It’s not often I do this but it’s not often I have the time to find new blogs. Although I’ve been involved in some way in blogging in this niche for the best part of 2-3 years (despite taking a break from last April to January) I rarely come across top notch, high quality blogs that give you solid information.

When I do, I try to share them with others. Note Grizz, Trent Brownrigg and so on. Here’s another one.

Viperchill is a viral marketing blog which you should definitely check out. I stumbled across it through PluginID, the old blog of the site owner, and funnily enough despite the size of both (over 10,000 subscribers combined) I’d never heard of them before.

I’ve browsed through ViperChill, and although I don’t have the time to read all the posts the ones I did all had something of value to them. Information on internet marketing, making money online, driving traffic or whatnot – all useful if you’re trying to build an online business.

Here’s some of the posts I liked best:

How I Wrote A $30,000 eBook And How You Can Too

Guest Blogging: The Ultimate Guide

How I Really Built A Blog With 6,500 Subscribers

How To Really Build Backlinks and Dominate Google

Although this isn’t a review, more a plug, it wasn’t paid for – in fact, like me 5-6 days ago, Glen has no idea I exist

The site has no ads, no recommendations for affiliate programs, just a very hard to find $37 eBook called Cloud Living. Which I haven’t read, so can’t recommend it… but if it’s anything like the rest of the site it’ll be awesome.

Anyways, another blog to add to your reader – check it out when you have the time. The posts are massive so it might be difficult to go through them (there’re double the size of the in depth ones on here so you might struggle) but take your time, it’ll be worth it. Enjoy!

Around a month ago I did a post detailing how to make money with adsense – make sure you check it out if you haven’t already.

Now a few people asked me questions about adsense and setting up niche websites (the main business of my internet marketing company in Bangalore, India) and the WSO guide wasn’t doing so well in terms of conversions (I feel it was too niche) so I decided to compile all the information I knew about Adsense through experience / learning from reading others and put it into one free guide for you guys.

I was originally waiting for the theme to be coded before I launched this but I’m waiting on the mascot so you guys can ‘proof’ it for me… let me know how you like it, whether it could be improved and so on. It’s a 50+ page report containing a LOT of information and should give you something of use.

If you’re already subscribed (through Aweber), check your inbox as there will be an email with the report. If you haven’t, you can get it by subscribing below:

 Discover How To Make Money With Adsense In This 50 Page FREE Report!

Email

Let me know what you think!

I mentioned I was getting a new design a few days ago, as one of the things I was doing to boost subscriber count… the design is shown below.

What do you guys think?

It’s clean, Web 2.0 ish, was done by a friend. The blank space at the top is room for a mascot – the little guy you see currently is getting redrawn.

More about who did it and the process when it goes live, but would love to hear your opinions.

Some updates…

If you squint (or click through to make the image full size) you’ll notice the topic of the 55+ page free report. I can promise you that it’s insanely high quality and i’ll be adding to it as we go on – hopefully it’ll become the ultimate resource about that topic. A couple people have looked at it / proofread for me and they liked it, but we’ll see what you guys think when it’s out (if you want to help proofread and get an early sneak peek, hit me up on MSN/Skype).

Quality matters less than I think

Although I don’t mind putting out 400 word generic articles on my niche sites to build backlinks, the silly thing I’ve done is that I have a way too high expectation of what quality should be, especially on this blog.

For example, although I think “how to install a wordpress theme” might be useless information for me to put out, a lot of people need to know stuff like that. Or, an article on how to make money writing articles – most of you would think that’s way too basic but there are people out there that would kill for that kind of information.

So I’m going to be putting out a lot more information on here, generic, but helpful stuff. For example stuff like 9 ways for teens to make money, 10 things you should do to get more blog comments etc. Both a mix for SEO and for social traffic from places like Digg, Stumble Upon etc.

The bonus for you guys is that I’ve disabled blog broadcast and will only use it to send out the elite articles, so if you subscribe to the Aweber list you’ll be getting only the top stuff (and some other info that won’t even be displayed on this blog). I’ll be pre launching the free report through Aweber, so if you’re signed up you’ll automatically get it.

Monetization

Unfortunately, I’m a bit of a weak person when it comes to promoting in this niche. I can sell a $10 report like the best of them… however I didn’t do it enough when I previously owned this blog.

My problem is that on this blog I interacted with people, and when I did that they became friends. I find it almost impossible to ’sell’ to friends, even if the information is useful – I’d rather spend an hour helping someone out than telling them to go buy a $47 product.

However, although I still love you guys I’m going to try and get over this irrational fear – I’ll be recommending stuff on here from time to time, although as always I maintain that a) you don’t need anything I recommend b) I won’t promote stuff too often and c) I won’t promote shite products.

This blog has a Marketing Team

As I mentioned, I’m currently in India training my employees – one of their tasks is to promote this blog. I’m teaching them about things like article marketing, blog commenting and forums… now you may notice a couple comments on your own blogs from them.

They’re still getting the hang of everything, including comment etiquette etc – they are real people, they are taught to try and add value, and they are passionate about marketing. So if you notice a comment on your blog that doesn’t sound like me… it’s from one of them and hopefully it’ll add to the discussion on your website.

Make Money Dynamo

A couple people have asked me about MMD – I’ve moved all posts to this site, although I didn’t do 301 redirects or anything too technical, just stuck up a maintenance page with a link to this blog.

MMD still has 200~ subscribers and I’ll be getting my employees to share their experiences on it, what they’re learning in internet marketing and so on in the next week or so. I’ll introduce them on this blog as well – but just wanted to let everyone know what was up.

Of course, they’ll be promoting that, this as well as a few niche websites so that’s quite a bit of work, but I see a lot of potential in all this.

Link Juice And Stuff

Due to the requests of a few spammers (or blogging friends ) I’ve decided to add dofollow and KeywordLuv to this blog (along with the already existing CommentLuv). Now I’ve added another plugin called Lucia’s Linky Love (I think) which makes comments dofollow only after 7 of them – this prevents people coming by, dropping a link and never coming back. CommentLuv is nofollow, your anchor text comment keyword will be dofollow after you’ve made 7 total (it shows your number I think although I’m not sure what it bases it on, either email/name/URL – any one of those I’m guessing ).

That’s it for now. If you’ve got any suggestions (re the theme, the blog itself or anything else), feel free to share em. I’m pretty proud that I managed to keep this post under 1,000 words, although it was a close ish one.

Getting subscribers has long been a problem for people – especially in the internet marketing niche where people are more aware, but also in other niches. I plan to try and take this blog to 10,000 subscribers by January 24th 2011, a promise I made when I joined… I’ll talk about how I plan to do that as well as some tips I’ve used for getting subscribers on other sites.

For a social blog like this one, subscribers are one of the biggest things used to judge whether the blog has value. Unfortunately, you can have a tonne of good content, but subscriber count is one of the biggest things people look at when visiting, and if yours isn’t at least at a reasonable level, most will just pass you by without seeing what you have to offer.

There are quite a few blogs with completely rubbish content… yet they’ve grown because of their subscriber base. On the larger blogs, people think that if XX,XXX people have subscribed, there must be something valuable to offer… so I should do the same.

Although I don’t plan to make a tonne of money with TUK, I do plan to build it up to reasonable levels. Why? Because having a blog in this niche means power in this niche, and thus it’s much easier to build JV connections, launch products, seminars and things like that in the future.

My employees are slowly working on building search engine traffic for this blog, as I’ve never focused on it before… so that should help a bit, anyways here’s how I plan to build this blog to 10,000 subscribers+

New theme. This theme is a bit… boring. I don’t know, I just don’t like it very much. Although I won’t be getting a complicated magazine theme done, I’ve hired a freelancer to create a new theme that has been coming along pretty nicely. I also plan to redo the mascot, and have contacted the guy who did the first one… so when the theme is ready, the guy at the top that you see will have a new look.

If a site looks nice, people are more likely to stick around and thus have a greater chance of of subscribing.

Killer incentive to subscribe. At the moment the incentive for people to subscribe is a free 30~ page report detailing how to make money with WSOs. This is bringing in about 5 new subscribers a day through optins. However, I think the WSO topic is a bit ‘too’ niche… a lot of people don’t know what WSOs are, so ignore it. I’m considering taking all the information that’s been posted on this blog about Adsense and compiling it into a large report to use to build optins – that should have some more interest.

If you can give away something valuable that will pique people’s interest, they’re more likely to subscribe to your blog. If you run a dog training blog, create a short 10 page report about teaching your dog tricks or something related, and as long as it’s well positioned and you’re getting traffic, you’ll get subscribers.

Easy to subscribe. In this niche, everyone know’s that the emails sent out aren’t personally created. So rather than ask for the Name + Email, I’ve only asked for an email address, something I was advised by a partner. This has slightly increased optin amounts. At the moment I’m getting about 3-5 new optins a day through the blog for the free report – which is pretty pathetic (IMO) but I haven’t done too much work on this site yet so that’s better than nothing.

Contests. Contests were one of the things that grew this blog massively when it was just starting out… I plan to hold a few more. Probably just for cash, maybe for a few gadgets.  The good thing about contests is that it’s win / win for all three parties, as long as they don’t happen too often. If prizes are sponsored, advertisers can generally get the same amount of exposure just by sponsoring a prize rather than buying a paid review, maybe even more exposure as with a paid review generally you tend to ignore them unless they’re of extreme interest. For example, at the moment I’m not really promoting paid advertising on this blog, however when I do so a review would cost at least $200 – $300.

Whereas if an advertiser sent me a cool music gadget or something funky to give away in a contest, something that would be worth maybe $100 maximum, this would cost less for them and also get more interest (people would read the post, and maybe even check out their website to find out how / what they could win. For me, I get to expand my reader base by bribing you guys with cool gadgets in the hope you stick around. For you guys, you have the chance to win stuff for doing relatively little work. Win / win / win.

This works for other niches too – for example you could give away one of those weight loss exercise machines (that cost $50-60) on a weight loss blog just for an optin. You’d get people interested in losing weight signing up just for a chance of winning, you might get other weight loss blogs linking to you, you could make it go viral if you require people to tell their friends… you get the idea.

Comments. Although I don’t have the time to leave hundreds of comments on blogs every day, I do have an evil strategy that will allow me to do this without spending too much of my own time (personalized comments, not spammy crap). I’m putting it into testing at the moment, but will update on how it goes. The good thing about comments is that you can get a lot of active visitors on your blog this way – if you comment on A’s blog, there’s a reasonable chance A will comment back if your blog is in the same niche, or that A’s readers will check you out if your comment looks interesting enough.

At the moment I have a list of around 20-30 blogs that I think provide interesting content and although I’ve fallen behind on doing so, I try to comment on them as often as possible when I have something useful to say (which isn’t very often, granted ).

Increase traffic/conversion. This is probably the most important point in this list, which is why I’ve put it last. The problem most people don’t have bigger lists is because they don’t get the traffic. Common sense dictates that either increasing your traffic or conversion rate will mean your list grows.

For example:

100 visitors a day at a 3% conversion = 3 new optins a day.

200 visitors at 3% conversion = 6 new optins a day

100 visitors at 6% conversion = 6 new optins a day.

Either by increasing my traffic or my conversion rate, my list number will shoot up. Some of the above can help me do this  - the theme would probably increase conversion rate, since I plan to have either a popup or a footer ad – it won’t be too annoying though, I promise! and things like contests, comments, SEO etc will increase traffic.

These are just some of the ways I plan to grow this blog. Nothing new really, but hopefully it’ll give you some ideas. Feel free to ask questions or give your own suggestions.

When starting with internet marketing the tendency is look for big, easy money, to go “glamorous” instead of sticking to the basics. With the amount of products coming out in this niche alone each and every day, all of them telling you to go after and all of them promising different things, it can be very confusing for anyone – no matter how experienced – to get started.

Since I rebought this blog I’ve tried to keep the post content solid and put out information about building a long term business, something I didn’t start doing for quite some time because I was always chasing the big thing. The main purpose of my company is to work on and setup more sites for my niche site empire, and although we’ll also be looking at one time income (like site flipping, for example) our primary focus is small money every day that will add up to a lot over time.

The problem with the “boring” way of making money is that people can’t really see the potential, with all the hundreds of other ways claiming to make you $50,000 per month or $20,000 per day. Why purchase an Adsense eBook that (realistically) tells you you have to work 3 months to start earning $1,000 per month when you have Product A, B, C, D, E, F, G and H telling you you could be making $15,000 per week with *insert method here* starting tomorrow?

So today’s post will show you the potential of what can be achieved with long term website development. I’ve done an interview with Trent Brownrigg, someone I’ve known for a year or so online. One of Trent’s primary business models is niche website development, and he also works on site flipping from time to time. Combine the two and you get a website that he sold for $48,000 – not a bad sum of money by any means, and a true example of the potential of starting a long term business.

The interview is shown below.

Hi Trent, thanks for agreeing to the interview. How did you get started in internet marketing?

TB: You are very welcome!

I actually got started with internet marketing sort of as a fluke. I had no idea what it even was and I certainly wasn’t searching for it or anything like that. I had just graduated college back in 2003 and was searching for a job in the major that I studied when I came across a work at home ad that looked interesting. It turned out to be some envelope stuffing scam or something like that so I never did it, but that was the point when I somehow started researching internet marketing and everything started from there.

What are the main ways in which you make money online?

TB: I like to spread out my income streams so I make money several different ways. I earn from affiliate marketing, network marketing, Adsense, selling advertising, site flipping, from my own products that I create, and sometimes from other ways. But it all boils down to SEO really. I say that because almost all the money I make from those various methods is from websites/blogs that I have gotten ranked highly in the search engines.

My basic strategy goes something like this… Find a niche, build a website, write some content, get backlinks, and repeat the process all over again.

You recently sold a niche website for $48,000. Could you walk us through the process, including the time it took setting that website up, your monetization methods and how you got backlinks?

TB: The site was in the work at home niche so it wasn’t really a “niche” website in the traditional sense of the word. It was actually the first real website I ever started. I had a few on free hosts before it that I threw up as a newbie because I didn’t know any better. But this one was the first site I bought a domain for and actually cared about. It started as a very simple one page website with some regular black text on a white background. Over time I added hundreds of pages and made it look a little better, but it was always a very ugly site. I used a WYSIWYG editor to build it and there was nothing fancy about it. Even to this day it’s still really ugly because the new owner hasn’t changed it much.

I was never worried about how it looked. All I cared about was getting it top search engine rankings so I focused on building backlinks. Regular link exchanges still worked really well when I started the site so I did a lot of them at first. Article marketing was also one of the main ways I built links to it. I am a big fan of article marketing because it has always worked for me. But I don’t do it the same way a lot of people do, which is blast out as many low quality articles as possible to a few top directories. Instead, I focus on writing high quality articles then I manually submit them to all the top directories and some average directories as well as submit them to any websites I can find in related niches that accept them. It takes a long time but it works, and I find that I can get a lot better results with far fewer articles that way.

I also did other things to get backlinks such as guest blogging, home page link partnerships, dofollow blog commenting, directory submissions, forum signatures, social sites, and other stuff like that. It also got a lot of natural links from other websites once it started ranking highly. I never purchased links or did any shady stuff that I had to hide. It was all done out in the open and for free. Pretty much the only money I ever spent on that site was for hosting and the yearly domain renewal. That’s how I do it with all my sites.

When I sold the site it ranked highly on Google for almost every major keyword phrase there is related to work at home, home based business, home business, and make money at home. And it still does.

It was monetized with affiliate links, Adsense, and paid advertising for the most part.

Listing it must have been hectic. Did you get a lot of interest, and what did you do to make your listing stand out?

TB: Listing it really wasn’t all that bad. I spent a couple days gathering all the information I would need for the auction, wrote it up, and listed it on Sitepoint (flippa). I didn’t do anything special to make the listing stand out other than write up a long description with all the information I could think of that anyone would want to know about the site.

I don’t really know how much interest it had because it wasn’t listed for long enough to see. It got a Buy It Now bid of $48,000 just two days after the listing went live. I also had a very well known internet marketing guru offer me $60,000 for it the next day but I had already started the transaction with the other buyer and I didn’t think it would be right to back out of the deal with him just because someone else offered me more money.

I was sad to see it go but it was time to move on. There are times when I do regret selling it but then I think about how nice the $48,000 pay day was!

How do you select a niche? It’s one of the hardest things for beginners, not knowing what to create a website about from the hundreds of thousands of niches out there. Could you give us some tips?

TB: There’s no real rhyme or reason to how I select a niche. It’s quite random. I’ll see something around the house or on TV or somewhere online that I think might be good for a niche site, so I write it down to research later.

Here’s a recent example: I used to hate coffee but on vacation a few months ago I started drinking it for whatever reason, and now I drink it every day. It got me thinking about how many people really do drink coffee and other drinks that are coffee based, such as cappuccino’s and other similar drinks. So, I started researching various related niches and came up with a bunch of ideas for websites. It turns out there are a lot of people looking to buy coffee makers, cappuccino machines, and other stuff like that.

I try to find niches where people are looking to buy rather than just looking for free information. Those are the ones that tend to be much more profitable. If it has some competition but not so much that it will be really hard to compete, and has enough of a market to be profitable then I’ll go after it.

Most people build sites in big niches like “Make Money Online” and simply can’t compete so they give up after a while. I have sites in that niche but I also have them in a lot of much smaller and easier niches to compete in. Finding a good niche isn’t very difficult. There are things all around you that could be turned into profitable websites. You just have to be on the lookout for them and do enough research to see if they are worth going after.

What is your opinion on some of the shadier ways of making money online, especially blackhat programs?

TB: I’ve never done them so I don’t really have much of an opinion on them. I guess I would just say to stay away from that stuff. There are plenty of legitimate ways to make money online that are much better in the long run so there’s no reason to go for the quick buck with blackhat methods.

Have you ever considered doing a large product launch in the internet marketing niche?

TB: Yeah, I have considered it in the past but not for a long time. That used to be one of my goals several years ago but now I’ve been an internet marketer long enough to realize it’s not something I want to do. I’ve done a few smaller information products over the years that made me a lot of money but it’s just not my style so I quit doing it. Not saying I will never create a product again because I probably will, but going for a huge product launch of “the next big thing” just doesn’t appeal to me anymore.

Thanks for your time Trent!

You’re welcome! It was my pleasure. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share a little bit about what I do.

Hope you guys enjoyed the interview!

When I bought this blog from the old owner, interviews were one of the things that were quite popular on here (check out the category Interviews). I want to continue doing them, maybe not as often but I’d like to keep them around. If you like the interviews, do let me know.

And make sure you check out Trent Brownrigg – there’s links to a few of his sites that have solid information that will help you.