Internet Marketing Tools and Tips by Steve Atwal

If you want to make money online, your first goal will be to find a niche market that will be profitable and return the most money for your efforts. To be most effective, you need to target a specific niche, and attract the right users and audience for your Website. For example, if your interest is weddings, that is too broad a topic. Instead, pick a more focused niche such as: wedding toasts, wedding speeches, wedding dresses, etc.

Does your niche idea have a lot of competition? How do you tell? Just go to Google, and do a search on your keywords, e.g. wedding dresses. Are there a lot of ads on the right side of the Google search results? If so, then you have a lot of competition, so make sure you use the right keywords to attract people to your Website. If there are only a few ads when you search for your niche idea then you will probably make more money as this niche may not have been exploited yet.

Next, see if there are affiliate products available to sell for this niche market. You can do this by visiting the ClickBank marketplace and performing a search using your niche market keywords. Those will be the products you will likely want to sell on your niche market Website. You want to make sure there are enough products to sell or you will not be able to monetize your Website as well.

Do the search engines send enough traffic for this niche market? Head on over to the Overture keywords tool and find out. There should be at least 15,000 searches for this niche market.

So, here is my list of the 20 ways to find a profitable niche market. To find a profitable niche market, take a look at:

• popular product categories on Amazon, eBay, and other major bookstores
• your local schools and their continuity education class subjects and catalogues
• popular hobbies and interests of your friends and family
• the  local clubs and the type of people they serve
• the local classified ads for products and services
• what other people are asking for and saying is lacking online
• local bulletin boards
• www.magazine.com for ideas
• your local library - see the new books, new audio, new video sections for ideas
• the TV ads - use a critical eye to see what is being sold and how
• the Discovery channel for anything that peaks your interest
• article sites and most popular subjects on those sites, e.g. www.ezinearticles.com
• popular posts on www.digg.com
• Google Hot Trends to see what is most popular for any day
• MSNBC most popular news articles and videos each day
• Yahoo Buzz to see the top overall searches
• DMOZ for topic ideas - this directory is used by some major search engines. Also take a look at the ThomasNet industry directory
• www.about.com for things that catch your interest
• your local Yellow pages
• download the free monthly Trend Briefing at TrendWatching.com

You can also check out:

• www.springwise.com for new business ideas
• VRE (virtual real estate) toolbar for Firefox. This installs a toolbar within Firefox and lets you search 15 places for niche ideas, e.g. About.com, eBay, Google Sets, etc.

As anyone who writes copy for the Internet will tell you, using good keywords is essential to getting your pages ranked high in the search engines, like Google, for the words you want. So, how do YOU research good keywords to use?

Do you visit various search engines or SEO services? Do you then enter your primary keywords, save the results, then use additional related keywords, do your research, save the results, and so forth? How long does it all take you? Hours? Your time is worth something, so make the most of it.

This software makes your life a lot easier. For FREE. Not only that but, from what I hear, even the best Internet marketing gurus such as Rob Benwell use this software.

With the Good Keywords software, it takes five minutes to do your keyword research. The software has one simple critical function, and does not include extra bloated and confusing features.

So, give it a try at www.goodkeywords.com.

Almost everyone is using WordPress these days. If you have a blog, then chances are that at some point you will end up using WordPress for it. Wordpress is popular, very well designed, extendable (with plugins), easy to customize (with themes), easy to use and a really painless to install. Thus, it is no wonder that you will find many tutorials, guides, and tips on using WordPress. However, most of those guides are not videos.

Enter, http://css-tricks.com and their great list of video tutorials. Chris Coyier at http://css-tricks.com has put together a nice list of very useful WordPress video tutorials from various sites. Follow along with these video tutorials to learn how to:

• Design a WordPress theme
• Create a WordPress template
• Use lots of customization tips and tricks
• Use WordPress as a CMS (content management system)
• Install WordPress Locally (great for testing things out on your computer)
• How to Modify a WordPress Theme
• Add a Twitter Field to Your Form
• And, much more

Further reading

• Find some great free themes at the official WordPress showcase site.
• Find 20+ Great WordPress 2.7 Compatible Plugins.
• Interviews with some of the best Web Designers and their favorite themes at SmashingMagazine.

Related content

• 15 Attractive (WordPress) Blog Designs

Do you want your blog to stand out from the millions of blogs on the Internet? Want some inspiration to improve your Website design? Then take a look at the following - you may see something to get those neurons firing with ideas.

Bearskinrug

[Read the rest of this entry...]

Content is king, as always, in the blogging world. Without it your blog will whither and die a slow death. Bloggers are always looking for something new to write about, report on, and inform their readers about. But, sometimes you need content and you are fresh out of ideas.

One way to get new content into a blog is to piggyback onto RSS feeds. If you don’t have anything original to blog about, or you just want to get the latest scoop from news sources, then you can pull in content from RSS feeds, and even automate the process of creating posts from them.

Be careful! Do not abuse this method. Do not simply copy blog posts from other Websites. It should be ok to post snippets of content from other sites, along with a link back to the original article so the author gets full credit for his or her work. However, if you want full articles without upsetting anyone, you can always pick up RSS feeds from article directories like eZineArticles.com - but I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s first look at some options to pull RSS feeds into WordPress: below are plugins you can use with WordPress to accomplish this.

WP-o-Matic
Download from: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-o-matic/

• This free plugin allows you to add and import RSS feeds, and sort them into campaigns and categories. You can then automatically generate posts from the feeds. This plugin also allows you to relink specific words as well as rewrite words within the new posts.
• One major problem, as of this blog post: it does not work with WordPress 2.7

AutoBlogged
Buy from: http://www.steveatwal.com/recommends/autoblogged.php

• This is a more polished plugin that does what WP-o-Matic does and more.
• Has numerous pre-defined searches to locate articles via Google Blog Search, Technorati, Blogdigger, Blogpulse, MSN Spaces, Yahoo! News, Flickr, YouTube, and others.
• They have a new version that is supposed to work with WordPress 2.7

YAAB-Autoblogger (Yet Another Autoblogger)
Download from: http://www.psypo.com

• This free plugin is still in Beta, so you may experience bugs. But it tries to do what WP-o-Matic does. Try it and see if it works for you.
• It is supposed to work with WordPress 2.7

FeedWordPress
Download from: http://projects.radgeek.com/feedwordpress/

• This free plugin is similar to the ones above and works with WordPress 2.7

So, once you decide which of the above plugins works for you, you will want to decide which RSS feeds to pull content from. There are many RSS feeds out there, so just pick the ones you like the best - Google is your friend in this respect. Below are two Websites with RSS feed listings to get you started:

• Yahoo RSS Feeds: http://dir.yahoo.com/rss/dir/index.php
• Top 150 Media and Marketing Blogs: http://adage.com/power150/