Niche site - small project

It's been a long time since I posted the last time. I want to reactivate this blog to trace a small project I want to do for the next 11 weeks. Another blog just did a little challenge building a new niche site from scratch. I'll try and do the same and write down my thoughts and progress here.

So the challenge to build this niche site starts today and ends on 8th of September. I'll do a small write-up every week (whenever possible on Monday).

First step is to select a niche and possible affiliate products. In my case I choose "Smoothie" as a niche. Now you might say that is not really a niche more of a pretty broad keyword but I'm targeting german traffic. I checked with Google Keyword Planer and it gets around 45k searches per month and it seems like it's still possible to get a good google ranking for the keyword. I also found a possible product on Superclix affiliate network which I can promote.

I created a first site on google sites and will create some articles and recipe sites there. I plan to include pictures as often as possible to gain traffic via image searches too. I linked the site with my google analytics account and we'll see how the traffic will develop.

Let's see how much money I can generate in those 11 weeks ... and as you might have noticed I'm trying to do so without investing a single cent. All will be done using free services from Google and other free sites.

I make money by showing others how to make money

That's what Johnchow does...so I assume it works :-) It's amazing how much money you can get by pointing others to good money making sources and receiving a provision. But what do you do while you are not at the top of the food chain and not everyone is following your lead ?
You sign up to something like cashcrate and earn money by doing small tasks one and a time and showing off. Than others will slowly follow your lead.



And the first dollar is free. So you only need to generate $19 and be ready for your fist check. If you do all daily surveys everyday you are done in only 2 weeks.

goo.gl - url shortener by google

Just a quick heads up for everyone..Maybe you already noticed but I didn't until today. Google launched their own URL shortener service. So if you often use an external service to shorten your links this might be interesting for you as the goo.gl look pretty nice and not so bad as tinyurl.com or others but maybe it's just personal preferance.

Here is the first URL in shortend : http://goo.gl/pFpAC

Another nice advantage is that each goo.gl link has it's own statistics page.

Driving traffic to your site via images

A good and easy source of traffic for your website, blog or directly to an affiliate link is by posting images containing a URL. You should make sure that all pictures or info graphics you post on your own site with a watermark of your website. This way if other people use it and your content is used in other places or even goes full viral it'll draw loads of traffic to your site.

But you can also spread your pictures yourself by posting to relevant image sites. If it's useful and/or funny and hits the target audience of those websites it will also draw traffic to you or directly to your product.

Let's see an example of one of my newly created blogs which normally only gets about 5 views per day. I took a screenshot showing a useful trick, added my blog url and posted it to a image board which has lots of viewers interested into gaming. This is what happend the following days:

Traffic increase after image posting

You can see a small spike directly after posting the image at the start of the week. It goes up from the regular couple of viewers to about 50 on the day of the post. The next day most of the traffic was already gone as this image board is very fast paced so the images move down quickly and don't receive a lot of attention. The very next day someone else was sharing the picture on another site which drove even more traffic to my site for the next three days. Right now the traffic is back to normal with a slight increase. But it's a great way to drive traffic to your blog to make people notice it. Just make sure that the image is interesting to the place you post it and not considered spam.
Enjoy your traffic !

What I learned from 'the apprentice' about generating traffic

I have to admit that I really like watching 'the apprentice' (the uk version of the show - nothing against mr. trump and his wonderful hair I just think the uk version is way more interesting). Most of the show is pure entertainment but every now and then some helpful advice might be hidden.

1) Buy as low as possible
This sounds like a no-brainer but it is very important and we often might accept the price given to us. I was using Adwords to get some traffic to one of my websites and noticed that I used the suggested bidding price given by google to be on the first search page. It might be nice to be on the front page for a google search but it is totally unnecessary. Even with a way lower price my site still received lots of hits and I got way more traffic to it with the same budget.

2) Give freebies
To get things rolling give freebies of your product or related to it away. Either as a big giveaway on your website or better directly to important bloggers in your niche. This way they might post about you and/or your product and will get your name to a large audience. Don't overdo this technic as it might be seen as spamming but whenever you have a good strong product ready send a sample to those with influence in your branch.

3) Location, location, location
In many selling tasks this is key to success. You have to find a place with as much traffic as possible of the right audience for your product. But if your 'product' is traffic where is the right place to be?
Well in the internet one place is nearly as good as the other (besides having a strong domain name for your website which helps a great deal with SEO) but I am talking about incoming links. You want to place links at places with high traffic of your potential customers. How do you get those without paying for them? Be a active and helpful member on other blogs or forums. Post comments which are related to the topic at hand and include a link to a related article on your site. This is way more effectiv than leaving random posts with just your signature. Even if those get past the spam filter they amount of people following those links is very little.

Even if those might sound trivial and obvious they are important helpers in generating traffic for your website.

give them what they want (to see)

'Sex sells' is a well known marketing slogan. We see it all the time in tv commercials or print ads all over town. And alot of blogs and websites us this formular too. Even if the actual product or article might not be related to women you often have some beautiful girl next to it.
If the product is targeted (mainly) to a male audience the presence of an attractive woman might catch the eye of a possible customer. Getting attention is the first and maybe the most important step in selling a product. Without someone watching the right way there simple is noone to present to. From their on it still isn't a simple task to sell something but you just can not skip this first step:

1) get attention
2) ...
3) profit

As with all things in life be careful to keep the right balance. Not all products can or should be present with sex. And more importantly your eye catcher should not dominate over your actual product. If the target does not even notice your actual product or article you gained nothing at all. Make sure it guides your traffic your way but they still read what you have to say.
Looking forward to your comments about this article about the famous 'sex sells' paradigm to see if someone actually read it or just had a look at the beautiful girl below. So here is the moment you have all been waiting for, my 1):

..and now to something completely different: Guatebexico

just seen a really nice video a friend of mine did from his recent holiday trip to guatemala, mexico and belize. i think he did a good editing job. music fits pretty nicely. thought you might like it so i'll share it ;-)