A good article will answer a question, provide information or deliver news within your niche. If you are stuck for a topic for your article you can go to places like Yahoo Answers to find out what information people are looking for. This is a great place of not only inspiration but also a great place to find information yourself on any given topic.

If I am researching an article, I often will post a question on Yahoo Answers and then use the answers people have provided as a means of gathering information to include in the article. In essence, other people pretty much write the article for me. I just put it all together into a nicely flowing story.

Another source for inspiration are article publishing websites themselves. What are other authors writing about? Spend a little time in the article sites and you will quickly get a sense of what makes a good article. Was it an entertaining or informative read? This will give you an idea of what your articles should look like.

Do not ever, under any circumstances, directly copy another article and claim it as your own.You might take the basic principles of an article and rewrite it in your own style with your own opinions added.

It is certainly okay to re-publish an article. Most authors hope you do; but be sure to also publish the author’s full credit as supplied by the article website. These articles are great for niche blog content and newsletters.

That is precisely the reason you are writing the article in the first place. You want people to read it and share it because it will have your website link in the author’s credits. This is a way for you to get the most back links to your website or blog without having to go out and search for them yourself. You do the work of writing the article and submitting it to the article publishing site and then it becomes a set-it-and-forget-it way of generating traffic and back links for you. Every article you publish about your profitable niche will become mini traffic generators for you. The growing back links will help you boost your page rank in the search engines.

Another benefit of article marketing is that the article publishing sites rank very highly in the search engines. You may be struggling at first to gain page ranking and search engine placement. Your published articles may out-perform your website when it comes to search engine positioning so while your niche website might be sitting on page 5 of the search engine results, your article may be on page one for your keyword.

In the next lesson of the niche marketing course I will cover the basics of writing effective articles for your profitable niche.

Today’s action: Visit Yahoo Answers and several article publishing sites and gather ideas for articles within your niche market. Get at least 5 ideas for articles and read articles to determine what makes them good or bad.

Lesson 14

Technorati Tags: article marketing, article publishing, internet marketing for small business, traffic generation

Now that you have your niche marketing blog set up and have several posts done you need to show Google that they are relevant by giving them some “link love”. One very good way to do this is through the use of social bookmarking sites. Just like Facebook, Twitter and other social communities, social bookmarking sites are used by many people surfing the net for information.

Why should you do this step?

This will help each page of your blog get indexed faster on Google. If your site is showing up on the social bookmarking sites then Google will make a point of crawling the page. This can mean the difference in how fast you can penetrate your niche. Once you get the hang of doing it you should take the 10 or 15 minutes to do it every time you create a blog post.

Remember back in the preparation for this course when I had you sign up for all of those sites? Well this lesson is where I am going to show you how to use them. I know you all understand now how very long it can take to sign up for them all. You can appreciate just how long it would take you to manually go into each site and place a link for each of your blog posts.

I am going to show you a several really great time saving ways to quickly add your links to them all.

socialmarker.com is a site where you can put the bookmark information of the page you want to bookmark into the text fields and click on submit. They will then go through one by one the social bookmarking sites you have selected and pre-fill in the forms. This makes it much faster to go through the process of adding your links and descriptions to the sites.

This video will walk you through how to use the social marker site. The first time you use it it will not be supre fast because you will have to sign in but if you use it on a regular basis all of the sites will already be signed in and it will go much faster.

The next service I use for bookmarking is called www.traffic-bug.com. Now this is not a free service but it does have a free trial period so you can use it while learning to see if it is something you find useful and worth the money. The reason I like it is because it is set it and forget it. It works away at submitting your site for you. Once you set up the first session for each page in your blog you do not have to do anything else ever again. Over a period of time this service will go out and submit your pages to the social bookmark sites without you ever having to do anything else. Huge time saver!

This video likely explains it better. I use this service so I don’t have to take the time to do all the social bookmarking myself for the majority of the sites. That way I can focus my time on developing more niches and doing more blog posts. It is up to you whether paying for this service is right for you. You may decide to wait until your niche is paying for itself and just use the socialmaker service instead.

Technorati Tags: social bookmarking, social bookmarking software, social bookmarking tools

Using Social Sites for Business

Most people have heard of sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc. These are social community sites where people of like interests can connect with each other. This can be a gold mine for your business or it can be a disaster. The key is to learn how to use them to your advantage.

You must remember that people generally congregate in these sites for fun and to gather information and to network. They are not there to buy. A successful internet marketer will join these sites to create a following and to brand themselves as being a good and trusted source of information on a particular niche.

You are there to gain the trust and friendship of your potential customers. To let them get to know you. You should treat these sites as if they were a party and use the same etiquette you would use if you were face to face with a new acquaintance. Do not be the jerk of the party who can only talk about themselves, their products or selling. We all have met that type of obnoxious house guest. We avoid them like the plague.

Be entertaining and engaging. Provide good quality information that is helpful. Be real. Why do you think reality tv is so big right now? People want to feel connected. Be approachable. If you are fun to be around you will attract followers.

Fill out your profile with a killer bio. Be creative and authoritative. Let them know what business you are in and a link to your blog or website or both. That is the only place you should really try to sell yourself. Use the same picture in all of the social sites so you can brand yourself. Do not make the mistake of using your company logo. It MUST be a picture of you. The smilier the better.

Most people belong to more than one social community. If you start popping up in all of them associated with your niche you will very soon gain expert status among your followers if you give them quality info and are entertaining. Let them know that they can follow you on all of the sites by telling them how to find you on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Linkedin, YouTube etc. Join niche groups and contribute or start one of your own.

Finding followers who are most likely to like you. You do this by searching your niche within the social sites. You already know you have something in common with them. Request to be added to their friends list or subscribe to their feed. 9 times out of 10 they will follow suit and add you to their lists too.

It is okay every now and then to say” I just did a new post on my blog about (whatever). Check it out if you are interested.” and leave it at that. Just don’t be too self promotional.

The process of gathering potential customers on social sites is as follows:

• Like me

• Know me

• Trust me

• Pay me

Report content to them instead of trying to create it all yourself. Find controversial but non-offensive topics to cause interaction. Don’t be spammy, or pushy.

If you follow these basic rules you will eventually start getting JV offers from people who see you as an expert or celebrity within your niche. No need to source out ways of making money yourself once you are branded.

So use social websites wisely and you will reap the benefits. In the next lesson I will show you how to manage all of the social sites from one application. This will drastically save you time while making it seem like you are very active.

Action for today: Get out there and be social.

Technorati Tags: facebook for small business, internet marketing for small business. twitter for small business, social marketing for small business, twitter for niche marketing

In the last lesson we covered how to create quality content that has the proper keyword density for your blog. By now you should have several blog posts completed and submitted. Now we cover how to get your profitable niche website found indexed.

Now let’s check and see if Google has found your site yet. Do not panic if it hasn’t and do not really expect your pages to be showing up on page one of Google yet. It is a process and sometimes it takes a few days for Google to find you.

Here is how you can check to see if Google has crawled your site yet. Go to the Google search engine and in the search firld type in site:yourdomain.com or site:yourdomain.blogspot.com whichever you have chosen to use for your blog. If you are indexed you will see the pages that Google has visited in the list. If nothing is showing yet give it a bit of time. Check each day.

I have had some pages that show up within minutes and other pages that takes several days.

IMPORTANT NOTE: There is one thing I can almost guarantee will happen so I do not want you to panic when it does. You will type in your site one day and 5 of your pages will show up. Then the next time you type it in they are all gone. Nothing at all showing. That is normal! Just continue posting on a daily basis and usually the next day you will be back indexed again.

The reason this happens is because the search engine wants to be sure you are not a flash in the pan. One of those sites that posts today and gone tomorrow. They will not serve old news to their customers. They will wait and see if you are still relevant a day or so later.

One way to show them you are here to stay is to do a bit of backlinking and promoting of your site. I am going to show you how to do this.

Remember when I told you to reserve one of your articles? There are some very good article sites that will allow you to post that article and give you a backlink to your site but ONLY if it is original content. The one that seems to hold the most weight with search engines is ezinearticles.com.

The reason this site carries so much clout with the search engines is because every single article that is submitted for inclusion on the site is read and approved by a human. The articles all must meet ezinearticle’s standards. This is the way they can ensure that they are delivering quality articles and not spam. Do not include any links within the article itself. They allow you an author’s resource box where you can put your bio and your link to your website. Never, ever place any affiliate links in any articles or it will be automatically rejected and may get you banned.

Play by their rules and you will be rewarded. Their articles are also a source for other websites looking for quality content. The terms of use for the articles is that they are free to be used anywhere so long as the original author is given full credit. This is a good thing for you.

Think about it. Your one article could potentially show up on hundreds of websites all from your own niche and you will have backlinks from each one. This will really boost you up the page ranks quickly. So make the articles you submit there top notch stuff.

Another place I have had fairly good luck with is hubpages.com. This site is kind of fun. You can create some great articles, add video, images, links, etc. You also have the option to monetize the articles although you will not likely get rich from them they may bring you in a few more dollars each month if you use Adsense, Amazon or eBay affiliate programs.

Again, they prefer and reward original content although not as strictly. You will get a lower hub score initially if your article is not original but can climb the ranks if it is good quality. Just do not use anyone else’s works. That is seriously frowned upon. If you use one of your blog posts be sure it is your own and not one you have mined from another source.

You can likely find many article submission sites. I know of a few. buzzle.com is another one similar to ezinearticles that does have human approval as well. It usually does well in search engines too. For the first while I would suggest you write two articles per day. Submit one to your blog and one to an article publishing site. If you do this it will be very quick for you to get your site indexed and really start climbing the position in Google within your chosen niche for your main keyword phrase. Check daily to see if you can find your site in the search results for the pages you know are indexed already. There is no point in checking pages that aren’t indexed yet as they will never appear in results.

Another way for you to get quality back links is through leaving comments on other people’s blogs and doing forum posts with your url linked in your signature. Now listen to me carefully here…DO NOT spam other people’s blogs or forums. If you leave a comment make it relevant to the post. Do not make your comment self promotional. Seem like you are genuinely interested in what the blogger was writing about. They will reward you with approving your comment and giving you a backlink. Spam or be competitive with them and they will disapprove your comment so you have just wasted your time and theirs. You have too much to do to waste time.

In forums, follow the rules. Many forums do not allow links in your signature until you have had 10 posts approved. So make your posts or replies to other’s posts polite, relevant and non-promotional. Add value to their site and they will reward you with back links. Nothing is more hated in any blog or forum than a spammer. Do not do yourself the disservice of ruining your reputation. Remember that the members of that blog or forum are interested in your particular niche and if you are helpful they will check you out.

There are various tools and software that can help speed up this process for you. Your Market Samurai is a huge time saver in this aspect of promotion. The Promotion Module will save you from having to surf for hours to find relevant blogs to leave your comments on. They will also be able to tell you whether the site has a “no follow” setting. You don’t want to spend time leaving comments on blogs that have no follow tags. The search engines will not be able to follow to your site so it will not count as a back link. It may drive a small amount of traffic your way if that particular blog is a very active one, but for now you really need to focus on quality back links.

Here is a very good Market Samurai training video that will walk you through using the Promotion Module and building your back links.

Another way to grab links on other sites is by using pingbacks. This is a relatively new technology but is super easy and way cool. If a blog is set to allow pingbacks, each time you place a link to that blog within your blog post it will appear in their comments as a link to the post you have created. But how do you know if a blog allows it? Well that is another engenious feature of Market Samurai.

In their promotion section they analyze other blogs to not only let you know if they have no follow tags but they also let you know if they allow pingbacks and you can very easily do a quick post up within the software itself that will create a post that looks a bit like an RSS feed with the link to thier blog post and a brief excerpt of the article. You can put them all together in a list and put it into your blog. I usually say something like, “Here are some great articles I found about (your keyword phrase) that I would like to share with you.” Then I paste the code that Market Samurai has created with the links and summaries. At the end, I finish it off with…”I hope you have found these articles about (your keyword phrase) as interesting as I have. Please leave me your comments to let me know what you think.

Submit your post and you now have a new series of very relevant back links that Google will love.

Make building back links a part of your daily routine. It is critical to gaining authority for your site. With the right tools it takes less than 10 minutes a day but can make all the world of difference to your success.

Today’s actions: Check to see if your pages are indexed, post your article to an article publishing site and leave at least 2 comments on related blogs (more if you are using Market Samurai)

In the next lesson we will begin building a Web 2.0 presence for your niche market website.

Lesson 11

Technorati Tags: building back links, getting relevant backlinks, how to gain Google page rank, niche marketing course

As we discussed in the last lesson, adding original content to your blogs is crucial to getting a good quality score with Google and providing value to your readers. But how do you write articles on profitable niches if you do not know much about the topic? How do you come up with fresh new ideas on a regular basis?

If you downloaded Market Samurai there is a great content creation module built into the program.  Here is a video tutorial on how to use Market Samurai’s find content feature. This will save you literally hours and hours of time surfing through blogs and article websites. You can analyze the quality of each article and gather your information. You can also create a blog posting directly from Market Samurai so that is a bonus time saver as well.

If I am in a hurry, sometimes I will find a very interesting article that I want to share directly with my niche market. I will use the entire article but will write a small introduction letting my readers know it is not mine. Something like, “Here is a very interesting article about “my niche keywordphrase” I found while surfing for the latest news that I thought you would be interested in as well. It is written by “author name”.

I cut and paste the entire article into the post here. Then I write a summary at the bottom. Something like, “I hope you found this article on “my niche keyword phrase” as informative as I did. “Give your opinion on it”. Please leave me your comments and let me know your thoughts.

I make sure I have done the on-page SEO things like keyword title, head, tags, highlight my keyword phrases, etc. as discussed in the lesson 8. And then send it off to my blog.

Obviously this is not original content and you should not do this for every post but it is a quick fix to adding content on the fly. Your blog should have postings on it at least every other day to advance your position on Google or gain in page rank. New content is the food of your blog and if you starve it it will die. But we all get busy sometimes, so this is a quick fix.

The next way you can write articles on the fly is to use a tool called Article Assistant. This tool is great for those of you who don’t have confidence in your writing skills, have writer’s block (it happens to everyone), are not very informed about your niche or just want an article fast without having to do a lot of thinking.

Here is how you use Article Assistant. Open the program and type in your keyword phrase and a word that you would typically follow the phrase with in a sentence. For example, “best hybrid cars + are or have”. The software will then quickly search through other articles and pull up sentences with that phrase in them. You can choose a couple of ones you like and click to add them to your article editing.

Now you do not want to make an entire article with your keyword phrase in each sentence. So here is where that list of keywords you printed out when using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool will come in handy. Select words from that list and put them into the Article Assistant one at a time. “Prius has”, “electric cars are”, etc.

Now you should have a good string of sentences that all deal with your niche and are SEO friendly for your chosen niche. All you have to do is rearrange them and write just enough to make them all flow together nicely. Remember, you are trying to create quality content that your readers will enjoy reading.

And that is it. That is just how dead simple it is to write good niche articles that will give your blog it’s lifeblood, drive your page higher in the search results and start to gather a following.

I know many of you are wondering why it is so important to write articles. We have all seen the blogs that have nothing but links to other sites, rss feeds and pretty much garbage on them and they are found in search engines. Well, to be honest, how often do you spend quality time on those sites?

Here are some goals you should set for your time spent on your niche blogs. You should keep these goals in mind when adding any type of content.

• Gain authority in your niche. You want your readers and Google to regard you as an expert in your field.
• Give your visitors a reason to come back.
• Gather emails of your readers for future sales. They will only trust you enough to give you their emails if you have given them value for free first.
• Become a real person to your readers by offering original content and your personal opinion on things.

Just filling your blog with drivel to increase the number of keyword pages will come back to bite you in the end. Google is always changing and it seems their main focus these days is to weed out the sites that do not add value to their own product, information. The higher the quality of your content the faster you will rise in the ranks. So keep that in mind whenever you are making your posts. Is that post something you personally would stick around and read?

Google also looks at the bounce rate of your site when they are deciding if you have a quality site or not. What is bounce rate? It is the length of time your visitors stay on your site before hitting the back button to leave. The longer they stay on your site the better your bounce rate and Google will decide that the visitor found what they were searching for. In other words, you gave them a good product to present to their customers.

If the customer clicks on a link in your site and follows it to another site it does not count as a bounce. So do include other sources for your visitors to find additional information on the topic. This typically means a non-competitor in the same niche. Google likes to see this. That you are guiding customers to find more info. A good example of this would be links to government and non-profit sites, directories and statistical sites. Sites that are not competing to sell a similar product as yours but will support the info you have provided to your reader.

Once you have established your site, article writing will likely take up the majority of the time you spend on the niche. Getting this right can be the difference in your bottom line. It can create the profitable niche you are looking for.

Task for today: Write several quality original content niche articles. Submit all but one to your blogs. Reserve one for our next lesson on article marketing.

Lesson 10

Technorati Tags: article writing software, article writing tools, tips for writing original content for your blog, writing information reports, writing niche articles

This lesson will cover how to write keyword rich articles that will pass the test of readers and entice search engines to index your page faster and rank your page higher for your niche keyword phrase. Many people get this wrong and as a result they lose both loyal readers and get sent to the lower ranks of the search engine rankings.

There is a fine line between what is considered good SEO and what is considered keyword spamming. Keyword spamming is a huge no-no. You can generally tell if someone is spamming their keywords because the same phrase will be used in almost every sentence or paragraph of an article. As a reader it is annoying and as a search engine it will get you black listed so please be careful.

A good practice is to use your keyword phrase sparingly yet strategically. Put your niche keyword phrase in your page heading title, once in the first sentence of the article, once somewhere in the middle of your article if it is a fairly good length article, and once in the last paragraph. If it is a relatively short article skip the one in the middle. That is certainly enough to get it across to the search engines what the content of the page is about.

You do not need it anymore than that because you are going to be sure the rest of your page is also keyword optimized. This is known as on-page SEO. Your keyword phrase should appear in the headings(h1, h2, h3, etc), url and page description and keyword tags. If you do that there is absolutely no need to flood your article with your main keyword. Your readers will thank you by actually reading your articles.

The next way to draw Google’s attention to your main keyword phrase is to bold, the first one, Italicize the second one and underline the last one. Google will recognize you are giving extra weight to those words within your page content.

Here is another secret trick that many people don’t know about that will get you placed higher in search engines and get a higher page quality score.

Go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. (If you don’t have an account sign up.) Don’t worry. You do not have to buy adwords to use this tool.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

This is a tool that is also very good for helping you come up with alternative keyword phrases if you are stuck coming up with some for your niche. For this purpose it is a way to find keywords to sprinkle throughout your article.

For this example I am going to use the “best hybrid cars” phrase. Make sure the descriptive words or phrases blox is checked and enter your mail keyword phrase in the keyword box. Check the synonyms. Enter the captcha and click the “suggest keywords” button.

Google will then come up with a huge list of related keywords and keyword phrases for your particular niche. These are words that Google feels a good content page would typically show up on articles related to your niche keyword. I suggest you pick out 4 or 5 of these and be sure you include them in your article. Keep these keywords in mind also when you are choosing categories for your blogs and anchor text for links, etc. I usually print that page out and keep it handy when I am writing an article. It is also a great way to brainstorm ideas for articles if you happen to fall victim to writer’s block.

Google Related Keywords List

When selecting which keywords to use off of the list I also pay attention to the search traffic for each word. In this case I notice that the word Prius has the highest amount of monthly searches so I will likely want to include that one in my article or links or categories.

Learning to write articles and provide quality fresh content will be the backbone of your niche marketing business. Don’t panic. I know for many of you this is scary or intimidating. It doesn’t have to be. In the next lesson I will show you some tools and some creative ways to write articles with very little effort. Even if you have chosen a niche that you really don’t know much about. For some of you the article writing will be the hardest part. For others, like myself, it will be the fun part of your job.

Your task for today is to write one niche article following the instructions for SEO and keyword density that I have shown you today and post it onto your blog.

Lesson 9

Technorati Tags: Google keyword tools, niche marketing course, proper keyword density, SEO niche articles, writing niche marketing articles

Well today is the day! You are going to finally feel like you are taking action and beginning to create content. But trust me, if you had not done the keyword research and all of the other processes necessary to find profitable niche keywords in the past 6 lessons everything from now on will not matter because it would have failed.

You should congratulate yourself for having the intelligence and patience to getting to this step. Many others would have given up because they are not really looking to succeed. They are looking for that quick buck; the get rich quick scheme that we all deep down know does not exist but are always still hopeful. The good thing is that now your are more educated on how success really can be achieved in niche marketing and are about to put the take the first steps forward into a new life for yourself and your family.

Today I am going to show you how to set up your blogs for the fastest indexing on Google possible. Learning some basic SEO techniques will make a huge difference in your Google page rank and placement within the search results for your chosen profitable niche keyword phrases.

The first thing I will show you is how to set up a Blogger blog for your niche market. I have written up the Blogger tutorial here. Even if you plan to register your own domain and use Wordpress I suggest you also sign up for a Blogger blog as it will make a great feeder blog for your main website which I will explain in a later lesson. Be sure to follow all of the steps in the tutorial as there are some very key steps that will give your blog an edge over your competition.

For those who choose to use a WordPress blog on your own domain name, you can view the video instructions WordPress Installation Tutorial that will show you a very easy one-click installation if you use Bluehost or Hostgator as your web host. Choosing this method gives you much more control over your web space and allows for many more features and options. I will be doing a complete tutorial on customizing your Wordpress blog later. For now just get it installed and ready to go.

Our next lesson of the Niche Marketing Course will cover the concepts of writing search engine optimized articles and blog posts for your profitable niches to get you the maximum ranking and search engine results.

Lesson 8

Technorati Tags: free niche marketing course, internet marketing blogs, niche marketing blogs, Setting Up Profitable Niche Blogs

If you have not already got a Google account you will need to set one up. It is free and is necessary for many of the things I teach in my free Niche Marketing Course.

Once you have the account set up go to Blogger.

Once you have signed in it will take you to the Blogger dashboard. In this area you can edit your profile, add a picture and manage all of your blogs. You can create as many blogs as you like within the one account.

Now click on the “Create a Blog” link in the top right corner.

Now this next step is IMPORTANT. This is where you will begin the process of giving yourself an edge over your competition in your chosen niche. It is basic SEO but many people do not understand it. That is good news for you.

• You MUST put your main keyword phrase as your blog title.
• You MUST put your main keyword phrase as your blog address. If your main phrase is not available then add a word to it. For example if your keyword phrase is “besthybridcars” and it is not available try adding the word “find” or “get” or any other word to it until you find one variation that is available.

Google will give more weight to your niche blog if the url and title represent the content of the pages. This means you will get indexed faster and rank higher than other sites that have not optimized their title and url.

Once you have done that, you will get the blog creation success page.

If you want to register a domain name for your blog or transfer a domain you may already have, this is the place to do it. Click on the “Advanced setup options” link and follow the instructions. For this tutorial I am going to focus on the free .blogspot.com options. So click on the start blogging arrow to continue on to the dashboard for this blog.

This area is where you will manage this blog. You can see at the top there are 3 tabs besides your posting tab. Lets first go to the Settings.

Now if you put your keyword phrase in the title when you were creating the blog it should appear in the top box. If not, you will want to put it in now.

Below is a box for your blog description. Again you will want to be sure that your keyword phrase appears in the first sentence of your description as I have shown you above.  In this example I have written just a very short description for demonstration purposes. You should go into more detail. This is what the search engine will crawl and display in the search results when someone types your keyword phrase into the search engine so be creative and truthful about your page contents. Nothing ticks Google off more than having a url, title or description that does not match the content on the site. Do not be tempted to put catchy or trendy words in there just to capture traffic if you cannot deliver the goods.

There are a series of boxes below. Go through them and make sure they are set to your liking. Especially make sure you select “yes” in the one asking if you want search engines to be able to find you. Unless you are waiting until you have a project completed, the sooner you get Google to index your pages the better.

Once you have completed the Settings page let us move on to the Layout tab.

Now comes the fun part of customizing the layout of your niche blog. I highly suggest you do not change the header. Keep it your niche keyword phrase. If you are dead set on using an image instead, try a simple background image behind your keyword title. I recommend you just keep it simple though and leave it as just the text as that is what the search engine will be looking for.

You can arrange your sidebar any way you like. To switch the order around of the sidebar components just drag and drop them into the order you would like them to appear. You will also notice an “add gadgets” link. This is where you can add many features to your blog such as affiliate products, custom links, Adsense, etc. Let’s click on the link and take a look.

When you click the add gadgets link a pop up window will appear and you can select any features you would like to add to your sidebar or footer. The arrows I have placed are particularly important if you want to monetize your blog with Adsense or Affiliate products.

When you click on the Adsense gadget it will take you to an area where you can choose to add the ads to your sidebar. I recommend you blend the ads into the color scheme of your blog so they do not stand out glaringly as ads.

The HTML/Javascript is the one you will select to add your affiliate ads. You can cut and paste the code for your ads into the box. Please keep in mind the size of the ads as they will have to fit into the sidebar of your blog. This is a great place for things like Clickbank, Paydotcom and Amazon ads or an ad to any of your other websites. You can also create ads within Market Samurai to be placed here.

Play around with the layout but don’t get too obsessed with the looks. It is more important to get your site up and running. You can come back to the layout at any time and make it pretty. You can change the template anytime too.

If you would prefer your Adsense to appear within your blog posts, you can click on the Monetize tab and fill that out and customize where you want the ads to appear within your blog. Remember that Adsense will only post ads a limited amount of times on your blog per page so do not try to force more ads than allowed as it will just end up with blank areas within your posts.

Your Blogger niche blog is now completely set up and search engine optimized and you can begin posting content to your blog.

I will be covering keyword density in my article writing lesson of the Niche Marketing Course so be sure to read it so you will understand the proper way to optimize your posts for the best page ranking.

A word of warning: Do not keyword spam. Too much of a good thing is not good in Google’s eyes and you WILL get buried in the lower ranks as a result. Learn how to do it properly and follow Google’s rules and they will reward you with a better ranking for each and every post of your niche blog.

Technorati Tags: Blogger, how to set up a blogger blog, niche marketing blogs, using blogger for your niche marketing blog

Before I get on with teaching you how to begin your niche website or blog, I want to make a note that if you do not have the means to purchase Market Samurai at this time I highly recommend you spend more time with it during the free trial period. Watch all of the training videos on their website and get all of the benefit you can of the available modules before your trial expires. Once it expires you will only have the use of the keyword research module. (which is still pretty awesome and extremely useful) The information you can gather from those paid version modules will benefit you over the next lessons.

For those who have purchased your copy (wise choice) you can proceed and learn all of the features of the software as you go.

Okay, let’s talk about domain names and blog user names. I hope you took my advice and did not already register a name in advance. You may wish you hadn’t when you learn how to do it right.

You will need to decide if you wish to use a free service or paid service to begin your business. There are advantages to both, however, you should keep in mind that Google and other search engines do give more weight to registered domain names. Potential customers also trust registered domains more than free sites. Their thoughts are that if a business is not successful enough to afford a domain name then maybe it is not a good choice to purchase from them.

Most web hosts are under $10/month so it is not a major expense and they usually include a free domain name. I personally use Bluehost for most of my websites. Other internet marketers also use HostGator. Both of these webhosts are trusted and offer the one click installation of Wordpress blogs which is a real benefit since you won’t need to know how to install the database necessary to run the blog. I suggest you check them both out and decide if they are right for you.

If you are unable to afford the $10/month yet then I suggest you use blogger.com as a free service. This is owned by Google so if you have to use a free service you might as well use the one free service that Google likes.

When setting up your blog or registering your domain get out your list of keywords. You want your blog name or domain name to contain your keyword. This will help you get your site indexed faster and carry more weight since the domain is optimized for the search engines.

It may be tough finding an available domain name. If your chosen one is not available try using variations like adding hyphens (-) between the words. Another idea is to put the word “get” in front of your keyword or “best”. Do not get hung up on finding a .com extension. Just grab whatever is available for your desired keywords. Yes, search engines like the .com best, but it is not a hindrance to go for a .us or .biz extension.

It doesn’t matter if your flooring business name is John Doe, Inc. That domain name is not desirable for niche marketing. You are better off using laminate-flooring.biz than to use your true business name. The search engines will like it better and reward you with more traffic.

Make your domain match your web content. If your domain is laminate-flooring.com do not make the majority of your content be about ceramic tile or vinyl flooring. Google frowns on keywords not matching content. Remember they want to only deliver relevant info to their customers.

In every step of the creation of your blog or website keep the search engines in mind. If you follow these rules you will get indexed faster and rank higher in the search engines.

So off you go and get your business registered with a great niche domain so we can get started building your business. In the next lesson of the Niche Marketing Course we will cover setting up your blog and writing keyword rich content.

Lesson 7

Technorati Tags: choosing a domain name, keyword rich domain names, niche marketing course

I am sure you now are getting a bit overwhelmed with finding some really good keywords for your chosen niches. Trust me, I know! This lesson I am going to give you a tool that will make the whole process much easier for you.

Last year the industry was pretty much turned on their heads by the launch of this software. This product takes the pain out of keyword research and automates the entire process of keyword research into one step. If anyone asked me what my secret weapon was to my success. This would be it.

If you have read my post on Market Samurai and how it has changed the way I run my business then you will know how much I love this program. Seriously, why would I be showing it to you if it wasn’t the best? I am not getting paid if you chose to purchase it. I am not a part owner or associated with the Market Samurai company. The reason I use it in this niche marketing course is because it works and having it will give you an immediate edge over anyone else.

You can pretty much run your entire business from this software because of the various modules included. For this lesson we are going to focus on the keyword research module. This function is accessable in both the free version and the paid version so do not be afraid that you will not be able to keep up if you do not have the reseources at the moment to take advantage of buying the software.

Because I really want you to fully understand how to use this tool I will be focusing a great deal of attention on it. There are two very critical points that you should know before you begin using it.

1. Do not use the broad niche keyword as your starting point in the software. Narrow it down a bit first as I showed you in lesson 2. This software uses Google’s system to gather data. If you use too broad a keyword to start then it makes Google take notice. If they see that your IP address is taxing their load they will shut you down for 24 hours or possibly for good if you continue to abuse their system. So don’t go crazy with the software. You should never analyze more than 150 keywords at a time from the list of possible keywords that Market Samurai will suggest. Cut that list back. Eliminate all of the non-factor keywords that do not pertain to your niche or that you know are going to be out of your league for competition before you hit the analyze button.
2. Watch the videos first. This software will gather information that you did not realize was possible IF you know how to use it properly. Don’t be tempted to jump right in and use it without first getting the proper training.

So here goes…This is the place to download your copy of Market Samurai.

If you need help walking you through the installation and registration there are videos in my Market Samurai Training section.

Once you have the softare installed come on back here and watch the first training video.

Take your time and check all of your longtail keywords in the software. This should really give you a feel for whether you have the most profitable keywords for your niche. It should also help you find more keywords within your niche. Write down all of the ones that you will use within the niche and keep them for the next lesson when we will begin to actually start building your website and blog.

If you have done all of the homework and followed all of the steps you should be fairly confident by the end of this lesson that you have found a profitable niche.

Technorati Tags: finding profitable niche keywords, keyword research, Market Samurai