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!

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)

As we’re coming up on a new year (at the time of writing) many of us start thinking about goals for the new year. I’ve never been one to sit down and write out all of my goals, although I probably should, but I do try to set them and keep them in mind throughout the year.

One of those goals is to bring my Adsense income back up to where it was a couple years ago. At one point I was earning a few thousand dollars a month via Adsense. Since then I have shifted my business model to focus more on my Info-Product Success Formula, which in turn more than quadrupled my online income!

I’ll continue to work on new info-products and to increase that income as well, but just setting an hour or so aside each day can make a big difference in my adsense income, so I figure, why not? That’s more money in my pocket and that’s what it’s all about.

So let’s get into making more money with Adsense.

The first thing that you need to realize is that Adsense isn’t a business model. Adsense is a monetization model! A business model is a complete system for making money, like my Info-Product Success Formula (shameless plug, but excellent example.) A monetization model alone will make you no money.

With that being said, I obviously can’t go into each and every business model and tell you how to make each of them more profitable in this blog post. But I can give you a few Adsense tips that seem to be interchangeable. These may or may not apply to the Adsense business model you’ve adopted, but chances are they do.

1. Keyword research, keyword research, keyword research, keyword research! They say 90% of all searches are unique. Meaning the keywords people are getting from expensive keyword research tools only account for about 10% of the total keywords used by real people. What does that mean to you? Use tools so you know what is being searched for by those 10%, but also get to know your niche and use COMMON SENSE in figuring out what people in that niche are looking for! THEN, and only then, create a compelling title and write your articles and pages.

2. The more content the better! Never rely on only a few pieces of content to catch on. Some do, some don’t and even those that do aren’t always big money makers. You should alot a certain amount of time every single working day for content creation. In most cases, Adsense earns you more on big content sites, so the more content you have the better!

3. Check your ads relevancy often. The ads that Google decides to show aren’t always 100% relevant. The more relevant the ads, the more money in your pocket, so the less relevant the ads are, the LESS money in your pocket! Fortunately Google has something called “Section Targeting” that allows you to tell Google where you want the Adsense bot to really look at and also where you don’t want it to look.

4. Test with channels. Your site should have the same overall design and template for each page. And in most cases your ads should be showing in the same spots on each page of your site. Each of those ad spots should have a channel and you should be recording stats. If one spot earns next to nothing, get rid of it. You should only keep units that perform. Also record the earnings for each spot for a month. Then change the design of the ads around a little.

Test different backgrounds, borders and text colors. For each modification give it 30 days. Obviously after you’ve tried 3 or so variations stick with the one that performs the best. Generally you want the background of the ad to match the background of the page and the text to match the text of the page etc. but that isn’t always the case. Testing is the only way of knowing for sure!

5. Don’t mix Adsense with loads of Affiliate banners! In most cases adsense performs the best when it is the only monetization on the page. If you think affiliate offers will earn you more money you should test it. Run affiliate offers for a month, then Adsense for a month. If you think Adsense and Affiliate offers combined will earn you more, test that for a month. Whichever performs the best wins. But don’t do what 99% of all Adsense publishers do and just stick everything that you think looks good on the page just because. Ads should be placed because they earn you money, PERIOD!

If there is one thing that you took from this article it should be this: TEST! I know people hate hearing that because it requires work, but the fact is that I can’t sit here and tell you exactly what will work best on your site and no one else can either unless they test it.

So take the tips I provided above, combine them with testing and I guarantee your chances for more Adsense income will greatly increase.

photo credit: Peter Forret

Just a quick post to show some really cool stats and to introduce a technique I’m using to actually promote one of my hobby sites primarily through Twitter!

As you know, Twitter is widely recognized as a powerful networking tool. It isn’t a direct traffic or sale generator in most cases, but as I explained the other day, Twitter could have direct sale/lead/traffic generation potential!

In that post I didn’t mention a current “case study” (I guess you could say) I’ve been doing with a Geocaching hobby blog of mine. A little while back I thought of a way in which I saw (in my head) Twitter as being a powerful traffic generator.

So I spent about an hour implementing it and so far I’ve accomplished the following directly from Twitter:

1. 69 unique visitors directly from Twitter (See screenshot below.)
2. An upcoming interview with the IndyStar (a very large Newspaper publication in Indianapolis.)
3. $20.75 in sales through the phpBayPro shop I have on the blog.
4. Found and got acquainted with a Geocaching shop owner who is going to set up a custom affiliate program just for me!
5. Received at least one blogroll link from another Twitter user, who geocaches and owns a geocaching blog!

None of that is extremely impressive until you consider the amount of time and effort I’ve put into that twitter account, which you can see at http://twitter.com/MadCacher.

Here’s what I did

I created about 10 random Tweets about Geocaching then I went to Twitter Search, did a search for “Geocaching” (without quotes) and for about 1 hour I added every person who mentioned Geocaching.

After that I just updated with questions every now and then… updated when I went out and found some geocaches etc. The traffic came mostly through the link in my bio… in other words I probably could have plugged my blog a bit more and drove more traffic! But I’m trying to build authority and trust in this niche, so I don’t plug my site too often.

As you can see, I only have 92 updates at the time of writing and each update takes about 20 seconds, so the time investment is very minimal, especially when it’s in a niche I love talking about.

I invested a total of about 90 minutes in that Twitter account. So, is 90 minutes worth 69 unique visitors, an interview with a big newspaper, which WILL indirectly drive much more traffic and exposure, $20 in sales (so far,) at least one sitewide link pointing to my blog and a custom affiliate program set up just for you? I know my answer!

Will this work in ANY niche? I seriously doubt it! Twitter users tend to be more technically inclined (Geocaching is a GPS game,) so if you go searching for people talking about vacuum cleaners you probably won’t get very good results.

BUT if you’re open minded about Twitter in general, I think you’ll find that it has far more benefits than just networking!

img credit: splorp

As you may know, I’ve been profiting from niche markets for several years now. I do more email marketing, blogging and authority site building now, but I still keep up with what works and what doesn’t and I’ll still stick up a little niche site every now and then.

As you probably know, Internet Marketing strategies change frequently. Algorithms are updated, trends change, new tools come and old tools go etc. We simply can’t do things exactly the same way for years and years, not with niche marketing anyway!

For that reason, I’ve decided to share what tools I currently rely on to find, target and profit from niche marketing. First off, like I’ve said before, if you have the money to invest in it, I highly recommend FirePow simply because it cuts off 95% of your time and effort! But, not everyone has money to invest, so the following tools will help you start making money with niche marketing with a much smaller investment.

Finding a Profitable Market

SpyFu (Free) – This is what I use to find highly profitable markets. Type in a main market (mortgage, credit etc.) and see what the “Cost/Click” shows. If it starts at $1 or more, you have a profitable niche (usually.) That’s all I use this for! This is a PPC tool, so that doesn’t mean that’s what your adsense clicks are going to be… I just use it to see what advertisers are paying big money for, so I can get some of that big money.

Digging in and Finding Long-Tail Phrases

Google Keyword Tool (Free) – There are alot of paid keyword research tools out there, but they aren’t needed. For years I relied on the SEO Book keyword tool and although it’s still fairly accurate, it doesn’t compare to Google’s newly refined keyword tool. I’ve been using it over the past few months will great results. I try to stay in the 1,500-2,500 monthly search range for my long-tail phrases.

Competition Analysis

I don’t use a tool for this… I use a VERY simple technique to determine what phrases are worth competing for and what phrases aren’t. Here is my extremely easy keyword research technique.

Themes & Templates

Niche Adsense WP Themes & HTML Templates – I’ve been recommending these themes and templates for a LONG time because they WORK. They look almost identical, but one is for WordPress and the other is for static HTML sites. These are the themes and templates that bring in up to 30% CTR in some markets and a higher than average CTR in ALL markets. Small investment for huge returns! Use the wrong template/theme and you’ll get a low CTR, get a low CTR and you’re just wasting your time!

Promotion

Automatic Article Submitter – I promote my mini-sites almost entirely via Article Marketing, so it’s nearly a necessity to have an article submitter! I’ve been using Article Post Robot for a few years now, but there were a few things I need on top of what was already available, so I spoke with a friend of mine, Milan Kosanovic, and he’s decided to created the ultimate article submitter! It’s not done yet, but it’s almost ready!

That’s it! Aside from 2 one-time investments (templates/themes and the article submitter) which pay for themselves after your fist site, it’s all free and very effective!

img credit: geishaboy500

Over the past several years I’ve been profiting from small, niche mini-sites. Lately I’ve sold several of them and shifted my focus to email marketing, blogging and other things, not because it’s a weak business model, but because I wanted to shift my own business model to things I personally enjoy doing more.

Niche marketing is typically one of the first business models people get into, whether they realize it or not. The purpose of this post is to advise against those who are now doing exactly what I was doing when I first began and that’s searching for the “secret!”

I honestly believed for the longest time that there was some kind of a secret that successful niche marketers were holding from me and the general public as a whole… you know, the “thing” that separated them from me

If you’ve been keeping up with my blog, reports, or coaching forum for any time at all you’ll notice there are a few things I CONSTANTLY say over and over and over again. Every time I get ready to mention one of these things I question whether I should mention it AGAIN or not, but I always decide to go ahead and mention it because these things are just not mentioned enough in my opinion and they are VERY important for “newbies” to understand. Things like the importance of retaining visitors and realizing there are no secrets to success!

That goes for just about every online business model out there! There are certainly important factors that you need to know before becoming successful with anything, but all of that important information is out there and 99.9999% of the time it’s absolutely free! (Buying ebooks is still a good idea from time to time… it’s kind of like outsourcing research, as Andy Beard once put it.) But you are not being kept from any secrets that are keeping you from being successful with niche marketing!

I won’t get into the specifics of what it takes to succeed with niche marketing because I do that for free in my niche marketing report, but I will tell you the basics:

1. keyword research and competition analysis are crucial! If you aren’t researching you might as well just invest in lottery tickets!

2. Ad placement is crucial, as traffic that doesn’t convert into income might as well not be traffic at all! Use a proven template if you’re doing html sites or a proven theme if you’re a WordPress user. If you go with just any template or theme you may find yourself working much harder than you need to in order to get your site(s) to convert!

3. Target high-paying markets. That doesn’t mean you have to compete for phrases like “debt consolidation.” Dig deep into high-paying markets like debt-consolidation and target low competition phrases WITHIN highly competitive markets! This can make the difference between $10 from 25 visitors and $1 from 25 visitors!

4. Don’t spend an eternity on one site. If you’re spending months at a time per site, you’re not going to get very far! I’m not saying you should create a bunch of incomplete sites, but once a site is complete and you’ve done some promoting move on. NOT every site is going to make you alot of money. Some do and some don’t. Put 100% effort into each one then move on.

5. NEVVVVVVVVER give up! I spent months and months and months and months before i started to see a decent return on my time and monetary investments. Some people profit much sooner and some later. But 99 out of 100 people who just stick with it no matter what eventually make big profits with niche marketing and that goes for just about every other business model as well!

I promise you making money with niche marketing isn’t all smoke and mirrors. Thousands of people do it every day!

Whether you leverage WordPress to do it like Garry Conn, you use powerful software to do it like Andrew Hansen or you leverage the power of article marketing to do it like Tim Gorman and myself, the basic principles are always the same, there are never secrets and those who realize that and NEVER give up are those who are successful in the end!

photo credit: andercismo

One of the most important aspects of article marketing and niche marketing is keyword research. If you do it incorrectly, or even worse, you don’t do it at all, it’s like shooting in the dark… you might hit something here or there, but most of the time you’re going to miss in a big way.

With that being said, you’d think there would be plenty of good information out there on the subject, right? Well there’s not! The reason being, many people just don’t understand it and there’s good reason for that.

There are 2 steps one must take to researching any given keyword and/or phrase:

1. Determine an accurate search volume
2. Conduct competition analysis

Both are equally important! Do #1 correctly, and #2 incorrectly and you may find that your article or post will never hold a top 10 spot. Do #2 correctly and #1 incorrectly and you may get a top 10 ranking, but no traffic!

The goal is to find keyword phrases, which have as much search volume as possible, with the least amount of competition.

The basic principles are pretty simple and straight forward, but understanding the overall principles and actually conducting keyword research are two completely different things!

In the past I’ve shared a more advanced keyword research method at Coaching with Josh, in the $5 Mini-Site Forumla and elsewhere, but most people just end up wasting time and resources because they don’t seem to get it and I don’t really blame them. To really dig deep and do 100% accurate keyword research, you really need to know what to look for… you basically need a few years of experience.

However, you can still do good keyword research, very quickly and easily without being an experienced SEO.

How to Conduct Quick and Easy Niche Keyword Research

Keep in mind, this is “hit or miss” and isn’t 100% accurate, but it’s very quick, easy, fairly accurate and doesn’t require much SEO or marketing knowledge.

1. First find a good keyword tool like the one at SEO Book. Most tools get their data from the same place (Wordtracker) so the data is typically the same. You can also use Google’s tool if you’re more familiar with that, but for this example we’ll use the one at SEO Book because that’s what I use and I know it’s fairly accurate.

Now do a search for a fairly broad term, which is extremely related to the niche you’re researching. Copy and paste every single relevant phrase that has approximately 100 daily searches and paste them into a notepad file. If you can’t find enough in that range, do some more searches on related phrases. Keep in mind, the 100 daily searches figure is for niches sites and articles. If you’re not looking for longtail phrases, obviously you’ll raise that number.

One thing to note, no keyword tool is 100% accurate. Nope, not even Googles! Why? Because what was searched last year, may not be searched this year, what was searched last month may not be searched this month, what was searched yesterday may not be searched today etc. etc… trends etc. They also count searches done by us marketers and other worthless searches that weren’t done by targeted prospects… just FYI.

2. Now go to Google and do a search for each and every phrase you pasted into your notepad file. Don’t worry about exact phrase matches etc. etc. just look at the Google PR of each of the top 10 listings in the SERPS. If the average of the top 10 is a PR of 3 or less, keep that phrase, it’s a winner. If the average is 4 or higher, dump it.

That’s it!

Now, for those of you who are thinking “Google PageRank is useless, why would I even consider that?”

Google Toolbar PageRank is known to be inaccurate in some niches, but when averaging a big group of pages (10 in this situation) the average PR is actually a fairly accurate measure of the overall authority in that long=tail niche.

Like I said, there will be hits and there will be misses, but overall it works and it’s easy!

photo credit: chrisjohnbeckett

After publishing “The $5 Mini-Site Formula” I’ve been asked MANY times whether or not I worry about Google suspending my adsense account for putting up “MFA” sites.

My answer is always similar to this:

“No, “MFA” sites are not all bad. If I were publishing crappy content, which didn’t help anyone, then I would be worried. But I don’t!”

What is an MFA site?

An MFA site is one that was made to generate income from Adsense. With that in mind, many people start shaking when someone quotes this, within the Google Adsense Program Policies:

No Google ad may be placed on pages published specifically for the purpose of showing ads, whether or not the page content is relevant.

The reason they added this was because spammers were putting up trashy sites, which scraped content and provided absolutely no value to the viewer. They put up these sites full of trash just to make a few cents with adsense.

Good on Google! This guideline was necessary!

Google WANTS Good Content and I provide it!

If I were to ever receive an email or a phone call from a Google rep asking me to take down my niche mini-sites I would be VERY surprised! Why? Because they fill gaps and answer questions… they contain quality content! They just happen to be monetized with Google Adsense.

If you find a handful of long-tail phrases that have little to no competition, but receive some daily search volume, wouldn’t Google WANT you to fill that gap with good info? Of course they would! What they don’t want is for that gap to be filled with scraped crap that isn’t going to convert an ad that their advertisers are paying for!

So, some MFA sites are indeed black hat, but not all!

A few months back I launched “The $5 Mini-Site Formula” and it was a BIG hit!

In a nutshell I explained exactly how I create and market little, niche mini-sites and have them bringing in $5/day minimum, in only 7 days!

This exact technique has already earned many people alot of money. My Private Coaching Forum members are all over it, picking my brain left and right and I’ve received several success stories already!

However, I’m writing this post to let you know that if you are one of the many who enjoyed my $5 formula, there is a new tool being created by one of my buddies, Milan Kosanovic as we speak that is going to make the search for high-paying, “HOT” niches MUCH quicker and easier!!

This new tool is called “Hot Niche Machine” and we are expecting to launch it toward the end of the month (May 08.)

If you’d like to be on the Priority Notification List, just head over to http://www.hotnichespy.com/ and sign up.

I’m extremely excited about this new tool and I believe you guys and gals will REALLY like it!

A couple weeks ago I wrote a blog post titled “Should You Target Longtail Niches or Competitive Niches.” The main thing I wanted to point out with this post was that targeting competitive niches is profitable, but targeting long-tail niches is profitable as well, they are just two separate models (techniques.)

In that post I mentioned something that I never imagined would have cause as big of a stir as it did. I mentioned the fact that I have created niche mini-sites many times over that were bringing in $5/day within 7 days.

About 20 minutes after publishing that post I started receiving email after email from many readers wanting to know how I do it. Many of you also asked in the comment field of that post, which ended up having over 50 replies!

Well, I promised a free report, so for the past few days I’ve been working hard on it.

It’s now complete and you can download it through the following link:

http://www.5dollarformula.com/

Note: If you are currently a member of my mailing list, check your email. The direct download link has been sent to you!

This report is somewhat short, at 17 pages, but I outline the exact process I go through when creating my niche sites, which typically start bringing in $5/day within 7 days of their creation.

Enjoy the report! I’m off to have dinner with Claudia, Aaron and my Parents