$1k Blog

First of all, there’s been a new breed of spammers visiting my blog lately, and, in spite of my best efforts, Akismet has been unable to prevent them from posting. If this trend continues - as I fear it will - I will have no choice but to enable manual moderation of comments. It’s not something that I would like to do, but I’m sure it is preferable to having thousands of links to porn sites all over my blog. If anyone can recommend a better anti-spam addon than Akismet, please do let me know.

As for me, it seems that this week has finally drawn to a close. With only one day left, I am really looking forward to getting down and dirty with info product development. I think it should be quite exciting and I really want to push myself to the limit and finally get some serious work done. You know what they say - that the best way to start writing is to never stop, and there is exactly what I intend to do. Heck, I spent the better half of the class today just looking around the room and writing down possible niche subjects (people thought I was crazy).

Ok, just a few quick noteworthy updates:

1. Steve Celeste has just updated his blog with the next chapter of his life story. If you’ve never read it before I strongly suggest you do so, because he really gives you a nice breakdown of how he succeeded as an Internet marketer from scratch. I have been following his story closely and strongly encourage you to do the same - here’s a link to his site.

2. I have become increasingly frustrated and confused with keyword research. As many of you may know, the Overture tool is no longer functional, since it only returns results from January 2007. I am currently thinking of buying myself a Word Tracker subscription, but with $27 a week and no clear business plan on how to use it, I’m going to wait for a while and see what other free keyword research tools I can find.

3. Warrior Forum got a new look today. One of the most noticeable changes is that there is now a Warriors Offers section in addition to the Warrior Special Offer one. Warrior Forum takes a 20% commission for all product sold through the new section, but there is no initial deposit fee to put your product up for sale. As I understand it, the commission fee payment process is not automatic, which means that you will have to make your payments to WF manually from your PayPal account every month.

4. This weekend, I’m planning to get some serious work done on my info product. The exact subject of the e-book has by now changed several times, reflecting my confusion with keyword research. However, come Friday, I am hoping to finally have some time to sit down and make up my mind on what exactly I want to write about. I will also probably buy one-week Word Tracker subscription then - I will, of course, let you know whether Word Tracker is worth paying for (I know a lot of people who swear that it is the best thing since sliced bread).

Well that’s all the updates from now — I don’t know if I will have the time to update my blog tomorrow, but you can definitely expect to see some news over the weekend as my product development process finally shifts into the next gear.

Folks,

I just wanted to give you a head-up that Steve Celeste just posted a really nice guide on his blog about how you can go from $0 to $1,000 in a month. It’s a really good step-by-step guide - not very detailed, of course, but if you’re at a loss how to get started making money online, then it’s definitely a nice read.

You can find the guide here.

For those of you not in the know, Terry Semel is the CEO of Yahoo - or was until Monday 18, when he got the boot. Ok, so it might not have been as flashy as Carly Fiorina’s exit from HP, but it does show just how long executives from traditional businesses tend to last in the Silicon Valley.

The short answer is: 6 years.

And, by Gods, the guy deserved it. Look, I don’t mean to be hard on him, but let’s face the truth - Yahoo has been underperforming Google ever since the latter’s inception. I remember sticking with Altavista just because I could search for exact phrases by using quotation marks - but as soon as I saw that Google had that functionality, I never looked back.

Come on - does anyone here even seriously consider Yahoo in their Internet marketing business (especially now that the Overture tool is become increasingly useless with everything passing day?) Seems like everywhere you go, it’s Google, Google, Google - Google Mail, Google Video, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Earth.

And then there’s Yahoo, stumbling blindly in Google’s footsteps, trying to haphazardly match its moves and acquisitions without really understanding the reasons for them in the first place.

I don’t mean to be hard on Terry Semel, I really don’t - I’m sure the guy did his best. But I, for one, welcome the fact that he’s out and Yahoo’s co-founder is in as the new CEO. If there was ever an example of an innovative company that blew it, it’s Yahoo - so hopefully it’s co-founder can return it to its roots (and maybe give ol’ Google some competition, thus making things better for us Internet marketers?)

Hey, maybe we’ll even get lucky as the new CEO will bring the Overture tool back?

You can read more about this story at TechCrunch.

Today, I had a life-changing experience - or, well, almost life-changing… Well, ok, not life-changing as in “Oh my God, I got an epic in World of Warcraft” life changing, but still life-changing…

Ok, you get the point, it was an interesting event.

Anyway, today my Mum and my girlfriend took me out to a lovely Japanese restaurant to celebrate my birthday. The meal was great, the service was top-notch, the cake was delicious (and with all the extra flabs I have on me, I know the difference between a good cake and a lousy one) - in short, it was the kind of dinner that makes you thankful to have such caring people by your side.

Then came the time for presents - and, since neither my Mum nor my girlfriend know what to get me (I’m a computer freak and they wouldn’t know the difference between a videocard and a floppy disk), they decided to just give me money instead.

That was awfully kind of them (it was a substantial amount of money - I’ll leave it at that), but it got me thinking - what the hell have I ever done for them?

I’m anything but the perfect son - and I’m definitely anything but the perfect boyfriend (keep the aforementioned flabs in mind shoudl you choose to dispute them).

So, I have to find a way to give back - to give back through caring and attention, yes, but to also through things such as vacations, Piaget watches (I made a promise to my girlfriend and I intend to keep it), cars, mansions, islands, space stations.

In short, if I ever needed another good reason to make a killing online, now I have it - to give back to the people who have never hesitated to bestow unto me.

Those of you bored enough to read my blog will know that I’ve set myself a goal to be earning a stable $6,000 a month within 365 days.

The way I see it, that should get me started on my ultimate life goal - a Piaget watch for my girlfriend and freedom to play World of Warcraft for me. Hey, a guy’s got to aim big in life, right?

But, here’s the deal - when I first posted on WF about my goal, people told me that I was barking mad to be focusing on e-books to accomplish that. For example, Steve Celeste pointed out that e-book profits are based on sales, and that means they don’t make a good source of residual income. Vince Runza (Vince, if you’re reading this, you are very inspirational) suggested looking at putting together a membership site (a PLR site could work well in my case, since I’ve got some writing experience to begin with).

So, here’s the choice I’m looking at - e-books vs. memberships. An e-book is fun to write and all, but a membership site will probably mean more reliable income (ultimately, I could write an e-book and sell it to my site’s members). However, it also means constant maintenance and provision of new content, which, if not outsourced, will lead to me working 20h a day just to keep everything going.

Steve Celeste writes that he successfully flipped his first-ever membership website when he realized that he just couldn’t keep up with all the work. After earning his first $2,000 from memberships, he sold the site via SitePoint forums for another $6,000.

What do you folks think? E-books or memberships?

Starting from tonight, I’m free.

Two weeks of arduous study have come to a close, and now I can look forward to a relatively relaxing month (or as relaxing as my professor can make it, at any rate).

With my birthday goals firmly set ($6,000/month in 365 days, in case you forgot), I already start planning and working on an info product - and I will finally have time to do keyword research and find a few more prospective niches to consider.

Oh, and let’s not forget the fact that I’ll finally have time for World of Warcraft again…

Well, folks, I gotta hand it to you - you handled having me around, living and breathing in this world for yet another year admirably well. I’m 24 today, and none of you have tried to kill me yet, which is pretty surprising.

Go on, put that rat poison into my birthday cake now or something…

Anyhow, this is an Internet marketing blog, so let’s get down to business, shall we? I first started Internet marketing in January when I got involved with ghostwriting to take care of the most pressing financial concerns. Since then, I’ve managed to put my finances in order, what with university studies and my girlfriend, haven’t focused a lot on making money online.

Time to change that, I think.

My goal for the next year is to set up income streams worth a stable $6,000 a month. I’m not talking ghostwriting or copywriting - the former is too time-consuming and I just haven’t got the talent for latter. Instead, I’m talking info products - all those lovely e-books that you’ve seen me rant about on this blog.

I checked at WF and it seems that $6,000/month is a fairly realistic goal for a year’s worth of work. And if I still fail, at least I’ll have the benefit of having something to whine and complain about when I’m 25.

Well, that’s it for today’s update - today is the day when I start actively building my info product empire. Hope to be able to post next year’s birthday update from a room in Four Seasons somewhere in the Carribean.

As some of you may know, I have recently been experimenting with the Adwords external tool to find profitable niches and longtail keywords.

If you have ever used the Adwords tool, then you know that Google doesn’t give you an exact number of searches for a specific keyword. Instead the best you can get are those little green bar indicators which show you whether a keyword has very low, low, average, high or very high monthly search volume.

But here is a little something I found on a blog recently. Apparently, some time back in March, someone experienced a minor glitch with the AdWords tool, as a result of which they were given a precise number of searches for related keywords on Google. In other words, this was pretty much Google’s version of Overture. Luckily, that person was kind enough to take a screenshot of the numbers he saw. You can read the full story here:

http://www.adamap.com/adamap/2007/03/google_keyword_.html

Interesting Conclusions and Hypotheses

1. This screen shot may give us a rough idea of what number of searches constitutes a “average”, “low” and “very low” search count on Google. There is a possibility that the result this tool shows can be applied to all searches done on Google. Although this is not very accurate, you can see, for example, that a keyword with 1200 searches is still rated as ” low “. Equally, you can also seen that a keyword with 7100 searches was ranked as ” average ” on Google. I suspect that we can use these figures to get a very rough idea of the number of searches for other key phrases.

2. We can also use this information to test the accuracy of Overture and WordTracker. For example, overture results have not been updated since January 2007. Since the information on the screenshot is February 2007, we can compare the difference between the search volumes on Google and Yahoo. For example, overture shows 8069 searches for the key phrase ” secretary desk” in January 2007. Google’s number for February is 52,000. Therefore, the number of searches on Google was almost 6.5 times higher than on Overture (calculated by dividing 52,000 by 8069). Even after we allow for different results between the two months, we can still safely assume that Google’s number of searches is five times higher than that of Overture. Simiar analysis can be done for WordTracker (though it will be less accurate since WordTracker does supply updated data every month, whereas Overture doesn’t).

Well it certainly seems that I am in a very productive state of mind today, because I just came up with another good way to look for profitable niches. If you’re ever stuck and want to see what you can possibly make a website about — or maybe even an info product — one of the simplest thing to do is go to www.amazon.com and browse their books section to see what’s available and what’s hot. I pretty much found a minor goldmine in their health and family section which contains, among other things, plenty of self-help book.

This method has three important advantages.

Firstly, it gives you some excellent ideas on the different subjects that you can write about.

Secondly and most importantly, it tells you whether there is demand for such products already. Remember that authors (just like everybody) else want to make money with their products, which means that they would not have bothered with writing a self-help book if they did not think there would be demand for it.

Thirdly, if you do decide to work in this niche and want to get your hands on some quality information - especially if you want to develop your own info product - then you already have your research done for you. Simply buy the printed book and see if you can’t integrate its contents into your own info product. Mind you, I’m not advocating plagiarism, but there is nothing wrong with doing proper research for your product.