I’ve talked before about the power of using social bookmark sites such as stumble upon to attract viewers to your blog. Well here is a very real example!

I’ve recently launched a blog where I share my blogging mistakes and how to save money by not doing what I did (http://www.imakenomoney.com) It was recently Stumbled Upon and I was amazed at the increase in traffic!  My traffic went from 10-15 page views a day to over 300! Here is a screenshot from my Analytics account:

So I would encourage to experiement with different social networking / bookmarking sites such as the ones featured at the bottom of these posts.  Remember however the golden rule, is better to give than receive!  So make sure you giving lots of “link love” to other sites that are preferably in your niche.

I wanted to share some recent personal success with you. I have some tutorials on one of my niche websites demonstrating how to use certain features of a professional mapping program. I think we all know that tutorials, especially video tutorials are a great way to build a community, subscribers and loyal customers. These videos have previously only been offered on my website and I didn’t previously think of offering them on any video streaming sites such as Youtube, Revver or etc. However, things have been pretty slow lately so I though it wouldn’t hurt to produce and distribute them to another market segment.
One of the things I did want to be sure to do though is before I published them on Youtube was to embed in the video some kind of information to direct people to my main site. This was done so that it reduces the chances that someone will try and use the video on their site and thereby reducing the chances that my affiliate commission will be “redirected” to them.

To do this I simply added a caption at the beginning, middle and end of the video saying that for more information they should go to http://mymainsite.com

Now, the success; on Friday, I posted the first tutorial to Youtube, by Saturday I had received a sale.  By Monday, I had recieved 2 more sales. Not even a week later I have four videos on my Youtube channel that have received almost 78 views! It may not sound like much but that is 78 people seeing my tutorials and my embedded advertisement for my main affiliate site.

So if you have some tutorials sitting on your site, I’d encourage you to reproduce them for Youtube or a similar site. You might too have some fantastic results.

Well, I haven’t had a chance to release a niche secret or tip this weekend because I have been busy trying to finalize my taxes. This year was pretty hectc as I bought a house, rented a house, moved, had a baby, started a new job and started a small business.  You think I would have a hired a professional but no, I’ll tackle it myself and teach you what I’m learning…

This is my first year using a Schedule C for my Internet Marketing Business so I have been learning a lot.  I have been juggling back and forth between my tax software, TurboTax, and Google looking for questions to some specific questions about blogging for profit and income taxes.

I found a few different resources and some information I’d like to share with you:

1)  TaxGirl (Kelly Philips Erb) did a guest blog on Probloggers.net that discusses common tax dedcutions blogger’s often overlook.  She also wrote this post on 7 things bloggers should know about taxes

2)  I bought a lot of domain names this year and was wondering how those assets get treated by the IRS.  I found this article at Monkier.com discussing “Domain Names, Accountants & the IRS”

3) I learned that as 2002 Affiliate company, Regnow, no longers sends out 1099 MISC forms.  I used the reporting tools to determine how much money I earned last year and filed that under general income because I did not receive a 1099 MISC.

4) After looking and not finding one, I determined that this year I am going to develop either a GREAT Excel spreadsheet template or software program that will allow me to keep track of multi-websites, affiliate programs,  and money earned so that this time of year is not such a pain in the backside (stay tuned!).  Kind of combining a typical finance program + accounting program + program management tool all-in-one.

As I get these taxes completed (yes, honey, I’m almost done) and find more resources, I’ll add to this list.  If you know of some good resources I’m missing be sure to share them with me.

I see better than I hear.  Nothing improves the visual aspect of a blog than having a quality photograph embedded in your post.  It keeps the reader’s attention and helps to compliment great content.

I just discovered a GREAT wordpress plugin that allow you to ad free photos from flickr to your wordpress posts.  It is called Photodropper.  It ads a “Photo Dropper Browse Photos” panel below your post main text editor panel in your Wordpress Admin.  Simply type a keyword that you are looking for (Pinot Noir) and it will search the largest photo directory in the world and display photos tagged with that keyword.   You can insert a small, medium or large picture in your post (this is a medium sized picture).

For more information about the plugin please visit here:

http://www.photodropper.com/ 

Enjoy the plugin and hope that this helps you add great photos to your niche posts and blogs

photo credit: b_d_solis

My “real” job is working as a professional pilot for a local corporation. I have many aspiring pilots who come up to me asking me, “How do I get a job in corporate aviation?” The answer is easy, network. It is fairly easy with some experience to get A job. The secret to getting a GREAT job is to know someone who will recommend you . So how does this apply to niche marketing?

In order to get relevant traffic that will be interested in your content, You HAVE to network. When you think about your niche, usually a name comes to mind. Someone who is the king or queen of your niche and has a closely related website or blog. That person should know your name. You need that “someone” who is connected on higher levels of traffic.

“Okay Paul I get it, so how do I do this?”

Well, just like networking in the corporate world you need to learn how to network in the wired world. Here are some ideas:

1. Leave useful, intelligent, relevant comments on related blogs in your niche and if possible leave your URL
2. Leave useful, intelligent, relevant posts and replies to posts on related forums in your niche.  If allowed place your blog URL in your signature of your user account on that forum.  Be careful about trying deliberately to redirect traffic to your site within the post to the forum.  Some moderators will try and ban you from that forum.
3. Join MyBlogLog and join communities with related subject matter to your niche
4. Join MyBlogLog and place the recent visitors widget on your site. When you get a chance, publicly message people who visit and thank them for visiting. It is similar to thanking people for visiting your store or retail location.
5. When your site has about 20-30 good quality posts and some regular subscribers. Start very kindly contacting people in your niche about exchanging links with them.
6. Add the email addresses of people in your growing niche network to your IM (google talk, yahoo, AOL, etc.) and occasionally chat with them. Not so much that it is annoying but enough that they will begin to know you by your first name.
7. Join Blogged (a blog directory) Add your website URL to your profile. Leave good reviews of content relevant sites. People in your niche will read your review, read your profile and visit your site. Use the MyBlogLog widget to contact them
8. If you can afford it (time and money) attend affiliate and blogger conventions (pick up a copy or subscribe to Revenue). You will be amazed at how much that will help you physically connect with fellow bloggers and affiliate managers for companies in your niche. Worth every penny (and vacation time).

I am sure there are many others. There is no one proven way to network. I would love if you shared with me some ways that you have found to network.

If your goal is to make money with a niche blog or website you have to have traffic. The adage from the movie, “Field of Dreams” that “if you build it, they will come” does not apply to the internet. You can have the world’s best looking website and features galore, but without traffic, you will not sell anything. There are a lot of ways to get traffic to your site but in this post we are going to discuss enhancing your website, specifically your Wordpress blog, for search engine traffic.

Search engines employ “bots” to crawl websites. What does that mean? Search engines companies visit your site. Why? They do this periodically in order to update and improve their index. One of the keys to good search engine traffic is to make sure search engines know EXACTLY what your site is about after they visit. You don’t want any doubt n the search engine about what your site’s content is and how relevant it is to your target keywords.

Let’s put this into plain language. Let’s say your website is about sandpaper. When Google, Yahoo or Microsoft send their bots to your site you want to make sure you have your pages or posts optimized so that those search engines know exactly how to classify and index your page. You want your site appearing in the top search engines results for sandpaper and related terms. So how do you do this?

1) Make sure you employ Search engine friendly URLs.

A URL is simply a website address. It is what appears in your internet browser’s address bar. It is important that this address is friendly for both your human website visitors and computer website visitor’s.

If you are using Wordpress to power your website. The easiest way to enhance your URLs is to employ proper use of your permalink structure. You can modify this by going to Options - Permalinks in your Wordpress Administrator backend. I recommend the following custom structure:

/%category%/%post_id%/%postname%.html

Paste this in the custom field. Make sure you click save settings. Wordpress will then create and place a .htaccess file in your default Wordpress folder on your server. That file will tell the visitor’s browser how to render the URL in the browser’s address bar. It will also do the same to the bot from Google, Yahoo, etc when it comes to check on your site. That information will help Google classify and categorize your site with relevant search keywords.

If you are using Joomla, I recommend a plugin called JoomlaSEF. You find more information about this plugin by visiting this link:

http://extensions.joomla.org

Notice. This is NOT a search engine friendly (or human friendly) link.

2) Use SEO plugins.

Every blog or CMS has SEO plugins. A great free Wordpress plugin is All-in-one SEO. You can find more information about this plugin here:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

This is a great plugin because 1) it’s free 2) it handles a lot of the SEO work for you.

3) Submit Sitemaps

A sitemap is just that, a map of your site. It basically helps guide the search engine to show them where your content is. It can also help tell your human visitors where relevant content is.

You can tell search engines about your sitemap by making a file called robots.txt on your server. In that robots.txt file insert a line like this:

Sitemap: http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap_1.xml.gz

Here you are telling the search engine where to find your sitemap. But how do you generate a sitemap?

If you are using Wordpress, I recommend this plugin:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

This plugin once installed and activated will generate a sitemap automatically for your site which is great. You can find similar plugins for Joomla at (http://extensions.joomla.org)

This would be a good time to also introduce you to Google Webmasters. (http://www.google.com/webmasters) There you can submit a sitemap to Google for your site and get a jump ahead on directing the Google bot where the sitemap is. Stay tuned to this blog for more information about Google Webmasters and how it can help you sell to your niche.

First of all, welcome.  This is the first post for my blog about selling online to niche markets.  “Niche” Marketing is the hot topic right now in online business and this blog is to help those who are seeking to target very small markets and interests.

My first post is actually a success story from my Mom.  My mom runs a blog at http://www.omasplace.com in the niche market of machine embroidery.  We had a conversation lately about increasing traffic and user’s at her site and the topic was brought up about a tutorial.

Tutorials, are very popular and a great way to increase readership and search engine rankings.  Most people who come online, especially in these smaller hobby markets are looking for information.  They need help.    Most people turn to dedicated, established forums in those markets.  In my mom’s case, this forum is Sew Forums.   What my mom did is create a tutorial on creating burp clothes, something that there were a lot of questions on the forum about and then making a post in the forum with a link to her site.  Brilliant!

Her average page views have been hovering around 5-10 a day and it jumped to 256 in ONE DAY!  Her adsense pageviews obviously increased as well.  In fact, she did better on ad impressions than one of my very well established niche forums!  Nice job Mom.

So, the secret revealed here is this…incorporate tutorials, targeted towards your niche on your site or blog.  Your readers (and google) will be sure to thank your for it.