It’s time to feed this blog with some fresh news again. I’m really sorry for the lack of content the last days, but I’m working on several new projects that eat up most of my time. But there’s definitely a reason for me working that hard! The year 2009 should be THE year for my online career. I would like to finally start earning some real money from the web, enough money to eventually make a living from it.

Ok, the last days I did some keyword research for a new niche site. I therefore used the Wordtracker Gtrends tool and also Google’s Keyword tool. Both tools are incredibely helpful and you could research thousands and thousands of keywords day in, day out. But there’s a catch! It takes a lot of time to build up a comprehensive keyword list. Building such a keyword list usually involves getting the monthly search count for a certain keyword, finding long tail keywords, finding competing websites that also target your keywords and many more things. And trust me, keyword research is time-consuming as hell (and also sometimes extremely boring).

So I went on to get some tools that may help me in automating my keyword research. And while browsing the Warriorforum I finally found some recommendations from the fellow Warriors which pointed me to a program called Micro Niche Finder. And before you think “hey, this guy is only trying to sell me some shitty software for some nice affiliate cash”, please be assured that I can really highly recommend this tool and I would also do so if they wouldn’t offer an affiliate program. But since I’m here to make some money…you know.

Ok, what is Micro Niche Finder? Well, it’s a program that does nearly all your keyword research for you, automatically! You put in some main keyword and MNF spits out dozens of long tail keywords, including the following:

• monthly search count
• search trend
• competing pages
• advertising cost
• commercial intent (based on Microsoft tools to value a keyword)
• strenght of competition.

Especially the last value (SOC) brings down your keyword research to a simple number which shows if the choosen keyword is worth any efforts or not. Low numbers show that it’s easy to rank with such a keyword, higher numbers keep you from wasting your time to optimize for such keywords.

MNF also let you dig deeper on a choosen keyword to find even longer tail keywords. On top of that it also helps you in finding appropiate affiliate programs (e.g. on Clickbank or Amazon), getting content and articles or a strong LSI search (it finds keywords that semantically fit to your choosen keyword, good for SEO purposes).

I could talk a lot longer about the benefits of Micro Niche Finder, but I will rather use that time to find some new keywords instead. That’s easy too, MNF also offer a brainstorm tool and shows what’s hot and heavily searched right now. You simply click a button and the keywords are coming in.

Ok, enough text. I won’t regret buying Micro Niche Finder since it helps me a lot in saving time. I now can concentrate on other stuff like getting content for my sites or building backlinks, other stuff that’s important for making money online! If you’d like to get some more infor on MNF, feel free to sign up for their free introducery videos that show the benefits of using that great tool!

Happy keyword searching!
Querblogger

Today I will show you 5 nice Wordpress plugins that I personally use here on my blog. I find them extremely helpful, especially when it comes to enhancing some SEO and increasing my visitor count, the main ingerdient for making money online.

Although Wordpress is incredibly powerful even without using any plugins, nothing will hold you back from making it even better. Plugins help you extending your Wordpress install far beyond its current capabilities, e.g. by adding widgets or integrating extra features like better caching. And the best thing, they are free! You can find a huge directory of Wordpress plugins by following this link.

1. All In One SEO Pack

The All In One SEO Pack is probably the best plugin to optimize your blog’s SEO. After integrating and activating it, the plugin will automatically keep track of improving different SEO criterias like setting correct meta tags or avoiding duplicate content. It will also add some new widgets below your post editor. These widgets offer you the option to write a custom meta description for each of your posts and also lets you put your own meta tags. This plugin has definitely helped my blog to rank better in the major search engines!

2. Enfore WWW Preference

This plugin is quite useful to set your preferred way of how you blog should be reached by visitors and indexed by search engines, either by having the WWW prefix in your blog’s URL or without having it. This will help you improve your SEO because search engines will only see and index one version of your blog, meaning URL’s with WWW or without it. Without the plugin, search engines may index two identical versions of your blog (with the prefix and without it), which is bad for your SEO because of duplicate content issues.

3. Google XML Sitemaps

The sitemaps plugins will automatically create and update your blog’s site map in a compatible version that is accepted by major search engines. Sitemaps will help in optimizing a blog for better search engine rankings because it’s a nice and easy way to show/submit a search engine all the posts and pages that belong to it. This way they may index your blog faster, especially after writing new posts.

4. AddThis Social Bookmarking

Although not quite a WP plugin correctly, this widget is a quite handy tool that enables social bookmarking on very blog post you’ve written. It add a small bar below each post where your readers can bookmark it on different social bookmarking sites like Digg or Reddit for example. Social bookmarking may drive a lot of traffic to your blog if you’ve posted an interesting article and may people liked it, I’ve personally seen many traffic rushes here on this blog where I got several hundred visitors in only some hours from those sites alone.

5. WP Cache

Last but not least, WP cache. This plugin adds an extremely powerful caching system to your Wordpress blog. It automatically generates static HTML pages from your blog posts and pages, which will load much faster and also give your blog slightly better chances in search engines. It will help your readers because of lower loading times and yourself because you’ll save a lot of bandwith and processing power, which is quite important if you host your site on a shared hoster.

There are dozens and dozens of different plugins you can use with your Wordpress install, those 5 above are those plugins I personally find very useful and that helped me a lot with The Making Money Experiment. Feel free to have a look a the Wordpress Plugin database and you’ll find the right plugin for your needs for sure!

Cheers,
Querblogger

The last days I thought about what would be better and easier to market, a niche product with small competition and less traffic or a popular item with lots of competitors and a whole bunch of traffic?

Well I haven’t got the excact answer for that yet, but so far I’ve already found some advantages and also disadvantages from both affiliate marketing methods. First, and before I’ve read some very interesting threads on the Warriorforum and other sites, I thought that going niche would be the ideal way for promoting products as an affiliate and making some good money from it. Indeed, niche marketing really works. I’ve already made some sales from my personal Clickbank niche test site that I created some months ago. But is it the “holy grail” of affiliate marketing?

A good question if you ask me. Although niche marketing has many benefits like having fewer competitors and an easy search engine domination with your choosen keywords, there are still some major disadvantages. The worst of all is traffic, simply as that. A niche market is, you may quess it, tailormade to a small group of people that are interested in a particular topic. Therefore potential traffic to a niche site is usually small too. Less traffic means few sales means less money. But doesn’t one want to make more money from affiliate marketing? What about choosing a more competitive “niche” with more traffic, more sales, more money to make?

You know what I want to say? No? Ok, let me explain. What would be better, to get a big piece of a small cake or to get a small piece of a (really) big cake? I would rather choose the smaller piece, not because I’m not that hungry…

Establishing you affiliate business, the small piece of cake, in a highly competitive market, the really huge cake itself, has some benfits too. Although you have a lot of competitors you also have the chance to grasp a certain percentage of the high traffic that swirls around a popular product. You don’t necessarily have to get to the first search engine results for your particular keyword in order to get some of that traffic. Even if your affiliate site is ranked at the 5th or even 10th position, it will probably bring you enough traffic, depending on how hot the product/service is that you’r about to promote. Maybe even more traffci than from a tiny niche site.

So what’s the difference between creating a niche site that you have to get ranked on the topmost search results in order to get some traffic and creating a site in a competitive market with a ranking far behind the first sites but with a lot of traffic? I personally think, and that’s also the reason of this post and my thoughts, it’s the work involved in creating an affiliate site and driving traffic to it. What would be easier, to maintain a number one position in the SERPs or say position number 50? Sure, the second position.

To sum up my thoughts, I think going for a popular product or service should be easier to make money with than creating a niche site. First, a popular item means traffic, a lot of traffic. Second, you wouldn’t have to maintain a #1 position in the search results, hence less SEO work. Third, you have a lot of competitors that have choosen many longtail keywords that you can “spy out” (hehe, evil evil) and choose for your own site (which should be a bit better optimized than your competitor’s one).

Now my question, what do YOU think about it? Is niche marketing the fantastic affiliate marketing money maker or is it going after a popular product and so to say being a “parasite” that subsists from the huge traffic such a product has created?

As I already said at the beginning, I don’t have a correct answer yet, althoug I’ve read some other people’s thought about going broad is far better than niche marketing. Just want to know what you think about it.

So long,
Querblogger

A long time ago, as I was searching for new traffic sources for my blog, I came across a site called TNX.net. I didn’t care much about it, until I recently realised that I had missed a real great service. You may ask what such a great service could be? Let me explain!

To put it in simple words, TNX.net is a site where you can trade links in order to gain more link popularity for your site or make money by selling links, or even both. Below you’ll find some more details regarding the features this website offers. You can use it for advertising your own sites and therefore generate new traffic and you can earn money just from placing links.

Increase your Traffic

There are several ways to drive traffic to a website, but the best and most useful one would be to gain many backlinks to it. The more websites that link back to your site, the higher your link popularity will be. More link popularity means a higher value of your site and therefore higher rankings in the search engines. And good rankings are most times a quarantee for more visits.

On TNX.net you’re able to buy links pointing to your own website or blog from other sites that are also part of the TNX advertising network. You can buy such links with help of points, which you can either earn by selling links on your own pages (more on this later) or by buying them with good old cash.

Prices for buying TNX-points are reasonable and range from $0.85 to $1.70 per 1000, depending on the quantity of your order. With $25 for example, you’ll get 14,706 points that you can use for advertising. And trust me, that amount would be enough to gain some hundred backlinks!

I’ve personally bought some hundred link on TNX.net to increase my blog’s link popularity. And I’ve done it for free! Yes, you heard right, TNX.net offers new users 5,000 points for free. All you have to do is signing up at TNX.net, head over to this forum thread and leave a reply with your member ID. You’ll get your first 5,000 points in no time. As I’ve already said, I immeditaley bought several hundred links with those 5,000 points and it didn’t take too long until those links where placed on other sites in their network.

Buying links on TNX.net is easy. When setting up a new campaign, you first have to provide links that you want to place on other websites. Most times it’s better to not only link to your homepage, but also to several sub-pages or blog posts. This gives your site a more “natural” look in the eyes of a search engine. TNX.net even provides a tool to make your links look more natural, you can read more about it in this thread.

Right after that, you have to choose different categories that best fit your advertising needs. You can choose several categories your website’s content belongs to, like marketing for example. The last step before buying links, is choosing site categories on the basis of their ranking. You have the option to choose based on Yahoo Backlinks and the Google Pagerank, the higher the ranking, the more points you have to invest. Usually higher ranked sites have a bigger influence on your own website or blog.

After choosing all options, the TNX.net service will start to automatically place backlinks on sites in their network. You can see placed links in your statistics after logging in to your account. It will take up to several weeks before major search engines will recognize those fresh backlinks and start to give your website more value. But it’s worth to wait, I’ve personally increased my daily traffic with the help of TNX.net. Besides having a Pagerank of 2 now, I also have an increasing stream of daily visitors.

Make Money from Selling Links

Besides gaining better link popularity and increasing your daily traffic, TNX.net also offers the option to sell links on your own website or blog. With help of a small code snippet which you have to place on your site or site’s template, you can start selling links automatically. Unfortunately you can’t use this service when using a free host like Blogger for example, it’s required that you have either PHP or Perl installed on your server or hosting account.

After placing the code, TNX.net starts selling links on your site. If you place the code directly in your website/blog template, links can be sold on every page of your site. That means you can earn many more points compared to just placing links on your site’s homepage.

The amount of points you receive from selling links depends on your site’s ranking and how many links you’re willing to place on each page. In general, the better your ranking and the more links you place (up to 4), the more points you’ll get.

TNX-points can either be used to buy new backlinks to your site or you can sell them back to TNX.net. At the moment selling price is at $0.84 for 1,000 points, but the value is permanently increasing due to the site’s getting more poular each day and attracts more advertisers.

I personally have gained over 20,000 TNX-points from placing links on my blog since joining the site. That’s worth around $17 at the moment, not bad! And the best thing is that Google won’t recognize those links on your site and penalize you for selling links (Google hates that). Sold links are looking natural to search engines, thanks to the code TNX.net provides you for implementing in your site.

Conclusion

TNX.net provides a great and reliable service which offers you the option to buy links for better search rankings and sell links to either receive TNX-points or money. So far I’ve tested and used it, I have only seen benefits for me and my blog. I’ve gathered nearly 1,000 new backlinks (including deep links) to my blog, my Pagerank has increased (sure, not only because of TNX alone) and my traffic is constantely increasing the last days and weeks. I like it very much!

TNX.net also offers a nice partner program where you can earn even more TNX-points. Each time one of your referrals earns points from selling links, you too earn a certain percentage. For example, if a referred member earns 100 points from selling links on his site, you earn 10 points.

If you want to see more benefits from TNX.net, I can only highly recommend to sign up on their site, grab your free 5,000 TNX-points (see above) and start your first campaign and/or sell your first links. It’s definitely worth it, I have tested it by myself and I will stay with them for sure!

So long,
Querblogger

You may or may not know that website directory submission is quickly becoming a very popular and easy way to get quality, one way links to your website. The more backlinks you’ll generate for your site, the higher your rankings in the search engines. These kind of links are exactly what the search engines are looking for. The websites with more quality, one way links are typically the sites that rank the highest.

With that said, there are several websites dircetory submission programs on the market. But the best one I found so far was created by Brad Callen and is called Directory Submitter. The software currently contains around 2200 website directories. And the best thing is, the free edition contains 350 of them! Imagine the impact on your search engine rankings for your blog or website!

The whole process for getting backlinks is easy:

1. Input your website details (i.e. title, description, URL, etc.) into the software

2. Click on the directory you want to submit to

And then the program will automatically fill in your website details. Then, you simply click the submit button and your website is instantly submitted to the directory. Then, you can move to the next directory, go through the list, and by the time you’re finished you’ll have roughly 2000 one way links pointing to your website (or 350 by using the free edition .

I can’t think of an easier way to get links. Of course, if you’re going to get links this quickly, it’s important to vary your website title (anchor text) every 20-30 links or so, to make things look more natural to the search engines. If you won’t do so, you may get banned from the search index!

But you can avoid getting banned by using a special feature within the software. There’s an automatic rotating system included that changes your website title, description or meta tags from time to time. You only have to provide slightly different text for each of them. You can do this very easily via Directory Submitter when you create your project in the beginning.

The directories included in the software are constantly being updated and their is an nice community of users that all work together to make the software better and better, so you know you’re getting great value for the money (if you buy the gold edition, you can use the free one anyway).

To check out the software, go here:

http://querblog.bryxen5.hop.clickbank.net

Happy submitting and Bye bye!
Querblogger

PS: It may take some time to see positive effects from many backlinks, the search engines need some time to correctly crawl all those directories and “find out” that they all link to your own site!