You see, I have tons of sites, PLR articles and am doing the niche site promotions with article directories and blogs. This is a lot of writing. I have known that video is where it is and is a great way to increase your traffic. Don’t believe me? Just try a Google search for a keyword you are targeting. On that first page, how many videos about that topic come up in the results? Uh-huh!

Now, one concern I had about making videos was I didn’t want to be tied down to the computer all day editing and recording, re-editing and publishing and all that stuff. This software will make your life easy!

It is a simple drag and drop software. Drag in some photos, drag in a text file, shuffle the slides around and click save video. It really is that easy! Don’t believe me? Watch this video that I created about it, and bear with me as it was my first time using Camtasia!

And now the final result as an example of what it can do. If you want to see a larger video of the software, view my videos page.

Order online video story today!

Updated: I have written another review about the Keyword Academy that you should read. Check out my latest Keyword Academy review with my own guarantee!

One of the hardest parts of learning how to make money online is finding the right information about what really works and how to put it all together. When I first started trying to learn, I wasn’t the smartest person when it came to anchor text or search engine optimization techniques. I of course found sites like John Chow and some of the other “A-listers” and knew I couldn’t afford the “stuff” (read: crap) that they were promoting.

Then I found sites like Griz’s, Court Tuttles and Vic’s sites (links in the sidebar) and really began to see the big picture of how easy it really is to make money online with little to no investments of my own. This was a little over a year ago and I can tell you that I honestly have learned a lot and it is paying off.

The biggest thing that causes people to fail online is patience. I wanted immediate results. I’m sure you do to. There are sites and people that tell you that you can make millions in a month. It’s all hype. Sure, there are the people that have done it, but if you are just starting out online, it’s not practical nor realistic. If you don’t have patience and aren’t willing to give it time, just stop reading now.

Court and Mark began The Keyword Academy as a private members area that offered only videos of how they build niche sites that mostly target long tail keywords. I delayed signing up with them for sometime due to the cost of the program, which at the time was out of my budget. However, I had a really good month and decided to sign up with them and see what they hype was about.

After signing up, I watched the first couple of videos and one of them really hit home. It was dealing with how to find and target keywords that are worth your time. The specific formula that they give in that one video make me excited and depressed at the same time. Why? Well, I realized that quite a few sites that I had been putting all of my time and effort into were not worth my time. That formula also gave me a new list of ideas and keywords that are now paying off, just a couple of months after signing up!

The Keyword Academy is now more than just a simple members area with videos only. Court and Mark have added a forum area with excellent support from other members. If you are new, this is a great place to learn from some of the most honest, down to earth people that are out there. You won’t find fluff and crap here, just good people willing to help you learn and succeed.

So, what is this gonna cost you? Well, I am paying almost $70 per month for just one article submission service. With the Keyword Academy, you get the videos, support forums, access to 30 article sites for your backlinks (more coming soon), monthly webinars that provide up to date information about changes to the SEO systems of Google and other search engines and more, including Q&A sessions and the opportunity to learn from the best in the niche marketing and internet marketing world.

Your only price is $33 per month. To me, that was a no brainer! But, if you can’t afford that much right now, it’s alright. You can sign up for the Keyword Academy Crash Course and still have access to the videos for only $1! This is just a sample of what you will find, and it might help you see the full potential that the Keyword Academy offers.

So, when he wrote his post about hubpages, an employee of Hubpages stopped by and commented on it, and the came back and put Court to the challenge of seeing who can make 100 hubs in 30 days and make the most money with them.

Sounds pretty good, right? Well, you have heard of Hubpages, right? If you’ve heard of Squidoo, imagine it in bed with Google. Hubpages are getting ranked well, and quickly also. Just like Squidoo, the better and more focused your topic is to a particular item or keyword, the better your lens will rank.

Well, what about the “no follow” links and stuff? Well, the become “do follow” when your author score reaches a certain point, like 75 or so. However, you are still making money with them through adsense, amazon.com and eBay and Kontera links too. So, don’t think of Hubpages just as a source of backlinks. Although they are good for backlinks as a source, the hubpages system closely monitors links that are outbound and will unpublish your hub if it has more than 2 links going to the same site, no matter what page.

So, if you are curious about learning more about hubpages, or the Court vs. Ryan 100 Hub challenge, then come on over to my hub to learn more about hubpages.

One of the frustrating parts is I don’t know where people are looking when they arrive on my site. Are they even looking at the navigation? What about where they are clicking? That would be really helpful. I found a product that will create a heatmap for you based on your timeline of daily, weekly or monthly.

The product is called Clickheat by labsmedia and it looks pretty good. While I haven’t installed it yet, I plan on doing so in the next couple of days on my servers to start tracking clicks on my sites.

Now, here is the most amazing part of the whole system. I know you are wondering what it costs, so let me tell you that I have worked out a special deal with labsmedia for my readers. For a limited time it is free! Well, it really isn’t a special deal as it is free anyways, but it sounded good, right?

Here are the requirements for your server that you will need to run Clickheat:

- on the browser’s client: Javascript (tested on Firefox 2.0, Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Konqueror…)
- on the server: either Linux or Windows (since ClickHeat 1.3 release), Apache or Lighttpd (other may work fine), PHP, the graphic library GD2 (PNG support needed).

ps…I am finally back from vacation and two weeks without the internet. I hope to be posting more regularly here now that I am finally getting organized with my sites and getting caught up!

It’s called the Niche Store Writer.

You probably haven’t heard of it, but you will be. If you love creating BANS sites, then you need to check out the article on this software. There are some great screenshots of it in action. If you can use a simple word processor like Word, then you can use this to create the unique content that your site needs to help gain keyword attention with Google.

You can read more about and see the screenshots of the Niche Store Content Writer software. I can tell you it is simply amazing!

I can agree with him. But how do you find free hosting?

Here is a list of free hosting services that you can use. Now, they do run ads or banners on “your site” but if you are looking for ways to increase your backlinks or have more sites for affiliate marketing, etc., then this is a great way to go. This is a huge list of free hosting companies, so I won’t copy them here.

Free Web Hosting

Hope this helps! I’m gonna give a few a try too!

These are the sites that I find most useful and beneficial for anyone starting out with niche sites, but also for those more experienced with niche marketing. This list is not all inclusive, but please feel free to share your list in the comments section. Or, if you prefer to write about it on your own blog, send me a trackback!

• Blogger Unleashed

BloggerUnleashed.com is an excellent site for someone looking for the truth in niche marketing and what it takes to make money online. Vic is one hell of a guy who tells it like it is. Some people don’t like him due to his style and language, but I can tell you that he hasn’t led me astray at all. You need to check out his site. Period.

• Make Money for Beginners

Griz at Make Money for Beginners has some excellent, and I mean excellent, posts about making money online. Now the site isn’t all that pretty, it’s actually pretty bland and plain, but that is the appeal. Some people question why he uses a blogger blog, so let me explain. A lot of people say that you have to get your own host, register your own domain, etc. to make money online. Griz proves that it isn’t true. He has several excellent series of post dealing with Adsense and affiliate programs. Check it out!

• Courts Internet Marketing School

Courtney Tuttle is another great source of information for making money online. Not only does he cover lots of great SEO tips, but affiliate programs, keyword selection and other topics on how to make money online. Court is also doing a series of posts with a new site demonstrating how to make a site, and get it ranked in Google. He is very helpful with everyone, and usually responds to all comments. Another must read!

• Ethical Internet Marketing

Josh Spaulding is a more recent find of mine. Josh has been doing Internet marketing for several years, and provides some really good insight into affiliate programs and internet marketing. He also has several free marketing and niche site reports that you can read.

• Mike’s Money Making Mission

Mikes site is another blogger blog site that is pretty interesting. Mike brings up a lot of information about different affiliate programs and has also posted some info on other items. Take a look, I’ve learned some things that are pretty interesting.

• Blogging Tips

Justin provides some neat information and insight into marketing and adsense. He also has some templates for WordPress that you can use too.

• Make Money online with Mark

Mark at 45n5.com has lots of information, mostly dealing with making money online with affiliate programs, reviews and other tips. He also has a list of the top 100 make money online blogs that he has put together. That list is well worth reading and taking a look at for some other great sites.

Those are just some of the great sites that I read regularly. Now, I’m not going to give away all of my secrets, or sites that I read.

What are some of yours?

I wanted to share a resouce with you that I have found that is a great, short and simple plan on how to make $5 per day with a niche site. Now, before you think anything about “Here comes the sales pitch”, let me tell you that this report is free. And it comes from a personal friend and trusted resource.

Josh Spaulding at the Internet marketing blog has created a great little report on how you can make $5 per day, per niche site using article marketing.

I have been reading Josh’s site for some time and he has been dead on for sometime with his article marketing tips and resources.

So, here is the link to read more about this great FREE report that he has put together:

Make Money Report

You can download it for free, like I said, and I am not making anything off of this. I wasn’t a big believer in article marketing, but after signing up with 5 sites, posting a couple of articles on them for one of my niche sites, and within 30 minutes, I had my first $1.07 adsense click!

If you would like to see a great article list from Josh, visit this post of his 15 Article Directories worth submitting to.

Let me know what you think of it!

I have included a forum here for members to participate and support each others local niche projects, but a forum is a great way to improve any niche site. And, it isn’t as hard to set up as you would think. Just a simple WordPress plugin and away you go!

If you have seen or used my forum area, or Vic’s over at BloggerUnleashed, then you can tell that it is a simple forum process. Not really a monster forum that you might think of when you have visited other places.

This simple WordPress plugin is called Simple Forum and it is by Yellow Swordfish. As for the ease of installation, it is just like any other plugin. Download, unzip, upload and activate.

Now the fun part comes in. You might need to modify your theme a little bit, or the forum CSS to get it to work nicely on your layout. It just depends on how much work you want to do. As for mine, all I did was change from a two sidebar layout to a one sidebar layout on the forum page.

There are lot’s of different options that you can control with the forum plugin, so once you get it installed, I would highly suggest taking a few moments to mess around with the different settings and layout options. This way you can be familiar with it if you want to change something.

This could be a great resource for your local niche site from the aspect that it could allow for more public interaction and commenting about local topics. It could also benefit your “hidden” niche sites as well if you are looking to draw people into it for participation. Just up to you what you want to do with it.

But, here is my one month review of Bookmarking Demon.

Let me begin by saying that I am not going to reveal my sites that I have used BMD on, and these stats that I am going to share with you are not researched in the fact of I didn’t look at how many have come from my BMD efforts versus other link methods, like comments, etc. I have quickly scanned the results of these sites and I can say that it is pretty impressive so far.

Since purchasing Bookmarking Demon, I have not used it everyday. It is usually once, maybe twice a week that I will fire it up and run it. I have created 5 account names for BMD that I am using. I am, on average, putting about 3 to 5 URL’s in each “run” of BMD, and I am not using all 5 accounts when I make a BMD to avoid looking spammy. I can’t guarantee your results, but from what I am seeing, this was a purchase worth making.

Having talked to Vic, Court and Grizz about how Google works their back links, I can tell you that I haven’t seen much yet for Google. Apparently Google is really picky with how it sees back links. They really need to be relevant to your niche. Also, Vic has said before that I can take a few weeks to several months before you will see anything from Google at times.

To gauge these results, I am using the SEO Quake toolbar for Firefox. Enough with the small talk, lets see the results!

Niche Site #1

This is an existing domain name that I purchased a about 1 week prior to buying Bookmarking Demon. It was a PR 3 and had only 5 backlinks pointing at it in Yahoo. It is still a PR 3 after the recent update from Google.

• Yahoo Links – increased from 8 to 69
• Yahoo Link Domain – increased from 9 to 89
• MSN Links – remained at 0 (picky bastard!)

When I reviewed the links result page, there are a lot of them coming from the BMD sites. One important thing I need to follow up on is to make sure that each account is set to show the links publicly. Apparently some of the sites are not set automatically to show the links publicly, and therefore they won’t show up as links.

MSN is apparently like Google and is rather picky with what they choose to pick up.

Niche site #2

This niche site is a pre-existing domain name that I picked up about the same time as niche site #1. It had no PR, and absolutely no links to it at all.

• Yahoo links – began with 6, increased to 179
• Yahoo link domains – began with 314, increased to 653
• MSN – still at 0

Conclusion

There is a substantial increase in Yahoo back links, but for Google, I am still waiting. I’m not sure if they have changed something to where they don’t give weight or recognize social sites anymore for back links or what.

From a time saving standpoint, BMD is simply amazing. I can take about 10 to 15 minutes, set up a run, click to run it and walk away or do other things. When I was manually submitting, it would take a long ass time, and I’m sure you know what I mean, to do it manually. To submit a post to the same sites that BMD has, it took me over 1 hour to complete. That was flying and having several windows open at once.

The nice thing about Bookmarking Demon is it has a randomizer built into it. You can submit a URL, it will automatically populate your title, keywords, description, etc from your page. You can then modify and add to them easily, click randomize, and it will automatically populate the fields when submitting to each site. This will help spread out the submissions from a standpoint that they aren’t so random.

BMD has a built in proxy searching and usage system to avoid all of your submissions coming from one IP address. It also has scuttle site search and submissions as well. Read more Bookmarking Demon Tips to learn a little more about avoid spammy submissions.

There is a lot of great things about Bookmarking Demon that I can attest to, some of which I won’t give away here as I don’t want to ruin the software in and of itself. If you have any questions, please let me know. I would prefer that you use the contact form, but you can also use the forum to ask questions in as well.