I run a few niche sites that I sell eBooks on, and I thought I would disclose on of my sites for people to see and understand how I make money from them. These sites that I run are called Niche Sites, and How I make money from them is simple.

1. I produce an eBook for the site
2. I write articles about the specific niche I am targeting
3. I people to sign up for a mini tutorial sent through email to help bring people back to my site
4. I choose keywords that are high traffic, low competition and low search results
5. I built a website and place the eBook on it for sale
6. I include some articles on the site for people to read and to get their interest growing so they want to buy the eBook
7. I use article marketing with article directories to drive traffic to my site
8. Once it’s set up and running, it’s low maintenance, I just let it generate money for me and I do very little once it’s running.

This is a nice little way of having passive residual income coming in.

In the short future I intend on starting a membersite where I give out 2 premade sites a month, which includes articles, eBook, and an eCourse for email. Relatively low priced membership that will have all you need to make your own Niche Site. You can see one of my sites here.

Download the articles, mini tutorial and eBook for one of my sites Here.

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Old Dog

I’ve been in the business of making money on the internet for about 10 years now. I started in the dating site niche back in 1997 back when the internet was still young and growing. I wasn’t making any money at the time, but I was running a dating site specific for people with a certain medical condition. I would receive emails with an ad and then I would post it by hand myself and people would then be accessible for dating.

At this stage of the game I didn’t know much about SEO, or traffic or html for that matter but I was doing it. I was also the first and only dating site for this genre of people, so I obviously stood out in the searches. I continued to be a stand out and then I noticed something, there were other dating sites in my niche but they were charging money. I got a little angry, then got over being angry and started to charge money too. This is when I started my marketing career on the internet.

“New” Old Trick

In my years of being in this niche I have had a very nice steady flow of income from this dating site even though there are bigger and better corporate entities around. I come up on the 1st page of Google, within the first 5 results for most if not all of the search terms for my specific niche. So how is it that, even though I am still pretty much the oldest site in this niche; I am not making more money than I am currently?

I decided to go to Compete.com and look up my traffic stats as opposed to that of my competition.  I typed in my URL and I had about 250-ish uniques, per month. Ok, not bad I guess considering a lot of traffic is repeat people coming back to check their mail, profiles and see what new profiles are on the site, Ok so it’s a little low but it’s not bad. Right? I then punched in the URL for my competition and my jaw hit the floor. My competition was getting 250, 000 uniques per month, 100,000 times more than I was getting.

The Secret

It hit me square upside the head, Traffic. I didn’t have the traffic. I had gotten so desensitized to the Basics of Traffic, that I forgot to continue with the basics. I hear it all the time, everyday, all day long about “generate traffic”, “marketing”, “more traffic…”, and so on that I had gotten completely desensitized to the fact that I still needed to generate traffic coming to my site.

Even though I am still in the top search engine results, I was not getting the traffic I needed or wanted to make more money. The secret to making money in ANY niche, market or blog, is TRAFFIC. If you have none, you have no money. Period. Sure people search the net for things, but they don’t always search for everything. So what I needed to do was return to the basics of traffic generation.

Forum posting, comment posting, link directories, link trades and talking anywhere and everywhere about my site. I needed to do this so people know it exists and see it, instead of having to go hunt for it. In effect I needed to get it to the point that whenever someone turned around, my URL was in their face. How did I find where to put my URL? I’ll tell you grasshopper.

And the truth shall set you  free…

If you go to Google and type in “link: domainurl.com” and hit enter. The domainurl.com is the URL of a competitors site that you might want to know where they have back links coming from. Once you know this, you can go to each of those results and see if there’s a place that you too can post your link and get some back link traffic and page rank. This is one of the EASIEST ways to find good places to put back links. Do this with several sites that you know of and you will have enough places to begin re-marketing your site. This is how I started to get my traffic to go up again, hopefully eventually as much as my competitor in the near future.

Have a great holiday weekend,

Larry

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Time…to play…

I have a favorite movie called Hellraiser, some of you may have heard of it, you know that movie with pinhead? Anyway, I love that movie for some strange reason, and I love that little box that everyone is always trying to get their hands on. I found a site that sells them and I ordered one a few years ago.

Quality Lacks

Well I finally got the box after months and many emails hassling the guy for either my money back or the box. when I finally got the box, it was already falling apart. the brass plates were peeling up at the corners and it was tarnished and it looks like he tried to sand the brass to shine it up. It was an unholy piece of crap.

My Vow to the world, or how I sold my soul…

I was pissed. No one should ever have to put up with what I did ever again, nor should this guy ever sell another piece of crap like that ato a Hellraiser fan, ever. So I decided I would make my own.

I got a scan of the box faces, had a friend who does autocad make a blueprint for me of the box faces. I found an etching house to etch the brass that is .005 of an inch thick, it’s thin as paper! Then I found a place that could cut me the 3″x3″x3″ cube of wood. I bought some black lacquer and some clear lacquer and off I went, I started making my own hellraiser boxes.

So I started making these things and I started giving them away to all my good friends. I had made about 15 that first run, and I realized when I was down to my last 2 that I had given them all away and not sold any of them. Well ok, call it self promotions, that was a good rationalization.

Ebay’s time to play…

I started to make my next batch and I decided I would sell these on Ebay and gt my money back to order more plates. The face plates alone were $800 for 25 sets. Each set is 6 plates, one for each face of the six sided cube. $32 for each box just for the brass plates alone, $5 for the lacquer which one can covered approximately 10-15 boxes. The cube of mahogany were about $5 each. Then there was my time into making them, and it took about 2 weeks to complete one box completely from start to finish. However I make the boxes in lots of 10-15 at a time so about $10 per box for my labor. Ok so roughly $50 for a box, what was my markup going to be?

Oh good, Competition…

I looked on Ebay and saw another guy selling them for an insanely low price. I had to email that guy and tell him he was hurting the market and to raise his prices. The theory behind this is that if you lower the price too low it hurt the industry  and the other people in that industry who are trying to make a living. It’s called devaluing the product by making the price so low there is no profit margin.

Well the guy actually did raise his prices and now I had some competition at $150 per box. He was selling them before for like 50$ per box. Insane. Well we both sold our boxes for $150 per box for a while and made a decent profit for a while. It’s not the same today in this economy.

The economy from hell…

I can tell that the economy is pretty bad because no one is buying the boxes anymore. I tried putting up 4 boxes a few weeks ago and deliberatly lowered the prices to about $75 and not a single one sold. I even put one up that was signed by Ashley Laurence, the girl who played Kirsty in the first 2 Hellraiser Movies, and no one bit on that either. A quality prop replica like I make is not easy to find at that price and for no one to bid even the lowest one any of them, it’s pretty bad out there.

I digress…

It’s the same in a lot of different industries that are luxury oriented. The boxes are a luxury, so is photography. I do photography on the side, and the only thing that is happening is baby photography right now, and that is a bit scarce.

So why is baby photography happening and the boxes aren’t? like I said, the boxes are a luxury and people don’t NEED them. Baby photography is somewhat a necessity for people. The need to document their families for historical purposes, for the sake of having pictures of their darling little babies. This is definitely something that people want and they consider it a NEED. Hellraiser Puzzle Boxes aren’t a NEED. They are a WANT. Big Difference.

Reeling it back in…

This is how I find my Niche markets that I plan to cater to. I find something that is a NEED and that people are desperate for. Sometimes its not really a NEED, it’s more of a desperate WANT. One of my Niches I am getting ready to exploit, is a segment in the dating industry.  Yes that’s right I said exploit. The definition I prefer to use is “To advertise; promote”. And not unethically.

I will be advertising and promoting a site that is geared towards a segment of the dating population that doesn’t seem to be hit right now. I found this at Google Insights. That is one place to find up and coming Niche markets, another place is Google Trends.  And yet another place is Amazon and Ebay. Just got to each one and look at the best sellers lists. Ebay has Pulse.

The think tank…

Another why I come up with my niche’s that I delve into is right here at The Niche Think Tank. Thats what I do here, I brainstorm and think and doodle and come up with new and nifty( that’s right, nifty) Niche Markets to Exploit. While I was sitting here writing this I started thinking about how I could get more people to bite on the Puzzle Boxes.

I go for several walks throughout the day and I am usually listening to one of Yaro Staracks Podcasts. While I was walking today thinking about the puzzle boxes and listeing to one of Yaros Podcasts, I had the idea to sell just the brass plates at a discount so that people could make their own. Then my Wife suggested a kit, sell them a 3×3x3 inch block of mahogany and the plates and instructions on how to put it all together. what a great idea. So there you have it, the start of yet another little money maker. Anyway I am hungry and I am going to go get some tacos at Ponces in Kensington.

See you all later.

Larry

P.S. If you would like to see some of my boxes head on over to my Hellraiser Puzzle Box Site:

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Have you ever thought about writing an eBook or eReport and selling it on the Internet? Maybe you found the secret to getting the smell of cat pee out of the couch or how to get the dog to stop chewing your shoes or how to get a checking account when you are in the chex system?

If you have thought about doing this but never got around to it, or talked yourself out of it you could be talking yourself out of making a lot of money. I had never really thought about this until I ran across the title of a forum called “Desperate Buyers Only“.

My first knowledge of “Desperate Buyers Only” was through The Warrior Forums, and I did a little research on it and decided to buy it in June of 2009. It’s an eBook by Alexis Dawes and goes into how to find what people are desperate for, how to create an eProduct for this desperation, and then how to market it.

I read the book from start to finish and was thoroughly impressed. The book is about creating reports or ebooks for people with desperate problems. People are always searching the internet for the solution to a certain problem they may have and it’s these people this book focuses on to create a product for.

If you are a person with a problem that causes you social anxiety or fear or causes you to not do something, then you would be desperate to find a solution. When you find this solution you would be more than happy to pay money for it, right? Well there you go. It is this premise that you start your research on.

This book goes into finding a desperate market, research, wording and phrasing, and also goes into why online entrepreneurs fail. It talks about finding the niche market that will sell, and it’s not going with the crowd either. This book is in my opinion The Book for creating books and reports that really sell.

I couldn’t wait to start brainstorming and get a product out on the market to see how well this would work. I came up with a product that many people are desperate for, from my own personal experiences. I wrote my story, wrote the solution and gave some extra resources to help with this problem and wrote my sales page.

After uploading the sales page and uploading the product to my secure download service I started to drive traffic to the website each day. I made sure to only point a couple links per day, each week to the new site, so as not to sandbox the URL with Google.

Because of the keyword selection I did, the lack of product for this kind of problem, and my slow propagation of back links, I started having traffic almost instantly. Granted right now it’s only an average of 13 per day, but I made my first two sales on the 20Th day the site was up.

From my calculations that would be 20 days x 13 visitors per day = 260 visitors, for the first two sales. So I am going to see if sales are about 1 sale every 260 people. I’ll get that average when I make my next sale or two. Either way I made my first two sales in 20 days of putting the product up, and no refund so far.

Basically I am really stoked about this process. As traffic goes up, so will my income. My next thing to to is little tweaks here and there to the sales page to see if I can boost sales.

Last week I had my consultation with Alexis Dawes, the creator of Desperate Buyers Only, and she is one of the nicest persons I have ever talked to on the phone. She reviewed my sales page and talked about how I could make it so people would definitely want it more by tweaking some phrasing and doing some cost justification.  We also talked about how to make it more personal, more of an intimate feeling for the person reading the website, making it very close to home so to say.

We I was done I had a really nice feeling and after making those 2 sales the other day, I knew this stuff was for real and plan on several more Desperate Buyers Products. Alexis also gave me her phone number to talk to her anytime about other pages I would be putting up for sale, she said her email inbox in inundated with email everyday and finds it hard to correspond to every single person, but is working on it.

I asked her if I had the latest version and she said I didn’t. so she emailed me the latest edition and along with it came several new pieces added to the package. here’s a list of the new contents:

• DesperateBook.pdf
  This is the Desperate Buyers Only manual

• BBGone.pdf
  This is a copy of Boils Be Gone. Boils Be Gone is an actual desperate product that I’m currently selling.

• GoodAndFastContentCreationFormula.pdf
  This manual will teach you how to create content quickly. Lots of good research ideas here.

• GoodAndFast-WriteBooksAndReports.pdf
  This report will teach you how to write your e-books and reports quickly.

• GoogleOperatorsCheatSheet.pdf
  This is a good sheet to have with you whenever you’re researching on Google.

• ArticleRewriterCheatSheet.pdf
  This cheat sheet will show you how to easily alter your articles.

Great pack of material to learn from and use for making content based manuals, reports and eBooks. This is how I am doing it from now on. If you haven’t already bought Alexis Book you can do so here with my affiliate link:

Desperate Buyers Only

It is well worth the $97.

P.S.

I just went to Alexis Blog to link back to her and it looks like she took her blog down. Bummer.

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