Saving on Web Hosting Costs

For most of us that are trying to make money online, our largest initial cost are web hosting fees. One way to offset these initial costs is to search for web hosting discounts and rebates. With a little effort you can easily save up to 50% on your hosting fees and significantly cut you upfront business expenses.

Here are some of the best deals that I have found for several large web hosting companies:

1. IXWebHosting:
   
   IXWebHosting offers nicely featured plans starting out at a very low $3.95/mo. Using the above link you can get cash-back rebates of $30 to $70 to save even more money.


2. SimpleHost:
   
   Simplehost offers a great hosting package for only $7.50/mo. Using the above link you can get a $50 cash-back rebate.


3. MidPhase:
   
   IXWebHosting offers a nice selection of hosting plans starting out at $7.95/mo. Using the above link you can get a $45 cash-back rebate.


4. CirtexHosting:
   
   CirtexHosting offers plans starting out at only $2.00/mo. Using the above link you can get a 50% off coupon.

There are many more offers out there. I just provide a small sample of the deals that I was able to find. Just remember - do a little research up front before you purchase your hosting and you will find that you can save some significant money.

AdSense Niche: Furnace Filter, Furnace Air Filter - $$$

I found another decent AdSense niche that would be very easy to get good rankings within the search engines. Furnace filters may not seem like a topic that would bring in any money, but there number of searches per month and the number of advertisers makes this an ideal niche.

Even though furnace filters is a seasonal item, there are still enough searches during the spring and summer months to be profitable all year round. I would suggest targeting the keywords "furnace filter" from and SEO prospective, because you will have an easier time getting your site to rank well due to the lack of competition.

All AdSense niches that I profile will use the following rating system that describes the average payout per click:

• $------ $.01 to $.25


• $$----- $.26 to $.50


• $$$---- $.51 to $.75


• $$$$--- $.75 to $1.00


• $$$$$-- $1.00+

Your results should be very similiar to those posted here, but your results may vary due to competition since this post was posted (MFA sites), smart pricing on your AdSense account, and or bad traffic sources.

Adsense Niche: Bail Bond, Bail Bondsman - $$$ to $$$$

Here is a pretty nice AdSense niche that I have recently stumbled upon - bail bonds, bail bondsman, or bail agents. Here is a niche that hasn't been overrun with MFA sites, and offers a nice per click payout.

Why is this? Well, the bail bond industry is very risky, but the pay outs are pretty nice for the bail bondsman. The bail bondsman will typically charge around 10% of the bail amount as their fee. Since most bails are $1,000 or more, this means each client/defendant that use them to post bail is worth $100 and up. On top of that, people that search for bail bonds or bail bondsman are looking to post bail for someone and are usually pretty motivated. Put these two together and these bail bondsman can pay quite a bit per lead and still make a ton of money.

What does this mean for you? Well it means that this is a great niche that can bring in some great money for each click.

All AdSense niches that I profile will use the following rating system that describes the average payout per click:

• $------ $.01 to $.25


• $$----- $.26 to $.50


• $$$---- $.51 to $.75


• $$$$--- $.75 to $1.00


• $$$$$-- $1.00+

Your results should be very similiar to those posted here, but your results may vary due to competition since this post was posted (MFA sites), smart pricing on your AdSense account, and or bad traffic sources.

Using Blogs to Test Niches

So, how do you find profitable niches to build a site around? There are many strategies for narrowing down your choice of niche markets from using the overture search results and bid tools to checking competition using site searches in google. But even with these techniques you won't know for sure how profitable a niche is until you put up a site.

But putting up a high quality, good content site takes time, so I have now been using blogs to test my niche ideas before I build a full-blown site. It is very easy to publish a blog on a topic, and by throwing my adsense code on the site I can get a feel for the average price per click. If the blog can get traffic and the price per click is high enough (I shoot for around $.50 a click), I will then develop a full-fledged site around the niche.

This method does take about a month to get enough data from the blog in order to determine if the niche is worth persuing, but you can easily start several of these test blogs very quickly over that month so that you can find the most profitable niches. During the testing period I just through a couple of posts up on the blog and add a post every other day or so. These keeps the amount of time I spend on each test blog to a minimum.

techTAGG - A better Digg?

When it comes to social bookmarking sites we all know that Digg is by far the largest and most popular (just ask anyone that has had a story hit the front page.) So how could a site improve on the model perfected by Digg, well techTAGG may have done it.

What techTAGG has done is brilliant. By making a a slight tweak to the model they are giving back to their contributors. They said -> Look, we want to build a community with a similar model that Digg has built - with improvements and evolve our own strengths. We are not going to pay you explicitly, but we will share the AdSense revenue with you 50% on the stories that you submit. In fact, we want to get this party started, so the first 250 members will get 100% of the AdSense revenues for the life of the site.

FYI, their are currently only 134 members as of today, so you still have time to be in the first 250 members and get 100% of AdSense revenues from your contributed stories.

Note: The site has already generated extra AdSense revenues for me in my first 5 days as a member. It is not much, but every little bit adds up.

For more information visit techTAGG.

Utilizing Google Alerts

As the number of sites that I have grows, I continue to look for little tricks and tools that can help me keep track of how my sites are doing. On neat little trick that I have found is to use google alerts to keep track of when my sites get updated in Google.

For every site that I have, I create two alerts: one for site:www.URL.com and link:www.URL.com. These provides me with emails that let me know when new pages of my sites are index and when new backlinks are found.

The 'site' alert happens in real time as google finds more of my pages, but the 'link' alert only happens when Google exports its backlinks. The good thing about that is that I know when Google has begun an update when I start receiving the 'link' alerts for my sites.

Brought to you by http://nichevalue.blogspot.com

5 Free Tools Every Online Niche Marketer Needs

The keys to online niche marketing are the ability to identify niche markets and the ability to get high keyword rankings in the search engines. Over the course of the last couple of months I have found several free tools that have become invaluable to improving my niche marketing efforts. With these tools you will be able to both identify new niche markets to persue and optimize your niche sites to rank high in the search engines for your target keywords.

5 Free Tools Every Online Niche Marketer Needs

1. Digital Point's Keyword Tracker - This very powerful tool allows you to track your site's keyword rankings on the three main search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN). Since the tool also stores the data, you can view a graph of your websites ranking trends over time to see how well you SEO efforts are working.
   
   How I use this tool: - I use this tool to measure the effectiveness of my SEO efforts for my sites. Using the historical data, I can see if my sites is trending down in the rankings. This let's me know that I need to work on optimizing that particular site.



2. Digital Point's Keyword Suggestion Tool - This tool will provide you search data from Overture and Keyword Tracker for keyword phrases related to the entered keyword. With this information you can design your site(s) to target popular keyword phrases.
   
   How I use this tool: - I use this tool as a start to find potential high traffic keyword niches. Once I have found a keyword niche using this tool, I will then research it further using some of the other tools on this list before I actually pursue the niche.



3. Niche Watch - This tool will let you analyze the top 20 sites for any keyword phrase (it will also diplay your site's analysis for comparison.) With the information that this tool provides, you can quickly determine how competitive a niche is for a target keyword, or you can see how well your site stacks up against the competition for your target keywords.
   
   How I use this tool: - I use this tool to determine the competitiveness of the keyword niches found using the suggestion tool above. I am looking for a niche that I can fairly easily rank in the top 20.



4. URL Trends - This site allows you to track some key metrics of your sites over time (the free version let's you track up to 10 sites.) The statistics are only update once a month, but it is a good tool to see how you site is developing over time.
   
   How I use this tool: - I use this tool to track my sites, so that I can see how well my sites are progressing over time. With this tool I can see the key metrics of all my sites on one page.



5. Directory Tracker - This tool will allow you to track your directory submissions for it's list of around 300 directories. It allows you to track submissions and listings.
   
   How I use this tool: - I use this tool to track the directory submissions for all my new sites. Once I have submitted the site to all the directories, I then go back periodically and run their directory checker to see which directories have listed my site.

This information brought to you by the http://nichevalue.blogspot.com

Google Analytics and Blogger Sites

One of the first things that I do when I find a potential niche market is to create a blogger blog. I then add content to the blog for a couple of weeks and see what happens. If the blog starts to take off and get a lot of traffic, I then create a full blown site around the niche.

The reason I like to use blogger sites is that fact that they are easy to maintain and update from one account. But blogger sites do have one major drawback: no built in statistics.

This is where I pair my blogger sites with the power of google analytics. Using google analytics I can view the traffic trends for each of my niche blogger sites. I can see which sites are growing in terms of traffic and where that traffic is coming from. Using this information I can invest my time into the sites that have the most promise and ultimately the highest ROI.

The one drawback is you can only monitor 5 sites at one time with google analytics. For me this isn't really a problem, because I can only keep up with 3 to 5 sites at one time.

This information was brought to you by http://nichevalue.blogspot.com

Adsense Revenue Sharing

I have been dabbling and testing to see if I could make any money by participated on adsense revenue sharing sites. Obviously I got the idea to look for other revenue sharing sites from my membership to Digital Point.

I mixed things up a little by joining several different types of revenue sharing sites. I joined several adsense revenue sharing forums in addition to Digital Point, a couple of adsense revenue sharing article directories, and an adsense revenue sharing content site. Over the last couple of weeks I have posted at all the forums, added articles to the article directories, and posted new content to the content site in an effort to earn some extra money from adsense.

The result was a lot of impressions and $0.24 added to my adsense account. So for all the effort, I only made $0.24. In addition the large numbers of impressions with a low CTR may start affecting the other sites in my adsense account, so I am removing my adsense information from these revenue sharing sites (I know that low performing sites in your AdSense account can affect your other sites click values.)

Here are the list of adsense revenue sharing sites that I have joined:

Forums:

1. Digital Point - Webmaster Forum


2. HTTPPoint - Webmaster Forum


3. Webmasters Home - Web Master Forum


4. Webmasters Talk - Web Master Forum


5. Hosting Refuge - Web Hosting Forum

Article Directories:

1. Xpress Ideas


2. Articler


3. Article Muse

Content Sites:

1. Senserely Yours - This is a very unique site that lets you add to their content either in the form of blog entries or book entries.

I had fun playing with the idea for a little while, but now back to creating content for my niche sites.

This information was brought to you by http://nichevalue.blogspot.com

Submitting Articles for Traffic

I have been testing a lot of different techniques to generate traffic to my niche sites. So far the best traffic techinique that I have found for my niche sites is to submit articles to the free article directories.

For one of my sites I was receiving 1 to 2 unique visitors a day from the search engines (site is currently in Google's sandbox so traffic is only coming from yahoo and msn.) I decided to write some articles and submit them to the free article directories to see if that would drive traffic to this site.

Over a month period I submitted 5 original articles that included the site's url in the resource box. With each article submission the traffic for the web site spiked up to 50 to 100 uniques a day for a couple of days after the submission. At the end of the month the web site is now getting 10 to 20 unique visitors a day with several of them coming from sites that picked up the articles. The adsense income for the site went from less than $.50 a day to $10 a day immediately after each submission and has since leveled off to around $2.00 a day.

Even though this technique seems to work it is very time intensive to write a 500 to 700 word article. That is probably why I have been very consitent in submitting articles ;)

I am planning to do some more article promotions over the next month for several of my other sites to see if they will also benefit from this type of marketing.

Getting a good deal on hosting.

Well I have been looking for a new host for some new sites I want to create. My goal was to find the best deal that I could on a good hosting plan.

I was able to find a deal that allowed me to save over %50 on my web hosting fees.
Here is how I went about finding my web hosting deal.

1. Researched hosting companies to select plans that met my requirements. I used online web hosting forums and review sites to narrow my search down to three companies (Bluehost, Hostgator and IX Webhosting.)


2. Looked for coupons, rebates, discounts for the three hosting companies. I used the following google searches to find the best deals and/or discounts.
   
   
   
   • "Company Name deals"
   
   
   • "Company Name discounts"
   
   
   • "Company Name coupons"
   
   
   • "Company Name rebates"


3. Selected the best deal that I found. Here are the deals that I found:
   
   
   
   • BlueHost - $7.95 (yearly) - Normally Costs: $95.40.
     
     Deals:
     $40 Rebate - Total Costs: $55.40 - Savings: 42%
     $50 Rebate - Total Costs: $45.40 - Savings: 52%
     
   
   
   • HostGator - Baby Plan $9.95 (yearly) - Normally Costs: $119.40
     
     Deals:
     1 month free Coupon ("cheaphosting") - Total Costs: $109.46 - Savings: 8%
     $25 Rebate - Total Costs: $94.40 - Savings: 21%
     $30 Rebate - Total Costs: $89.40 - Savings: 25%
     
     * I think that you can use the rebates and coupon codes together, but I am not sure.
     
   
   
   • IX WebHosting - Business Plan $7.95 (yearly) - Normally Costs: $95.40
     
     Deals:
     $55 Rebate - Total Costs: $40.40 - Savings: 58%
   
   I ended up selected the IX Web Hosting plan because of the $55 rebate.
   

The key is to select the company or companies that you want to use and then to look for any coupons and/or rebates that you can use to lower costs of the plan that you selected.

PageRank Does Not Equate To Traffic

A lot of people seem to be focused on building their Google PageRank for their sites without understanding that PageRank does not equate to getting traffic. It is fairly easy to get a new site to have a 4 or 5 page ranking within 30 days. But even with a PR5 ranking these sites are not guarranteed to recieve tons of traffic.

So, how come a PR5 ranked site not recieve very much traffic:

1. Pages are not optimized for the right keywords. It doesn't matter how high a pages PR is, if it is targeting keywords that nobody searches for.


2. The "anchor text" of incoming links does not target the right keywords. A lot of webmasters ignore the importance of using "anchor text" correctly.


3. The "anchor text" of internal links is not keyword optimized. A lot of sites out their just use general text like "home" or "articles" as the anchor text for these important internal links.


4. Site has landing in Google's Sandbox for its main keywords. This can happen to new sites that are targeted to popular keywords. There is nothing that can be done to remove a site form the sandbox, except waiting for it to come out naturally.

The good thing is that it is easy to correct the first three problems.

I have to admit that I have been guilty of jumping on the PageRank wagon over that last two months. Currently, I now have two PR5, and 8 PR4 sites that have all been built since January, and none of them are getting the traffic that I expected.

So, I am currently optimizing the sites to target the right keywords (ones that people search for) and have modified the "anchor text" of internal and external links to support these keywords.

Google Frustrations

I have been going through frustrations of getting good SERPs in Google. Google's algorithm does seem to punish newer sites. Almost all of my sites listed high on certain search terms for their first couple of weeks, but then dropped down in the SERPs.

This has had a drastic impact on the amount of traffic that gets to my site and my income. I still get traffic from MSN, but it is only a fraction of the traffic from Google. I am just waiting for the day that my sites start climbing out of the sandbox and begin getting traffic again.

Right now, two of my main sites are generating $10 to $15 a day together with an average of 75 to 100 page views. If these percentages can hold once google starts sending me traffic, I should see my income quadruple from these small niche sites.

Playing in the Google Sandbox

Well, its official, my main site is definitely in google's infamous sandbox. While my site ranks well for auxilary keyword phrases within my niche, it isn't even in the rankings for any of my sites main keywords. Although this is frustrating, I am still getting traffic from the other search engines to hold me over.

Determining Ranking Without Sandbox

I was curious to see how my site would rank if googles sandbox filter was disabled, so I went on an online expedition to see if there was a way to determine a sites try ranking. Well I found a simple method that will let you perform a google search with the filters disabled (originally I found a tool that would perform this search, but it has been taken offline.)

It seems that you can overwhelm googles filters if you add a search phrase that is over 40 words long. So using the following pattern, you can do a search on your keyword phrases with the filters disabled and determine where your site will rank when the sandbox effect is gone:

"'keyword phrase' a at the is to of on"

Just repeat this pattern in the search box until it is over the 40 word limit. For example, if your keyword phrase was "dog training" you would enter the following sequence into the google search box:

"dog training a at the is to of on dog training a at the is to of on dog training a at the is to of on dog training a at the is to of on dog training a at the is to of on"

Using this technique I found that my site's true ranking would place me on the first or second page for my main keywords.

What am I Doing while I am in the Sandbox?

There is no way out of the sandbox excepting time. It can take 3 to 6 months for a site to get out of google's Sandbox, so in the mean time I am going to concentrate on adding fresh content to my site and increasing the number and quality of its backlinks. I will monitor my sites true ranking using the above mentioned technique, so that I can get my site into the top ten rankings for my main keywords.

Also during this time, I am going to work on launching some one or two page niche sites. This way these sites will season in googles sandbox until I have the time to develop them into full fledged sites.

PR5 Ranking in 30 Days - Part 2

yThis is the second part of the how I acheived a PR5 ranking within 30 days on one of my niche sites. In this part I will descibe the internal linking strategy that I used for my the sites.

Internal Linking Strategy

There are a lot of different internal linking strategies, and each one will have a different impact on how PR (page rank) is distributed throughout your site. If you are not careful in your internal linking, you could be lossing a lot of your PR through your outbound links.

By planning your internal linking you can keep most of your site's PR within itself, and you can then push that PR to your important pages (one's that you want to rank in the SERPs.)

I used a strategy that pushed as much of the site's PR to my home page and reduced the amount of PR that I was giving away through my outbound links. I just used the following simple linking plan as I built my site:

Page Classifications:
The first thing I did was to assign a type or classification to each page that would make up my site. I was then able to create simple linkg rules for each page type.

• Home Page - Main page of my site.


• Content page - Page containing content like an article.


• Category Page - Page that contains links to internal pages of a specific type link articles.


• Outbound Link page - Page that contains outbound links.

Home Page Linking Rules:
The following home page linking rules will perserve and push your sites PR to its internal content pages.

1. Limit the outbound links. I will only link to my other sites from the home Page, and I limit these to 2 or 3.


2. Link to as many internal content pages as your can. This pushes the PR into your site, so that your content pages get indexed faster and move up in the SERPs. My site is fairly small, so I linked to all my content pages from my homepage.
3. Link to all Internal Link Pages.


4. Never link directly to an outbound link page, otherwise you will be giving up too much of your hard earned PR. I did violate this rule on my site by linking directly to a page with all my outbound links. I have since corrected this issue by moving the links into category specific pages, so now my home page links to a link category page.

Content Page Linking Rules:
The following content page linking rules are designed to push as much of the PR up to your Home Page.

1. Always link back to your Home Page (make sure your anchor text for the link is your primary keyword.)


2. Limit outbound links as much as possible. I write most of my own content so I don't have to worry about linking to outside sources on my content pages.


3. Limit all other internal links only to those that make navigation easier. We want to push most of this pages PR to the Homepage.

Category Page Linking Rules:
The following category page linking rules are again designed to keep as much PR within your site. By providing a category page between your home page and all your outbound link pages, you will significantly reduce the amount of PR that is lost through you ourbound link pages.

1. Always link back to your Homepage (again make sure your anchor text for the link is your primary keyword.)


2. Link to the internal pages within this pages category. This will be a list of links to content pages or outbound link pages.


3. Never put any outbound links on these pages.

Outbound Link Page Linking Rules:
These following outbound link page linking rules are designed to dilute the amount of PR passed through the outbound links. By including a lot of internal links, we can reduce the amount of PR lost.

1. Always link back to your Homepage (again make sure your anchor text for the link is your primary keyword.)


2. Link to as many internal pages as you can. This will reduce the amount of PR giving up through the outbound links.


3. Link to the external sites.

As you can see, my linking strategy was very simplistic and easy to follow. Agian this is just one of an infinite number of linking strategies. If you have an internal linking strategy that you would like to share, please leave a comment.

PR5 Ranking in 30 Days - Part 1

Would you like to know how I took a new niche site from PR0 to PR5 in 30 days? Of course, so in this post I will tell you the strategies and techniques I used to take a small financial niche site to a PR5 ranking in its first month.

I used a combination of a targeted external link compaigns and an specific internal linking strategy. Both of these combined contributed to giving the home page of the site a PR5 and the internal pages a PR3 ranking. In this entry I will discuss the external linking compaigns.

External Linking Strategy

I tried three seperate external link compaigns: article submissions, targeted reciprocal links, and link exchanges. I am not sure how much each of these compaigns contributed to the high PR ranking, so I plan on using all three on my future niche sites.

Article Submission: I wrote five original articles within my niche and submitted them to 6 free article directories. Several of these directories allow you to syndicate . These articles were republished on over hundred other sites within my niche, given me hundreds of relevant backlinks. One of the sites that picked up my syndicated articles was also picked up by google news for my main search terms. This caused the articles to be displayed on all sites the use the google rss feed for my niche. I am sure that these backlinks helped with my page ranking, but with google cracking down on duplicate content, I am not sure how much.

Targeted Reciprocal Links: I contacted several sites in my niche and related niches and was able to get links to my site on several ranked pages including a PR6 page from a related site. I provided links back to these sites in exchange. That link page now carries a PR3 ranking, so these sites are now benefiting from the reciprocal links. I believe that these targeted reciprocal links contributed quite a bit of my PR5 ranking.

Link Exchanges: I signed up for LinkMetros free service and manually acquired links to related financial sites. Most of these links were from PR0 pages, so I don't think that these links drove as much PR to my site as the targeted reciprocal links.

Obvious there are other external linking strategies, but these are the ones that helped my site achieve its PR5 ranking in its first month. I am still learning and plan on looking into other strategies to increase my backlinks.

If you have other backlinking strategies that I worked for you, please leave a comment to describe the strategy. This way we can all learn from each other.

Finding Value in Niches.

What is the value in a niche? Well I am going to find out and document my progress as I begin building small highly focused niche sites. I will be using a combination of adsense and assorted affiliate programs to make money on these niche sites. I won't specifically mention the niches that I am currently working with, but I will document the various strategies that I am using to increase the sites search engine rankings and page rankings.

Currently I have 5 different niches that are in various stages of development.

• One finance related site started on 1/15/06: Site already has a page rank of 5 and is indexed in all the major search engines and is recieving 20 to 30 unique visitors a day from the search engines (I will be documenting how I achieved a page rank of 5 within one month.)


• Another finance related site started on 1/15/06: Site already has a page rank of 4 and is indexed in all the major search engines. Site is recieving 5 to 10 unique visitors a day from the search engines.


• Another finance related site started on 1/20/06: Site already has a page rank of 3 and is indexed in all the major search engines.


• 2 sites in development phase.

Daily Income: $10/day.

My goal in this is to generate an income of $300/day by the end of 2006. I started this exercise on 1/15/06 which will give me almost a full year to accomplish my goal.