Micro Niche Sites Journal – Day 1

After a lot of thinking and even more reading I’ve decided that I’ll start building my own network of micro niche websites. I didn’t set any goals (which is a bad thing), not yet anyway, but I have rough plan in my head which will be written out on paper later today. That will probably the best time to set my goals…

The rough plan in Phase A looks something like this:

Create 2 micro niche websites using the criteria from How To Find Perfect Keywords For Your Micro Niche Sites
All articles on the micro niche site will be original written by myself
Websites will have 5-10 articles
Create 20 web 2.0 properties (WP blogs, Blogger, Squid, Hubs etc.) for each keyword
Submit decently spun content to these properties, link to appropriate micro niche categories
Create another bunch of spun content and submit it to one of the article submission networks (not yet sure which one), link to web 2.0 properties
Create third bunch of spun content, submit, link to micro niche sites
Ping all links to ping services
Collect some money

Ok, so this is a rough draft which will certainly be improved during next few days. Some of the steps might be outsourced, but I’m yet to think about that. I believe that at least the first two micro niche websites should be created by myself than I can outsource more easily.

I also plan on using some software to help me out, which one I’ll let you know in another article soon. The plan is also to create one special software which would help in managing micro niche site network once it gets big but that’s another story altogother.

WordPress MS

I was on a buss today for three hours so while I was staring out of the window I’ve realized that in order to keep my development and administration tasks simpler in the future I should use WordPress Multisite for managing my micro niche websites. If you don’t what WP MS is here is a brief explanation:

WordPress MultiSite enables one to create a Network of websites, all sharing the same WordPress installation including themes, plugins etc. while keep websites ie. content separate.

This means that you can easily create hundreds of micro niche websites from one single WordPress installation. I’ve actually tried this tonight and it works like a charm, if you know how to read the manual that is

What are you experiences with micro niche websites? Do share

How To Find Perfect Keywords For Your Micro Niche Sites

Micro Niche Sites are small websites which have content based around very specific and small (micro) niche. Micro Niche Websites are usually composed of couple of pages, 5-10 on average, with keyword rich (unique!) articles. The purpose of these websites is to create highly specialized content which a small number of people are looking for and to monetize on their interest via different forms of online monetization methods, the most popular being Google Adsense of course.

In order to create such a site you need to do some heavy keyword research, find keyword(s) which are very specific but have relatively high demand in search.

Below are characteristics of those keywords:

Exact search count in Google Adwords Tool more than 2000 (note Exact, not broad – very important)
CPC: Cost per click estimated by the same tool at least 0.5$, should go for keywords above 1.0$ cpc
Easy to rank: Competition in Google Search should be very easy to compete with (more on specifics below the list)
Keyword should not be seasonal ie. Google Trends should display a consistent flow of traffic
No Google Places, Wikipedia, Youtube, Facebook or any other high authority domains in the top 10 in Google Search
Exact Match Domain: keyword should have an available keyword.com (or keyword.net) domain name
Related long tail keywords: in order to create a successful micro niche site you keyword need s to have a couple of
(5-10) related keywords with similar characteristics
Doesn’t contain any company name or trademark of any kind
Keyword shouldn’t contain any city or state names
No product names like “Rezb Super Tool”

Easy competition in search engines requires a bit of explanation if you are not in SEO business. Some of the facts were actually listed above like no Wikipedia results etc. One of the factors to look for is that when searching “your keyword”
including quotation marks should return no more than 30,000 results. Also top 10 results should have weak page authority according to http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ and not a lot of links…

That’s it, can you find your perfect keywords?

How to double your affiliate income in 4 minutes (with a real world example)

The intro

I just saw Matt Cutts’s speach at TED titled “Try something new for 30 days”. In this very short speech (03:27) Matt who is a well know Google engineer talks about improving your productivity doing an “easy” exercise, doing something that you’ve always wanted to do for 30 days, every day. Since I’ve always wanted to write more and given the fact that I have written total of 3 posts since this blog started (shame on me) I feel that this is the best time to start doing what Matt said, writing one post/article every day for the next 30 days.

Now let’s get down to business, the title promised a quick and easy way to double your affiliate income so here it is for you.

The explanation

I’ve been reading Smart Passive Income blog which is a great blog written by Pat who shares his knowledge and tricks about earning passive income online. Pat’s blog stands out from the gazillion of other passive income/money making blogs because a) Pat actually makes some money and b) he shares his detailed monthly reports
Looking through his reports I’ve noticed that a lot of his passive income comes from a hosting company BlueHost. As he said himeself this company brings him a lot of money, as you can noticed it made more than 7000$ in June by referring 79 customers. After seeing this I was wondering if it is possible for Pat to earn even more money by doing nothig but changing a couple of affiliate links. I’ve remembered that one other great web hosting company, HostGator, had a great affiliate program too so I went to check if there is a difference in commission and here is what I have found out:

BlueHost pays 65$ per referral
HostGator pays 125$ per referral (if you send 21+ cutomers in given month)

Simple math says that HostGator would earn Pat almost 10000$ which is a lot of money no matter were you live.

There is one small but significant BUT in this story and that is: you shouldn’t promote products you are not familiar with, it will make you look like a hard sell and could drive your affiliate sales down and I believe that this is the main reason why Pat is not changing his affiliate hosting. Even dough , he could give HostGator a try and then give an honest recommendation like he does now…

The conclusion

It is possible to double your affiliate income by doing some research but keep in mind that you should always recommend products which you have tested and used yourself, this way you’ll increase sales by just being honest with your audience.

Whats your opinion about affiliate sales? Would you promote a product which you haven’t used yourself? Tell me what you think.

p.s. this post is set to be published on 10th September (today is 10th August) so this means you should have 30 other posts to read if I have followed my 30 day challenge

How To Make Money On oDesk

If you have never heard about oDesk then you most certainly never wanted to make any money at all.

I’m kidding of course but the thing is oDesk is probably the most reliable way to make money online if you posses any kind of computer related skill set.

So what exactly is oDesk?

oDesk is a website which connect employers and freelancer in one place. Their idea is not something new, there are a lot of other freelance job sites out there, what makes oDesk different are some it’s unique features:

it’s free for both employers and freelancers
free skill tests
guaranteed payments (on hourly jobs)
fixed and hourly based projects
oDesk team application
cheapest usually DON’T get a job

oDesk is free for registration, once you register as a freelancer you can fill in your profile (another article will be dedicated to this, most important. part of your oDesk journey) and start looking for jobs. There are no monthly fees, there are no “featured” placements on job submissions etc. We are all equal there, sort of.

oDesk provides a wide range of skill test which range from basic Windows XP test, PHP4, PHP5, CSS, XHTML, SEO, English language, English spelling test etx. These test are free and they show a potential employer that you have certain skills which may be required for a job. Sometimes employers explicitly ask for certain test from contractors so if you have passed a test it is more likely to get a job.

oDesk offers both fixed price project and hourly based contract. Fixed price projects are usually smaller projects up to 1,000$ and they have no guaranteed payment. Hourly based contracts on the other hand function like this: you install an oDesk team application which takes screenshots at random times in the intervals of 10minutes, one screen shot taken presents 10 minutes of your work. This way you bill your time automatically and the employer can see what you were actually doing. For these project oDesk guarantees that you’ll get payed so you are safe and so is the employer.

Probably the best feature (which is not a feature actually) is that a lot of times it’s not the cheapest price which wins the contract. I remember when I’ve just started working on oDesk there was one job where the average price was something like 40$ and the employer put a 50$ budget. I was feeling a bit cocky that day so I decided to apply with a 100$ price and a good cover letter. Guess what, I’ve won the contract. And I was more than twice expensive as the average contractor who applied.

Another great thing about oDesk is that people are pretty much always honest, at least from my experience. I always got paid and never had any problems with employers which is really important.

So how much money can I make on this oDesk thing?

This greatly depends on which skills do you have and how hard do you wish to work. Hourly wages go from 1$ to 100$ (yes, I saw a 100$ per hour job) so there is a great opportunity to make a lot of money. Will you be a millionaire? Well probably not but you can live pretty good once you start earning regular income as a freelancer, this is more true for non-US based freelancers….

So what are you waiting for? Go to oDesk and join, tell me about your success!

jQuery loan calculator using sliders

jQuery loan calculator is a simple loan/mortgage calculator which utilizes jQuery sliders (which I find very cool UI element). I was bored last night so I decided to code this simple loan calculator using my favorite jQuery UI component, slider. This is a simple calculator and here is the demo:

Here is the code:

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.2/jquery.js"></script><script type="text/javascript" src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.16/jquery-ui.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(function() {

	$( "#amount_slider" ).slider({
		orientation: "horizontal",
		range: false,
		min: 1000,
		max: 300000,
		value: 100000,
		step: 1000,
		slide: function( event, ui ) {
				$( "#amount" ).text( ui.value );
		},
		stop: function( event, ui ) {
				calculateMorgage();
		}
	});

	$( "#amount" ).text($( "#amount_slider" ).slider( "value" ));

	$( "#interest_slider" ).slider({
		orientation: "horizontal",
		range: false,
		min: 1,
		max: 10,
		value: 5,
		step: 0.25,
		slide: function( event, ui ) {
				$( "#interest" ).text( ui.value );
		},
		stop: function( event, ui ) {
				calculateMorgage();
		}
	});

	$( "#interest" ).text($( "#interest_slider" ).slider( "value" ));

	$( "#time_slider" ).slider({
		orientation: "horizontal",
		range: false,
		min: 1,
		max: 30,
		value: 15,
		slide: function( event, ui ) {
				$( "#time" ).text( ui.value );
		},
		stop: function( event, ui ) {
				calculateMorgage();
		}
	});

	$( "#time" ).text($( "#time_slider" ).slider( "value" ));

	function calculateMorgage() {

		var amount 	 = $( "#amount_slider" ).slider( "value" );
		var interest = $( "#interest_slider" ).slider( "value" ) / 1200;
		var time 	 = $( "#time_slider" ).slider( "value" ) * 12;

		var rate 	 = amount * (interest * Math.pow(1+interest,time)) / (Math.pow(1+interest,time)-1);

		$( "#result" ).text(rate.toFixed(2));
	}

	calculateMorgage();

});
</script>

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/wp-content/themes/recipress/jquery-ui-1.8.16.custom.css"/>
<style type="text/css">
#amount_slider, #interest_slider, #time_slider { width: 200px; margin-top: 20px; float: left; }
#amount, #interest, #time, #result { margin-left: 20px; margin-top: 20px; float: left; }
#result { font-weight: bold; } .message { float: left; margin-top: 20px; font-family:Arial; width: 100px; }
.clear { clear: both; }
</style>

<div>
<div class="message">Amount</div><div id="amount_slider"></div><div id="amount"></div>
<div class="clear"></div>
<div class="message">Interest</div><div id="interest_slider"></div><div id="interest"></div>
<div class="clear"></div> <div class="message">Time (years)</div><div id="time_slider"></div><div id="time"></div>
<div class="clear"></div> <div class="message">Monthly payment</div><div id="result"></div> <div class="clear"></div>
</div>

You need to be careful about your css file location, everything else is self explanatory. Sliders are used to select loan amount, interest rate and time (in years). I use a standard monthly payment function, you can’t be creative here, this is how it’s done, copy and paste it. When you slide the sliders nothing happens, but once you stop the call to the calculateMorgage() function is invoked to populate the $result div. And yes, I know I could have written those divs in a more clear way but I leave that up to you, for my purposes this is just fine.

If anybody needs any clarification of the code feel free to leave a comment and I’ll do my best to explain everything. There is no need to say this but here it goes: You are free to use this code in every way you like, you have no obligations towards me but if I saved you some time or have helped in any other way I would appreciate a link back or at least a comment saying thanks…

30 Day Challenge

I was watching Matt Cutts from Google (all the SEOs in the world know who Matt is ) giving presentation, a small but memorable one, at TED conference. In his presentation Matt suggests doing something that you’ve always wanted to do every day for the next 30 days. It can be something simple, like taking a picture every day if you are into photography, or going for a short run, it doesn’t matter what, start with something small and see how it goes.

Matt is a great speaker, no doubt about it, and he got hooked to this 30 day idea, so I’ve decided to write a post on this blog every day for the next 30 days. Actually that was about ten days ago. Since then I have actually written a post every day but yesterday and I don’t really feel that good about skipping a day but this challenge should be fun, so I’ve decided that I’ll write two posts on a different day to make up for my missed post. I actually have one post already written, the first day of the challenge but it is set to go live 10th of September, the last day of my mini challenge…

I would encourage everyone to try this little fun challenge, it makes me happy when I finish a brand new posts, I’m sure that your challenge will make you happy as well and we all need more happiness in our lives. Here is the Matt’s presentation so you don’t have to Google it:

And remember, telling someone about your goal or challenge will make it less likely to happen, so keep it to yourself.

Tell me what you think about 30 day challenges. What did you do and did it you make it till the day 30? How did challenge affect your life and you as a person?

How To Find Motivation (And Keep IT)

I’m going to quote Eminem here to get us started:

Cause sometimes you feel tired,
feel weak, and when you feel weak, you feel like you wanna just give up.
But you gotta search within you, you gotta find that inner strength
and just pull that sh*t out of you and get that motivation to not give up
and not be a quitter, no matter how bad you wanna just fall flat on your face and collapse

I usually don’t quote rappers, I’m a fan of Sun Tzu and quotes from The Art of War (which is a great book by the way, highly recommended) but the title of this post and this particular quote make a great couple. Actually as I read this quote over and over again while listening to that same song in the background I get a bit motivated to do some more work today, even tough I slept only 4 hours last night….

If you are just starting your freelancing, or any other career for that matter, you’ll soon discover that there will be days when you, as the quote says, feel tired, you will want to give up, you wont appreciate your own work but these are times which shape you as a person, you need to overcome this feeling which is sometimes mixed with a bit of fear of failure. I can tell you from my own experience that working full time while working on freelancing project can be very tough sometimes, you can feel extremely tired and your concentration just vanishes. There a couple of thing you could do to reboot yourself:

Take a power nap
If it’s late, go to sleep
Go for a walk
Do something else

Power naps, or short naps are a great way to reset your body a give yourself that extra push during the day which is necessary to keep going. Power nap is a short nap during the day, experts suggest no more than 30 minutes of sleep and this is from my own experimentation more than enough (even dough I sometimes drift off for an hour or two ) . Practice your power naps, they will save your life someday.

If you are working on a project late at night and you feel sleepy, go to bed. You wont be productive and your motivation the next will suffer. You don’t want this so just go to bed and continue working with full capacity tomorrow.

There will be times during the day when you feel like just being lazy, use these time to go for a short 30 min walk and then come back to your project, I guarantee you that your motivation level will be as high as possible.

Do something else. Yes, your motivation vanishes, do something else for a while, read a book, watch some tv, stare at the ceiling, whatever to keep your mind distracted for a short bit. Then return to whatever you were doing and your motivation will be much much better.

Remember this:

…But you gotta search within you, you gotta find that inner strength…

You are your most powerful weapon, use it!

5 great things about being a freelancer

Ever since I’ve started working on oDesk last November I’m discovering how great working as a freelancer can be.

Don’t get me wrong, I did some freelancing projects before but only for local clients which, frankly, don’t pay that much…. oDesk opened my eyes towards the world of possibilities and it showed me how great life can be when you are working on things that you actually enjoy doing (I’m actually still working full time job which I don’t enjoy as much as I used to…).

1. The money

You can lie through your teeth as long as you want but we are all capitalists and each one of us wants to make more money in order to have a better life, to life healthier, to buy big houses, fast cars etc… There are many reasons why one would want to earn more money but we all want it, the reasons don’t matter really. Working as a freelancer enabled me to have an hourly wage which is 5 times bigger than the wage I earn at my job. How crazy is that? Just thinking about the possibilities of full time freelancing and the amount of money it would earn gets me motivated, I can go through the day just thinking about many things I could do by earning my steady freelance wage….

2. Ego boost

As much as we all love other people most of us are egoists in one way or the other. We like people liking us, we want to be famous and rich etc. To tell you the truth my first big(ger) project gave me a tremendous ego boost ( in a good way, don’t get confused with arrogance ). This feeling is great and I’m afraid that I’m not good enough with words to transform this feeling to words, you’ll just have to experience it yourself

3. Flexible working hours

This is just great, let me tell you great it is for me. I’m a night person, my most productive part of the day is between 22 and 0, I feel like I’m at least 200% more productive in those two hours, my mind is focused, everything around me is quite and I can easily enter “The Zone” in which time stops and creativity kicks in. I also like to watch comedy shows, so this means I sometimes go to bed at 1 or 2 AM which is not really good when you have to wake up at 7am… and boy do I like to sleep While working on my last project I took a week off from work in order to dedicate myself to this client 100%. My work schedule looked like this: wake up at 9 am, quick breakfast over the latest news skimmed, checking email, checking new messages on Skype (from a client) and a quick shower. I would start working at about 10am and work until 2pm, I would then eat my lunch, relax a bit and continue working at 3pm. I would work until 18 and the go out for a run or a walk. I would “waste” my time until 22 and the kick in another 2 hours of work. This schedule made me feel so relaxed you can’t even imagine. I honestly did not feel like I was working, I was enjoying producing stuff for my client. Flexible work hours can be a drawback too but I’ll leave that for another article.

4. Being in charge

Even dough when you are working with a client he is in fact “the boss”, if you are clever enough you can make things go your way but just remember, never argue with the client, “the customer is always right” and you should treat him like he is. Try to make him see your point of view if you think something should be done differently, but be a gentleman about it, I guarantee you this will pay off. I would recommend reading How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie, it can help you learn how to deal with people if you are not a big people person (and you need to be in order to deal with clients). So yes, be smart and you’ll be in charge

5. Interesting projects

Don’t work on boring project. Boring project are for boring people so don’t be one. Choose only those project which will make you happy, from which you can learn new and great things and this will in return make you happy and almost as much important as you, your client will be happy to and this means more projects, more money, cars, drinks… You get the picture…

So these are my 5 great things about being a freelancer. Have you been working as a freelancer? What do you like about it? Share

Niche sites – How to make money with niche sites

Do you want to make a lot of money in passive income? Great, so do I, read on.

Back in the 2007 I had a small blog which was built mostly because I was just starting my learning journey in SEO and I really wanted to test how can one manipulate search engines in order to get better rankings. While I was reading all SEO related articles and blogs I’ve noticed that more and more people come up on various forums and web sites claiming they have earned a lot of money online. To tell you the truth, before that I thought that the only way to earn serious money online is to have a web site with millions of visitors and to sell ads. It turns out, this is just one way you can choose to follow. as everything in life, online journey has many roads to your destination.

In between one of those reads, and once I found out everything about affiliate programs, I’ve decide to register for one affiliate program which was totally unrelated to my blog content but back then I’ve already started writing paid posts with links in them so my blog was already off the track for some time. It turns out that one 250 word article that I have written then has thought me more about earning money online than all of the blogs I have read until that point. It turns out (and I was just checking this a minute ago) this small piece of content was ranking in Google for 976 different keywords! It turns out that this little piece of words scrambled together has earned me over 1000$ (I don’t have the exact number, this is from my memory). I know that this doesn’t sound much, especially to those of you who live in USA but for me it was a lot since I didn’t to anything and some checks would come once in a while. Why I haven’t developed this blog, or any other until now is a question I can’t answer, my mind sometimes (well all of the time) works in strange ways…. But it’s never too late, right?

What are niche sites and how exactly are they going to make me earn passive income?

Niche sites are relatively small websites, usually 50-100 articles or even less focused on a very specific niche, or part of the industry. For example Wikipedia is not a niche site, it deals with everything. On the other hand websites about “How to catch a fish with blue widgets” are extremely niche oriented. Every niche has it’s crowd, buyers and sellers, writers and readers etc… One big thing about niche sites is that they are very specialized in something so people tend to trust these sites more which is perfectly natural and this point alone is a great selling point.

Niches sites are very often monetized via Google Adsense or other contextual ads, they are also great for promoting affiliate offers and they work very well if you have your own product to sell. Which road you take is up to you, I would however suggest diversifying your portfolio as Wall street people say, ie. do both Google Ads and affiliate offers. You can even squeeze your own product, compare couple of products (affiliates) with your own product, if the customer doesn’t want your product he’ll still earn you some money by buying from competition.

This is for today, I’ll have a couple of more niche site articles in the next few days where I’ll cover some example niche sites, how to do keyword research for a niche site, how to build links and SEO your niche and much more so stay tuned.

12 WordPress Code snippets for theme developers

This post came as an inspiration from a similar post published on http://wp.tutsplus.com/ Titled: “10 Code Snippets WP Theme Developers Should Have on Speed Dial”

Even dough this post is great I know most off you will react in a manner like this: “Yeah, this is cool, I should create my own shortcuts…” and you never do because most of us are just lazy sometimes even when it comes down to our productivity. So to help us all out I’ve created 10 snippets for Notepad++ FingerText plugin, you only need to download my file and import it into your FingerText plugin. Combining FingerText and ZenCoding gives you a lot of productivity on your fingertips so make the best of it…

Here is the db3. file, I believe (this means no testing) that you only need to copy this file into your FingerText config directory which you can find in AppData folder, mine is located in: C:\Users\Sasha\AppData\Roaming\Notepad++\plugins\config\FingerText

The file: Download snippets

You’ll notice that I have changed shortcuts from the original article, I’ve prefixed all of them with wp because I know that most of you are not just developing themes for WordPress so it’s handy to have other snippets at your disposal and shortcut like “start” might get confusing. After all, you can change your snippets any way you wish…

Snippets included:

wptp[tab]

<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>

wpquery[tab]

<?php $query = new WP_Query(''); ?>
<?php if($query->have_posts()) : ?>
<?php while($query->have_posts()) : $query->the_post(); ?>  <?php the_content(); ?>
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>

wplink[tab]

<?php the_permalink(); ?>

wpcf[tab]

<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'custom-field-key', true); ?>

wpmenu[tab]

<?php wp_nav_menu( array( 'menu' => 'Navigation', 'sort_column' => 'menu_order' ) ); ?>

wpinc[tab]

<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/filename.php'); ?-->

wpside[tab]

<?php if(!function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar('Sidebar') ) : ?><?php endif; ?>

wpstart[tab]

    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
    <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">  

    <head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="<?php bloginfo('html_type'); ?>; charset=<?php bloginfo('charset'); ?>" />  

    <title><?php wp_title(''); ?></title>  

    <meta name="generator" content="WordPress <?php bloginfo('version'); ?>" /> <!-- leave this for stats -->  

    <link rel="stylesheet" href="<!--?php bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); ?-->" type="text/css" media="screen" />
    <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" />
    <link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="RSS .92" href="<?php bloginfo('rss_url'); ?>" />
    <link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom 0.3" href="<?php bloginfo('atom_url'); ?>" />
    <link rel="pingback" href="<?php bloginfo('pingback_url'); ?>" />  

    <?php wp_enqueue_script('jquery'); ?>
    <?php wp_head(); ?>  

    </head>  

    <body <?php body_class(); ?>>  

    <?php wp_footer(); ?>
    </body>
    </html>

wpgh[tab]

<?php get_header(); ?>

wpgf[tab]

<?php get_footer(); ?>

wpgs[tab]

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>