It appears there is a discussion on the 30DC forum about adult niches and adult marketing in general. I know a thing or two (but not much more than that ) about promoting adult content on the internet. Before I continue I just want to note that everything that isn’t adult is called mainstream in the industry.

The principles of internet marketing apply to both mainstream and adult content, products, and services. Adult can be divided into countless niches, subniches, and microniches, and some of the methods of earning money (affiliate marketing, PPC ads) are the same, but there are some distinct differences…

The strength of Web 2.0 in terms of traffic potential isn’t nearly as high in adult as it is in mainstream. This is because the biggest Web 2.0 sites don’t do adult. But lately there has been a small boom of YouTube-like sites and Digg-like sites designed specifically for adult.

Adult PPC advertising is also “weaker” compared to its mainstream cousin. You can’t use mainstream ads like AdSense, and you generally earn much less per click. We’re talking a few cents or even less per click, depending on the PPC network. That isn’t to say you can’t make a lot of money from it, but you’d need a ton of traffic to make up for decreased click revenues.

Another thing is that it is sometimes harder to convert in adult. If you are participating in the 30 Day Challenge, you might recall Ed using a 1:200 conversion ratio as “bad numbers.” In adult, 1:200 isn’t great, but it isn’t bad at all.

And let’s not forget the potential legal consequences, which vary according to where you live. After all this, it sounds crazy that anyone would even think about promoting adult content, doesn’t it?

But there are many people who make a decent income from it. Although there isn’t a lot of Web 2.0 traffic, it’s growing. Most people get traffic from link exchanges, gallery/link submissions, directories, or search engines. It’s much easier to get consistent traffic in adult than in mainstream, but it’s harder to convert.

And stereotypes aside, it isn’t as sleazy as most people make it sound. These people just want to make a buck, just like all of us online, but in a different market. And what of spamming? Exploitation of children? There are bad apples in every bunch, adult and mainstream. One remarkable thing about the adult industry is that it’s self-regulating. It isn’t uncommon for webmasters to be in a rouse about a dishonest webmaster or sponsor on one of the many of the industry forums.

Want to learn more? Here are some resources and forums I highly recommend. They aren’t linked but with a quick search you should be able to find them. Although these are forums and informational resources, expect to find some content inappropriate for the work environment or children!

YNOT - A great adult webmaster resource site with a message board.

Cozy Academy - Tons of information on adult webmastering. Also part of a “Cozy” network of sites, all of which you should check out.

Cozy Campus - Friendly message board but very small.

Greenguy and Jim - Adult webmaster site run by two guys in the adult business. Has stats for adult sponsors and hosts a message board.

Netpond
- Overall a great message board with a very friendly atmosphere. Also
has a small subforum dedicated to earning money online with mainstream sites.

GFY Webmaster Board - A very
popular adult webmaster board. Not the greatest place for newbies and
those without a thick skin, but home to a lot of very talented
webmasters and others in the adult industry. Expect to see a lot of that “rousing” I mentioned earlier.

Technorati Tags: Adult Industry, Adult Webmaster, Adult, Mainstream, Affiliate Marketing, Censored, Conversion Ratio

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This post is a rant.

I’ve got a lot of crap I want to get off my chest about online schemes to make money. This rant was inspired by a post I read at Cash Quests about making money with AGLOCO. This is just one of a long line of schemes meant to seduce the average surfer and aspiring webpreneur into wasting time and making other people money.

There are too many people who are looking for a quick buck, online and offline. I have been guilty of this myself, but over the past six months I’ve dedicated more and more time to projects with longer-term earning potential. One lesson I’ve learned is if you want to earn money online you need to be in it for the long haul.

But I didn’t always think this way.

I can’t even remember the names of them, but I participated in some of those paid-to-surf and paid survey programs a few years ago. Let me tell you that if you want to earn at most a few dollars for a few hours of work, knock yourself out. Oh, and I never saw a penny out of them, although for one paid-to-surf program I could’ve used my measly $3 and some odd cents toward a purchase from their online store.

You know who loves paid-to-surf and paid survey programs? People who sell paid-to-surf and paid survey programs. 

AGLOCO is the same deal with a pyramid scheme angle. Unless you’ve got a huge network of referrals under your wing, you won’t be making any significant income. That adage, “If it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t,” always applies to these schemes.

There is one “scheme” that I actually made some decent money with. It’s Amazon Mechanical Turk, or mturk for short.

I’m not sure how many of you participated in the mturk craze of late 2005, but I know plenty of people who made hundreds and a couple who made thousands working on mturk. I pulled in around $150 over a few days, limited only because I had exams. Because I had no US bank account I couldn’t cash it in, but I could use it to purchase things (like textbooks!) on Amazon. Its heyday is over now, and isn’t worth it unless you want to spend 20 minutes on a task that pays 35 cents.

AGLOCO is the same deal. Unless you’ve got a huge network of referrals under your wing, you won’t be making any significant income. The adage, “If it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t,” always applies to these schemes.

Most of you reading already know this, as most of you reading this are participating in the 30 Day Challenge and have at least some idea about how difficult it is to make anything online. But many of you have also stumbled upon this blog with little experience and plenty of interest in this kind of business. I’m no “guru” but there are a few places you can go to get started.

Check out internet marketing forums such as the Warrior Forum and Digital Point. And while you’re at it, check out the 30 Day Challenge. From blogging to article marketing to pay-per-click arbitrage to eBay to review sites, you will see that there are zillions of legitimate ways to make a buck on the internet.

But hey, I just wanna make a few extra bucks.

Take it from someone who is already making “a few extra bucks.” Set your eyes on free online resources and stay the hell away from paid-to-surf programs and paid surveys. Actually, there’s a whole lot more you should stay away from, but I’ll get to those soon.

What’s the pitch? There is none. I just have some things to get off my chest.

Technorati Tags: Paid Surveys, Paid to Surf, AGLOCO, AllAdvantage, Mechanical Turk, MTurk, Sweatshops, Internet Marketing, Make Money Online, Prophets, Heresy, Rants, Make Money

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Today is the day I’ve been waiting for since Day 1 of the 30 Day Challenge. I’ve been hanging on for so long for this. Ed said this week we’d be moving into high gear, but I really think (hope) it’s going to start today. But all this waiting had me thinking…

The idea is to make your first $10 in 30 days. For the first eight days, we’ve just done research. This is crucial, but really doesn’t take that much time once you know how to do it. The hardest part is coming up with the ideas, even though you can literally find ideas anywhere.

So, we’re expected to make $10 in 30 (actually 31) days, but we’ve already spent 8 days, over a quarter of the challenge, on research. We haven’t put out a product, we haven’t set up any websites or blogs. We’ve just done research. And now that we know how to do it, we can do it even faster next time. Imagine if we already knew how to do market research, we could zip through it in a full weekend or less, depending how easy it is for us to generate ideas.

This really only gives us 23 days to reach our 30DC goals after market research, and even less if we don’t move on to the “traffic phase” tomorrow!

When I start class again in September, I’ll already be working on testing and driving traffic.

This begs me to ask the question, how fast could you complete the 30 Day Challenge if you knew what you were doing from Day 1? I think the only limit would be anything that’s time sensitive, like testing traffic over a few days.

As I’ve briefly mentioned before, if you could make $10 in a month being taught every step of the way, could you repeat it on your own the next month? Could you make that same amount of money in less time? Could you continue to work on your niches next month and triple your profit? Could you work in several niches concurrently and generate even more money? I think this is where the true power of the 30 Day Challenge lies.

Technorati Tags: 30 Day Challenge, Thirty Day Challenge, TDC, 30DC, Internet Marketing

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This post was inspired by Jasper Pangilinan, a fellow 30 Day Challenge participant. He wanted to know how I got my microniches. I explained in my response that microniche is really a misnomer in my case, as many of my “niches” were really narrowed down to product ideas. But I still have many, many microniches to work with.
Here’s an example of how I took eBay, Google, Amazon, etc. categories and broke them down into smaller and smaller niches. This is a little cross-section taken straight from my pile of niches that I brainstormed. I don’t actually draw it out like this. This is just to show you how I go from major categories like toys, education, and games, into small niches.

I took larger categories and broke them down like this. I noticed part way through my brainstorming session that educational games and toys was really a subcategory of these three major ones. You could further break that down into age groups  (6-12 mos, 1-2 years, 3-4 years, 5-8 years, etc.), or split it into online and offline games. One microniche I came up with was educational online games for toddlers. Is this a viable market? Can I take advantage of it? We’ll see what Ed tells us in the next few days!

I’ve been blogging all day! I should take a break and post on my other blogs. :-p

Technorati Tags: 30 Day Challenge, 30DC, Thirty Day Challenge, TDC, Niche Marketing, Niches, Microniches

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After listening to today’s podcast and watching the videos, perhaps I was a bit overzealous! I’m going to take my list of 76 possible microniches and product ideas but lump them down to 12 (my lucky number) distinct niche markets. I’m keeping the list on hand because there are more than a few ideas that look rather good, but when tomorrow’s podcast and videos are uploaded I’ll be working with 12 niche markets. Why 12 and not 7? Because even lumping my product ideas into niche markets will leave me with way more than 7 niche markets I’m interested in. 12 just happens to be my lucky number so that’s what I’m using. Trying to earn $100 online in 30 days, I’m going to need all the luck I can get.

So what did Ed talk about today? Essentially what I’ve been talking about, although he did mention Google Groups, which brought back very sad memories. I tried affiliate marketing with Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Groups with very little success. He also mentioned Technorati, which you can use to find out popular topics.

In summary, Ed Dale’s instructional videos involved these four things:

1. See what people are buying. (eBay Pulse, eBay Pop, Amazon Bestsellers and Popular Tags)

2. See what people are talking about. (Technorati, Digg, Reddit, and other social bookmarking sites)

3. See what people are passionate about. (Google, Yahoo!, MSN Groups,and forums)

4. See what people are looking for. (Google Trends, Yahoo! Buzz, Lycos 50, AOL Hot Searches)

Technorati Tags: 30 Day Challenge, 30DC, Thirty Day Challenge, TDC, Niche Marketing, Niches, Niche Markets

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I’m anxiously awaiting the next podcast on the 30 Day Challenge website! As of now, I have 76 niches, most of which are very narrow. Some are similar to one another, but even considering this I have over 60 distinct niches ready to be evaluated!

And believe me, I’m not done yet! Today and tomorrow, Ed is likely to cover how to go about finding niches and going deeper into market research. He then said the next two days after (basically, the weekend) will be for catching up so everybody is up to speed. That leaves PLENTY of time to find dozens more niches and maybe start separating the golden niches from the duds.

The word of the month is: microniche. Less demand, but less competition and thus more opportunity to cater to that demand. Some microniches can be dominated.

My current strategy of brainstorming ideas is to scour the vast resources of the internet for broad niches, then break them down into smaller niches. For example, one of my broad categories is Education. I took that and broke it down into a few subcategories, one of which was Private Education. I broke that down further into two sub-subcategories, one of which was Private Tutoring, which I broke down into even smaller microniches which were borderline product ideas, such as how to find a tutor, and how to start a tutoring business.

I may have gone overboard breaking down these categories, but the end result is a lot of tiny niches and possible product ideas. Even one of my product ideas branched off into an even tighter niche! Are these microniches worth working on? We’ll see later on in the market research phase!

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After watching to today’s video and listening to today’s podcast for the 30 Day Challenge, I was reminded that August has 31 days, but my “30 day” goal is still to make $100 by the end of August. Today we’re supposed to take it easy, just watch the video, listen to the podcast and let the information stew in our minds to prepare for the first phase of the 30DC. I’ll be starting this phase in earnest today as I already know a bit about market research. So what did Ed cover today? The four movements of the symphony that is internet marketing.

First Movement - Market Research

This is where I have the most trouble with internet marketing, and it’s the most important part of the process. If there’s no market for whatever you’re pushing or if the market is saturated, you are going to have a really difficult time making any money, especially if you’re not that experienced like myself. I’m going to spend a while on this topic since this is where the 30DC is heading first. There is an immense wealth of information online and literally countless sources of finding niches. Ed will likely go over this in the 30DC, but here are some places that are great to get niche ideas:

• eBay Seller Central - In particular, the Category Tips and What’s Hot sections. In the former section, you can see what is in demand in various eBay categories. But the real showstopper is the What’s Hot section. In here there is an extensive monthly Hot Items report that shows you all the categories with the highest bids, highest bid growth from the previous month, and highest conversions (>50%) for that month. It’s concise, only 27 pages for July 2007, is a great idea generator. eBay Pulse is another great resource to see what people are searching for on eBay, giving you the top searches for each category and overall. A brand new tool you can use to your advantage is eBay Pop. This site provides top searches, popular items, and trends akin to big gainers and losers lists in the stock market.

• Search Results - Seeing what people are searching is a good way to gauge what niches are in demand. Google Trends is one of the first places I go to see what people are looking for. Not only can you track the search trends for individual keywords, but another Google service, formerly Zeitgeist, has been merged into a Hot Trends section. Now you can see the post popular searches for any particular day. Yahoo! has a similar service called Yahoo! Buzz. Another favourite of mine is the keyword suggestion tool at SEO Book. Take any keyword and it will give you an estimate of its monthly search volume, as well as those of similar keywords. As an example of how you can use this to find niches and subniches, I took the broad niche of “camping” and found similar keywords such as “camping gear,” “camping food,” “Florida camping,” and even “nude camping.”

• Amazon Top Sellers - Visit Amazon.com and you will find near the top of the page a link to the latest top sellers. You have overall top sellers, and you have categories on the side. You can further delve into subcategories. The top seller list is updated hourly. From there, you can also find your way to the Movers and Shakers page. This page is analogous to the Hot Trends section of Google Trends. It shows all the biggest gainers in the last 24 hours, and is also divided into categories and subcategories.

• Your Interests - Look at your own interests. Maybe you enjoy computer games or maybe you’re a coffee connoisseur. Look at your friends’ and family’s interests. Have a friend who is addicted to Pokemon? Have a relative who is a knitter? These are all niches you might have been exposed to and never realized it. And each niche can be subdivided into subniches. Then you can take those ideas and see if there is a group of people out there who are into those niches. The biggest advantage to being genuinely interested or experienced in your niche is that it will offer some intrinsic motivation to move forward with your IM projects, whether it’s building a niche blog, or writing a info product.

In the podcast, Ed mentioned that historically, the most successful participants of the 30 Day Challenge were those that worked in the smallest niches. In my experience, this is true. My most successful blog is in the smallest niche. The small, the obscure, that’s where the money is. Why? Because there is little competition. There are countless subniches and microniches that are still relatively untapped.

Second Movement - Traffic

Traffic is the most important aspect of online income generation, but we’re going to be looking at this after finding our niches. As an extension of market research, I suspect at this point we will be starting to actually test our niches by driving Web 2.0 traffic to our websites or blogs. If you find a niche that is getting you hits you can test to see how well it converts…

Third Movement - Conversion

For me, this is the second most difficult part of internet marketing. As an internet marketer, what’s the point of getting thousands of uniques a day if you’re not making any money? If you’re not getting conversions you’ll need to see why you’re not getting conversions. Tracking your stats every step of the way is crucial. In one affiliate program, they provide additional tracking codes to see differences in conversions with different marketing techniques. Are you getting clicks but few conversions? Maybe you could try a new sponsor (if you’re doing affiliate marketing).

I use StatCounter to track the traffic on all my blogs and sites. It shows additional information like visitor length, the path the visitors take throughout your website, where they came from, what search engine terms they used to find your page, etc. This gives you an idea of your typical visitor’s behaviour, and you can use it accordingly when tweaking your site and marketing a product.

It should be noted that in the podcast, Ed said that the actual process of selling or pitching a product will be different this year. He even mentioned in passing that you may not even have to sell anything. The product will sell itself. I’m already intrigued! But what made me particularly happy was when he said they won’t be focusing on the sales letter. He briefly mentioned in passing about using other media (audio and video) to market your products, insinuating that these could replace the role of the sales letter in this year’s 30DC. I’m excited!

Fourth Movement - Product

The fourth, last, and optional “phase” of the 30DC is to create and market your own product. I’ve never done this before. I literally have zero experience in this department, although one acquaintance of mine who started a successful niche community began marketing mini info products (e-books) to his viewers and used a paid service to deal with the sales and delivery. I might not need to do this as I could see success as an affiliate, but we’ll cross this road when we get to it.

Technorati Tags: 30 Day Challenge, 30DC, Thirty Day Challenge, TDC

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My favourite browser which I highly recommend if you don’t already have it, is Firefox. And one of the reasons It’s so great is because of how easy it is to customize.

Although I primarily use Firefox for browsing, as an internet marketer I use Firefox and Internet Explorer to make sure my blogs and sites look the same in both browsers. As of June 2007, 93.39% of users are using either Firefox or Internet Explorer - 14.55% and 78.84%, respectively [source] - so it’s wise to make sure whatever you do will work in both IE and FF.

Anyway, I love FF because of all the useful extensions that make my life easier. Because FF is cross-platform, available on Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux, these extensions are cross-platform, so anybody can use them. So here is a list of the relevant extensions I have installed.

Last update: September 1, 2007

Google PageRank Status - Want to know the PR of the websites you visit but don’t want to install Google Toolbar? This nifty little extension shows the PR of the current opened website on the bottom right of your FF window.

FireFTP - A lightweight FTP client.

Sage - A lightweight RSS and Atom feed reader. Great for blogs, social bookmarks, news sites, and more! Has a single Sage button which opens a side panel listing your feeds (which can be organized into folders). Clicking on a feed shows recent feed items listed below and loads a page showing more details about the items.

Adblock - An internet marketer’s worst nightmare. I still think it’s a great extension if you want to clean up an ad-filled website. You can manually block ads and use wildcards to block images or iframes from an entire domain or directory.

Del.icio.us Extension - Adds a “My Bookmarks” button to easily access your bookmarks and a “Tag” button to easily bookmark websites you visit. You need a Del.icio.us account to use this.

StumbleUpon Toolbar - Same idea as the Del.icio.us extension. Add sites to your favourites easily. You need a StumbleUpon account to use this.

ScribeFire - This is some really nifty blogging software. You can add your blog account(s) and . I didn’t even know about this until I saw Ed Dale using it yesterday on his 30 Day Challenge blog. I’ve only used it once (posting this!) but it looks really cool.

ReloadEvery - This is a very simple tool. If you right-click on a webpage, it will give you an option to reload the page at a set interval. I don’t use it too often, but it’s great for sites that log you out after a few minutes of inactivity!

Adsense Notifier - It’s a customizable little extension that sits at the bottom-right of the status bar, showing you clicks, impressions, earnings, etc. Great tool!

Allow Right-Click - Some websites don’t let you right-click for one reason or another. This extension bypasses most sites that try to prevent right-clicks.

IE Tab - Most internet marketers or webmasters use at least the two major browsers, Internet Explorer and Firefox, so they can make sure their website looks the same in both of them. As the name suggests, this extension lets you use IE within a Firefox tab.

ColorZilla - Another great tool for webmasters and internet marketers alike. It lets you select the colour of any pixel in the browser window, among other things.

MeasureIt - Another web tool which lets you drag out a ruler box and measure anything in the browser window in pixels.

Pearl Crescent Page Saver - The basic version lets you take a full screenshot of an entire webpage, top to bottom. Great for surveying the layout of a website.

VideoDownloader - Lets you save videos from YouTube and other flash video sites in FLV format.

DownThemAll! - This little gem allows you to mass download anything on a website. Got a lot of files or photos on a page you don’t want to spend the time to click and download? Just use this!

Fetch Text URL - This is little time saver that lets you highlight and directly open text URLs (like this one: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~jchien/code/ftu.html) in the current tab, or a new tab or window, like this one.

Twitterbar - Lets you update your Twitter from Firefox. Has a little unobtrusive button that you press after typing your message in the address bar.

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