Today I found a niche that that looks to be extremely profitable with incredibly low competition! This is a perfect example of the type of niche that I am constantly telling people they need to find because it has a very high Adwords CPC (meaning it requires very little traffic to make big bucks) and it has VERY weak competition!

So watch the video below, where I reveal this niche and show you exactly how I did it!

As shown in the Video, I leveraged “Hot Niche Spy” by doing a Keywords & Competition Search for the very general word “restoration.” I then scrolled down and picked out the keywords with high CPC’s then searched for each keyword individually to see how strong the competition is. It’s THAT easy!

I use HNS to find SUPER Profitable niches just like this all the time. I also find and register keyword rich domains for those niches, find and target long-tail keywords, find and target UNTAPPED keywords, check rankings, find hot products in the niche and much more!

Click Here to Use “Hot Niche Spy” NOW for Only $1!

This tool is becoming very popular in the Internet Marketing Community, but I am VERY proud to say that I’m actually making more money as a Niche Marketer (by using it for what it’s for) than I am selling it, which is impressive to me considering it is selling very well!

I recently took on 20 websites to critique as part of a little experiement I’m doing. It didn’t take long to realize that most of the issues I found on these sites are pretty common. In other words, before even going to the next site I could almost bet that it would have many of the same issues the last site had. That tells me many people are making many of the same mistakes, which means it’s time for a blog post.

So here they are! The following are mistakes that I found to be very common throughout this little test, but also throughout the web in general. If you’re making any of these mistakes, STOP!

#7 Poor or no keyword research – Many sites I visit will be targeting one main keyword on the homepage, but when I look at internal pages they are targeting either EXTREMELY competitive phrases, which they will probably never rank for, or they don’t seem to be targeting any particular keyword. If you’re not doing some kind of keyword research, you’re just “taking a stab in the dark.”

#6 A lack of a good internal linking structure – This applies mainly to larger sites (approx. 30 or more pages.) If you have a site with alot of pages, it is very important that each and every page links out to other pages on the site. A list of random pages, popular pages and recent pages that appear on every page of your site is an excellent way to improve the internal linking structure of your site, which in turn helps the SE spiders crawl your site quicker and also spreads authority throughout your site. If at all possible every page on your site should be within 2-3 clicks from the homepage.

#5 Too many banners – Adding a few targeted, well-placed banners to a site is not a bad thing and will generate a little more profit. But contrary to what many people seem to believe the more banners you have does not mean the more money you will make! It can very quickly equal LESS money because a site full of banners is irritating and unneccesary.

#4 Lack of a clear purpose – Way too many sites that I visit require way too much thought on my part (the viewer) before understanding what the purpose of the site is. When the site is yours and you start thinking about a million different ways to do this and that, it’s easy to get off track and present an incredibly confusing site to new visitors. If there is any doubt at all as to what the purpose of your site is to new visitors, you should simply add a 2 sentence or so site description in your header.

#3 Little to no focus on building a list. As many times as I hear (and say) “The money is in the list” it is surprising to me how many people still do not actively work to build their list(s.) In nine niches out of 10, if you’re not building a list you’re wrong. If you’re not collecting opt-ins on your site, you should be! It’s that simple! However, it’s not as simple as sticking an opt-in form in the sidebar with “Join our Mailing List” above it. You need to have something of value to offer and use that in your call to action to draw readers into your funnel.

#2 Using the title tag improperly. The title tag of a page is the absolute most important on-page SEO factor. If the phrase that you want to rank for is not contained within the title it is going to be very difficult to get that page to rank for that phrase! NEVER use your domain name (mysite.com) in the title of your site and don’t saturate your keyword(s) with loads of filler words. That title should be the exact phrase you want to rank for with as few additional words as possible (although adding a few words to make it user friendly is ok… just don’t add TOO many.)

#1 Not Building Enough Backlinks. This is by far the biggest issue I see. People wonder why they aren’t getting the rankings they want, while they’re spending 90% of their time worrying about little things and ignoring the MOST IMPORTANT SEO ASPECT! If you’re not submitting articles to article directories, Submitting your URL to web directories and spending time working on other link building techniques on a weekly basis, you’re not doing enough. If you want to consistantly improve your rankings, you NEED to be consistanly generating backlinks!

I’ve been doing alot of thinking about how I can provide various forms of coaching and mentoring over the past few weeks. But in order for me to get a good idea of what I can offer and what rates are reasonable, I have to do some testing and you’re going to benefit greatly from that testing!

The first thing I need to know is how many sites I can offer a solid site review/critique for, how long it will take me to do them and how much I should charge to do so.

SO, I’m accepting a limited number of site critiques at a discounted price, but I obviously can’t give this test a month of my time, so I’m going to have to limit it! If the order button still appears below, then I’m still accepting orders.

I’m only going to charge $47 per site review, which I believe will be at least 50% less than what I’ll be charging in the future, but this “test” is in part going to help determine that among other things.

Here’s How It Works:
1. Order through the link below:

Sorry, too late. Thanks for the great response. Bookmark this page and check back in the future.

2. Forward your receipt to joshspaulding1@gmail.com along with the URL of the site that I will be reviewing.
3. I’ll personally review your site within 7 business days and send a PDF with my findings/suggestions to you via email.

It’s that easy. I get some valuable data and you get a professional website critique at an insane price, which will surely earn you MUCH more than what you pay.

Hurry, that button won’t be there long.

Jonathan Leger recently conducted an interview with me on the subject of Niche Marketing and I wanted to make sure you didn’t miss out on it.

In the interview (below) I answer some of the most asked and vital questions on the subject. To keep the “flow” correct and so it all makes sense, I’ve just pasted the entire email below for you to read:

(Beginning of Interview)
Jonathan: I decided to conduct a few interviews with some very savvy marketers and send you the information they’ve provided. I think it’s a great idea to read the perspective of other successful people… My first choice was an easy one — Josh Spaulding. He’s a very successful article marketer and the creator of some powerful tools for anyone looking to make a living online.

I asked him some questions about how he researches new niches to target, and his answers are FULL of awesome information.

Here’s the full text of the interview:

Q: What is the first thing you look at when you consider targeting a new niche?

A: How much money is in the overall market. I learned early in my Internet Marketing career that not all niches are equal. A website in the “Football” niche (for example) isn’t going to profit nearly as much as a website in the “lasik” niche.

Just 20 unique visitors in one niche could only be worth $0.10 while 20 visitors in another niche could very well be worth $10.00. So for some niches you have to work 10 times harder to earn the same amount of money.

It’s also important to see what products (if any) are available to promote as an affiliate. Some niches are profitable, but have little to no products to promote. With that being said, determining a profitable market is the first thing I look at when considering a niche and also one of the absolute most important factors of the whole process.

Q: How much importance do you place on using your keywords in your domain name?

A: For big, authoritative sites I don’t place too much importance on it. But when I’m creating smaller sites that target “long-tail” phrases I put a great deal of importance in it!

When you’re targeting long-tail phrases every little SEO bump counts and having your main keywords in the domain can really make a noticable difference.

Q: Do you use the Google Keyword Tool for your Keyword Research?

A: I use some of the data from the tool, but I don’t believe it’s a complete tool particularly because it provides limited results. Somewhere around 80% of all SE queries are unique, meaning they have never been searched for.

So I typically use Google’s data to give me my initial list of keywords. I then filter them with my own criteria and use what is left to get started.

Q: You mentioned you use your own criteria to filter the keywords, will you share?

A: Sure, I’m a firm believer in Occam’s Razor (keeping it simple), as I believe you are. I think most people who fail at niche marketing do so because they over analyze everything and try to find perfection.

But the fact is some sites will fail and some will succeed. With that being said my criteria for filtering keywords is very simple!

I filter them by search volume to start. The exact volume will vary depending on my goals, but for an average niche site I try not to go much higher than 3500 monthly searches.

With what is left I simply calculate the average toolbar PageRank of the top 10 competitors for each keyword. If that number is above 3 I throw it out. If it is 3 or below I keep it.

I then look at the competition for each keyword and do some common sense elimination based on what people are looking for and what sites are ranking.

The success rate varies from niche to niche, but overall I’ve had pretty good success using that process and it saves me LOADS of time.

Q: You had also mentioned that you feel the Google Keyword Tool is incomplete. Do you have other sources for finding keywords once you’ve selected a niche to target?

A: Yes, once I’ve used the keywords that passed my criteria I start submitting articles and writing pages that target keywords that I extract from Google Suggestions (the phrases Google recommends via a drop down menu when doing a search.) These are often extremely valuable and untapped phrases. I also dig into my competitors sites and will often target phrases that they are targeting as well.

Q: In order of importance, what would be your three top tips for a person who has not yet found much success with Niche Marketing, but is determined to?

A:
1. Understand that everyone fails and that those who react to failure positively are often the people who succeed in the end. This isn’t specific to niche marketing, but I feel it’s so important that it should always be the #1 tip no matter what the question.

2. Always remember that the more money that is spent in a niche, the less traffic you need to make considerable profits.

3. Automate whenever possible! I think you’re the King of automating Internet Marketing processes, Jon. So I think you’ll agree, if something can be done quicker and/or easier then it needs to be!

Make smart investments and don’t spend too much time doing something that could be done much quicker and/or more efficiently.

Q: Is there anything out there that you use to automate these processes and make your niche marketing easier and more profitable?

A: For the longest time I paid a lot of money for multiple tools that did one or two things in the Niche Marketing process. But obviously I didn’t like spending all of that money.

There were also a few things that I did manually and couldn’t find tools for. So I had a few very talented developers work together to create an all-in-one “Multi-Tool” for me that I call “Hot Niche Spy.”

It’s my personal tool that was created for ME, but after time I figured why not let others use it too.

So I’m now allowing full access to the “Multi-Tool” for only $1 at:

http://www.HotNicheSpy.com/

I use this tool to find profitable niches, filter keywords, extract untapped “Google Suggests” keywords, extract competitor keywords, do average PageRank and competition analysis, find keyword rich domain names that are available, check my rankings, Check internal PR & more.

So there you have it — some serious niche marketing advice from a Master at the trade, Josh Spaulding.

Here’s to your success Josh!

Jonathan Leger
(End of Interview)

In the past I have said some negative things about the Warrior Forum, but in hindsight I realize that in many ways the Warrior Forum has made me a GREAT deal of money. It has even introduced me to people who have become very good friends.

The negativity or bitterness I’ve had for the Warrior Forum in the past comes from some members there who tend to provide what they consider to be “advice” but in reality it’s inaccurate and only hurts those who accept it, by slowing their progress toward success.

HOWEVER, that’s a natural human behavior and it happens everywhere, in all forums and even offline. It certainly shouldn’t cause anyone to leave the community because of it. Instead, we should ALWAYS keep that in mind and simply be cautious about who we take advice from… always remember that there are many people out there who just want everyone to think they know what they’re talking about.

But there are also those of us in these Internet Marketing Communities who only offer advice on things we know about and sincerely do want to help!

So, I just wanted to write this short post to clear that up because I’ve made remarks in the past to the contrary. The Warrior Forum, and other Internet Marketing Forums provide an EXCELLENT opportunity to network, make direct & indirect sales, build your LIST, find topics of interest, build links to your site and more!

I wrote a post a long while back pointing out the major advantages to forum marketing and they are still true today.

Read those, join those forums, participate, HELP people (that means only giving advice on things you are confident in) and leverage these forums to grow your business.

Just a quick post that will hopefully save alot of people alot of time and money. There seems to be more and more services popping up out there that offer links from profile page, many from forum profiles. Some of these services are create and they do work! BUT some do NOT. The reason being, many forum profiles require you to be logged in to see the actual profile, which means those links will not count, no matter what the toolbar PageRank is.

SE’s do not access password protected pages. The only exception is with Google allowing adsense publishers to allow the adsense bots to crawl password protected pages/directories for better relevancy, but that has nothing to do with indexing.

Here’s an example. Go to my Internet Marketing Forum, scroll to the bottom. If you are a member and logged in, be sure to log out. Now click on any user’s profile and you will see that it’s only showing statistics (no user information or external links.) Profile pages can and do still accumulate toolbar PR, but that authority does not get passed to any external links on that page!

This is the case with many forums no matter what software it’s running. vBulletin, SMF and PHPbb are the most popular and every forum I found that runs any of those platforms has either a login in place, or only shows limited information with no external backlinks.

This could very well be the same with non-forum sites, so before you invest in a service that points backlinks to your site(s) from profiles, be sure to check out what type of profile is giving the backlinks and ask for examples so you can see for yourself if external backlinks are showing up without having to be logged in!

Link Wheels are a linking scheme that have been around for a little while now and I don’t believe I’ve ever discussed them publicly, so this is as good of a time as ever. Let me start by saying I have never attempted a “link wheel” and probably won’t be in the future (I’ll explain why later in the post.) This is simply my “outsider” thoughts on the scheme as a whole from someone who has been doing SEO for about 6 years now.

From what I’ve found in my own research there seem to be many different opinions as to what exactly constitutes a link wheel… there are many different “types” of them. But the most common is what is shown in the image above.

You have one “money site” which is your content site that you want to rank better in Search Engines for the keywords it targets. So you start a link wheel to do so, which basically consists of leveraging multiple web 2.0 sites like Squidoo, EzineArticles, Blogger etc. by creating pages on each of them, linking them all together to build up authority then link each of them to your site. You can see a good illustration in the image above.

DO THEY WORK? That’s the million dollar question. From an SEO perspective I can definitely say they should and probably DO work. I say they should because it makes sense to me and I say they probably do because in my research ALOT of people have said they do.

So WHY do they work?

It’s pretty basic SEO really. Let’s say there are 4 web 2.0 sites (a, b, c and d) and your money site. To simplify things we’ll say there are only two links on the entire page of each of the web 2.0 sites and we’ll give each of the 4 web 2.0 sites 10 authority “points”. This isn’t realistic, but to prove my point it doesn’t really matter… the same basic principles apply.

So, site A links to the money page and site B. Since authority is split up between links on the page, both pages receive half of the authority. Since our web 2.0 pages each have 10 authority “points” that means site B and the money page each receive 5 authority points. So now site B has 15 authority points instead of 10. So now site B links to the money page giving it 12 1/2 points and site C giving it 17 1/2. Now site C links to the money page giving it 21 1/4 points and site D giving it 18 3/4. Site D links to the money page giving it a total of 30.62 total authority points, which is about three times more authority than it had in the first place.

BUT if you only link to the money page and not to the other web 2.0 sites, each one of them will retain half of the authority points since they aren’t leaking it into the next web 2.0 site, meaning the same amount of authority will flow into the money page in the end.

So do they work? Yes. But I don’t see any reason why a link wheel would be any more effective than if you just link a bunch of web 2.0 sites to your money page, since that authority would be retained and would flow through to the money page.

Link Wheels direct authority around a wheel then into a hub site. That authority would snowball, but it’s the same authority… You can’t create authority out of thin air.

Why I Will Not Be Using Link Wheels

Aside from the primary point I just made (it just doesn’t make sense,) there is one other reason why I will not be doing any link wheels in the future. They are against Google’s TOS, so any “money site” that is the recipient of the link wheel authority is at risk of being flagged by Google. You can read how Google feels about “link schemes” for yourself.

I’m sure some will argue that it’s not a scheme, although to me it’s the epitome of a link scheme… a perfect example. So while a link wheel may very well help you rank your site higher in the SE’s it is risky and to me kind of pointless. I prefer to invest my time, money and resources into more stable and reliable link building techniques.

What do you think? I would love to hear your thoughts on link wheels in the comment field below.

One of my favorite quotes of all time is:

“Brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls aren’t there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to show us how badly we want things…the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough!”

– Randy Pausch

I’ve had it posted toward the bottom of this blog for a long while… I have it posted very clearly at the top of my Internet Marketing Forum and I mention it every chance I get, for good reason.

It carries what I believe to be one of the most important and meaningful lessons anyone can learn in business and life in general. Those “brick walls” are failure and we all fail from time to time.

For me, when applying it to my online business it serves as a reminder that not all sites, products and even blog posts are going to be a success. It reminds me that it’s ok when something I do doesn’t turn out to be as good as I had hoped… or even when something just completely FAILS!

I see this as the #1 reason so many people give up on their Internet Marketing Business. They spend alot of time and often alot of money in learning. They finally take action and they make little to no money. They hit a wall, lose confidence and quit. But in reality they didn’t fail, they just learned a lesson. Doing THAT didn’t make them any money, so they now know one way NOT to do it.

Another one of my favorite quotes is:

Failure defeats losers. Failure inspires winners. – Robert T. Kiyosaki

That’s a quote I often think about when I come across a “wall.” Is this failure going to defeat me or inspire me? So when you’re faced with a wall, will it inspire you or defeat you? I know what it will do for me!

Recently there has been alot of talk about something called “Google Caffine.” I had planned on writing a blog post explaining what it is and how it will affect you, but my friend Jennifer (PotPieGirl) beat me to the punch. And although I do not believe Google Caffeine is going to make or break anyone, I do think it’s important for you to at least understand what it is and how it may very well affect your sites.

So, instead of explaining something that has already been explained in details, I’ll just send you over to her blog to read the long, technical explanation and I’ll give you a very quick explanation for “dummies” like myself.

So here’s Jennifer’s very detailed and thorough explanation “Google Caffeine – What it Means To YOU”

And here is my explanation for “Dummies” like myself.

Google Caffeine is what Google has named the new index for their search engine. Basically, pages will be indexed MUCH quicker once Caffeine is fully implemented. That is a good thing for those of us who create alot of content. I remember years ago waiting a few MONTHS was typical for a site to be indexed. I remember very clearly my Germany Travel site took almost 3 months to be indexed by Google and I was building links to it daily. These days even before Caffeine it’s not uncommon to get a site indexed within a few hours, but apparently Caffeine will be even faster! So that’s cool, right?

But you also have to think about how the search results will be affected by this, specifically trendy topics.

I believe Google Caffeine is a result of Google’s desire to show news and social media pages more frequently whenever possible, because news, blogs and social media pages tend to have the most updated and current content.

Let’s say you have a page that holds a top ranking for “hair regrowth.” Now let’s say some miracle drug comes out that regrows hair 100%. The second that product hits the media, news sites and social media is going to BLOW UP with fresh content about it. Before Caffeine Google wouldn’t even know about these news, blogs and social media stories so your page would get alot of attention until that time. But with Caffeine Google will know about them almost instantly. Now, which do you think Google wants to show in those top positions? Your old, static page or all of those news and social media pages? I’m betting on the latter.

So to put it in layman’s terms, from what I understand, Google Caffeine isn’t going to affect the average Webmaster until there is a hot trend in your niche or if your niche is extremely active (a great deal of social media and/or news activity.)

As always, just keep doing what you know you need to be doing (helping people, building links etc.) and in most cases I believe you’ll be just fine.

I know there are millions of people out there who definitely think the answer is yes and they are right. But, most of them think they will do so by frequently posting and sticking up a few adsense ads and/or affiliate banners. And when that’s the case, they do make some money, but very rarely is it a substantial amount.

I’m writing this blog post… the same blog post that so many others have written on other blogs because I believe I have something new to offer. I bet there are at least 100,000 other blog posts on the Internet right now with a topic similar to this one “Can you make money blogging?” And I bet 98% of them say basically the same thing (yes, you can make loads of money blogging)… written primarily by people who are making little to no money blogging.

So let’s talk about the average blogger, then we’ll compare the average blogger, who makes little to no money, to “professional” bloggers who make a good deal of money.

The Average Blogger:

- Has an interest in the topic he or she writes about.
- Doesn’t really have any form of business strategy in place other than “write as much as possible” and try to build links.
- Worries WAY too much about how many people are subscribed to their RSS feed and doesn’t even build an email list.
- Will go about 1 year (max) … realize he or she isn’t making much money and quit posting to that blog.

The Successful Blogger:

- Has a PASSION for the topic he or she writes about.
- Has a solid plan for his or her business, in which his or her blog is usually only a PART of.
- Concentrates on using his or her blog as a platform to build his or her list!
- Will not quit, even if little to no money is made because of passion and confidence.

I predict one of the first 5 comments below will be similar to “But Darren Rowse of ProBlogger doesn’t seem to concentrate on building his list.” And you’re right… or at least it’s seems that way by glancing at the current layout of his blog. My answer to that, he’s leaving ALOT of money on the table and for every one successful blogger who doesn’t have a list, I’ll give you 10 Successful bloggers who do!!

Give me 100,000 RSS subscribers and 100,000 Email Subscribers all in the same niche and I Guarantee you I’ll make $100,000 more with the email subscribers.

The primary reason I decided to write this blog post is because I see SO MANY people spending hours every single day writing blog posts with no real plan… no visitor retention other than RSS… no passion.. Yet they have a dream of blogging full-time and being a “Pro Blogger.”

If you are one of these bloggers please don’t let this post discourage you. It’s meant to do the OPPOSITE of that! I hope it helps you understand what you need to do to make your dream a reality!

And lastly, I want to make one other thing clear. Owning a blog or multiple blogs and being a blogger are two different things! Blogs are useful platforms in many different Internet Marketing Business Models like Niche Marketing. So if you’re a niche marketer (for instance) using blogs for your mini-sites, this doesn’t apply to you. This only applies to those who consider themselves bloggers and have one or two “flagship” blogs where they frequently update.