I had lost hope at finding reasonable domain names after the dot-com bust, but now I’m realizing you just have to be creative and current. You have to be agile – jumping onto each fad early before it saturates. Sometimes all it takes is a little widget, like a Jersey Shore name generator that people can post on Facebook and their own blogs. Twitter is another great way to spread the news about your site. Twitter search is a perfect way to find popular people who might be interested in spreading your new site.

So how do you come up with the next big viral marketing idea? Look at life through a marketing lens – watch for trends, pick up on comedy in everyday things that people can relate to, watch TV and stay current. Follow Digg, Reddit, and other social networking sites to monitor what’s hot. Google trends is another great way to find hot topics.

Once you find your great idea and successfully go viral, you still have more work to do – make sure you have a game plan to make money. Sell adspace? Adsense? T-shirts? Relevant affiliate deals? Build your SEO network? Sell your site? If you really hit it big, you can always sign a book deal.

The nice thing about this stuff is you can usually rubber stamp it. Once you build a name generator, you could use for for every hot MTV show, video games, and movies. WordPress blogs are pretty easy to mass-produce too… and it certainly easier if you have some lackeys to do some of the grunt work.

Keep the dream alive – going viral may not be a realistic expectation for anything, but the sites you can build may keep things interesting in comparison to boring, thin, affiliate sites and other stereotypical money-making sites.

Marketing Blogs

Hopefully these will be as entertaining and inspirational for you as they’ve been for me.

1. Ma.tt: Who better to read than the founder and owner of WordPress, the top blog engine.
2. Tim Ferriss: Author of The 4-Hour Workweek… for anyone who wishes the escape the 9-5 grind.
3. Seth Godin: SEO Genius, creator of Squidoo – he knows a little something about internet marketing…
4. Rachael Elnaugh: One of the UK’s most successful and well-known entrepreneurs.
5. Labor Liberator: Full of good business ideas.. how to make money with a blog-centered business.
6. Mashable: Follow the social networking scene – social networking startups and innovation
7. Top Rank Blog: Blog on the intersection of social media, digital PR, and SEM/SEO.
8. Breaking Free: All about starting your own business and quitting your day job.
9. Jim’s Marketing Blog: Jim’s had his own marketing business since the 90s and has helped countless companies improve their bottom-line.
10. Fresh Inc: Inc magazine’s staff blog  – read stories on insanely successful startups, venture capital, and the latest greatest business ideas.

I know this list isn’t comprehensive, but it should give you a good start. Whenever I find a killer blog I typically subscribe to its feed and check in with it once every few weeks to get some good ideas. Please share any marketing blogs you think I missed – love to hear your feedback!

If you’re really agile, you could make money off the hottest trends as they come and go – the key is being extremely fast, and be able to switch gears to follow the next big thing. This is where it helps to have a collection of websites and a full-time writer to be able to branch into various niches year round.

But let’s not diminish March Madness – if you’re curios, here’s the official Niche Free March Madness tournament bracket. I’m banking on the Big 12 having a pretty strong year… we shall see!

So, you’ve figured out your niche market and have a website, and now you’ve arguably reached the toughest part – how do I get traffic to my site? Paying for traffic via banners and PPC does not always make sense and may not be feasible for your business. Or maybe you just want to supplement your current traffic sources. After all, SEO traffic is typically the best you can get – targeted, high-converting, and best of all, free (nothings actually free, but we often have more time than resources).

A general rules to follow is to make things descriptive and useful to your users. And just be natural! Over-optimizing wastes time and energy and can often hurt more than help.

Doing a little search engine optimization is usually a no-brainer, as you can often do 80% of the work with little time and effort. Here’s my list of 10 quick seo tips and advice to help get you started and improve your rankings.

1. Determine a couple keyword phrases for each page on your site. Don’t just guess what users will be search for – use Google’s and Wordtracker’s keyword tools to make the final descision. You can spend all your time optimizing for “green foosball tables”, but if only 10 people search that in a month, it’s obviously a complete waste of time. Before deciding on a keyword phrase, check how competitive it is. Search for your phrase and take note of the top 10 results in Google. Could you see your site ahead of some of the current results? Do you think you offer something more relevant? Last thing you want to do is to start an endless uphill battle with little chance of success.
2. Optimize all of your page titles. Your title has the most ranking weight for keywords, so you should at least make sure every page has a title containing the keyword phrase(s) it’s targeting. Make sure your title is 70 characters or less (here’s a great tool for optimizing site titles and descriptions. Unless your brand name is extremely important and will be searched by users, put your keywords first and and your brand name last (e.g. Regulation Foosball Tables | Foosball City).
3. Make use of the heading tags (<h1>, <h2>, etc). Make sure each page has an <h1> tag containing the main keyword phrase for the page. You can line up your h1 tag with your page title if you want, although I would consider changing it up a bit to be a little more natural (e.g. “Regulation Foosball Tables for Sale”). Use <h2> tags for secondary keyword phrases, if any.
4. Make sure your images have descriptive alt tags containing your keywords. Make it natural, and don’t make everything word-for-word the same (e.g. “professional foosball table”).
5. Make use of META descriptions, and write a unique one for each page. If you do not have time to add a unique one per page, then don’t bother adding one (identical descriptions may signal duplicate content to Google and the other search engines). Keep in mind that your page description will not provide any actual ranking power, so don’t bother keyword stuffing them – make them helpful to users to improve click-thru rates.
6. Link out to high quality, related sites. Some people speculate you can improve ranking by linking out to relevant sites. Even if that’s not the case, it still provides valuable resouces to your users, and may encourage sites to link back to you. If you’re linking to a spammy, shady, or otherwise non-trusted site (maybe from user-generated content) make sure you include the rel=”nofollow” attribute.
7. Make sure every page has unique content. It shouldn’t be too hard to have at least 200 words per page. Your content should of course contain your keywords, but don’t worry how often it shows up – use slightly different phrases in different contexts, keeping with the “be natural” theme (e.g. “foosball tables”, “regulation foosball table”, etc.).
8. Link to your own pages from within your content. This is especially important for blogs, as older posts get shoved into the archives or moved to page 3+ of your category pages. Look for terms that relate to other pages on your site and make them links. Ideally every page on your site will be within 2 clicks from your home page. You can also accomplish this by creating a sitemap page, linked to from your home page, that links to every page on your site (with appropriate anchor text for each page).
9. Sign up with Google Webmaster Tools. It’s completely free, and is a great resource for SEO. You can find out which of your pages are having issues, what pages are missing, what search terms your site is ranking for, and many other great things. You can also manually submit an xml sitemap, which can help Google index your pages faster and find new content. If you run a WordPress blog, there are several great plugins for automatically generating the sitemap.
10. Build backlinks, but make sure they look natural. If possible, have links to your site contain your keywords, although make sure to change them up a little bit. And have links pointing to pages other than your home page. You can do a few reciprocal links between sites, but try not to go overboard. Don’t waste too much time with link directories besides Yahoo! and DMOZ. If you really are a quality resource, you should be able to get at least a few relevant sites to link to you. And experiment with social networking sites like Digg and Stumbleupon to promote your site.

If you’re still hungry for more SEO tips and discussion, be sure to check out SEOmoz! Great resource, even if you just read the blog.

If you’re able to code, or if you have some great ideas and are able to find a reliable programmer, there’s even more potential. Freeware can work on many levels – everyone’s looking for free software, so the traffic potential is enormous. You can distribute your software to the thousands of freeware sites (there are great automated ways to do this), and benefit from the thousands of great backlinks to your site. You can also experiment with bundling some pay-per-install applications with your own software. And of course, if your product is useful enough and there’s enough demand, you can sell it at a reasonable price. If people are willing to buy your software, you have even more opportunities, as you can advertise with PPC and banners ( on relevant niche-targeted sites, of course ).

I do like to support people who make great software that I use on a daily basis. One such product, and a perfect example of taking advantage of the software niche is Format HTML. Format HTML is a code beautifier that you run against your messy HTML (or even Coldfusion code) and it will instantly format and indent HTML. It inspects all your mark up tags (HTML, CFML, XML, etc.) and will indent them according to which tags you decide should be handled by modifying a config.ini file. You simply drag and drop your files or folders onto Format HTML and the program will make backups of all your files first and then clean up all the file types specified in the config.ini file. Lastly, it can be easily used with CFEclipse, Eclipse, DreamWeaver, HomeSite, or any other editor for tidying up your code. I use it on a lot of my websites (especially the ones where I spend a lot of time tweaking the html) and it has worked out great.

We spend so much time on computers these days, surely you have some good ideas for software that would make your life easier. I’ve only scratched the surface on the software niche marketing, I have plans to go more in depth over the next couple months. Stay tuned!

Energy efficiency and products that promote greater power savings are still a growing niche. I know this is related to my recent green niche marketing post, but there’s so much money here I just can’t pass this up! The increasing cost of energy prices coupled with our insatiable thirst for oil and other energy producing sources is fueling greater demand. We are currently exploring new alternate energy sources and efficient green power generation technologies such as wind power, solar power, hydroelectric power, geothermal power, and newer technologies such as wave power and tidal power, to feed this increased demand while lowering costs. What this creates is a heightened awareness of energy costs and household energy draws. Consumers have different ideas why to conserve energy, whether to lower their monthly bills and save money, or to preserve the environment, they both lead to a new ‘energy efficiency’ niche.

A perfect example of a website that aims to profit off this niche is the Green Efficient Guide. They have information for various efficient, green products, and make commissions off sales through sites like Amazon. With energy calculators for each individual television model that calculate both annual energy uses and energy costs based on both the on power and the standby power, you get the actual cost to run the device. By making this available to the consumer along with the other efficiency data for each electronic device is helpful in making an informed decision about efficient electronics. It’s pretty cool-  all of the efficient televisons listed are energy star rated for excellent power savings, as are the home electronics and audio video devices. With the incoming recession, everybody is trying to pinch pennies where they can, and energy efficiency is no small potato. Five percent of electricity used in the United States goes to standby power resulting in a whopping $4 billion a year in wasted energy costs. And it’s no wonder, how many electronic devices do you have plugged in at home? Cell phones charging (once the phone is charged, most charging devices continue to draw power), DVD players, televisions, gaming consoles, electric toothbrushes, etc, all can add up very quickly to compose a decent percentage of your electricity bill. It’s a great idea for a website – now it’s your turn to profit off this niche!

1. Sign up for some affiliate networks. I’d definitely start by signing up with Pepperjam and Commission Junction. I also recommend and have had good success with eBay. I’ve also used LinkShare with some success – your mileage may vary and I’m sure it just depends on which advertiser programs you want to sign up for.
2. Take a look at the available advertisers in your affiliate networks and start joining affiliate programs. You’ll want to try a bunch, it may take a few tries to find the ones that work best for you. If your affiliate network provides program payout history, be sure to follow this closely – you want to weed out the bad eggs (there are a lot of advertisers I don’t trust). You want to choose niche affiliate markets that payout a good amount of money (face it… you can only make so much off $5 items…. go for something you can get commissions that make it worth your time). But at the same time, avoid things that are likely too competitive. Do some Google searches and research your top competitors. See if you think you can beat some of them. Also it’s best to pick niche markets that you’re knowledgable about and like. This will come in handy for step #3…
3. Create your website and make it better than the typical affiliate site. If you’re going to be lazy and throw up a few affiliate links without much thought and effort, you’re just wasting your time. Keep your site’s focus on 1 or 2 related markets – if you want to get into more niche affiliate markets, then create more websites. You don’t have to be a expert on your niche, but definitely put a little thought and effort into this part. If you don’t have a nice-looking website, be sure to check out some free templates you can use at a site like www.oswd.org. Now add some content! Write some reviews and add your own descriptions. Try adding some social networking components – user-generated content (if moderated) can be great. Make your site look professional and clean (that does not mean complex and complicated!). Have a friend look at your site – if it looks spammy, clean it up! Make sure you know a little something about SEO (search engine optimization) – start by reading some of the great articles at SEOmoz. The content on your site is really going to help for step 4…
4. Now drive traffic to your niche affiliate site! Experiment with some PPC campaigns. Google Adwords is the best. Try Microsoft AdCenter as well – they don’t have the traffic but often have decent conversion rates. I’d try Yahoo as well but I’d be very careful – I’ve noticed more click fraud – you have to monitor and block certain domains. The content you created is really going to help your quality score in Google AdWords. Make sure your landing pages target the keywords you bid on, and make sure your ad text matches up as well. You can definitely do some SEO and start building some backlinks – nothing beats “free” traffic. But whatever you don’t do, don’t completely skip out on running ad campaigns. You need to get some traffic and test out your advertisers and see what converts.
5. You gotta have conversions. Now that you have some affiliate programs that look like they could work, you need to get your conversion rate as high as possible. Optimization is a must – you have to get used to testing everything! Look into doing some split testing, rotate ads, change out content. Move things around! Target more longtail keywords – they often have the highest conversion rates! Research your competition in the same niche affiliate market and find out what they’re doing. Make sure you have some sort of stats installed on your site (Google Analytics are great) to monitor your traffic. Find out what keywords your visitors are coming in on. Find out your bounce rate and try to keep it low. Find out how visitors navigate through your site. Testing and optimization are the name of the game!

I hope this helps you get started in marketing your niche affiliate sites. I tried to keep this relatively short, although there are a vast amount of resources out there on every aspect of this. I’ll try to go into more detail on some of these items in the near future. Good luck finding your niche!

We’ll begin by evaluating a niche blog I recently found in the ecology niche, The Chic Ecologist.

The Chic Ecologist website

The green niche is hot and growing quickly, so how do you define yourself? The Chic Ecologist stands out as a blog devoted to chic and stylish products and companies that are sustainable and eco-friendly. Don’t mistake it for a hippie site, you won’t find hemp and patchouli here. High design and functionality (even architecture) is paramount. Catering to a hip younger crowd as well as the high end market they feature articles on everything from eco friendly diamonds to green roofs.

This is not a limited market either. The green industry is experiencing huge growth as people become more aware of global warming and the ecological impact of our industrial and consumer-centric society. The Chic Ecologist is a dynamic resource promoting green solutions and eco-friendly products by socially conscious businesses. It could be used as a platform for launching new ideas and products by smaller companies through product reviews and sustainable business spotlighting. With an explosive surge in green design and research of new ecologically sustainable materials such as bamboo, recycled plastics as well as reclaimed and repurposed products, many businesses are looking for that green edge.

Marketing of this niche is also gaining popularity as it’s now cool to be green. Although the cost of oil has dramatically dropped from its highs during this current recession, dependency and supply concerns for oil and gas are driving new technologies for renewable energy and products less dependent on traditional energy sources. Blogs such as The Chic Ecologist are great platforms to test, prototype and launch new green products by generating interest and buzz within their target market.

I do have a few suggestions for the site. I know not everyone is looking to make money money on their blogs, but I would still suggest the author look into affiliate programs to promote that fit well in the green niche (which shouldn’t be too difficult). A few green eBay listings couldn’t hurt, either. They promote a lot of good products, but unfortunately wouldn’t get any credit for it if someone were to make a purchase.

And of course, Adsense clicks and affiliate conversions are impossible without traffic. I’m not sure how much SEO work they’ve done, but I would definitely suggest making friends with other green niche bloggers and exchanging some links.

I would also consider reducing the size of some the images, since 2MB is a lot to load for the home page. I’d probably use jpeg’s instead of .png’s for photos, and maybe increase the compression a tad.

Questions? Comments? Let me know your thoughts of this review and if this is something you would like to see more of in the future. And don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS feed to stay up to date on niche marketing ideas!

Example seasonal niche – Black Friday shopping:

Black Friday Ads - Search Volume

(Check out my post on google insights to learn how to research search trends)

You might think it’s a wasted effort to get into a market that’s only viable once a year. But that’s just the beauty of it – you only have to put time into it once a year. You could have several seasonal niche websites up and running, such as a Halloween niche site, a couple Christmas sites, maybe even an Easter site. The final few weeks before the holiday mean a massive influx in search traffic, and people love to spend money during the holidays. In the 2007 Christmas holiday season, people spent almost $30 billion dollars shopping online. Granted, this year will likely miss that mark by a lot given current economic conditions, but people are still spending money – what’s wrong with taking your piece of the pie?

Yes, the holiday markets are highly saturated and it can be extremely hard to compete with all the big players involved. You have to be more specific, more obscure, and more creative. An easy way to find your niche would be to think of all the little things you like about a holiday. Take Christmas for example. Everyone celebrates Christmas in their own way (or not at all… and that could be your niche!). We all have our own traditions – what little things do you love the most? Maybe it’s the Christmas lights, building gingerbread houses, creating little miniature towns, finding new Christmas recipes, or coming up with creative gift ideas – the possibilities are endless. You want to get into a niche that you enjoy.

Christmas Miniatures

How will you make money off your niche? Well of course that depends on whether you’re creating a niche blog, or a store, or whatever kind of resource you have in mind. You can always make money off the proven combination of Adsense, eBay, and affiliates.

The nice thing about having a seasonal niche site is that it keeps things interesting and should keep you from being bored. You would only have to worry about each site no more than a few weeks each year.

So this is your homework – list out the holidays you enjoy and celebrate. Write down every little thing you like about them. Now highlight the niches that you think could have some money in them, research some keywords in Google Adwords, narrow your choices down, and get started. What are you waiting for?

In his post he stated the need and importance for gathering alexa users from around the world. It is very important to get visitors from other countries to increase our Alexa ranking. So how do you get visitors from around the world? Easy, you join social blog networks and directories like BlogCatalog or Social Spark.

BlogCatalog

One great resource for finding Alexa users from around the world is Blog Catalog. Locating bloggers from other countries is easy. First, Sign up for an account on blog catalog. Once logged in, visit the directory and start browsing blogs by country. Try to request as many blogroll/ link exchanged with various bloggers from other countries. Another way to drive traffic from these blogs is to ask them if you could do a guest post on their blog. This will most likely result in a increase in foreign traffic to your blog, thus increasing your alexa rank. Make sure that your post is relevant content to their blog and not just yours.

I used this technique and it did increase my blog’s Alexa rank significantly. My blog has been active for about 3 months when this post was written and now has an Alexa rank under 89K. That shows the power of this technique.

I’m sure there are plenty more social blog networks out there to help you find more foreign Alexa users. Just wash, rinse, and repeat the process.

What other methods are you aware of to help increase your alexa ranking?