Blogging – Micro Business Specialist

5 Tips for Successful Niche Blogging

To be successful with niche blogging you’ve got to have a plan and then work that plan. As an affiliate marketer, you’ve need to systematically work toward your long term objectives.

A strong sense of focus plus the commitment to succeed as an affiliate marketer will liberate you from your regular job and set you on a course to success. But with no one else cracking the whip over your head, you need to do it yourself.

The acronym for FOCUS, stands for: “Follow One Course Until Successful.” When you learn to focus and keep your eyes on the prize you can be very successful with affiliate marketing.

1. Choose the right WordPress theme for your niche profit blog.

Perhaps that heading should read, “Choose the correct blogging platform.” That is WordPress.

There are hundreds, no thousands of free WordPress themes you can use for your affiliate niche profit blog. Take the time to seek out the best affiliate marketing WordPress theme you can find.

Quality themes are optimized to boost your blog’s CTR (click-thru rate). They also will make AdSense ad code placement easy, and more effective.

2. Major in marketing

A large portion of your time should be spent in marketing your niche profit blog. At the outset, you should define your overall marketing strategy and then break it down into steps that you can perform daily.

Keep a spreadsheet where you can track all of your marketing activities. Use a blog analytics program so that you can track and measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

Never stop learning about the many ways that you can market your blog and get more exposure in the marketplace.

3. Follow a Mentor

On the face of it, affiliate marketing seems fairly simple, but there are a lot of challenges to overcome before you find success.

When you follow someone who has already ‘been there and done that’, you save time and effort by learning from the mistakes that others before you have made. You can also emulate their success and achieve your goals much more quickly than you would on your own without guidance.

4. Be willing to invest in your success

So often new affiliate marketers always look for the free option. They want free tools and free software and then they wonder why they are not as successful as they could be.

You must be willing to invest in yourself in order to achieve your goals, and you must be willing to invest in yourself if you want others to take you seriously.

Yes, the free options save you money, but investing in the best tools can give you a competitive advantage over all of those marketers who are only using the free tools.

5. Keep learning and taking action on what you learn

The Internet is full of distractions and shiny objects that lure you and distract you from your chosen path. These can cause you to lose the focus that we mentioned earlier.

While it’s true that the internet world is constantly changing, it’s also true that the basic principles of marketing remain constant. Resist the temptations and focus on your work. Keep your eyes on your goals.

Being successful in an online business, just like anything else in life, is about 80% mindset and 20% implementation. If you’ve got a mindset that is focused on success, then everything else will fall into place for you.

When you are ready to get serious about affiliate marketing with a niche profit blog, you’ll want to visit, Passive Niche Profits, where you will discover many other tips and strategies like these to help you make money online.

[tags]passive niche profits, niche blogging, successful niche blogging, blogging[/tags]

Am I Doing It All Wrong?

I’ve been posting to a number of different blogs over the past several years. But I can’t claim that I have made a great deal of money from my blogs. Oh I get some opt ins, and send people to an affiliate offer from time to time. I also enjoy pontificating on topics, and teaching others. But money making hasn’t been the main motivation, because had it been, I would have stopped long ago.

And maybe I should stop now.

I just watched a short video by David Walker. He’s a UK based marketer who I interviewed as part of my Messages from the Battle Front series I produced earlier in the year.

In it he reveals what he calls the $100,000 blogging secret. And while I’m not sure I’d value the secret he shares at $100,000 I will say it got me thinking.

http://askearlabout.com/BloggingBoss.php

I owe it to him to keep mum on the secret, although I am using it right now as I pen this post to you. Can you guess what it is?

Now he isn’t charging a dime for this secret so there is no reason for you to not check it out. When you do, I’d love to have you tell me what you think. Just come back here and comment on this blog post.

I set the link to open in a new window, so you should be able to get back here without any difficulty.

Looking forward to hearing what you think.

http://askearlabout.com/BloggingBoss.php

[tags]blogging boss, David Walker, blogging, making money with blogs, blogging secret[/tags]

Plug In Update Tweet My Blog Change Required

Just yesterday, I posted here an interview I did with Mike Paetzold. I mentioned that Mike was my “Go To” guy on everything wordpress.

Like everything these days, things change, and just today, Mike puts out an alert that one of the plug in’s I use is about to expire and not be updated to meet new Twitter standards.

So I am spending my day in part updating my blogs. If you use “Tweet My Blog” you really need to check out Mike’s post today. Go to Tweet My Blog Update

If you missed my interview with Mike you can access it here:

Mike Paetzold Interview

Mike outlines not only what the issue is but has a suggestion to replace the functionality and explains just how to install it.

That’s why, I recommend him to you.

[tags]Mike Paetzold, plug ins, blogging, Mr Word Press, Tweet my blog, [/tags]

Profitable Blogging Steps Author Interviewed

I recently had a chance to do an interview with Mike Paetzold, also known as the Word Press Guy and author of the great video series for new and intermediate bloggers called, Profitable Blogging Steps.

Mike Paetzold

He is my personal “Go to” guy on WordPress issues. I am a regular visitor to his blog http://wptutorial.com/blog to keep up on the constantly changing and improving wordpress world.

Tomorrow August 12th, Stephanie Mulac is launching her Ultimate Blogging Giveaway Event and I wanted to do something different for the event, so I arranged to do the interview with Mike. It is one of the gifts I am offering on the Giveaway, and I think a good one.

I tried to focus on issues that go beyond introductory discussion of what plug ins to use, and Mike was most gracious to work with me.

If you would like to download the session to listen to it at your convenience you can do so by going here: Interview Download

If you prefer to listen to it now, just click on the arrow below. The entire interview is just under an hour in length:

Blogging Interview with Mike Paetzold

[tags]Mike Paetzold, Word Press Guy, Ultimate Blogging Giveaway, Stephanie Mulac, profitable blogging steps, profitable blogging, interview, [/tags]

Publish Your Blog On Amazon’s Kindle

I used to be an active seller of Amazon’s Kindle until I ran afoul of the Big “A’ policies on use of the term “Kindle” in my pay per click ads. While Amazon doesn’t provide sales figures for its Kindle, I thinks it’s fair to assume it’s not insignificant. I know I sold a fair number and I was a very small player.

If you haven’t bought one yet, you can now, by going here. Kindle: Amazon’s 6″ Wireless Reading Device (Latest Generation)

I bring it up because Amazon has just opened the Kindle Doors to Bloggers. If you blog regularly, it’s now possible to sign up and upon approval by Amazon get a subscription to your blog listed for sale on their Kindle.

I did as soon as I heard about this, about 30 minutes ago. So I don’t know for sure that my blog will be accepted, but I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be. From what I read, I don’t expect to make a lot of money from Amazon in the near term. They set the price, not you, and it appears that initially the going rate is 99 cents a month. Amazon will keep 70% of that, so don’t order than new car just yet.

You need to make $50 before you will see your first payment. So unless you have a good way of promoting your blog to Kindle users it’s likely to take a while to get your first check.

That said, your blog will appear in their Kindle Blog Directory and if you have a good title, description and content, you will attract readers you may not have otherwise found. And that’s why you should seriously consider adding this venue to your marketing program.

It took me less than 15 minutes to log in at http://kindlepublishing.amazon.com and get my first blog (this one) set up.

One thing about the kindle that makes it a bit different. They will publish images as well as the full text.

A niche blog launched with Niche Profits Classroom

I’ve finished creating my first Niche Profits Classroom Blog Site. It’s called Aromatherapy Scents.

It took me about four days to complete, which is a lot longer than the Adam and Alen say it should, but I am an expert and finding every possible way to screw things up, and I did.

That said, I was very happy with the step by step videos that are part of the Niche Profit Press segment of their membership site. Virtually every step of the way is spelled out in detail. And even though I was able to mess up, I was also able to figure out what I did wrong by playing back the individual videos.

One of the things I like about their approach is that they have a lot of very short videos to cover each step. These are sometimes a minute or less sometimes as long as 5 or 6 minutes. That means you don’t have to sit through a 30 minute video to see the detail you missed at minute 25.

The other thing to say about the Niche Profit Press setup is that there are a lot of steps involved. You could do this yourself if you have a lot of experience with WordPress. But for those of use with from little to moderate skill with wordpress, the step by step process is the way to go.

Now some of my problems were due to dumb mistakes on my part. For example, I misspelled my url and then couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t showing up when I set the DNS to the new web hosting service I am using. And a couple of times, I sped ahead thinking I knew what I was doing only to be disproven in short order.

The other end of it is that Adam and Alen teach a way to outsource all your research and writing. I’m still at the do it myself stages. And that is the second half of what I want to share with you today.

Some of you are aware that I was promoting a PLR package last week for aromatherapy. And yes, I bought it myself. The package contained an 11 chapter, 50 page ebook and 10 additional articles. It was by and large pretty well written and contained a lot of worthwhile information. From my perspective it was like buying a research paper on the topic, only I also had the additional rights to use it as my own.

But I didn’t use it out of the box. First I rewrote the various articles that came with the package. Initially this was to be sure it wouldn’t be seen as duplicate content by Google.

But what was more interesting was rewriting it a second time to fit into each of the articles keywords that I discovered using the Niche Profits Classroom’s Money Word Matrix.

The Money Word Matrix is what first got me interested in the Niche Profit Classroom. Rather than just finding highly searched for keywords, the money word matrix seeks keywords that are actively searched for but for which relatively few resulting sites exist. In other words, keywords that I could have a real shot at getting top rankings on relatively soon.

Access to the software is part of the Niche profits membership and is well worth it on its own. It still took some time to figure out the best such keywords to use for each of the ten articles. But once I found them, I went back to the article text and worked them into the articles.

Now in addition to the articles and the eBook, I needed to come up with a 10 lesson e-Course. To do that I went to the eBook, and in essence pulled a summary lesson from each chapter, being careful to not give everything away in the course. So once again the PLR was more of a research document from which I wrote my own articles. I mention this again, because I sense that some people new to the concept of PLR see it as plagiarism. In fact, private label rights are a well established and inherently ethical approach to publishing information.

And now that I have my site up, I have been writing articles, one a day focusing again on each of the articles one by one on the blog. Again each of the articles I write will be focused on the keywords used in each of the articles on the blog and will be directed not to the home page alone but to the interior pages of the site. Since I first acquired the PLR rights and worked on the article, my wife brought forth an alternative health tome she picked up at a garage sale and I am now supplementing the PLR material with information from another source.

I have no doubt that this concept and approach will eventually raise my new post on Aromatherapy to a top ranking on Google in the next few months. I am confident my e-course will generate a list of people interested in aromatherapy whether they buy my eBook or not. And I am also confident that many will buy the ebook, and some will also buy aromatherapy candles, lamps, dispensers and other paraphernalia over time.

I’ve written in length about this today, to demonstrate one way of effectively using PLR material and to encourage you to give serious thought to joining Niche Profits Classroom. For under $50 a month, it is well worth the investment.

I intend to resurrect some past PLR purchases of mine and run them through the Niche Profit Classroom process and I will be watching for other niche PLR products I can use in the future. This won’t keep me from pursuing my other Micro Business Specialist consulting efforts, but hey once once of these little blogs are set up and fully launched, they will generate income for a long time. I think I could soon pop one of these out in less than a day. Since its April already, I can imaging having 25-35 of these by the end of the year. That could make my year.

http://askearlabout.com/NicheProfitClassroom.php

Blogging PlugIns- Which Ones to Use.

While I have been blogging for a while now, I am far from an expert. Luckily, I have run into Mike Paetzold who is as good a blogger as any I have encountered so far online. I have learned a lot from him and monitor a couple of his blogs on a regular basis.

In a new posting today, on his Word Press Made Easy Blog, he offers a list of the plug ins he uses. This is an important topic and I wanted to share it with you. Plug ins are powerful and can seem mysterious as well to those just getting started in blogging.

I will be going through his list of plug ins and comparing it to the ones I am currently using. You may want to do so as well.

However, you need not follow his list blindly. I will be not be changing one for sure. I prefer the audio manager plugin for pod casts to the one he uses. That’s not to take anything away from his list though. Different plugins work differently on different themes. That ads to the Joy/frustration of Plug ins, but it is the real world. So you will need to experiment.

You can find his list at: http://wptutorial.com/blog/information/plugins-i-am-using-right-now While you are there you may want to do yourself a favor and sign up to his list. He will reward you with a good ebook, called Blog Tracker thats worht $37. More importantly, you will find that Mike is a valuable resource if you are blogging on a regular basis. And you should be.

Tweet your Blog

Would you like to earn auto-pilot commissions every time you post to your blog? And at the same time use the Power of Twitter to drive traffic to your blog.

I know it sounds like a fairy tale, but it just became reality, with the launch of John Merrick and Soren Jordansen’s new “Tweet My Blog”.

Just by using the powerful free plugin, you will be promoting your affiliate link on auto-pilot. In other words, you can earn commissions just for posting to your blog.

But that’s just one of the many benefits of using TweetMyBlog, visit the page to learn more – and grab your free copy today.

And… Even though they are giving this plugin away for free, you should take a close look at the special offer they have in store for you when join. I instantly grabbed my own copy, and I know it will skyrocket my marketing power when using Twitter and WordPress.

Just click on the image below to access this powerful new tool. -etn