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Drilling Into Profitable Niche Markets

by Charles Cornelius on August 29, 2010

Here are 4 important things you will want to consider while drillin’… ;)

  1. Ask yourself, “What are the most popular topics?” Select a topic that has a good size of passionate audience and list them down. It’s not necessary to spend long hours on this as you can quickly evaluate these topics by visiting relevant forums and blogs. Quickest way to evaluate its popularity is by looking at the post and comment counts.

  2. Can these topics be broken down into smaller subtopics? Will the subtopics be small enough that you won’t have to deal with too many competitors, but still large enough for you to make a good return? Take Internet marketing for example. This topic can be broken into many subtopics such as affiliate marketing, social media marketing, article marketing etc.

  3. Be enterprising and innovative. Don’t be afraid of trying out new niches or drill deeper into sub-niches even. There are many out there waiting to be discovered for example; article marketing can be branched out into sub-niches like “writing effective titles“, “writing compelling resource box” etc.

  4. Select a niche that you know something about. It is difficult to maintain your interest in the niche if you are clueless about it. Better yet, select a niche that you have interest in. This way, you will be able to talk about your niche comfortably. The last thing you want to happen is ending up with abandoned sites and/or blogs. When this happens, all efforts put into this campaign will be nothing but wasted.

In review, finding a niche market is just about getting into a special, select group of people who are in need of a specific solution. This will give you a head start in your marketing campaign and you’ll find that it is way faster and easier to make a profit than it would if you try to market any product to the masses.

Note: Missed the “WHY” part of niche marketing? Look for it on page 11 of the “Instant Cash In-A-Flash” report. You can find the report on the right —>

 
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Posted in Niche Marketing

 

Living an Inspired Life and Live It Inspiring Others

by Charles Cornelius on July 10, 2010

I’m inspired by this book and now, I hope to inspire you by giving it as a gift to ya!

Read it and take your rightful place in the Chain of Inspiration! ;)

Click on the book to go to the download page…

Living an Inspired Life and Live It Inspiring Others

P.S. Share this with your friends using the buttons below if you like it… and let me know what you think about it in the comment below, ok?

 
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Posted in Motivational & Self Improvement

 

The Risks You Take in Paid Online Surveys

by Charles Cornelius on May 18, 2010

With plethora of things to do online such as games, social networking, and shopping to name a few, job opportunities have also swamped the internet.

Today, many people are depending on the internet to apply for jobs, find work, as well as search for employees. Aside from the popular online writing jobs, the booming activity on the internet is the paid online surveys. The paid online surveys’ appeal is the “work from home” system and most of the time, being paid for “very little effort.”

However, what many do not know are the several risks that come along with paid online surveys. These risks work both ways – the companies that administer them and the people who take them.

Websites Offering Online Surveys

KeyboardThere are several websites that offer a varied systems and mechanism of online surveys. Some even cater to specific group of people such as the age category, the racial division, and a lot others. But the common denominator of these sites is rewarding system: paying participants for filling out online surveys. It should be noted that each site has unique reward systems.

So how these sites generally work? First, they ask participants to register at the website and answer some basic contact and login information. Then, the participant will receive an e-mail with a link that directs to a page asking for more detailed demographic such as sex, marital status, education level, and race. After which, participants will receive intermittent e-mails with links to surveys that correspond to the demographic.

Though the duration varies, most surveys take an average of 10 to 20 minutes to fill up. Some sites give reward based on how long the survey was completed. For example in e-Rewards, it gives $29 for one-hour completion of survey. In a case where a participant does not qualify for the survey, a partial award is given for some instances.

In paying off the participants, sites have varied reward systems. Some send an actual check, while others let participants accumulate points to be encashed for rewards.

Possible Risks

One of the foremost risks of paid online surveys for companies is the credibility of such surveys. With this kind of method, participants can actually cheat and lie to take more surveys—thus to be paid more. Sometimes, people may lie on demographic profile to be able to qualify to take surveys. In other cases, people sign up for the same companies with multiple different addresses to be able to take more surveys using varying profiles. The quality of the surveys can be compromised when people begin to make cases as mentioned above.

On the participants end, there is a higher possibility for signing up on scam websites. Participants should by now know that paid online surveys have become haven for internet scam. Participants should beware of the middlemen who charge registration fee for accessing the lists of surveys, which in fact are free.

Tips for Avoiding Paid Survey Scams

Participants should avoid signing up with web sites requiring charge for accessing surveys. They should read privacy statements and disclaimers. And the more the site defends itself as legal, the more likely it is a scam.

“The Risks You Take in Paid Online Surveys” is a PLR article. It is not subjected to copyright of CharlesCornelius.com · Feel free to use it as if it’s yours or just enjoy reading! :)

 
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SEO for Beginners

by Charles Cornelius on April 29, 2010

I posted this on Wealthy Affiliate forum in response to a fellow member’s question on SEO and I think it’s good to share it here too… So, here it is:

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For SEO, there are TOO many information out there which is not a good thing as you can end up confused. SEO is about ranking your website on page 1 of Google, Yahoo, Bing etc for your keywords. Period.

Why SEO? To get free traffic!

To achieve that “easily and quickly”, you’ll first need to find a keyword which has low competition and high demand. Optimize your lens with that keyword; make it appear with a density of about 5%. Now, different people will give you different figure. Some say that’s too high while some say that’s too low. They’ll scare you with stuff like getting banned by Google etc etc etc… :roll: I have quite a number of sites ranking nicely with keyword densities way higher than that!

Next is building backlinks. Backlinks are just links to your website/lens which are placed on different websites all over the internet. Why backlink? When you find something interesting on the internet, you refer it to others by giving them the link to the website. This link gets indexed by search engines (if the link is placed publicly, of course!) The more people link back to the website, the higher it will rank.

As a webmaster/lensmaster, you don’t wait for people to link back to your website/lens. You need to build them yourselves. Build your backlinks as many as possible. Build backlinks way more than what your competitors have so you’ll stay around longer. Again, people will scare you saying that if you build too many backlinks in a short period of time, Google will see this as spamming and you’ll be banned. I say bull****! If that’s the case, I’ll build backlinks for my competitors then! :mrgreen:

Important Note:
When you build your backlinks, make sure you use the same keyword which you want to rank for as your anchor text. Don’t build backlinks with anchor texts such as “Click Here”, “Visit This Page”, “Check This Out”, etc etc… I did this mistake when I first started because I didn’t understand what “anchor text” means… You can laugh at me if you want… (^^)

How do you build backlinks? The best way is to write articles and publish them everywhere… *sigh* … but we can’t run from it. Good news is, you don’t need to write quality articles for backlinking purpose. Search engine bots are just… well, bots! They’re not humans… even if you write crappy articles, they will not know. But I don’t think that’s gonna happen in your case, I see you can write pretty well.

My point here is, if you’re writing for humans, quality is a priority. If you’re writing solely for bots and backlinking, you can put aside quality for quantity. Another way is to “social bookmark” your lens. Just Google that and you’ll find plenty…

If you still find it difficult to write, how about re-writing? I’ve got tonnes of PLR articles sitting in my hard-disk. If you want, I can pass you those in “quit smoking” niche… Just PM me your e-mail address and I’ll send them to you.

Hope that helps~!

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Posted in Search Engine Optimization

 

Site Speed Now Matters in Google Search Ranking

by Charles Cornelius on April 17, 2010

Yes… site speed is now officially part of Google’s search ranking algorithm!

I just read about it on Google’s Official Webmaster Central Blog. The announcement was posted on Friday, April 9th (more than a week ago, I know… but I’ve got a strong reason for being a bit late, lol! Hint: TMnut Slowmyx). I’m not sure whether I should blame this for causing one of my sites to drop from rank 1 to 6 and another one from rank 2 to RANK 15!!! Okay, not so much impact to the former but as for the latter, making it rank back to the first page is going to put my other projects on hold!

There’s no way to know for sure. Although Google did mention that “site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page,” they did add a note too… it says, “Please note that at this time, the only way to determine whether your site has been affected is if you’ve seen a recent change in your search ranking.”

Coincidence? Whatever the reason, I’ll have to work on it anyway…

Google’s taking site speed into account in its search rankings is being greeted with mixed feelings. You can read the post and comments by clicking here. If you are running any AdSense site, and feel worried about JavaScript affecting your site speed, don’t rush and change your AdSense setup. You may want to read a post on Inside AdSense Blog concerning this matter.

Here are two free tools you can use to evaluate your site speed:

  1. Page Speed
  2. YSlow

These two tools will help you analyze your site and provide suggestions on how you can improve it. Both are easy to use and, the descriptions and instructions are pretty much straight-forward.

 
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Posted in Search Engine Optimization

 

Four Words

by Charles Cornelius on April 16, 2010

I’ve shared this article on Facebook quite some time ago but I feel that I need to share it through this blog as well. This can be applied in ANY situation in our lives. Not going to write a “review” on it, it’s powerful and inspiring enough on its own… ;)

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FOUR WORDS
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A king called all of his wise men and counselors together for a meeting. He addressed them and said, “I want you to go and think, read, and research. Consult the wisest and most learned men in the land. Spare no expense.”

“I want you to find the ONE statement that will get me through all situations in life. Whether I am on top of the world or in the pits, find that statement.”

“I don’t want to learn long and complicated philosophies. I want one simple statement. Find it or write it; I don’t care, just bring me the statement.”

The men left and consulted for months. They finally returned and handed the King a scroll.

The King unrolled the scroll. On it was written four words.

“THIS TOO SHALL PASS”

That was it.

The wise men explained.

When you are on top of the world, that is but a fleeting moment, things change, always remember, this too shall pass.

When you are in the pits, all nights are followed by day, at your lowest moments remember also, this too shall pass.

All external circumstances and material things change.

No matter what your circumstances, remember…

THIS TOO SHALL PASS!

The wise men reminded the great King that this would get him through his earthly things but the truly wise knew there were things beyond this earth and life…

Things that were eternal.

True wisdom they reminded the King was in the ability to recognise the fleeting temporal things of the material world from the truly eternal things.

“O Great King”, they said, “Most of the things that you worry or gloat about are temporary and our four words apply.”

For most of your situations…

THIS TOO SHALL PASS!


http://www.mountainwings.com/past/1222.htm

 
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Posted in Motivational & Self Improvement

 

Are You Upselling or Just Desperate?

by Charles Cornelius on April 6, 2010

How many times have you visited a site selling something you’re interested to buy (or even offering something for free that you wanna grab) – let’s say an e-book, but you had to scroll waaaaaay down through more than 10 pages of repetitive BS before you can finally click the “Download” button? Well, for a sales letter, I think 5 pages or so is okay, but more than 10?

But wait… that’s only the first part. After clicking the “Download” button, another sales letter appeared with a “time-sensitive” offer! Then, another 10-page scrolling to the bottom where you found the button that says “Skip this offer – I understand that I’ll lose millions of dollars by doing so.” Yeah, right…

So you skipped, thinking that you’re getting your e-book downloaded already… BUT, another 10-page “Exclusively for YOU” sales letter appeared instead! This went on for few more sales letters before you finally get to the REAL download page… Tell you what, I didn’t even care to get that e-book anymore. WHY? This person is obviously desperate to get my money! Even if the e-book that was offered earlier is free, you can expect it to contain more pitches and hypes rather than delivering real, useful information one can learn about and apply.

See, upselling is about ADDING VALUE to whatever products that you have to offer. In this case, it was overdone and the e-book lost its value. Upselling is a powerful technique that is widely used but if abused, it’ll not only turn prospects away but you’ll suffer from the loss of trust and reputation.

 
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Earn Money on the Internet through Affiliate Programs

by Charles Cornelius on March 27, 2010

Running an online business is tough. The competition for online visitors, traffic and sales is stringent. If you want your business to earn money on the internet, you need to be creative in your marketing strategies. You need to grab and take advantage of the different online marketing techniques available. Although you need to pay for some, most are free. Of the different methods to keep your site visible, an affiliate program is one of the most efficient ways. However, many are still not aware about affiliate programs and even worse, misunderstand the whole concept.

The Entities of An Affiliate Program

Affiliate program or sometimes referred to as associate program includes three important entities, the buyer, the affiliate and the merchant.

For someone who has never heard of affiliate program, it helps to compare it to an offline business or company where a network of sales personnels are recruited to market and sell its products and services all around the globe. In this scenario, the company is the merchant and the sales personnels are the affiliates. Instead of a merchant selling directly to the customers, it sells through a series of distributors and salespeople which are the affiliates. Through affiliate program, business owners can benefit from increased sales and expanded network and branding with very minimal cost.

This arrangement is becoming more and more popular. Obviously, there are many individuals who will jump on the opportunity to supplement or even replace their existing income. This is a true win-win situation where both parties profit from it. Affiliate program makes it possible for anyone to earn money on the internet without having his/her own product.

How Is The Payment Tracked?

The merchant can pay its affiliates based on pay-per-sale, pay-per-click or pay-per-lead. In the pay-per-sale method, which is the most popular one, the merchant pays the affiliate for every successful sale. In the pay-per-click, the affiliate receives commission for every click made by visitors to their ads/links regardless whether or not they make any purchase. Lastly, in the pay-per-lead, the affiliate gets paid when a visitor signs up or fills up a form in the merchants’ web site.

Each and every affiliate will be provided with a unique link. As an affiliate, this unique link is what you will use to refer customers to the merchant’s site. This is how a merchant tracks an affiliate performance and number of sales, and pays commission.

Conclusion

Affiliate program is an efficient way to increase your sales or earn money on the internet. If you are a business owner, this program is a great way to leverage your business. For the rest, this program is a chance for you to earn money on the internet, be it to supplement your income or make it a full-time job.

 
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Posted in Affiliate Marketing

 
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