As I sit here with coffee doing it’s thing at 9PM and “Where is my mind?” by the Pixies playing (I LOVE Fight Club!) I thought a tutorial was a good thing to share with you. My inspiration for doing clear and detailed posts like this is the fact that there are many great paid membership sites for learning things. I thought Lynda was the best, but they have been knocked off their platform by LearnVisualStudio.net which I fell in love with. I have been attempting to learn C# and other programming languages for years, but I always got busy with projects that were more important and felt that materials out there weren’t clear enough. That all changed recently, and now I know a LOT about C# and have a great program I am developing for keyword research which I will be putting out initially for free when I’m done.

With that said, I will provide you with a clear (and hopefully inspiring) tutorial on building a niche empire. It really is easy to do, but very time consuming at first. It doesn’t have to take years for it to start netting you some cash…not pocket change but actual cash that can pay your bills.

The first thing you need to do is…

Decide on a Niche!

This may or may not be obvious depending on your experience level, but choosing a niche is the very first step. We don’t normally just roll the dice and say “ok, let’s just go with this”, but that’s how I tend to do things. It saves me time. Many other niche marketers will do lots of heavy handed keyword research. The way that my brain works though is I rely heavily on common sense. I have been told that it’s more like uncommon sense by some people because they claim not everyone is that smart. Who knows if that’s true. If you prefer keyword research, then by all means jump on it. I will even help you right now.

Most blogs like mine will walk you through this process by promoting a software such as Market Samurai or some other keyword research software that ends up costing more than you are willing to put into this business at this point in time. The reason they do this is because they are earning an affiliate commission off of it if you decide to buy that software using their link or coupon code. There’s nothing wrong with that because that’s what we do as affiliate marketers, but I am assuming you are broke and barely connected to the internet right now. Because of my assumption, I will walk you through a process that costs you nothing other than your time (and maybe some of your hair). You can pinch your pennies though.

Google has a handy (and free) tool you can use called the Google Keyword Tool which can be found by clicking here. Notice the following screenshot, I typed in “making a million dollars” and hit search. Once I did that, Google gave me a list of keywords related to what I searched, and a number showing how many people search for that on a monthly basis. The volume is low, so you can call this an easy niche.

I am going with this niche because it is appealing to me. Even if it had a lot more competition, I would go with it because competition is irrelevant. Some people prefer to find something with low competition because it’s easier to get ranked a lot of the time. Just in case, we will check Google listings and find out what some of these keywords bring up.

A search for one of the recommended keywords “make a million dollars” shows 14.9 million results. That’s actually pretty small of a number for me.

If you don’t believe me that this is low competition for me, have a look at the results for a search phrase my blog comes up on. If you search “popular blogging topics” without the quotes, my site shows up on the very top with 56.7 results!

Let’s start promoting!

Head on over to ClickBank at http://www.clickbank.com and login (or register if you haven’t already). Once you are logged in, you can go to the marketplace and start your search for products to promote. For this example, I am in the E-Business and E-Marketing category because I am in that industry as an internet marketer and entrepreneur.

There is a dropdown menu that is defaulted to “Popularity”, but I actually check the “Gravity” which means it tends to stick better. People not only buy the product but they don’t return it for a refund as often. This way, you get to keep more of your commissions. If you relied on popularity, you may end up getting a bunch of sales, but also a bunch of refunds so you will never see the commission.

I chose Millionaire Society as the product to promote. When choosing a product, I like to go to the actual product’s page and see if they have affiliate marketing materials. If they don’t have much to work with such as banners, emails, and other codes to use already, then they aren’t that serious. I would rather work with a company that put in some of their actual time into it rather than rush to put out a product and get sales. See the screenshot below of their affiliate center.

As you can see, they seem serious about their product by offering affiliates like me with codes I can easily copy and paste into whatever promotion I am using. I like to use banners for my sites, as well as some articles.

Notice the following screenshot that shows a banner kit this company provides. It has lots of variety and size differences to fit whatever kind of site you have.

I can place some of these bad-boys right here on my blog with confidence because they fall in line with what I recommend to my readers. I can open up my OIOPublisher plugin and create a banner slot for it. First, I will add a Ninja Link using ninja affiliate (you don’t have to do this if you don’t have this premium plugin). I like to create short-links which is why I use this plugin.

Now my long ugly affiliate ClickBank url is shortened to http://www.brandonconnell.com/goto/millionairesociety and it’s much more likely to get clicked on.

Now I will add the banner to my blog using a cool (but premium) plugin called OIOPublisher. I like this plugin despite the fact that it costs because I can use it not only as a WordPress plugin, but also a standalone script which can be used on a plain old static html website. You can basically reuse this script for every site you create and build up your empire with an automated system of advertising. I can also automate the direct ad sales process with OIOPublisher so I can focus on building great content.

After I add it, you can see it on my blog (see below).

See how sexy that looks?

Setting up niche sites

Not everyone is a website designer like me, however you will quickly become a code junkie if you are affiliate marketing. That’s because you will always want to create some new niche sites, add features, or some other task that will come up and force you to learn some basic html and css coding. With that in mind, what better time to start learning than right now!

You can actually do this without any coding by signing up for a cheap $15 a month unlimited Hostgator account. You can use coupon code bconnell994 for $9.94 off of your first month! Hostgator allows you to install a script such as WordPress with the click of a button, and you can set that WordPress blog up as an affiliate site, thus not coding anything yourself. You can also easily login and start putting in content using an administration. Very easy stuff. If you would rather do things the harder way, you can use free html templates that you can find easily with a quick Google search.

Whether you are using WordPress or the html templates, you need to add content to the site along with the banners and other promotional materials. It’s not smart or wise to copy someone else’ content. You should actually spend your own valuable time on creating content, or hiring a writer on Fiverr to create original content for you. Run it through Copyscape and make sure it truly is unique content. By providing free content along with your ads, you are making an actual contribution to the world wide web.

If you took my advice and decided on WordPress, there are some basic setup items that need to be taken care of. The first one is permalinks which are the URLs that are used when you post an article, page, or other content on the blog. When I setup permalinks, I set them up for /%postname%/ which tells WordPress that you want the URL after your .com/ to be the title of the article. This eliminates the dynamic aspect of your website and allows for easier indexing by search engine spiders.

Another important setup item is a good spam catcher. I use Akismet on most of my sites, but there are alternatives that others prefer more. You can find some free plugins for this on the WordPress Codex. I also use a simple captcha plugin for my forms. Anything that prevents automated spam bots from taking up your valuable time will be beneficial.

Stay tuned for part two, where I give you more details on setting up niche sites and marketing them.…