Make Money With A Hobby

January 10, 2012 By 2 Comments
gardeing as a hobby

This brief post will show you how to make money from a hobby that you love.

First, why is it easier to make money from one of your favorite hobbies rather than something you know nothing about?

Your passion.  It’s easy to discuss, talk about and write about things that you love and actually enjoy doing and know something about.

Have you ever had a conversation with someone who was interested in whatever you’re speaking about on a topic you enjoy discussing?  How did that conversation turn out?  I am willing to bet it was enjoyable for not just you but the person you were having the conversation with.

So how can you make money from a hobby that you love?

  1. It all starts with a little easy research.  Research the relevant keywords for this niche hobby.  If you have no clue where to get started get a copy of my free course called Unleashing Your Success and I’ll show you what to do step-by-step.
  2. Next get a domain and hosting.  Again, revert back to Unleashing Your Success above if you need help doing this.
  3. Create a website based on this hobby.  (It’s easier than you think.)
  4. Put some posts on your website about your hobby.
  5. Place affiliate links or ads on your website.
  6. Start talking about your hobby on Facebook, forums, Pinterest, Snip-it and link back to your website.
  7. Work on getting your website to show up in the top 10 on the search engines.

Eventually, as you continue to post on your topic and build traffic to your website sales begin to roll in.

It’s really that simple.  Again, if you don’t know how to complete the above steps grab my free course and I’ll walk you through it all.  You can actually have your own website built today and you can create a post in about 20 minutes.   Plus, it’s fun and enjoyable to share your hobby with the world.

Questions or comments?  Leave them below!

 

Filed Under: General, Website Building Tagged With: , , , , ,

How To Make Money With Pinterest

December 24, 2011 By 15 Comments

In the ever changes Internet world it seems that every single week a new Internet sensation explodes onto the market.  Well, it’s happened again with the introduction of Pinterest.

If you do not know much about it yet, don’t worry, you soon will.  It’ll be all over the news just like Facebook and Twitter.  Then the time will come when we’re sick of hearing about it.

What is Pinterest?

A social site that allows you to create boards and post pins to it.  Pins are pictures that can be extracted from any website and then added to your boards.

I know, I know, more social stuff to do and another place to waste precious time.

However, I think this is going to be useful in the make money online world.  So the biggest question and the reason you are reading my blog is to find out how to make money with Pinterest.

So How Do You Make Money With Pinterest?

Well a couple ways really.  (NOTE: I am still experimenting and will have some feedback shortly).

But, this is how I see making money with it for now.  Sine you can pin up pictures and it generates a link back to the page where you snagged the picture from you can drive sales to an affiliate page of yours.

For instance, if you have a blog that promotes Baby Grand Pianos and someone clicks through on your link from Pinterest back to your blog site and ends up buying through you, you make money.

Pretty simple, eh?

I have yet to try to send directly through an affiliate link and I suppose I’ll be trying that as well over the weekend.  I’ll keep you updated as to any results or if this will work.

Moreover it’s at least a great way to get traffic to your blog or website.  So if you need more traffic I highly suggest coming over to Pinterest and starting to post as many pictures from your websites as possible.

Some early tips for the best results with Pintrest.

I’ve already noticed with Pinterest you need to have unique pictures or inspiring pictures to get more attention.  For instance, a picture of a baby playing a piano would get more attention than a picture of a TV remote; a cute picture of two kittens playing would get more attention than a picture of a set of muddy shoes, etc.

So far the pictures I see doing well on the site are pictures of:

Landscaping

Beautiful Homes

Hot people

Unique foods (pretty cakes, etc)

Cute pets and animals

Photography studio pictures

Interesting quotes

Unique gift ideas

Hair and design

Art

I am sure there are many other categories that are being used too.  Go easy on me right now, it’s all brand new.  :)

If you own a business (whether your own personal business or an affiliate work at home style business) I think you'd do well to make money with Pinterest.

I think the gift area has some real potential to be a money maker at Pinterest unless they completely turn off any ability to link to things at some point.

I also think using their site to get traffic to places like Youtube videos and other video sites will be extremely useful.

I was checking one video still frame that was posted on Pinterest that lead back to a Youtube video about hair braiding.  This video had over 180,000 views from Pinterest alone in the last few months!  That is substantial!

If only 1% of those viewers clicked on just one of your ads that would be 1800 clicks.  I am not sure how many people click the ads from Pinterest or what they’ll go onto buy as of now.  But, I will say this, if you’re not on the site testing now you’re missing out!

On a final note if you check out the stats in Alexa for Pinterest you’ll find that so far 80% or more of the sites users are female!  So if you are promoting products that are useful to the female population you’ll probably have more success making money with it.

Another funny note by looking at Alexa keywords coming into the site is that people are having a hard time spelling it.  Just look at some of the terms people are typing in to find Pinterest:

Pintrist, pininterest, pin- interest and pintereste.  So you can see it’s so new that many people are just frantically searching to find “what the heck” it even is.

So if you’re looking to drive more traffic to you site or make money Pinterest might just be a nice free way to attract new visitors!  Go give it a try for yourself.  It’ll take a few days to get an account approved but it’s worth experimenting with (at your own risk as I am not 100% sure on their rules yet – it’s not clearly defined, but I see other people using it commercially).

 

UPDATE JAN 5 2012:

I tested posting direct affiliate links on the site for a few days.  I just used direct Amazon products.  I found that all male products did terribly.  This is about what I assumed.  Female products with bright colors did well and I actually had quite a few repins of the products I posted.  I posted about 20 pins total (nothing crazy) and made about $10.18 so far with only about 15 minutes of total work.  I expect the few pins I put up will make more money over time.

That's not awesome but what it does tell me is that from clicks on pins put on Pinterest you can make money an you can also scale it up.

What I suggest is this:  Make your own blog based on a female oriented niche market and put good pictures on it for every product you promote on the blog.  Then simply pin those images to Pinterest.  You'll want to promote as many images as possible.  The more the better.  Also note that so far brighter more vibrant colors tend to catch the female viewers eye more (at least from this experiment). 

In my opinion to make a fortune from Pinterest users lone you'll need a lot of Pins!  I would use this more as a means to help promote your website rather than the ultimate solution.

If you do not know how to build a blog yet go grab my free course here.

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, General, Increasing Traffic Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Build A Website By Product Or Topic?

December 7, 2011 By 33 Comments

When it comes to making money online and building a niche affiliate blog there are 2 ways you can do it.

#1.   By Topic

#2.  By Product

Both have advantages and disadvantages.

If you are creating a blog based on a topic you have a clear road to building a much larger website but you’ll sacrifice some of the targeted content.

A topic covers a more broad range of a niche rather than a product which is focused mainly on one item or type of item.  Let me give you some examples of blogs based on topic using certain keywords:

Celebrity Gossip

Landscaping

Home Improvement

Pet Care

Self Help

That is just a few of the millions of possible topics.  You’ll notice the ones I mentioned above could easily have thousands of pages/posts added to the site.  This makes it easy to build a massive website that can gain mass exposure and make you great money online.

So what is the downside? 

You need to be organized or you’ll get lost while you’re in the building mode.  Staying focused and writing down several keywords early on will help immensely.

You’ll also spend much of your time working on link building on a site like this.  But, you’ll be able to do a little each day or week and your site will grow to a pretty amazing site.

Slower start up is also expected.  Since your blog will be about a topic ranking the home page will be more difficult. 

To get the most out of a site like this I recommend using tools like Market Samurai for keyword research and 1 Way Links to automate your link building process.

On the flip side of selecting a topic let’s take at what a product style website might be based on keywords:

IPhone Accessories

Flat Screen TVs

Tractor Parts

Knitting Supplies

Beer Recipes

This is just a few of the millions of possible niche sites based on a product or type of product.  Below I’ll explain the good and bad.

Let’s look at the good stuff first. 

Much easier to start and get ranked in the search engines for.  It’s much easier to exact match and try to rank for a keyword based on a simple product.  The reason?  Usually a product has far fewer monthly searches than a topic and that usually means much less competition (but not always).

A product based website is usually a quick build.  Often, a website build around a product will not be a large build.  Because there aren’t that many keywords based on the product you can usually build an entire product based website in less than 20-30 pages/posts and as few as 5 or 10.  This means that you can usually build an entire website with full content in under a couple of weeks.

Product sites also lead to not becoming overly bored.  Because you can build them quickly you’ll be less likely to get bored with the topic.  When we get bored with things we are less likely to work on the things that make us feel that way.  This is the part we can damn our short attention spans as humans.

Less confusion is another great thing about building a small website.  If you are building a site with 500 pages it can become more confusing to work with than a smaller site with 20 pages.

Let’s take a look at the bad side of building a product based website.

Product based websites are limited.  Let’s face it; they can only grow as the industry grows.  Let me give you an example.  Let’s assume you built a website based around a certain toy.  Let’s assume that toy has currently about 20 different keywords that you can base certain pages of your site on.  Unless the company adds to the product selection of that toy or adds new features your site can’t possibly develop many new keywords based on that particular product.  Therefore, you are limited whereas with a topic you wouldn’t be.

Limited searches are also a problem.  As I mentioned above building a site by topic usually allows you to build a big site with many pages.  Typically, the fewer amounts of pages/posts you build, the less amount of traffic you’ll receive.  This can limit your growth as well.

These types of sites have a lower income in the long run.  The larger the site the larger the overall income for the long haul (typically).  A site that you can continue to add pages/posts to over a longer period of time usually can make much more money as well.

In closing I just want to share what I believe you should do if you’re just starting out.  I always say, start small.  Go for the product site, learn, get your feet wet and then as you get better and start making more money build the larger more competitive sites!  But, start small.  Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day and it started with one block.  You should use Rome as an example minus the whole internal implosion thing! smiley

By starting with smaller sites it allows you to stay focused, construct a site that you can make money with and at the same time you’re learning a lot of new things.  The knowledge you’re learning is the most important thing because you’ll never lose that!  Start with the small products sites and work your way up to the large scale topic styled sites.

Filed Under: General, Niche Research Tagged With: ,

Are Your Web Pages Optimized?

October 1, 2011 By 3 Comments

Are your web pages optimized?

If not you’re probably missing out on a lot of sales or ad clicks.

The better your site is optimized the better your results are.

However, even looking inside of Niche Blitzkrieg’s website review section one thing we see often is websites not living up to their potential simply because their optimization is poor.

Good optimization means….

*Having your keywords in the title and header of your web site

*Using your keywords and related words on the web page itself

*Not over using the keywords (be at the optimal level of keyword density)

*Adding in an occasional H1 H2 and H3 tag on your pages (you can do this through your dashboard in WordPress on the post/page editor

*Using “alt” tags on images (remember search engines can’t read images only text… so you need to tell the search engines what your images are about

*Using the occasional bolded, italics and underline keywords

See all of these things help you organically rank in the search engines.  This is how websites with less backlinks can often outrank websites with many more backlinks.  It’s because search engines see well optimized websites as more “important” for their topic than websites poorly optimized.

 

One thing I use to optimize my web pages and posts for my niche sites

is a new cool (check it out right here).  <<==== I highly recommend this…

 

This tool checks all the parameters I mentioned above and does it in about 5-10 seconds….

It’s cheap and easy to use and affordable.  It’s a simple tool that you simply install on your computer and at any time you want you can check any of your webpages/posts out and see if they need anything optimized.  It will tell you what you’re pages/posts are missing and you simply just need to correct anything in RED. 

If you can’t afford the tool or just don’t want to spend the money right now, you at least need to manually check the things I mentioned above.  Make sure you’re doing them and your sites WILL rank better in the long term.

Ranking higher in the search engines provides more visibility to your site and the more visible your site is, the more money you are likely to make.

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, General, Internet marketing, Niche Research, Website Building
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »