All Your PLR Problems Have Been Solved

Written by Susan on October 6th, 2009

You know that your sites – even if all you have is one blog – needs new content to keep it fresh and constantly under the eyes of the search engines. But oh, isn’t it wearisome to keep up with all the writing you have to do? Some days you just don’t have anything new or original to say.

And then there’s the article marketing. Articles are hands down the best way to get free advertising for your site, service or product, but again – where do you go to get all the content to keep a steady stream of interesting, traffic-gathering material to write about? Where’s the GOOD stuff that you can quickly and easily package into a sell-able ebook or product to shoot out to your list?

Well, you’ve probably run across the Private Label Rights concept, or PLR, which gives you free articles, or videos, or other useful content that you can use however you want. You may have even signed up for a membership with some of the places that make this material available. But what did you find? That most of it, as you might expect with a price tag of “free,” was useless, poorly written, unreadable crap. But somehow, you’re still convinced that good PLR content must be out there somewhere, and must be a good way to get traffic and make products that can actually generate income!

If you’re in a hurry and want to see how PLR can be
made easy again, just go to: PLR Site Reviews

With all the different PLR sites available now, a lot of people are running into the same kinds of issues. Issues that make getting into PLR look not-so-enticing after all. Issues that are big enough that many consider it not really worth the bother.

Do you find yourself thinking along these lines:

It’s too costly!

With most PLR sites, you don’t get to see what’s really inside until you pay. Sure, a lot of the sites offer money back guarantees but, is it worth the hassle? For those who are just starting out – the budget is tight – right? You have to be super careful of where every single dime goes. Is sinking your hard earned cash into worthless PLR sites time and time again until you find that perfect fit worth it? (Sidenote: If the site you’re interested in does not offer a money back guarantee – keep on moving!)

It’s too time consuming!

Having to research each and every site available becomes a huge time waster (because they’re all “the best,” right?). Time consuming tasks such as these are also considered just another form of being too costly and as they should be. Why? Because time is a precious commodity. Time is money.

Too much junk!

Let’s face it. There are just too many lousy PLR sites available these days. Everyone and their sister is throwing together a PLR site. A lot of which just end up being the same regurgitated crap you find everywhere else. How much time and money is it going to take to find the one that’s actually worth it and perfect for you? Unfortunately for you, the answer to that could be too much.

Which one is the best?

Each PLR site wants to be the best and completely unique from every other one available. Of course this is a good thing for you. The better the service, the more money you’re going to make. But how does one know which one offers the best benefits and bonuses?

I want one niche – not twenty!

How many PLR sites have you seen offer content in ten different niches? How about twenty, fifty, more niches? Depending on what you’re looking for in specific, some of these PLR sites offer entirely too much content from too many different niches. During the first month you might get lucky and receive content for your specific niche but then you might have to wait three or four months in between ’til they cycle through all the different niches they offer and get to the content you need again.

Any of this sound familiar?

Well, guys – I have the perfect solution for you! PLR Queen Liz Tomey has taken this entirely-too-wide, close-to-not-worth-it, almost-too-good-to-be-true profit arena and squeezed it down into literally mouth watering, bite-sized, easy to digest nuggets of pure decadence. The fact that it’s free makes it just beyond scrumptious and now gives you absolutely no reason at all to not jump on the PLR bandwagon and bring home your own little piece of this deliciously sweet pie called pure profit.

PLR Site Reviews

Download My Private Label Site Reviews (Version 3.1 which is updated on a constant basis) right now and start saving time and money pretty much instantly. I call this report a comparison chart on steroids. Seriously, this report is a review of what Liz considers to be the “creme de la creme” of PLR sites. Only the best PLR sites available are listed in this report and more importantly she lists exactly why each of them made the list.

Only PLR sites that Liz personally uses to make her own income is on this list. With this report (which is updated every 4 – 6 weeks), you’ll be able to save time and money by comparing what each site has to offer and pick only the best PLR site for you.

PLR Site Reviews

Here’s to making PLR profitable again!

Oh, just so you know, she also includes links so you can get a discounted membership to some of the sites. Don’t worry, you can get the report for free without having to join/pay/obligate yourself to anything. But if you decide you like the idea of pursuing PLR as a way to structure your online business, or even just recognize the value of having access to the best quality PLR stuff in the world (no more recycled garbage!), these discounts are great.

Do What The Pundits Say You Can’t

Written by Susan on July 2nd, 2009

Remember the days of yore – the ones before there was an Internet? No, you’re not dating yourself – it really wasn’t that long ago. But the advent of the ‘net has changed how business is done pretty drastically in that short space of time, and if you want to squeeze a living from that massive online marketplace, you need to know something about how the rules have changed.

Pre-web, you could crack open a newspaper, check the business opportunities section and find ads galore, all promising to teach you how to make money from home. You’d pony up with a $10 check, they’d mail you back a package teaching you how to sell their package. That self-serving formula hasn’t changed much; you’ll still find plenty of those online, but they aren’t charging you $10 for it anymore, that’s for sure.

But there’s another kind of teacher that you can find online that isn’t trying to sell you on selling them. They really want to teach you how to make money, and aren’t trying to fleece you out of what money you have. But they often have one problem: they promote their way of making a success on the Internet as the only true, genuine, workable way to succeed, and proclaim everybody else’s methods to be useless at best, and a scam at worst. They take what works for them as a universal truth, and really, they’re not wrong, exactly. They just suffer from tunnel vision. You’ve probably heard the parable about the blind men and the elephant – each one felt a different part of the beast and made their separate (and incomplete) conclusions about it based only the part they came into contact with. That’s what a lot of these online gurus are doing.

If you’re trying to learn what “really works” when it comes to making money on the Internet, you are no doubt completely confused by what your research has brought up so far. Let’s dispel some of these myths.

Theory One
In these days of blogs and social media, you need to prove your authority for your site to succeed. Build your traffic and your authority first, then monetize later.

Theory One Shot Down
While this method can certainly work, it doesn’t take into account what your personal style of blogging might be. Perhaps you don’t feel yourself to be an authority on a topic you want to turn into a business. If you prefer to write posts that come across like an online diary – if you have your smiling picture up on your “About” page – then the relationships you’re forming with the visitors to your blog is a friendly, cozy, interactive one. Once you have a lot of traffic and want to monetize your blog, you’ll find yourself in the uncomfortable position of trying to solicit money from people who have become your “friends.” You can either establish yourself from day one as an authoritative source of information, or you can be a blogging buddy. You can’t really do both.

Theory Two
You can’t be anonymous. People don’t respond to a gravator…they need to see a face.

Theory Two Shot Down
Have you ever heard of lolcats? The icanhascheezburger.com site launched in January, 2007. By June, they were getting half a million hits per day. Nobody knew who ran the site. In July, the two founders were interviewed by Time Magazine, and told their interviewer that they preferred to remain anonymous. It wasn’t until they sold their little hobby site for $2 million dollars that we learned their names: Kari Unebasami and Eric Nakagawa. Anonymity didn’t seem to hurt them any, eh?

Theory Three
If you have a blog, you must post often or you’ll lose traffic.

Theory Three Shot Down
Ask Frank Warren. His postscret.com blog gets update once on Sundays, and he landed a multi book contract with a major publisher not long after it swept the web. It’s also in the top 100 site online.

Theory Four
The fastest way to build a list is to give away freebies.

Theory Four Shot Down
Well, this can work, but you could also be laboring to build a list of freebie hounds that never, ever end up buying anything from you. It’s a crapshoot.

Theory Five
Your website, blog posts, or mailing list should be about whatever you’re selling.

Theory Five Shot Down
On the surface of it, this makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? Problem is, it doesn’t necessarily reflect reality. You have a brand of socks that you think are the bee’s knees, but do you really want to read a newsletter about them? You wanna join a mailing list and hang out in forums and get updated blog posts about your favorite nose hair trimmers? Ask a few gurus what they’d do about trying to sell a product that nobody really wants to read about, and most of them will tell you not to bother trying to sell it. But people do sell these things online, and make a very nice living for themselves doing it. How do you manage that when you can’t stay “topical” or “targeted”? Well, find a way to promote an idea that’s related to what you’re selling. If you’re trying to sell socks, consider talking about the fashion industry in your posts. If you’re selling nose hair trimmers, you could write about hygiene, or personal grooming in general. If you are selling your services, for instance home renovation, roofing, decks, etc., how about creating a site with barbeque recipes and kids crafts, with testimonials from your clients telling about how they loved their new deck and that the kids are crazy about their new playroom. People will love your cool articles and fun stuff, and return to your site to buy what you’re selling them. Just talk about what people want to hear and they’ll remember the connection.

Theory Six
Do what you love, and the money will follow. It won’t even seem like work.

Theory Six Shot Down
Again, another idea that makes sense on first viewing. What better way to spend your life than getting paid for doing something you love? But think about it. What was a leisure pursuit, a way to relax, a way to express yourself, will soon become a full time job, with pressures, deadlines, expectations, and endless compromise as you cater to each new “boss” that pays you to give them what they want. How long do you think it will take before you have no desire to look another doll, or sewing machine, or kit car, or pile of PC parts in the face again? There’s nothing wrong with making your hobby into a business, if that’s what you really want. But considering the downside, it’s also perfectly possible and often desirable to go into something else altogether, keeping your hobbies and business completely unrelated.

Theory Seven
You can’t succeed in a field you know nothing about.

Theory Seven Shot Down
It’s not tough to see how having a lot of knowledge in a particular field can help you achieve great success in it. And sometimes it’s even a prerequisite: you probably wouldn’t take flying lessons from someone who’d never flown a plane.

But do you suppose that every successful marketer, website designer or ghostwriter is an expert in every field they’re asked to apply their expertise to? Of course not. So what did they do? They found out what they needed to know. If you know how to properly research an industry, you can sell anything to anyone in any field and make a success of it.

So don’t take what someone trying to sell you their “Make Millions Online” program says as gospel truth. They may not be trying to mislead you, but they may have a fatally narrow focus and a “can’t do” attitude that won’t reassure you that there really is an infinite number of ways to make money online. If you keep an open mind about the possibilities, you really can make the dream work for you.

Step 1 – Finding A Profitable Niche Market

Written by Susan on February 12th, 2009

There’s an almost infinite number of ways to make money online, and each one of them requires a different set of tools, knowledge and strategies to make them successful. But there is one fundamental thing that must be done before you take another step into the Internet wilderness – you must find a niche market to which to apply your time, effort and advertising dollars.

Believe me, I know how easy it is to get distracted and confused. There is so much information and so many enticing promises crowding the virtual airwaves, most of it uploaded by people whose primary interest is in separating you from your money. They want you to hurry up and get that website up (just purchase their easy template program!), launch that blog (just a “pittance” a month for their consultation services!), sign up for their affiliate wares, buy their “get-it-for-a-steal” product that will automate everything for you, and once it’s all set up, which they assure you will take but a single enjoyable afternoon of your time, the money will start pouring in like a financial tsunami!

Well, dealing with information overload and hype is a topic for another post (or ten). Right now I want to share with you a vital truth that gets lost in all the hoopla – until you have a product to market, a targeted group of people to market it to, and the knowledge of how to get these things – you will spin your wheels furiously and not move forward a single inch.

When you’re first starting out, it’s probably best to steer clear of the tough markets to break into, like IM. There’s money to be made there, no question, but the competition is cutthroat, and you might want to get your feet wet by concentrating on a niche that’s less saturated – specialty items, hobby stuff – doesn’t really matter what it is, you’ll probably find somebody somewhere wants to buy it. For all you know there’s a dedicated group of one-eyed, hermaphroditic underwater pole vaulters with shingles who get together once a month in Kissimmee to swap handmade dolls made from used dog beds. Bet they could use a good source of flea shampoo. Sell it to them! Find a starving niche, feed them, make a good income.

But I would further recommend that you stick to those niches you have an interest in personally. It takes some dedicated forum hopping to get to know your target niche well enough to sell them what they really need and want; you have to get thoroughly inside their heads. If you couldn’t care less about the relative depths of the dimples on golf balls, you’re going to be bored witless trolling the forums that talk about nothing else. Why burn the little candle of your life illuminating some corner wherein you have no interest?

So how do you go about finding a “hot” niche that you can actually get excited about? It takes some research to be sure that, just because you’re passionate about something, there’s enough other people out there dying to spend money on it too. Or even that they have any money to spend.

Start with Clickbank. They have a huge selection of products that you can be promoting, and you know there’s already a demand for them. But you want to find the right products for you. Stay away from the products that have high gravities (“high gravity” means there’s already a ton of affiliates out there selling the stuff). The numbers you should look for vary among the experts, but a good range seems to be minimum 30, maximum 200. This means that it’s probably a niche with a demand but not too much competition.

Once you’ve found one you’d like to pursue, you’ll want to check how many people are actually searching for this niche on a monthly basis. Go to the sales page and make a list of the keywords that are being used for this niche. There are a number of keyword tracking tools available online – I use Wordtracker. They have a great free trial version you can use until you’re ready to go pro. Alternatively, you can use Google’s keyword tool. Then, put the keywords in quotes and plug them into Google’s search engine – you’ll be able to see how many competing sites are already out there.

So here’s a little formula: (monthly searches/competing sites) X monthly searches = KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Indicator). If your KEI is 100 or greater, than that’s a niche you can hope to make some money in.

Finally, you’re ready to dive into those forums dedicated to the niche you’re after and get into the heads of your future customers. Do a search on Google: niche + forum. If you can’t find a forum, drop that niche and move on. If you do, get inside and start looking around. If the forum seems to be comprised of people who have no money to spend – kids, college students, people on unemployment – on to the next!

Keep an eye peeled for hot button words, like “problem”, “solution”, “how do I…?”, “where do I go…?”, “issue with…”, “I wish I had…” and so on. Read the sticky posts, read the posts that have the most replies. Find out what the people talk about the most, what they need, want, and wish they knew where to go to get. Maybe it’s just information – see what kinds of questions they’re asking, go research the answers, and put them in a little ebook you can sell them for $7. Participate in the forum if you can be at all helpful – it’s ok to have a link to your site in your signature, but don’t point it out. Get to be known as a source of help and information first – win their trust. The business will follow.

That’s basically it. Find the niche, check if it’s viable, find out what they’re looking for, and either build a site around an existing product or create your own. Then market the living daylights out of it.

And that’s a post for another time.