Niche Designer

You can get free .info domain names from 1&1 right now. There is a limit of 5 per customer and you can only register new .info’s (not transfer old ones).

High Google ranking is usually the holy grail of SEO. After my google nightmare I gave up on google. Instead I turned my attention to MSN. Why? Because my efforts pay off with MSN. Soon after creating a site or page, it gets ranked in MSN. If I put a little extra effort, I can easily make it into the first page of MSN. Additionally, I always had a feeling MSN traffic clicked more ads than google ads. I can nearly count my clicks by counting my MSN search strings. But I don’t have an adsense tracker installed, so there was no way for me to know for sure if MSN converted better than other search engines. Now, the Web analytics firm WebSideStory has confirmed my suspicions. Their experiment returned the following conversion data:

AOL traffic 6.17%
MSN traffic 6.03%
Yahoo traffic 4.07%
Google traffic 3.83%

A nearly double conversion rate is huge. Why the difference? Their conclusions included “With portals rich in content and services, AOL, MSN and Yahoo may tend to appeal toward a more buyer friendly demographic. Google, meanwhile, may appeal to more browsers – those with less of an intent to buy.” Personally, I have long regarded the MSN/AOL users as less technically oriented than Google users. It is possible more technical users are blind to ads. I think more than anything this proves that you shouldn’t put all your egg’s into one basket just because that basket is the biggest.

I have created a template system for new niche sites that I make. I’ve used this method on the last few sites I have created and it works great for me. My system isn’t fully automated like a site generator. Instead its a matter of copying a small template for each page and entering my own articles into each page. This way I have genuine content without spending extra time to code it. This system also has a contact, links, about page, plus an auto-generated sitemap. So far, its working out well for me, so I thought I would share my system with my readers. You can see the template at work on my MRSA website. (more…)

Dotster is having a domain name registration “Happy Hour” tomorrow (Feb. 14th) at 4pm Eastern. During that hour you can get a .com/.net/.org name registered for just $1. The trick is that you can’t get more than 1 $1 domain per order. However, you can make unlimited numbers of orders. I only hope Dotster is capable of handeling the high volume of traffic. If they are, then this should indeed be a fun hour.

Note: If you plan on getting some $1 domains you might want to start checking the Dotster website earlier than 4 eastern tomorrow. Although that is their published time to start, 4 doesn’t seem to correlate with their countdown clock on their homepage. Unless I got my timezone calculations wrong, which is possible… According to world clock its 7:30 Eastern right now and their countdown says 1 day 2 hours 30 minutes, does that sound right?

I am loving this keyword difficulty tool. You type in a keyword and it will tell you how difficult it will be to rank well in that term. And instead of confusing numbers, it gives you an answer in graphical format.

You can try it for yourself below:

This site also has other neat tools like the google cache dance, which will let you see when the next update of your cache will happen, or you can check to see if you are banned by google.

I have just finished my first niche site that includes Peakclick as a method of monotization. I made a site about Wholesale Wallpaper with RSSG (really simple site generator). RSSG is a free site generator that is open source. I have never used any of the site generators that cost money, but I must say I rather liked RSSG. In the future I will offer templates to use with RSSG and also additional modules, etc.

For this site I used Peakclick RSS to add filler content that will keep my pages fresh. I found that Peakclick paid about 4 - 5 cents for a click with the keyword “wallpaper”. This might sound terrible, but Adsense usually pays less than 10 cents for this keyword. Also, other keywords do make more (although I don’t think they have any keywords that get over $2.00 bids). I wouldn’t stop using Adsense or YPN and use peakclick instead. But I don’t think that’s what peakclick is meant to do. It is a nice way to add RSS content that can make you a little extra money.

I actually used 3 new tools for this site: RSSG, PeakClick, and Orwell. Orwell is a great piece of software! I found out about it over at the Niche Marketing Mastermind Forum. Basically, its like an article browser. You to go certain article sites with the software and search for your keyword, when you find an article you like, it saves all the information for you. You can save it as a .txt or .html. I used it tonight to find wallpaper articles for my Wallpapersite and it was actually fun to use. I didn’t want to stop finding articles, it is addictive! Be warned. Plus it’s free, can’t get any better than that.

One of the most important steps in niche site building is keyword research. You can have the best design, best content, but if you pick poor keywords you simply won’t get the traffic you deserve. One option is to spend money on a keyword subscription. I prefer to do things for myself. I think it’s also beneficial to find your own keywords because then you don’t have to compete against the other members who are using the same keywords. Here are the steps I go through when I research keywords.
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