The key factor of selling in today's society is "Instant gratification"... and that is exactly what you should give them. Nothing else will do. The good news is that technology allows you to fulfill that key factor and deliver your products immediately after your customer purchases from you.

I know this is stuff you already know or at least imagined (else you wouldn't be reading this course). However, there are still thousands of 'so-called' marketers who are not taking advantage of this incredible technology... are you one of them? If you are, you are loosing more sales and money than you could ever imagine... and that is a terrible situation to be in.

What kind of products sell the best from mini-sites?

Yes, you guessed it... informational products (or infoproducts) are by far the highest sellers. This kind of product usually delivers a great deal of useful information or how-to knowledge to the user; they can be any of these types:

* E-books
* Digital audio feeds
* Digital video feeds
* Members only websites

Out of all those categories, the one I prefer are e-books. And I'll tell you why:

1) E-books are easy to produce. If you can convert your writing into html files, you can package it into an e-book.

2) Delivering e-books is done instantly and it takes the least amount of web resources and bandwidth. (Most web hosting companies charge you the extra bandwidth you use exceeding their quota). Maybe in the future, when broadband is the standard in every home, digital audio and video feeds turn into the best solution... but for now, keep it on the safe side and save your customers and yourself a lot of headaches in making everything work.

Even when broadband becomes the standard, you can pack your audio and video feeds into an e-book for easier distribution. Some marketers are already using this kind of technology in their publications. Check out this url as an example of a mini-site selling digital audio inside an e-book: http://www.MarketingTwister.com/

3) Unlike "Members only" websites, e-books are considered by most as a one-shot deal. People don't expect you to update your e-book frequently. This gives you more time to create even more infoproducts and add them to your cashflow... thus, increasing your monthly profits.

Here are the three strategies I use to crank outkiller infoproducts every time I need to make money.

Strategy #1.- Imitating Success

Pick up some copies of the New York Times (today's and a couple of past but recent- episodes) and find out what the top ten best-selling books are on each one.

You will notice that there will be a repeating pattern on the subject of some of these books. This tells you what topics are hot. You can also check out the top 100 best selling books at:

http://www.amazon.com

http://www.barnesandnoble.com

http://www.usatoday.com/life/enter/books/leb.htm

Now, go out and buy 5 or 10 of the most popular books on a hot subject. Read them and summarize the findings into your own words in an infoproduct of your own. Don't just copy the information you find... that would be illegal. Instead, write your own findings and complement them with the information you got from the materials you bought.

You can then sell that product as a special report, a course or an e-book. As long as you market it correctly, you are guaranteed to sell a lot of copies, because based on the bestseller list, you know it is a topic in demand.

Strategy #2.- Use your industry

The easiest and more often overlooked ideas for an e-book are right in your current industry or in your favorite hobby or interest. If you are an engineer, a doctor or an attorney or just a plumber or a steelworker, you know your industry inside and out!

You know exactly how your industry works and what it's needs are. There is usually always an information product you can come up with that your industry needs or wants and information product that is in high-demand.

What do you know? What skills do you have? What could you teach others? These are all areas where you could create an information product. Don't dismiss this without giving it some thought. Really, almost everyone overlooks this, you should not.

If your hobby is horseback riding, don't you think you could come up with a product that helps others to learn your personal riding techniques? Could this be a periodical publication? A course? A single book? Find out what's best for you and do it. After all, writing doesn't really cost you anything but time.

Strategy #3.- Computer software

Do you use computers? What software programs do you use? Do you master any of these?

Create a tutorial for a popular software product you use. For example, you might be using a program like Corel Draw. This is a very popular program that many people have problems with, create a couple of tutorials for it and market them to Corel Draw users. Many of them will thank you for coming up with such a great product.

Another way to go is by visiting:

http://www.cnet.com

http://www.pcmag.com

http://www.download.com

http://www.tucows.com

http://www.zdnet.com

Find the top 100 file downloads on each site to see which programs are popular online. This information is very helpful when trying to find a large market for a software product to write a tutorial on.

Are you good at a popular computer game? Well, why not make a few screen captures and write down your secrets to beating this game? it's that easy! Doing a screen capture is as simple as pressing the "shift" and "print screen" keys on your computer keyboard. Then just go to a bitmap painting program and select "paste" from the "Edit" menu (this works on most programs, but it may vary on yours).

Using the same technique above, you could use the screen captures to produce an e-book consisting of the most impressive, important, resourceful websites for a specific topic.

For example, you could produce an e-book called "Top 10 websites every man should visit to know what women like". Capture the screens, make a link to each one of these sites using their own graphic and write down your thoughts on each particular site. Then market this product to male individuals (they are 60% of the total internet users).

People will not be buying the information on those websites but your thoughts and the findings of your research which took only a few days of websurfing to complete.

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How to write irresistible copy for your mini-site and turn it into a cash machine.

The following section is a collection of incredible copywriting articles made available to us by Miguel Alvarez (thanks!) and are published with his full authorization. Read each one of them to learn the exact techniques you need to know when writing the copy for your mini-site...

1. An introduction to copywriting
2. Knowledge is the key to success
3. The importance of graphic design in advertising
4. The most important element is your headline
5. The four functions of a headline
6. The 22 types of attention-grabbing headlines
7. 11 tips for writing clear copy
8. Using the right tools in your writing
9. The motivating sequence
10. Developing a winning USP
11. The 22 reasons people buy from you
12. Writing for the web (short copy vs. long copy)
13. Words that make people buy
14. Scarcity can help you... use it!

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The secret formula for creating killer mini-sites that sell like crazy!

What I'm about to reveal to you is one of my most closely guarded trade secrets. As you'll see in a minute. This formula drives a system that is quite simple - but extremely powerful when you set it in action.

I have tested and tested many different ways of making mini-sites work, and this formula that I'm about to present to you is the final result of all my testing.

This is a fool-proof formula that will help you bring in the largest amount of sales possible with the lowest investment and advertising budget (and thus the highest ROI).

Knowing this formula doesn't mean you'll be free from testing. There is still a large number of elements that you need to test while fine-tuning your mini-site to make it the most profitable for you, I'll tell you more about this in another part of this report.

The image to the right of your screen is a representation of how a mini-site looks, click on each of the different colors to learn how to structure each indivitual block...

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How to create killer mini-sites

Welcome to "How to create killer mini-sites that sell like crazy!". In this special report, I'm going to show you the exact steps to involved in creating one or two page websites that skyrocket your product and service sales trough the roof.

Not only these techniques work like a charm, but they are also quite inexpensive and pretty easy to learn by anyone. With all the options out there and all the possible ways of how to set up websites, I'm sure you'll come to appreciate how inexpensive it really is to set up a hard-seller to pump up your profits.

Is the web making you lose money faster than you earn it?

One of the greatest myths in web marketing is that all you need to do is slap up a website showcasing your products and submit it to the search engines... and instantly you'll have hordes of customers flipping out their wallets to buy from you.

As you and I both know, nothing could be further from the truth. If things were really that easy, you wouldn't have ordered this special report, right?

The fact is, setting up a website and making it profitable can be costly and cumbersome. But as expensive and difficult as it may be, you have no choice but to get yourself on the .com bandwagon.

If you don't optimize your website with the killer strategies I am about to reveal, your business may just wither and die... just like all the "dot com deaths" you see on television. And we wouldn't want that to happen, would we?

A simple but effective solution!

Fortunately, you no longer have to waste tons of money and time in a futile attempt to bring in sales from your website. This special report will give you the exact strategies I use to create killer mini-sites that literally produce money on command.Here is a small overview of what you are going to get by reading my special report "How to create killer mini-sites that sell like crazy!":
Section 1) The secret formula for creating killer mini-sites

Section 2) How to write irresistible copy for your mini-site

Section 3) Creating your own infoproduct to sell

Section 4) Selling other people's products

Section 5) Where to host your mini-sites and get the best bang for the buck

Section 6) The 5 foolproof strategies to promote your mini-sites

Section 7) Master strategies and twists the pro's use and my exclusive mini-site swipe file that you can use to model their success!

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