I have just gone through the process of chosing the niche for my next BANS store, and I thought I would share with you my process of choosing a niche to help others. (feel free to critique my process)

1. Go to Ebay and find an interesting category.

I like to look for ones that have expensive products, that people would be interested in checking out even if they are not interested in buying. So I went straight for the collectables section.

2. Choose a Category You Like

After looking through the collectables, one kind of jumped out at me.

Fossils - I thought this was an interesting topic so I clicked on it to view the products and sorted it by most expensive first, and found out there are a couple of fossils for in the low $XX,XXX.

So I had found a niche of interest, but was there enough people interested in the topic?

3. Check Search Engine Stats

I like to use the SEO Book Tool because it gives indepth info on both google and yahoo search results.

What I did was type “Fossils” into the search box, and see what came up. there are a few key phrases that are getting a lot of traffic, but they would also probably have a lot of competition for keyword results. Plus I needed just the right keyword.

A little way down the page I noticed “Fossils For Sale”

It was getting about 3,500 searches a month, which is quite good, and fitted my future BANS store perfectly.

4. Check Your Competition

Do a google search for your chosen key phrase, try with and with out paranthesis. If your search results in over a couple of 1,000,000 results you know that your niche is to broad, so go back to step 3 and look for a less competitive keyword (but make sure it is still getting traffic).

“Fossils for Sale” has 1,420,000

This is still a fair bit of competition, but I am willing to give this a shot, but only if I can get the right domain.

5. Buy Your Key Phrase As Your Domain

Go to your preferred domain registrar, and type your keyword into their search box. Don’t fret if the .com is taken, it doesn’t make too much of a difference, and the .info is much cheaper anyway ($2.99 with Godaddy).

www.fossilsforsale.com was taken, but www.fossilsforsale.info was available - so I snapped it up.

This is the process I go through to pick a quality niche, I hope it is a help to you.

I know I have been plugging the benefits of report writing for a while now, but I have never actually done it before - so to be honest I have no credibility on the subject!

But that is about to change, I am currently about to go into lock down to write a small 15-20 page report for my acne blog. The report will be free - I know I talked about selling them for $7-10 each, but this is about list building and brand awareness, not money at this point in time.

So Here Is My Strategy:

1. I Focused On My Strengths - I havn’t cured my acne so I cannot promote a so called miracle cure. What I have focused on is what I know that doesn’t work - some of the myths.

2. Topic Sure To Attract Attention - I will keep this under wraps until I launch it (you never know who is reading this blog :P)

3. Written In A Conversational Tone - There is nothing worse than a ebook report that is written like a text book. This will be very easy to read, and only take 10-20min to read.
The Free report will be targetted at long term acne sufferers. This is my main target market, because :

1. They will be long term readers

2. They are the most desperate to try new products as they just want to get rid of their acne.
Will be interesting to see how it turns out, I will be getting a professionally designed ebook cover done - and hopefully I can build a decent opt-in list, and traffic to my new blog.

Over the last couple of days my work future has become a little uncertain.

My boss is looking at selling his current franchise to more onto something else, and to be quite honest if he does, then I won’t want to stay - and if he asks me to go with him, I don’t think I will.

I feel like a change, but I am not sure how to handle it.

In all honestly I would love to focus on internet marketing full time. But at the moment I don’t have the results to back myself up when it comes to explaining to my parents that I want to be a full-time internet marketer.

So over the next couple of months I really need to bump up my online workload to build my online ventures to a level that I can live off.

I don’t need anything flash, I live at home and am pretty frugal when it comes to spending money, but I want to be making some money before I finish up my current job.

And in all honestly, I really don’t want another job. I hate the idea of working for someone else, and will ever be truly happy while I am.

So keep watching this space as I use this as a motivation to take things up a notch. And if you havn’t already subscribed to my rss feed than now is the time - you will not want to miss the next couple of months of my online journey.

I know I havn’t been blogging here as recent as I would like to, but as you know I have just launched my latest blog, and to be honest - It just seems so much easier to write about acne.

I know it is said a lot, probably even too much, but my tip for you is:

Blog about what you are passionate about!
Im not saying I am not passionate about making money online, cause I am. But the thing with the topic my new blog is that:

1. I live with it
2. It is something I think about constantly
3. I am constantly researching it
4. It is a part of me

Can you say that about the subject of your blog?

If you can, then you will have no problems coming up with the next post, how to attract more visitors. You just you - because you are passionate about the subject and it drives you.

“Wow… thats a bold statment to be throwing around” you may say.

True, but let me explain.
I logged onto DealDotCom today, and noticed the product was Keyword Elite. Keyword Elite is a product that I have been looking at purchasing for a while to use with my PPC campaigns, but at $176.00 I just wasn’t ready to purchase.

So when I saw it today, I thought “you beauty” I mean at $129.00 it is still expensive, but it saves me $50 (any kind of saving is good right?)

But then a thought hit me.

What is the affiliate payout on clickbank for the product?

So I went on over to the Clickbank market place and found Keyword Elite, and do you know what the pay out was?

50% per affiliate sale!

That means that DealDotCom in theory could just be using a clickbank affilate link, to purchase Keyword Elite through and reselling it at a $30 profit! It makes me wonder whether they are even cutting deals with the product owners.

I might just have to purchase the product through my own Clickbank hoplink, and keep the $30 for myself.

I woke up this morning expect my five latest articles to be accepted and taking me one step closer to an upgraded account. I have already had 14 articles accepted by EzA and was expecting to see the number jump to 19 when I logged in.

But what I found was a totally different story.

I got one email saying that one of my articles had been rejected due to an affiliate link. Which is just stupid as I have used one of my own domains in all my articles which is then forwarded to an affiliate link, in accordance to their terms and conditions.

I don’t understand how 14 articles with a link to the same domain get accepted and 1 doesn’t? How does this work?

So I logged onto my EzA account, hoping it would be an easy fix and got another shock.

My account had been suspended because of “An invalid email address on file”

Obviously my hosting provider was down for the couple of minutes that they checked two of my articles, because they reported invalid links, and then they tried to email me and my email bounced.

I mean apply some logic, I have received 28 emails to that email, 1 each time it write the article and 1 each time it is accepted. None of them bounced back! Wouldn’t you first check back at how the submitter had 14 articles accepted and no emails bounced back - promoting the same domain, and think “maybe they are having some hosting problems”. I mean this is the first thing I would think of.

Why suspend an account, when you can just put the articles on hold, and ask for an explanation? I think there are some EzA reviewers that are picking at little things to the “Nth” degree.

Sorry about the rant, but it has really got me frustrated, I have just started to get something happening, with:
125 Views
2 Affiliate Sales
$56.56 Profit
in just 4 days

And now I have to wait at least a day for my account to get reinstated.

I just got back from a camping trip that I went to with all the men from my church.  It was a great weekend, and I really enjoyed taking the time to just relax and have some fun.

One of the highlights of the weekend was when we went hiking up a mountain. The idea of the hike was to get people thinking about how to overcome mountains or obstacles in your life, and  I had a few thoughts that could be related back to blogging.

1. Focus on the End Result

As we were walking up the mountain there were a lot of times when we couldn’t even see where the top of the mountain was, and since we could not see the end destination a few of the guys started getting discouraged. But the thing is we knew what the end result was, when we got to the top we would have an amazing 360 degree view, but those with a lack of vision started to talk about giving up.

With blogging set some goals, whether it is your rss feed count, or number of visitors per day, or even how much per month your are wanting to earn. If you focus on the end result it is so much easier to get through the hard times.
2. Don’t Journey Alone

So many people try to do things by themselves. But if they do, who is there to pick them up when the fall or convince them to keep going when there are the thoughts to give up?

As we were hiking up the mountain I took the time to chat with my pastor and we were just talking about anything from blogging to planting churches in Switzerland,  but the thing was that we got shocked when we hit the halfway point. Why? Because since we had been talking, our focus had been off of the obstacle of the mountain, and we had not even had one thought about how far up the mountain we were.

Keep people around you as you blog, build relationships with other bloggers and continually encourage them. Take the journey together, because not only will you enjoy the company on the way, but you will have someone to celebrate with when you reach your goals.

There will always be mountains or obstacles that will try and stop you from achieving your goals, will you let them win or will you see them as opportunities to make yourself stronger?

I have pretty much had a whole week of blogging, and having that time off gave me a bit of time to think about things. One of the things I did stop and think about was:

Why do I Blog?

Is it for money or fame? What was the main reason I was actually blogging for. I came up with 3 main reason why I personally blog.

1. Networking - In the early stages of blogging I started to notice the great potential for networking through blogging. There was the opportunity to network with:
   

   • My Readers
   • Other Bloggers - I have been able to build relationships with a couple of bloggers that I have been able to learn so much from, which I never would have been able to learn if I had not started this blog.

2. Authority - I guess this could also be called “creating a brand”. But there is authority that comes with a blog. If you can provide quality information on a specific topic, you start to become known around the blogging circles as an expert in the field.

   I am currently planning a few niche’s that I will be focusing on shortly with my blog, trying to do this very thing. By becoming an expert in something it allows you to start creating products, and recommending products in that niche - and people will buy because of your position ( so don’t abuse their trust)

3. Money - I put this third on the list because I believe it will follow if you are able to do the first 2 points. If you are networking with other bloggers and building a community around your blog, and also becoming an expert in your field that bloggers start to associate you with a certain way to ‘make money online’ for example - then the money will follow.

That is why I blog. I’d love to hear why you blog. So why not drop me a comment