ICANN, the organization in charge of domain names, is planning on a dramatic rewriting of the rules for web addresses (top level domains) which they say could reduce the overwhelming importance of the .com domain. Under new ICANN rules, groups and organizations will able to apply for new Internet extensions (the part after the dot in a web address).

Today there are just a few generic top-level domains (gTLDs), for example: .com, .net, .org, .biz, and .info. But ICANN is planning to open the door to potentially hundreds or more generic domain extensions. These new extensions include the following, though the process is ongoing and more are likely to be added:

.africa .bank .bayern .bcn .berlin .bike .board .bzh .cymru .eco .eus .fam .film .florida .free .gay .gmbh .green .hamburg
.hiv .horse .hotel .irish .ker .koeln .kurd .london .love .madrid .med .moscow .money .miami .movie .music .ngo .nyc .okinawa .osaka .paris .phone .quebec .radio .real .reise .riga .rocks .roma .saarland .secure .sfo .shop .sco .scot .sic .site .skate .ski .sport .surf
.vegas .versicherung .web .wine

So what does it mean to us, is this really going to make things more competitive? In a word… dunno! OK I admit I cheated and that should be two words, or even three, but the fact remains that it is anyone’s guess what difference it will make.

There are some like Adrian Kinderis CEO of ARI Registry Services who asked in Marketing Magazine “Will a new TLD web address automatically be favoured by Google over a .com equivalent?” Subsequently answering his own question with – ” Quite simply, yes it will.” – though arguably, since he is CEO of a domain registry, he might say that mightn’t he?

Severe doubt was then thrown onto the opinion when Google’s Matt Cutts responded with – “If you want to register an entirely new TLD for other reasons, that’s your choice, but you shouldn’t register a TLD in the mistaken belief that you’ll get some sort of boost in search engine rankings.”

However, could it be that such an explosion of new TLD’s might just alter the importance of dot com, something once threatened by the last motley collection, but never actually realised? In the final analysis, it’s individual opinion that counts, so if you want to get in first with scotland.scot or england.eng, best keep an eye on pre-registering sites.

Heads Up: Just looking for the word “Cornish” identified the following ‘available for pre-booking’ domains in these newly proposed top level domains: cornish.hotel, cornish.web, cornish.site, cornish.music and cornish.shop

If you have a great deal of content in your site you should consider adding a ‘Sitemap’ so that your visitors can find their way around. This is especially true when you have a teaser type front page, such as the ones I use on my Nichepreneur and Richpreneur blog sites.

We are not talking about an XML sitemap, one that helps search engines to spider the site, the aim is to create a page which has links to all our site content, in a mapped structure for navigation purposes. If you are using WordPress there is a really useful plugin designed to create HTML sitemaps automatically produced by Dagon Design called the ‘DDSitemap Generator’. It did not appear in the list of returned Plugins when I searched for it through the WordPress interface, so if you want to get it you will find it here.

All you need to do is install the plugin and create a ‘slug’. Slugs are words that describe a post or a page in a URL friendly way and are added to the end of the site URL as a means of navigation. This particular page has a slug of “html_sitemaps”. Having installed the plugin and created the slug then simply add the following line to a WordPress page (one where you would like the sitemap to display):

<!– ddsitemapgen –>

Name the page “Sitemap” or something appropriate and then make sure you add it to one of your site menus.For those of you using the new rich-text editor – be sure to click the ‘html’ button to edit the page source directly. Otherwise WordPress will wrap code tags around the line which generates the sitemap and it will not work properly. One added bonus of creating a sitemap page, is that it creates additional links within your own site, some consider that this may have a beneficial effect on SEO.

Two hundred blog posting tips that I have discovered from various sources to save you all the hard work and help drive people to your site.

1. Create email lists of your subscribers.

2. Write a good quality tutorial and share your knowledge.

3. Give away your very best content to improve your credibility.

4. Make sure your content is up to date.

5. Personalize but don’t write irrelevant content.

6. Create content that will endure.

7. Write with confidence.

8. Write with authority, there is no substitute for research.

9. Recycle good information found on other blogs, but in your own style.

10. Keep a record of anything good that you find, make “top (number) lists”.

11. Read everything until you become an expert in your niche.

12. Break news as it happens.

13. If you find something new, share it widely to be seen as newsworthy.

14. Write short, upbeat posts that are not intended to sell anything.

15. Try to foster relations with big players.

16. Use polls.

17. Write longer detailed posts that give precise instructions.

18. Answer all comments and emails.

19. Keep up to date with your email and comments.

20. Be clear about methods/posts informing of both positives and negatives.

21. Write on a controversial topic and close comments.

22. Make readers depend on you by sharing your expertise generously.

23. Write about blogging.

24. Blog about writing.

25. When writing try to see from a beginners perspective.

26. Be the ‘Devil’s advocate’ try to envision any opposing views.

27. Ask experts to make comments on your best posts.

28. Comment on the posts of others.

29. Encourage your readers to digg, tweet, like, and plus your posts.

30. Write about Google.

31. Write about Twitter.

32. Bookmark all your posts.

33. Interview parties with opposing views.

34. Research a topic and post your findings.

35. Integrate references to other sources in your posts.

36. Post with personality.

37. Run relevant ads that are even better than your content.

38. Write exclusively about a certain theme for a week.

39. Don’t be afraid of being critical of herd ideas.

40. Consider ad placement, have some ad-free content.

41. Use your skills to help a charitable causes.

42. Review and update old posts with new ideas.

43. Post your photos on flickr.

44. Seek out new post ideas from readers.

45. Write a satirical post.

46. Use an outrageous photo.

47. Make it easy to share what you are doing.

48. Encourage visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed.

49. Give visitors a good reason to opt in to your list.

50. Seek out endorsements.

51. Pioneer a great topic and then encourage others to blog about the same thing.

52. Don’t overwhelm visitors with too many options.

53. Make topic lists.

54. Make ‘good blog’ lists.

55. Mention any useful, but little known resources.

56. Make a post that solves a problem.

57. Make a post that creates inspiration.

58. Encourage your followers to help you dominate top blog lists.

59. Write a post that causes controversy.

60. Do a 30-day challenge.

61. Write a long comment.

62. Start a blog meme.

63. Share your blog statistics with your readers.

64. Pick a topic by reading business book titles.

65. Pick a headline by reading top Dugg stories.

66. Start a discussion in your blog comments.

67. Answer your readers questions in a post.

68. Challenge your fellow bloggers by writing something nearly borderline about them and close comments.

69. Share link love and expect some back.

70. Add to the list started by another blogger.

71. Be complimentary.

72. Do your market research on Amazon.com.

73. Write about stuff that most people want to read about, like Web 2.0.

74. Disprove a myth.

75. Write a post about something merely good, but not great.

76. Constantly read other blogs, leave comments, look for ideas.

77. Edit yourself without mercy.

78. Create cornerstone content.

79. Skip introductions and get to the meat of the posts – your readers do.

80. Point out something ironic or contradictory.

81. Write a series of posts.

82. Come up with a more efficient way of doing something.

83. Create a widget or plugin.

84. Make your content unmissable.

85. Be everywhere, all at once.

86. Take in other people’s ideas, learn from them constantly.

87. Tell a story through pictures.

88. Focus on unmonetized, but high-trafficked searches.

89. Combine some of your best older posts into a new series.

90. Treat every day as a new beginning, because you’ll always have new readers.

91. Be patient.

92. Post on the weekdays because more people will read it.

93. Change up your posting style every once in a while, like do reviews, etc.

94. Showcase some of your best posts on Squidoo lens.

95. Post on the weekends because there are less posts.

96. Leverage April Fool’s day with an outrageous truth.

97. Write about how things have changed in your niche.

98. Invite your readers to do guest posting for you.

99. Answer your readers questions with more questions.

100. Aggregate ideas, tips, etc from numerous places/blogs into a blog post.

101. Attend a live event and broadcast about it.

102. Write “Dear Abby” posts.

103. Don’t be boring.

104. Write a post about a scam.

105. Write about everything under the sun so that you don’t bore your readers.

106. Alternative to link exchange: get a group of bloggers together and write reviews for each other’s blogs.

107. Turn off “nofollow” to encourage comments.

108. Be very focused on one topic, in deep detail, so you become a recognized expert in it.

109. Be opinionated.

110. Answer very specific questions in deeper, more specific ways than currently exist.

111. Help people who are just starting out.

112. Don’t interrupt your posts with a lot of links.

113. Connect with your blogging peers and share ideas.

114. Create a guide for your niche.

115. Write an interesting analogy.

116. Write posts that includes tons of trackbacks to other blogs so that other blogger will notice you.

117. Make a post simplifying a complex problem.

118. Create a huge list of your best posts.

119. Give credit to those who inspired your post.

120. Respond to criticism in a post (i.e. criticism of you, your company, of the way you squint your eyes, etc).

121. Make a “[blank] for Dummies” post.

122. Tell a great story.

123. Put some thought into post formatting – increases readability.

124. Check out your competitors’ archives to see if some of their old posts can be turned into an updated version on your blog.

125. Write a post that uses the words “futile” and “desperate”.

126. Write something to inspire and motivate your readers, especially if you don’t do it on a regular basis.

127. Don’t try to be all things to all people.

128. Review your analytics to see what keywords are brining in traffic and make more posts on those.

129. Contrast two or more positions in your post.

130. Write about obscure stuff that appeals to an obsessed minority.

131. Post about what’s popular and why it’s beneficial.

132. Invite a couple of bloggers with opposing opinions for a duel on your blog.

133. Tell a joke (preferably funny one).

134. Browse thesaurus to spruce up your posts.

135. Don’t make your readers pull out a dictionary to understand your posts.

136. Make a post about frequently asked questions in your niche.

137. Make a post about questions that should be asked about your niche, but nobody thought of asking.

138. Create an exhaustive list of jargon for your niche – with definitions.

139. Make a post alleging conspiracy.

140. Don’t always focus on your own niche to find readers.

141. Write about how to use a product in an unconventional way.

142. Poll your readers on a topic and post results.

143. Don’t promote yourself or your products at the expense of the readers’ attention.

144. Write a post about a blog, which is popular, but provides poor content – explain why. You’ll open pandora’s box, but create traffic.

145. Run a contest, offer a cool (but not expensive) prize.

146. Visit your readers’ blogs and post comments.

147. Dissect an argument in a post.

148. Gather a bunch of creative commons images about your niche and make a gallery-post (with credits, of course).

149. Narrow your blog focus.

150. Write a “tag” post and have other bloggers who you tagged add to a list.

151. Make a post about what in your niche is being done wrong and how to correct it.

152. Offer an ethical bribe for commenting or subscribing.

153. Make friends with power users on Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, etc.

154. Make friends with forum and message boards addicts.

155. Make friends with influential bloggers and social media leaders.

156. Create a post that leaves your readers hanging till a later post – it’d better be good!

157. Create a list of “bite-sized” tips for your niche.

158. Write part 2 for any of your posts that are extremely popular.

159. Submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools.

160. Put together a list of the most tweeted/dugg/shared posts in your niche.

161. Dress your blog (design-wise) like you would for your first date.

162. Collect inspirational quotes from other bloggers in your niche; compile them in a post.

163. Invite a well known blogger in your niche to contribute a short guest post.

164. Use a human voice.

165. Use a translation plug-in to translate your blog into other languages.

166. Ask other bloggers (preferably more influential ones) to review your blog and make a post about their findings.

167. Tell your readers to change the world and give them examples of how they can do it.

168. Turn your blog posts into articles (use EzineArticles plugin).

169. Write a press release about your blog.

170. Add a forum.

171. Interlink your blog posts.

172. Keep tweaking your template to optimize readability.

173. Write a post about a generally unknown secret in your industry/niche.

174. Be a comedian – “They’ll be standing in line for that old honky-tonk monkey shine!”

175. Ping the comments you leave on other blogs.

176. Always work on improving your blog.

177. Join a blog carnival.

178. Submit your site to Alltop.

179. Answer questions on Yahoo!Answers via a post on your blog.

180. Answer forum questions by linking to a post that has the answer.

181. Add your RSS feed to MyYahoo, IGoogle, Netscape, Bing.

182. Install OnlyWire plugin – simultaneous posting to many bookmarking sites.

183. Start reciprocal guest blogging: you guest post on their blog, they guest post on yours.

184. Ask your readers to email you links to their best resources and make a post about it.

185. Write an “attack post” by setting up an argument and them shooting it down.

186. Share the secrets that made your blog successful to enable your readers to do the same.

187. Make your blog DoFollow and submit it to DoFollow directories.

188. Twit your blog posts, blog your tweets.

189. Come up with a series of posts unique to your site.

190. Post linkbait.

191. Assign a theme to each day of the week and write about it on that day on a weekly basis.

192. Review your blog’s stats (weekly, monthly, yearly) and write about the results.

193. Do a Twitter search on a particular subject, compile them in photoshop and do a review of the trend.

194. Compile YouTube videos on a specific topic into a VLog and post it to your blog.

195. Walk your readers through a day in your life, use photos, videos, but put a fun/funny spin on it.

196. Write a post about things you can learn from “…” (insert a popular personality in your niche market).

197. Write a summary of a long report, white paper, ebook – make it an easy bullet-like format.

198. Compile a list of niche-related news over the past week, month, etc; keep adding to it over time making it into a series.

199. Create a sense of urgency in your title, make readers think they will miss out if they don’t read it.

200. Be undeniably interesting for years.

If you feel you can add any blog posting tips that work to these, please leave a comment!

Keyword Research software “Tools” – What’s in a word?

Keyword research software delivers invaluable information, such as the number of times something has been searched for in recent months, the exact search count globally and locally, how many of those searches actually resulted in ‘conversion’, how much competition by others is present with a keyword and a plethora of other information.

By comparing words and phrases with other related words, keyword research software tools can make the user aware of untapped, or little used alternatives, in essence; providing them with better and more productive opportunities.

There are many such tools and some have been around for some time.
One I use myself is Market Samurai which has a comprehensive set of features and although this is not free Keyword research software, it has so many additional features I believe it is well worth paying for. This keyword research software tool is based on what it calls “The 4 Golden Rules of Keyword Research” and presents a very structured method of carrying out thorough keyword research.
These are their 4 Golden Rules:
• Relevance
• Traffic
• Competition
• Commerciality
Download Your FREE Copy of Market Samurai Here!

You need to know three important details if you want to be successful.
• How many sites are competing for a particular keyword
• How many backlinks (sites linked to them) they have
• The number of indexed pages the site possesses
Without knowing this essential information, you will simply waste time on keywords that you have no hope of success with.
Programs such as Market Samurai can enable you to identify your opposition, learn many of the reasons for their success and mimic the things that work.

You can never know how your prospective customers find you without research. Even high activity on a site is no guarantee of success, as visitors may be arriving by accident. You need to understand how to target potential customers; not simply to seek high numbers of hits.

Don’t forget that there are also a number of free Keyword research software tools that can provide really useful information too.
• Google Adwords Keyword Tool : Google’s keyword research tool may not provide such comprehensive information as Samurai but it is completely free.
• Google Suggest: Google Suggest is built into the Firefox and Chrome browsers and is an excellent way to find synonyms and suggested words to help you expand your keyword list with some alternatives. Whenever you type a keyword into Google’s search box, it ‘guesses’ what you might be seeking, as in the image shown.

• Wordtracker – Free Keyword research software tool : Wordtracker’s free keywords tool & training videos are also a very good place to start. You will need to register with them to continue to use the free service but that is a cheap price to pay.

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Should you subscribe to email lists?

The answer is an emphatic yes!

However, you should first set up an email address for solely that purpose.

The fact is that all the worlds budding Nichepreneurs know something, they will have read stuff, bought stuff, discovered stuff for themselves and generally absorbed some really useful stuff!

All this material could potentially be what you need to get a small advantage over your competition, so you would be doing yourself a huge disfavour if you simply ignored it. So sign up to one or two of the Web Marketing Guru’s newsletters on their email lists and sit back, it won’t be long before everyone with a pulse is sending you tips and tricks.

Which brings me to the next important point, don’t buy anything from these guys! The sad fact is that nearly all of their products are not worth parting with your hard earned cash. Most of them are making money solely from each other, it’s a sort of “last one in gets to sit on the floor”.

Heads Up: Actually, there’s only one or two chairs, in a hall that will give ‘floor sitting’  room for thousands, all hoping to cash-in with this ‘how to create an internet income’ niche.

The guys that write the books are a good place to start, when I started out I signed up to Scott Fox and a few other email lists. Before a week had passed I was getting about a dozen emails a day from so-called Guru’s and I soon learned who’s to read and who’s to leave unopened in the spam box.

Example: Confirm receipt

These guys will use all kinds of ‘subject’ headlines to get you to read the email, this one is one of the better ones, but I didn’t read it because it was dishonest, if they lie to me in the subject headline they are not going to be that worried about lying some more.

As a general rule anything that looks stupid like “Congratulations! You QUALIFY…” or “Refund #FR-8945″, doesn’t get anywhere with me, because I don’t have time to waste on nonsense.

Now and then you will find emails from people who realise, that if you are going to short-list their emails, they are going to have to give you something useful once in awhile, without constantly expecting you to buy from them. This may be in the form of email content or links to video material that I can record, so that I can glean as much as possible from them in my own time.

In the next post I will show you how to capture other people’s video material so that you can re-watch it at any time. This is important because very often these videos do not stay available for long. Of course there are videos that are worth looking at and some that are a waste of effort, so it is a good idea to download them all so that you can flick rapidly through them and only save the good ones.

Unfortunately there are a great deal more pointless, “get rich quick” videos like the one below with lots of images of fast cars and piles of money, so be prepared to watch some ‘time-wasters’.

Actually I just loved the ‘Stephen Hawking’ voice on this one and it might be just a tad unfair to Aussie Matt Carter, who does actually give away some very good free stuff and generally does not produce amateur rubbish like this himself.

What makes a good niche and why are good keywords all important in developing niche websites?

Too often people start up a website with little thought to the market potential, the level of competition or the appropriateness of the domain name. I avoid making a monkey out of myself by remembering “APES”.

Before spending too much time and/or effort on a proposition I consider whether it is:

Apt – Possessing a firm logical connection

Is it really possible to have a top scoring keyword, or brilliant sounding Domain name, generating lots of traffic, which fails to produce useful results? The answer somewhat surprisingly is yes. If it has no relevance to the site content, your visitors will simply go elsewhere. Site visitor numbers are only significant when they stay on your site, to learn more or to purchase something.

Popular – Has some evidence of high traffic

Being top in Google searches is unlikely to reap many rewards if public interest is low

Exploitable – Lacking in competition

Highly popular niches with high levels of competition are best left alone, as they will drain your resources, wear down your enthusiasm and almost certainly yield little

Satisfying – Meeting a specific customer need

Whether that is providing information or promoting a useful product, it is not much use spending time and effort on something that nobody wants.

Because I want to spend as little time working and as much of it as I can riding my motorcycles, laying on the beach, socialising with friends and all the good stuff that life is really for, I use a Keyword Generation tool. You don’t have to use one, Google has pretty much the same tools, it just makes finding keywords and therefore discovering what makes a good niche a whole lot easier.

There are several around, but I use a program called “Market Samurai” (I am sure you will have seen the ads on this site). There’s no sales pitch here from me, I don’t advocate you buy it at all, unless like me you want a quick and easy method of finding keywords.

First I put in the niche keyphrase “Hair Extensions” (a keyphrase is where multiple keywords are applied and henceforth I will use either expression without necessarily distinguishing any difference between them).

When I hit the ‘generate’ button this yields a whole bunch of keywords, they are basically ‘grabbed’ from Google Keywords utility, so you’ll need a free account from them but all is explained in Market Samurai’s user notes.

Next comes the clever bit, I press the analysis button, wait a moment or two and then sort them according to the SEO Traffic numbers, which is achieved by clicking the title on that column.

It is a little known fact that 90% of possible keywords relating to any given ‘niche’ have little or no traffic. So we are trying to sort out which of them are likely to be worth pursuing.

Next we want to select only the keywords that have low numbers of competitor web-pages, we can do this be altering the SEO Competition settings to those keywords that have less than 30000 competitors. Thirty thousand sounds like a lot of pages, and frankly that is a lot of pages but you have to get used to the fact that it is a competitive world out there! If you are a little intimidated, try thinking about how many shoe shops there are in the world and it will seem less daunting.

Of the remaining three keyword candidates we can ignore two because they are either too competitive (hair extensions) or have a strong regional character (hair extensions Toronto). This leaves us with “microbead hair extensions” which we can now analyse further.

Looking at the SEO Competition in Market Samurai, it is clear that of the 10 top listings in Google, five are very strong and of these one has been around awhile. Also none of the sites has the keyphrase in it’s Domain name, so there does appear to be some potential here.

Heads Up: Although “microbeadhairextensions.com” was unavailable (also inactive) microbeadhairextensions.co.uk was unowned at the time of posting.