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I saw a random tweet tonight that had me interested – so I clicked through to see what all the fuss was about.  As we know – Google likes to roll out random small tests to random users in an effort to constantly improve their search algorithms and the way search works.  I’ve seen several of these tests in action – but this one intrigued me a little bit more then the others.  This is a video shot by an SEO consultant.

As you can see – from the video – the search results are constantly updating as the users types and what Google thinks they are searching for is constantly changing. Google has officially found a way to make searchers even more lazy – now they don’t even have to hit enter!

I wouldn’t really say that Google is entirely original in this – I knew that I had seen it before so I went out looking for it. You can see that it’s been done before over at http://www.istartedsomething.com/livesearch. Obviously Google will make a much larger impact however – so it’s interesting to think about.

I’m wondering what the effects that this could have on marketers and brands are – and a few things come to mind right off the bat. Based on watching the video – it looks really distracting and I’m not sure that it would improve user experience at all. There are all sorts of organic results and ads flying past the users eyes – do you think that any of them will catch their attention before they reach the final page? How will this effect your ads impression count and thusly your CTR and QS?

I know that users are easily distracted – but I can’t see them stopping and click on an entirely unrelated ad to what they were looking for too often – however I can see them skipping right past related ads because they typed in another letter and it disappeared.

They would have to come up with some way to judge impressions – it can’t be an impression if the search barely even loaded before the user kept typing.

What do you guys think? Will Google actually implement this change? I don’t see the use in it personally – but I’m sure there are some differing opinions out there. Let’s hear them.

As most of you know – I’ve been a member of PPC-Coach for a long time.  Will also owned a site about CPV training and it’s been around for awhile.  CPVCoach has thousands of posts – but it had been slowing down as of late.  Will decided that it was time to focus on his flagship site – and sold off CPVCoach.

New York, New York 08/16/2010 – CPVDen.com the contextual marketing training site run by Lucas Fambrough and Sean Cantkier has just announced the acquisition of CPVCoach.com. The announcement was first made during a webinar held by Will Haimerl, the creator and previous owner of CPVCoach. Haimerl made the announcement at the tail end of the webinar which primarily focused on a new tool released for his PPC-Coach.com membership. Haimerl is quoted as saying “Lucas and Sean have proven to me and the community that they’ll take the cpv training model to the next level. The sale will give me more time to focus on other projects, and I’m happy to be supporting two long time contributors to PPC-Coach.com”.

Although the exact terms of the deal will remain private, Fambrough says the plan is to merge the content, tools, but most importantly the member base from CPVCoach into CPVDen. Existing CPVCoach and PPC-Coach members will be given special discounts to join CPVDen and lifetime members will be grandfathered in. “We’re going to take care of everyone” said Fambrough. “Our aim is to be the most comprehensive CPV focused training site on the internet. This acquisition will take us out of beta stage and put us a step closer to achieving that goal”.

Terms of the acquisition have been finalized and work on merging the two sites has already begun.  CPVDen.com plans to release the newly formatted site, complete with an additional 6000+ posts of CPV marketing content, on August 16,2010. Fambrough has not indicated if the price will remain the same or increase for new members following the merge date of August 16, 2010.

I’ve been friends with Lucas – one of the owners of CPVDen for a long time.  CPVDen has been growing rapidly and this move shows that they are serious about becoming the top CPV training forum around.  If you are struggling with CPV traffic, or you are looking for help thinking outside the box – then you need to check out CPVDen.com and talk to Lucas over there.

Wordpress Install

Wordpress is by far the most powerful blogging platform that there is.  This blog and millions of others are hosted on the Wordpress platform.  Since we want to use our own domain we will want to install Wordpress on our own host.

Today’s post is going to be very short – because I just have one action item for you to take care of.  I thought about writing the entire Wordpress installation out here, or even making a video.  However I really don’t think that I could show you how to install Wordpress better then the creators themselves.

Based on what hosting plan you have – there are several ways to install it.  Personally I install it using Fantastico now that I’ve done it so many times.  I would suggest to you though that you get your hands dirty at least once or twice and installing it manually.  The installation process only takes about five minutes anyway.

You’ll need your hosting account ready, a text editor to make some changes, and an FTP program to transfer the files from your computer to your web host.  I use Filezilla for my FTP needs – it’s a free FTP program that is fairly user friendly.  So go ahead and download Filezilla and then head on over to the Wordpress Installation Manual and get started!

Once you’re done with that you have your task done for the day.  I’d suggest you go back to your keyword research and dig up as many keywords as you can for your niche.  In a few days we’ll start writing content and you’ll want to have plenty of ideas ready.  So if you have time after your blog is installed – try to come up with at least ten posts that you can write.  You can begin writing if you’d like!

Choosing Your Domain NameThere are other factors involved besides choosing a domain based on a brand or keyword.  You have to think long term when you are creating your domain name.  You have to consider the goals and objectives of the site that you are building past just the brand or keyword decision.

Overall Naming Strategy

What is the topic of the blog?  Obviously you’ll want to consider your blogs topic when you are naming it.  Most blog names reflect the topic that they are speaking about, as with all domains.  There are some major exceptions if you are going for branding.  Google and Yahoo are two big domains that provide no insight as to what they are based on the domain alone.  So if you have an interesting and brandable domain that you think will work then just go for it!

  • What would you like to achieve with your blog?  Are you blogging because you love to blog?  Or are you blogging because you want to earn a living online?  What are your plans to monetize your blog?  Is this blog to drive traffic to your existing business or will you be an affiliate of others?
  • What style will this blog be?  Are you writing alone, or with others?  What type of blog posts will make up the majority of your posts?
  • What tone of voice will it be written in?  Will this blog be your personal thoughts on a subject?  Or will it be news based or even humourus?
  • Who will read your blog?  Your audience is very important.  You’ll want to choose a domain that resonates with them as well as possible.

Your Blogs Traffic Source

In the last post we talked about this a little bit.  You have to ask yourself how you will be getting your traffic.  Where will the bulk of your traffic come from?  We already went over this yesterday but I want to reinforce it.

If you are planning to hit the pavement and really work the social media angle and promote your site then a domain that is memorable is your best bet.  If you want to simply optimize your posts and let the search engines bring in the traffic then you should look for a keyword.

Personally if I am going to be writing on a subject that I plan to create a blog around I would rather have it be a branded name.  If I am simply creating a small affiliate based site it’s not really a blog in the first place.  While I do use the wordpress platform for my smaller keyword based sites – I create 10 or 20 posts but I’m not blogging daily like I would with a large authority blog.

Consider the future of your blog

What are your plans down the road for this blog?  Are you going to start small in a micro niche and then try to tackle the large niche?  If that’s the case you’ll want to get a domain that works for the larger niche.

You don’t want to outgrow your blogs name to the point that it no longer makes sense.  So you should plan for the future as best as you can.  Make sure that you pick a name that is evergreen, one that will stand the test of time and has no relevance on a certain period in time to make sense.

Keep it Short and Simple

People have a tough time remembering what they had for breakfast – you can’t expect them to remember your domain name if you register one that is 100 words long.  You also want to make sure that your domain makes sense, and it flows when the user is trying to say it or type it in.

Hyphens can cause a problem in most domains because people forget to type them in all the time.  While one or maybe two hyphens in a domain name may work out well for you – don’t go overboard.

Web users are lazy and they don’t want to have to think about it when they are typing in your domain.  Depending on your demographic – some users might not type your domain name in but rather search for your domain every time they want to go to your site.  So make sure that your domain is easily found in Google so they don’t give up finding your site.

Which TLD (top level domain) should I buy?

This topic has been widely debated for many reasons.  Most users default to typing in .com when they think of a websites name that they want to visit.  SEO’s debate back and forth as to whether or not this choice will affect your rankings so I’m not even going to get into that.

Choosing a .com is typically your best bet – most people remember and trust .com’s more than any other domain.

If the perfect .com domain is taken then you may want to try and buy it from the person who has it.  Unless your blog is a smaller affiliate site as opposed to a massive authority blog.  If you buy the .net version and wait until your blog is an authority to go after the .com – the seller is going to want a much higher price.

Protect Your Niche

When you do decide on a domain name, you should buy several variations of it if you can.  To protect your brand and your niche you’ll want to buy the .net and .org versions at least.  You may also want to buy the plural versions as well.

This is assuming you plan to turn your blog into an authority in your niche – and not just an affiliate site to make some money from.   Of course, both ways are valid, you just won’t need to protect yourself as much if you don’t plan to make an authority site.

Choose Your Domain Name

I can give you all of the tips that I know but that won’t help you actually click that purchase button.  You need to complete the proper research and planning that I’ve outlined here but don’t let this step hold you up for too long.

As with all of the steps – taking action is better than overanalyzing everything.  So do your due diligence, but get out there and buy your domain name!

Before you can begin to actually build your site you need to know what to call it.  Choosing a domain name is an important exercise because your blog is stuck with it forever, because changing it is a pretty big hassle.

There are quite a few factors that you can take into consideration when choosing your domain name, and the exercise of doing so shouldn’t beNamecheap Domainstaken lightly.  Following this we’ll be talking about the many factors that you need to think about when creating a domain name.

When you do decide on a domain name – I would suggest using Namecheap to register all of your domains!  They offer free private registration and SSL for all domains for their first year.

Brand vs. Keyword Domains

Obviously you have to think about this when you are creating a domain.  Before we think about anything else we need to decide what the long term goal of our blog is.

Have you chosen a niche that you are passionate about?  If you have – then you will want to think about choosing a brandable domain.  When you are blogging about a niche that you are passionate about and plan to blog about for a long time – loyal readers will be the bulk of your readership.

You’ll get traffic from social media marketing, and of course from the search engines.  Even though your domain may not have any keywords in it you will still be able to get search engine traffic by properly optimizing each post.  You’ll have to work a bit harder to rank your site in the search engines without any keywords in your domain.

Going for a brandable domain has more advantages then problems if you plan to create a long term authority site.   A brandbale domain needs to be as short and memorable as possible.  The domain becomes the identity of the blog itself.

The other type of domain that you can choose is one that is based on a keyword that you would like to target.  If you plan to create several smaller blogs then this might be the route you would want to go.  With a keyword based domain you give yourself a much easier chance of ranking high in the search engines.

If you find a keyword that you want to target and you are able to get the exact match dot com of that keyword then that is the easiest way to begin ranking for a domain.

You don’t always have to choose one route or the other.  You could choose a brandable domain that also contains a keyword or two in it.

Your job for today is to come up with ideas for your blog using both brand and keyword domains.  In our next post I’ll go over more factors involved in choosing your final domain name.  Get your creative juices flowing and come up with as many names as you can and write them down. Don’t share your ideas with anyone or they may buy the domain before you do!

Choosing Niche Blog Web HostingThere are literally thousands of hosts out there that want your money.  When you are first starting out, finding a decent host can be a daunting task.  There are several options that you can choose from at each host as well.

Eventually you will want to get a dedicated web server for all of your sites.  However since you’re just starting out you can simply purchase a shared hosting plan.  Shared hosting means that you are sharing the same web server with other people that are also paying the hosting company to utilize their server.

Hostgator is one of the largest hosting companies in the world – you will hear very mixed reviews across the web on their service.  While I don’t like the fact that they advertise unlimited space and bandwidth, since that’s physically impossible, they are still a fairly solid company.  They have to be doing something right to be as large as they are.

Hostgator has a promotion going on right now specifically for Wordpress blog hosting.  When you arrive at their website you’ll want to choose the Baby package.  This package will only cost you $7.95 a month if you pay for the entire year up front.  Enter the coupon code “wordpress” (without the quotes) to get your first month for one penny. Use coupon code JeremiahCooperHostgator to get the 1 penny package for the first month.

As you expand however – I have a company that I wholeheartedly endorse.  Liquidweb is by and far the best hosting company that I have ever dealt with.  If you aren’t too worried about price, you can start out with their shared hosting services which are around $20 a month.  They are more expensive, but they don’t advertise unlimited anything, and they have the best customer support I have ever dealt with.

Either of these companies will get you started – if you are low on cash choose Hostgator.  They will be more than enough to get you moving in the right direction.  As you grow you’ll want to look into moving onto a dedicated server with Liquidweb.

Today’s post is fairly simple.  The only action that I need you to take is to choose a hosting plan and purchase it. Tomorrow we’ll talk about choosing a domain.  There are a few ways that you can choose your domain name, and it’s all based on how you plan to get traffic.

Keyword Research GuideKeyword research is one of the most time consuming parts of the setup process.  Finding all of the keywords that you will be targeting with your site, and seeing how much search volume and competition there are is extremely important.

I’ve taught keyword research to people in the past, and because of that I actually already have a 17 page PDF document that shows exactly how to work on keyword research from beginning to end.  One of the things you should be thinking about as you do your keyword research – are any of these keywords going to make a solid domain name?

Simply sign up to our email list in the top right hand corner of the blog to receive this keyword research PDF in your first email.  By signing up for our email list, you are getting the keyword research guide, as well as special content and information that won’t be posted publicly on the blog.

Previously the email list was set up to email you the new posts daily – but since a lot of people don’t really like that I am switching to emailing out a weekly digest of all of the posts that were created the past week.  You’ll also see some product promotion on the email list from time to time.  I won’t be sending you any products that I don’t personally use myself – so you won’t see too many promotional emails.

If for any reason you do not want to sign up to the email list – please send me an email using the Contact Me form on this page and I will send you the keyword research tutorial personally.

In our last post we talked a little bit about what we’ll be doing, and I asked you to write down several things that you wouldn’t mind writing about every day.  One of the hardest parts to creating a blog is actually choosing what you are going to talk about.  People struggle with this for days or even weeks before they even begin to work on their blog.

  1. 1. Choose a Niche You Love.

The reason I’d asked you to create a list of several things that you could write about daily, is because the easiest way to get moving on a blog and stick to it is to choose a niche that you already love.  When you create a blog, your goal is to become an authority in that niche and have a massive following of people who listen to what you have to say.

Many blog readers are able to see right through a blogger that has no interest in the subject, and is only writing about it for its commercial value.

When you are looking over your list of topics – you should ask yourself if you can see yourself writing about this niche in 6 months?  A year?  5 years?  If you can’t see yourself still being interested in less than a year of writing then you need to move on and pick a new niche.

  1. 2. Check Out Your Competition.

So you have several niches that you’ve decided you’re in love with – now it’s time to narrow those down.  The first way we’re going to do that isby checking out what competition you face.  Whatever your topic may be – there are only a finite number of people searching for information on that topic.  Your brand new blog doesn’t stand much of a chance against thousand of established blogs in the same niche.

The easiest way to find out how much competition is in your niche is to head over to Google and start typing in various keywords associated with your niche.  Check out how many sites there are dedicated to the topic.  Click on several of them, and see how active their sites are.  What type of site is it?  If it’s a blog, see how many people are commenting and interacting with the site.

There are other ways that can tell you a bit more about who your competition is and how easy it will be to beat them.  The tool that I use the most is a tool called Traffic Travis Pro (affiliate link).  It’s a very simple tool that you can easily type keywords into and find out how much competition there is.  It even has a graphical 5 star representation of the amount of difficulty of your competition for a keyword.

Traffic Travis Pro (affiliate link) has a $5 trial followed up by two $47 payments.  I’ve been using it for months now and it was money well spent.  I use it to check all of my keywords for competition and how much work it will take for me to rank #1 in Google for that keyword.

They have tons of videos that explain how to use each part of the software, and if you guys need me to I can create a quick video demonstration of checking keyword competition, just leave a message in the comments if you can’t figure it out.

Sometimes your best bet is choosing a much lower competition topic that may not have quite as many people interested in it.  Diving down into a micro-niche, or a niche of a niche is one way to really narrow down your competition and gather all of the readers interested in that particular micro-niche.

You have to remember that this is only your first site in what should one day be a massive online empire of sites.  If you are completely in love with a topic and must enter a competitive niche – then just make sure that you realize it will be even longer before you start to see a solid income from your blog.

  1. 3. Check your niches popularity.

Checking Your Niches PopularityThe niche that you end up choosing has to be popular enough to sustain a decent readership.  If you are the only person that is interested in this niche then you need to move on and pick another niche.  I have always read other blogs say the joke that underwater basket weaving may not be a niche that you want to tackle.  Think popular enough to find others interested, but not a mainstream topic that everyone is interested in.

One quick and easy way to see if other people are searching for your topic is to take the broadest keyword you can think of for your specific topic, and go type it into Google’s Keyword Tool.  We’ll use this tool a lot more in the Keyword Research section, but this should at least give you an idea of how many searches are being made for a keyword and its related keywords.

When you go to Google’s Keyword Tool it will bring up two boxes.  In the box that asks for keyword phrases, type as many keywords as you can think of for your niche and then click ‘Find Keywords’.  This will pull up the data on the keywords you typed in, as well as suggest some other similar keywords.  This will give you an idea of how many people are searching for topics relating to your niche.

You are on the hunt for topics that other people are passionate about and they are constantly trying to learn more about.  Topics that are fairly generic or simple won’t work as well either, which brings us to our next tip.

  1. 4. Make sure that your niche is sustainable.

So you’ve made it through the first three tips to choosing a niche blog to create and you are feeling pretty good about your list.  Well here’s another way to eliminate some of the topics that you may still have on your list.  Some topics just do not lend themselves well to blogs.

You have to determine if there is enough information on the subject that you want to blog about to be able to consistently keep putting on new content.  Many blogs die simply because their owner has run out of relevant information to talk about.

  • Is it possible to keep new content flowing on this topic?
  • Is there enough news on a daily basis to write about?
  • Is the topic deep enough to write about for years to come?

If you are struggling to decide if your niche is sustainable over the long term, there’s a few ways that you can figure that out.

  • If you have a whiteboard nearby, create a mind map for your niche.  Start by putting your main niche in the middle, and then creating several subcategories.  Quickly see how many post ideas you can come up with in each subcategory.  If you can come up with ideas fairly easily, then you should have plenty of information to work with.  You can also use free mind mapping software to create your mind map.
  • Another way to think about how many posts you can have it to decide what the problem is you are trying to solve for readers.  How many problems are there?  How easily is it for you to write about those problems?
  • If you are utilizing a news style blog then check out Google News to see if there are many stories on your topic or if it’s not very newsworthy.

If your niche has passed all of these tests, then you should be able to choose it as a niche.  There is however, one final tip that you need to consider.

  1. 5. Prove that you can monetize your niche.

Here’s the moment that we’ve all been waiting for – can you really make money blogging about your niche?  Since you are on a website aboutProving Your Niche to Be Profitablemaking money online – I can safely assume that you would like your blog to make money.  There are various ways to monetize a blog which we’ll talk about more in depth later.

It’s easy to see if there are ways to monetize your niche (nearly every niche can be monetized).

  • Ads on search engines – Take your favorite search engine and start searching for the keywords that you looked up before in Google’s Keyword Tool.  If there are many ads being shown for these keywords then there are already people monetizing your niche so it’s obviously doable.
  • Affiliate Products – Do a quick search for your niche keywords + affiliate at the end of it.  If you can find several affiliate products that would fit in with your niche then you have another easy monetization strategy.
  • Your own product – Are you a true expert in your field already?  You can work on creating your own product and selling that to the readers of your site to monetize your blogging efforts.

Don’t choose the first niche you think of.

Make sure you carefully examine each of the niches that have passed all 5 of these tests.  Go over this post again and ensure that you’ve done everything right.  If you choose the wrong niche out of the gate you’ll make it a lot harder for yourself to bring a solid income in.

Talk to some of your friends, make sure to do your due diligence on your research and come up with the best niche that you can think of.  Take your time and don’t get sidetracked on any other money making strategies – you have to walk before you can run.

However – the last thing you want to do is get analysis paralysis.  Choose your niche and get working on the rest of this blog post series.  Taking action each day is the most important part of making money online.

I’ll leave you with this action step: take your list and narrow it down to all of the niches that pass these 5 tests.

Tomorrow we will talk about keyword research and you’ll be able to utilize that to finalize your niche choice.

Can you think of any other tips to choosing a niche blog to create?  Let me know in the comments.

Make sure you subscribe to our email list so you can get all of the updates to this blog series!

Why Should I Blog?Blogging has become a phenomenon over the past several years.  Millions of blogs have been created, and a vast majority of them are left rotting because their owner got fed up by the amount of work it took without any return on their time.  It’s not always the amount of work that you put into something that makes it successful – it’s the amount of work done properly.

There are several things that go into building a great blog and most blog owners fail to complete all of them.  They either write tons of great content and they don’t promote the blog at all, or they try to do nonstop promoting of the blog without anything to really read once the visitors get there.

Your job is to create a good mesh between content creation and blog promotion.  You could have the best content in the world but it’s not going to do you any good if nobody is reading it. Luckily, blogs lend themselves to fairly easy promotion strategies.

There are many reasons that we have chosen a blog as the first type of site that we want to create in our online empire.  Blogs are extremely easy to setup and use, even for the complete beginner to the online world.  When you begin blogging in a niche, you begin to solidify your presence as a market leader in that niche. As long as you are continually putting out great content, you’ll keep readers for a long time to come.

When you become a market leader in a niche – people trust you – they see you as an authority figure and they will gladly buy from you no matter how you are monetizing your blog.  Different niches require different monetization strategies and all of them are easily implemented using the Wordpress blog platform.

Blogs are great platforms for beginners and experts alike.  I use Wordpress blogs for nearly every one of my websites and I know many successful marketers that do the same. Wordpress is easy to setup to be completely SEO optimized and there are literally thousands of free and premium themes out there so it’s easy for you to change from the default design.

Every person has a different reason as to why they use blogs for their websites – if you already have several Wordpress blogs – what’s yours?

Each day of this series I will be giving you an action item to complete to make sure you are on the right track.

Tomorrow we will talk about choosing a niche to create your blog on.  One of the key components to choosing a niche for your first blog is choosing something you are passionate about.  So the action item I’d like you to complete for today is to write down at least ten items that you think you could have fun writing about on a daily basis.

Remember to subscribe to our email updates at the top of this blog, and our RSS reader to get daily updates so you can keep up with this series.