Is there a substantial amount of articles that can be used as newsletter or blog content?
Because you will likely know very little about the niches you chose to target and because writing quality articles is a laborious process, you need to make sure there is a steady supply of article content available for your use.
Ezinearticles.com is the premier article directory and has more quality articles then just about any other directory I've encountered. You can find articles for your niche by either browsing the main categories (which will yield the highest number of articles) or typing in your main keyword into the search bar.
If you find more than a few thousand articles then you should be good to go. Be sure to actually read a few of the articles to make sure they are actually quality before you use them for your blog or newsletter.
Once you've found a niche that passes all 7 tests you're pretty much in business and can move on to the next step of setting up a profile for this niche market.
Are there digitally delivered items available that you can use as a giveaway item to build your list from your Myspace page?
You need to give people a powerful incentive to join your list. After all, people don't want to just give out their email address to anyone who asks for it. They need a good reason to join your list.
A digitally delivered item such as an ebook that is related to your niche is a very easy way to convince prospects to join your list. Before you start giving away a digitally delivered item to build your list, always make sure that the item comes with resell rights. If not, you could run into some serious trouble.
The easiest and cheapest means of acquiring items with resell rights is to type the following command into Google:
free [keyword] ebook
If an ebook is already being given away for free there is a good chance that resell rights are included as the ebook is intended to be viral. Browse around until you find an ebook that looks good and has a nice cover design.
A cover design is actually very important because it conveys the impression that people will be getting something tangible and not just a bunch of words thrown together. Remember that product packaging is often times more important than the product itself.
If you can't find any free products with resell rights to give away, you should check out the Information products section on Ebay. To find the information products section, click on “Everything Else” in the left menu and then “information products.” You can find a whole mess load of cheap, digitally delivered items on a wide variety of topics, most of which come with resell rights.
You can also try Butter Fly Reports, which contain ebooks that not only come with resell rights and ecover graphics but actually allow you to insert your affiliate links into the ebook itself. Best of all, all the ebooks listed at this site are 100% free.
Finally, if you still can't find any digitally delivered products, you can take a look at 7 Dollar Offers which carries a broad selection of information products for, you guessed it, $7. Many come with resell rights or at least the option to purchase them.
Do people actually spend money on products and services related to this niche?
And, what is the average demographic of a person within this niche?
To answer this question you will need to do some market research using your favorite search engine, I prefer Google of course.
Once you have your favorite search engine pulled up, type in the following search command:
[keyword] market demographics
This search should bring up information offered by media publishers such as websites, ezines, and newsletters in order to answer the questions of advertisers. Advertisers of course want to know exactly who it is they are advertising to before they drop a chunk of change on ads.
Because you are essentially an advertiser for a given market niche, you essentially need this same information. You may have to browse several pages deep in order to find the demographic information you are looking for, so don't be discouraged if you can't find what you're looking for in the first few results.
The market demographics should contain a multitude of facts including level of education, annual household income, monetary size of the market, age, gender, relationship status, and so on.
When you are building your Myspace profile and accompanying newsletter, you will need this information so you can get a better idea of who you are marketing to. Once you have found the right demographic data make sure to bookmark the page for future reference.
If you can not find the market demographics within 5 pages of search results, try instead looking for websites, ezines, and magazines related to your niche and check out the “Advertiser” or “Investor Info” tabs located somewhere on the website. These sections usually contain the desired market demographics.
Are there a diverse line of products intended for this niche that you can promote as an affiliate?
To answer this question, you will need to visit the following websites:
On Google, type in your main keyword along with “+affiliate” and hit search. If there are a lot of products for this niche you can promote as an affiliate you should find many of them here.
If you see only 1 or 2 products with low paying commissions in the search results then you might be out of luck. Chances are there just isn't much to promote and therefore very little money to be made.
On Clickbank, click on “Marketplace” on the top right and then enter your keyword and hit search. Often times clickbank will bring back a huge list of search results totally unrelated to your search query. Make sure that the products listed are actually related to your niche.
The products listed at Clickbank and most products listed at Associate Programs and
Paydotcom are digitally delivered and these are perfect for promoting as an affiliate.
Ideally, you want to find at least a few digitally delivered products you can sell as an affiliate as these of course command far higher profits than comparable physical products.
On Paydotcom, type in your keyword into the search bar located on the left hand column and click on search. Paydotcom's list of products is not nearly as comprehensive as Clickbanks but there are often times products listed there that are not listed at Clickbank. The more products you have to chose from the better.
On Associate Programs, select “search affiliate programs” from the drop down menu and then type in your main keyword and click on search. You should find a list of both physical and digital products that you can promote.
Unfortunately, Associate Programs does not update their site very frequently and many products that are listed may no longer be available. Make sure to visit the main site to see if the product is still available for promotion.
To make sure that you can actually profit from the niche you have found, you need a diverse range of products that way you can experiment to find out which ones sell the best.
If few or no products exist you can always create your own, which is not difficult and is far more profitable than selling someone else's product. But bear in mind that if few products exist for a given niche market, chances are there is very little money to be made in this niche hence the reason why few products exist.
Test 3
Is this niche market a short lived trend or a long term, stable market?
To answer this question you will need to head over to www.trends.google.com and look at the historic search volume for the niche you are researching. The Google Trends tool is 100% free and is actually a lot of fun to use. I use it all of the time just to feed my insatiable curiosity.
To use Google trends simply type in the main keyword of the niche market you are researching such as “scrapbooking” and click on search.
Ideally you are looking for a niche that has a strong upward curve as this indicates tremendous growth. Unfortunately, you will seldom find these kind of graphs.
More practically you are looking for a graph that has little fluctuation over the past four years and is therefore relatively stable. Any niche that generates a strong, consistent downward trend should probably be avoided as this may indicate a growing lack of interest.
Test 2
Approximately how big is this niche market on Myspace?
To answer this question you will need to go to Google and type in the following search phrase:
site: profile.myspace.com [keyword]
The number of results returned will give you a rough idea of the market size on Myspace. In reality, the actual market size will be several times higher than this number as not everyone who is interested in your niche market will have your keyword written in their profile.
Ideally you are looking for a number greater than 100K, although 50K or a little less is okay too. Because we are trying to build a targeted mailing list, the market size gives you a general idea of what the ceiling is for your mailing list. In other words, the market size generated by Google lets you know about the maximum size you can grow your mailing list.
While you will likely never actually reach this number no matter how hard you work at it, it's nice to know what kind of potential exists.
Far and away the most crucial component of successful online marketing and wealth building is locating a profitable niche market. This is perhaps the number 1 reason why people fail to make money online. Once you know how to find profitable niches (and there are thousands to chose from) the sky is pretty much the limit on how much money you can make.
I've seen niche marketing courses that charge $47 to teach you the methods I'm about to share with you. Within a few hours of following the steps outlined below you should have no problems finding 2 or 3 profitable niche markets.
Get Ideas...
Before you start looking for niche ideas, I strongly suggest clearing your head of any preconceived notions of what constitutes a profitable niche market. In other words, don't let your own passions and interests influence your brainstorming and researching.
If you can find a profitable niche that is also of great interest to you, that's great, but don't restrict yourself to researching your own hobbies and pastimes. To make money from a given niche market you don't necessarily have to know anything about it, you just need to know whether or not it's profitable.
To start getting ideas for niche markets the best place to look is on Myspace groups. To begin, start browsing group categories that will likely have affiliate products you can promote. More than likely, groups under “Nightlife and Clubs,” “Places and Travel,” etc. will likely not have many affiliate products that you can promote. Then again, you never know what you'll find until actually start searching.
For now though just stick with categories that have obvious product potential. As you browse the different groups within a category, take note of how many members are registered with the group. Generally the higher the better. Also take note of how many total groups exist for that niche on Myspace.
You can find the total number of groups by doing a keyword search on the main groups page. Again, the higher this number the better. It's also not a bad idea to store your niche ideas in some kind of word document so that you can research them all at once and eliminate the ones that don't pass the following tests.
Day 1
Does this niche have a reasonable amount of demand?
To answer this question you will need to use your favorite keyword research tool, I use Nichebot because it's cheap and extremely effective. What you're looking for is a niche that has at least a few hundred searches per day and ideally 1,000 or more searches per day.
If you don't want to shell out $13 per month for Nichebot (which is not a crucial tool if you're going to focus on just Myspace marketing) then you can just use the free wordtracker tool
I genuinely hope to show the world that with the internet, the impossible is possible.
While the challenge may sound impossible there are by this point innumerable multi-million dollar internet businesses that have been created with very little seed capital. One of the most prominent examples is that of a 17 year old who dropped out of high school because her free MySpace layout website was earning in excess of $1 million per year (and yes, with the internet you can make a fortune giving things away for free!).
So, while building a million dollar business completely from scratch is very difficult, it is absolutely possible. If successful, the myth that “it takes money to make money” will at long last be dispelled.
What I plan on doing…
I plan on starting a series of free blogs using blogger.com and then promoting them. I have already chosen several profitable niche markets that I intend to target with each blog. The niche markets themselves will not be revealed until the start of the contest. Once the contest starts I will also reveal why I decided to target each market and how to perform basic market research online.
Once each blog has enough traffic and actually begins to generate some revenue, I will then launch a website using the blog as a sort of launching pad. I will also be experimenting with businesses on the side, primarily creating and marketing information products. Information products cost very little to develop yet can yield enormous profits, making them perfect for the million dollar challenge.
I will be starting with blogs because they are free, very easy to setup, very easy to promote, and can also generate traffic in a very short amount of time. Traffic afterall is money and the faster I can get traffic the quicker I can start making money.
While the million dollar challenge is going on I am only going to focus on things that I believe the average person can replicate. Therefore I will not attempt to create sophisticated websites or software programs that, while very profitable, would be out of reach for the average person. However, as cash becomes available, I may outsource the creation of a sophisticated website or software program if I feel it is a profitable investment.
The point of the million dollar challenge is to show that anyone can build a profitable business online, regardless of income or education.
Rules & Definitions…
(1) The challenge is not to earn $1 million in cash but to build a business valued at $1 million or more. A business valuation takes into account all assets, liabilities, cash on hand, revenue and predicted revenue and then arrives at a valuation of that business.
(2) The only money I will spend on building my business will be money earned from the business itself.
(3) I will post updates to the million dollar challenge blog at least twice per week. Each update will describe what I’m doing, why I’m doing it, and will also report my traffic and earnings. The first two months will likely be very slow in terms of traffic and profit as I will be spending most of my time doing grunt work.
(4) Any revenue generated from the million dollar challenge blog itself will not count towards the million dollar challenge.
(5) To prevent myself from having an unfair advantage, I will delay the disclosing of each blog, website, or information product I create until they are steady earners. The reason for this is simple: the million dollar challenge blog will likely have a great deal of traffic and if I include links to what I am doing as I am doing it I would have an unfair advantage that the average entrepreneur would not have.
(6) I do not guarantee that I will succeed in building a million dollar business from scratch. I simply guarantee that I will attempt to do so to the best of my ability.
(7) I reserve the right to end the contest early if I feel the goal is totally unreachable or if I become too involved in my other businesses.
Dayton, Ohio – With money and jobs in increasingly short supply, many Americans face a very grim Christmas this holiday season. In the spirit of generosity and helping others, Zachary Skinner, a seasoned Internet Marketer from Dayton, Ohio, is launching The Million Dollar Challenge on the start of the New Year.
Skinner, who has been a full time internet marketer and business developer for nearly three years, is a self described eccentric who spent much of his childhood in a poverty stricken family. “I grew up in a family who had very little. And I mean very, very little. In fact, we were possibly about as poor as a family can be in the United States,” Skinner says.
“I think it’s very important for people to understand that they don’t need an expensive education, massive amounts of capital, or affluent parents in order to be successful. With the development of the internet you no longer even need money to build a thriving, seven figure enterprise. The only obstacle facing anyone today is a lack of motivation and I intend to prove it.”
When asked how he got started making money online, Skinner laughed and replied, “I got started about 7 years ago with one of those internet based get rich quick schemes everyone’s seen ads for on the computer. The course I purchased was largely a joke but it really opened my eyes to the possibilities. For the next four years I tinkered around on the computer experimenting with different things until I finally struck gold about 3 years ago.”
The “gold” Skinner is referring to is information products. An information product (for those not familiar with the latest internet lingo) is how-to information that is then marketed, sold, and delivered over the internet. Because there is virtually no distribution or manufacturing costs, properly marketed information products can yield enormous profit margins and can also command very high prices, several times the cost of a physical book for example.
“I made my first real money online selling information to online businesses and entrepreneurs but the truth is that are a thousand different ways to make a fortune online. Selling and creating information products just happened to be something I was good at so I decided to focus on that. With the million dollar challenge I’m really going to try to focus in on things that just about anyone can replicate such as simple blogs and websites.”
“More than anything,” Skinner says, “I hope to show people that the economy collapsing is not necessarily the end of hope. In fact, thanks to the internet, the economic downturn can actually be an opportunity."
“Even if I fail to build a million dollar business in the next year, I promise people will get one heck of an education by simply staying tuned to my million dollar challenge blog.” According to Skinner, “Once you know how to harness the true power of the internet, the sky is pretty much the limit on what you can do.”
