Well, another week has gone by and I’m not any closer to releasing my information product. Sadly, the sheer amount of stuff I’m having to deal with every day is plain ridiculous - in fact, Tuesday was the only day when I was free of both helping my girlfriend and attending my part-time job, so I took that opportunity to relax as well as get a little bit of writing done.

With my Mum’s project still on the backburner (she’s as swamped with work as I am), I started working on a separate product as well pending the completion of her part of the job. However, this time around, I’m going to follow a more systematic approach by using the step-by-step guide in Jim Edwards’ How to Write an E-book in 7 Days. It’s a huge piece of writing (200+ pages), but it’s really worth every penny.

Basically, Jim explains really well how to write your own e-book in just a week. He gives you a 7-day schedule (with only 3 days allocated to writing, actually), and he claims you can even release your info product in a weekend (although I suspect he assumes that you already have sufficient knowledge of the subject and don’t need to do research). Some of the advice he gives isn’t really applicable to me (for example, he spends some time explaining how to overcome writer’s block or any inhibitions regarding writing that you may have), but it’s a great read for anyone new to writing.

I’ll be honest with you here - you probably don’t need Jim’s e-book to write one of your own, especially if you’ve already written a few of them before. However, if you have never done it, then Jim’s guide is really great. I’ll be following it for this week - let’s see if I can get my product ready by the weekend!

For those interested in Jim’s e-book, you can get it here.

Over the last few days, I’ve been working extensively with a number of free keyword research tools. Now, I know there are some paid alternatives out there, but I can’t afford them, and, at any rate, I see no reason to invest into them just yet, since the research tools I’ve found so far seem to do their job just fine.

At any rate, I thought I’d take this opportunity to give something back to my readers and share the free tools I use for keyword research - who knows, those of you who’ve been living under a rock for the last few years might find them handy.

Here they are, in no particular order:

• Overture
• Wordtracker
• Digital Point (a nice combination of Wordtracker and Overture)
• SEO Book (only came across it today - seems to be very powerful)

Now, a few notes as to the functionality of these tools.

Overture is great, but it’s slow and it only pulls results from Yahoo, which means that you have no idea what people are searching for on Google (which, after all, is probably what most of you are hoping to dominate, right?) One rule of the thumb I’ve heard is to multiply the Overture number of searches by 8 to get an estimate of Google searches for the specific keyword.

Wordtracker is great as it already includes Google results - however, the free tool I linked to provides daily search count, which is not always consistent with Overture results (some phrases will appear in Wordtracker but not in Overture, and vice versa). Use at your own risk.

Digital Point is slowly becoming my favourite because it provides both Overture and Wordtracker results - however, be prepared to enter really long authentication humans to prove that you’re not a bot (can be rather annoying at times).

SEO Book provides an estimate of Google and MSN searches (although it multiplies Yahoo results by 2 to get its Google estimate, which may be too conservative an estimate). All in all, a very nifty tool, but I’ve only been using it for a while, so I’m not at all sure if their Google search calculation formula is correct.

One final note of caution - never, ever rely on just one keyword research tool! Not all of the search instruments I listed above are 100% accurate, so it’s always best to analyze what looks like a lucrative niche with another tool or two just to be on the safe side.

Recently, I’ve been looking at a number of what appear to be profitable niches. Unfortunately, they all have one major issue with them - they need to be addressed from a woman’s point of view.

Now, no matter how talented a writer I may be, I really can’t write as a woman. Sure, I can design the e-book in cute pink colours, but anyone who reads it will immediately realise from my analysis that it’s being written by a man.

However, there’s one person whom I never considered involving in my Internet marketing adventure…

My Mum!

She’s a woman. She can write. She can analyse things from a woman’s point of view. And she doesn’t charge you an arm and a leg for coming up with the bullet points you need to get started.

So, next time you’re fishing around for an alternative point of view, never forget your family and friends. You’ll be surprised just how many valuable perspectives you can get this way.

So, today I registered the domain name - a niche Overture keyword .net domain - for the niche product, while my Mum is sitting in the other room scribbling away at the bullet points I need to get started.

Honestly, I never thought I’d turn this into a family business, but it might not be such a bad idea, after all…

Just a few moments ago, I was thinking how to deal with the difficulty I’m having with taking action, when, suddenly, a thought struck me:

Taking action is a question of faith

Really, at the end of the day, it all comes down to whether you believe in your business venture or not. Do you think that your product is going to be a success - or do you fear that it will fail miserably? Do you think that, a month from now, you will be wallowing on piles of cash - or are you scared of wasting time, money and effort to end up with a 1-2 daily visitors to your brand new niche website?

However, the fact that I need to drill deep inside my tiny little head is that risks are inevitable in every business - and even if you invest nothing except for the domain registration fee, there’s still an opportunity cost to your time.

I guess a lot of it depends on how much faith you have in the method that you used to uncover the niche in the first place. Sure, if you’re a grizzled veteran who knows exactly what he’s doing, you probably don’t stop to think about it - you know your tools work, and, anyway, even if they don’t, you probably already have a nice income stream going from your previous successes.

But what do you do when you’re just starting out, when you haven’t got any release products behind your belt - how do you convince yourself to take that proverbial shot in the dark and hope that it doesn’t ricochet right into your face?

Ok, I might as well admit it - I’m suck at taking action.

Loud boos from the audience, please…

Here I am, sitting on a goldmine of a keyword. It receives 600 searches daily and has only about 900 results on Google (most of which are utterly worthless). It’s just begging for an e-book, and yet today…

• I played Victoria and annexed Korea and a sizable chunk of China
• I played Kudos and modded the game to my satisfaction
• I played Democracy and turned Russia into an alcohol-free, capitalist society
• I watched the first half of the fourth season of South Park (and it rocks)
• I promised my girlfriend I’ll take her out for dinner when she comes back

The only thing I didn’t do is take action!

So, here’s my question, folks - how do you motivate yourselves to take action? How do you go from the “Oh my God, I found a niche!” stage to “Oh my God, I’m friggin’ rich!” stage?

Just a few minutes ago, I was doing niche research using a little Excel-based tool I developed based on Myleena’s excellent Niche Inspector Formula when I realized something shocking…

Bloody hell, I’m getting good at this!

Here’s what I noticed - not one of the niches I discovered had a KEI of less than 10,000 (in fact, most of them were well above 20,000) and some were even as high as 3,924,002.31! Actually, one of the niches I found was an absolute goldmine - a long-tail keyword that gets about 600 Overture searches daily!

Now, granted, KEI isn’t the sole indicator of niche profitability (I’d be pretty stupid to rely on a simple mathematical formula to determine my investments).

But, ceteris paribus, it does go to show that my niche research methods are slowly but surely improving - and if both KEI and common sense tell me that a niche is profitable, then it just might be worth developing.

You know, there’s one thing I hate about affiliate marketing: waiting for your paycheck to arrive.

Truly, there’s nothing more frustrating that knowing that you have earned some money, but that it will only be paid to you at the end of the month (I’m sure there’s a good reason for this, but I haven’t quite figured it out yet).

It’s particularly annoying when affiliate programs have a threshold you need to reach before they send you your money (I’m looking at you, Clickbank).

And it’s no difference with Adsense, either - after all, I believe you receive your earnings for one month at the end of the subsequent month, meaning a delay of at least a month and a half.

Frustrating? Yes. Annoying? Very. Failing to satisfy my craving for instant gratification? You bet.

Hence why I’m going into product development, because, frankly, nothing beats logging it to your PayPal account and seeing that you have earned some very real, immediately dispensable cash overnight - and no, you don’t have to wait a month to receive what’s rightfully yours.

Thing is, releasing your own product isn’t as hard as it’s cracked up to be. If you have some starting capital, just get the product you need from a PLR site and modify it to your heart’s content (or just hire someone to write it for you, though it’ll cost a lot more). Worst comes to worst, roll up your sleeves and write the product yourself - after all, if you can’t write to begin with, then your Internet marketing career is going to be short-lived, anyway.

So, the message of the day is - if you want to see money in your account right now and not a month or two later, get a product of your own out there. Not only will you immediately get some cash to play with (hopefully you won’t blow it all in a lavish nightclub and leave some to reinvest in your business), but you’ll also build a list of customers (you do have an Aweber account, right?), and that’s probably worth more than any sales you make from the product.

Yesterday, I put up a link to Myleena’s Niche Inspector Formula - a terrific step-by-step guide to identifying profitable niches… or so I thought.

Don’t get me wrong - Myleena’s formula works great. It’s a fantastic way to quickly identify potentially lucrative niches, especially if you are unwilling to spend $100+ on a decent niche research tool.

However, if you are going to follow it, keep in mind that, just like Myleena says, no formula can substitute human touch, which means that you still have to use common sense instead of mindlessly using the guide every step of the way.

For example, yesterday I followed the guide to the letter, identified what seemed to be a profitable niche, even wrote the first few pages of what looked like a great guide… only to realize that there is no way in hell I could ever beat Google’s 350,000 competing search results with the Overture keyword domain already registered!

So, here’s my tip for you for the day - just because you’ve followed Myleena’s guide and eliminated all the results that return more than the allowed number of competing sites does not mean that you will magically skyrocket to the first page of Google SERPs. Always check for domain name availability and just how serious the competition is before you get started working on the product. Myleena does advise you to do as much, but if you’re anything like me, you’d probably skim right through it and get straight to work, with your pupils slowly acquiring the shape of dollar signs.

Yes, I know, I haven’t posted here for a while - my apologies to all of you who bothered visiting my blog in the meantime and were dismayed by the lack of updates.

Unfortunately, over the last few weeks, I had to deal with a tremendous amount of offline work, ranging from studying for - and successfully passing, of course! - my own term exams and helping my girlfriend with hers. Afterwards, I also had to leave the country for a few days to address some legal irregularities, so, all in all, this has been anything but the kind of vacation I was so looking forward to.

What’s worse, I had a bit of a difficult time with my girlfriend afterward, and, though we’re back together now, for a few days, Internet marketing definitely did not top my agenda.

In the meantime, I have also got myself involved with a rather lucrative - though not entirely reliable - income opportunity offline, which pays me well enough to stop bothering with writing articles. Writing is a great way to start making money online, but it is very time consuming, and, unfortunately, the payoff is not always worth the time you invest into researching and writing a quality article.

So, what’s next? Well, with my schedule looking rather relaxed for the next few months, I will likely release an information product of my own (which should be quite managable, now that I no longer have to write articles for a living!).

In fact, just today I came across a great e-book by Myleena Phan which explains step-by-step how to identify profitable niches - it’s free and you can download it here.