A completely FREE guide to developing small niche sites using the WordPress platform. Learn how to setup and administer your site, super-easy monetization strategies and a lot more.
In September 2007 I quit my day job in order to follow my dreams of becoming an Internet entrepreneur.
This blog is my record of that journey. My aim is to learn how to make a living online and transfer that knowledge
to others through this blog.
Some observant people have already spotted that I changed the name of my Stumble Rush course to Traffic Rush yesterday. This has also involved a domain change. In this post I’ll explain why it has been changed, the implications for students and affiliates and also cover some of the technical details of domain redirection.
Why The Name Changed
StumbleUpon weren’t happy with the use of the word ’stumble’ in the name of the course and also of the use of the logo. Although they are happy for people to sell guides, courses etc about the use of StumbleUpon to drive traffic they want to ensure that there is no possibility of people thinking that these products are actually produced by them. I added a disclaimer to the site but it wasn’t enough so I had to change the name and the domain. Luckily, it was very easy and quick to do.
I remember when I first held the naming competition I did wonder if I might run into legal problems but then dismissed it as I assumed that seeing as the word ’stumble’ is a regular English verb that it would be fine. If I produce another similar product such as a Twitter course or something, I would contact the company involved beforehand to check that they approve of the name before I went ahead.
The new name is Traffic Rush and the new url is http://www.traffic-rush.net/ Traffic Rush is probably a better name anyway as at least it gives a hint as to what the course is about! Stumble Rush doesn’t really mean anything unless you already know that the course is about StumbleUpon.
Students Of The Course
For those students on the free course, the links to the lessons are delivered by email. I have changed the links in the autoresponder sequence to the new domain so any new messages sent will now have the new name and url’s. However all of the old links still work as they just redirect to the same location on the new domain so I haven’t bothered doing a broadcast.
For those who purchased the full course the story is the same. The old links simply redirect to the new ones so it doesn’t matter if they continue using the old ones. The graphics are all the same as before so I suspect that most people won’t even notice so I’m not going to send out new links as it might lead to confusion.
Affiliates of The Course
I modified the link in E-Junkie to point to the new domain so that all existing affiliate links will continue to work as before. However, one thing that you might want to do is update your graphics. I’ve had all of the banners and cover graphics re-done but if you copied the graphics to your own server you can grab the new ones here:
Currently the videos are only distributed via the amazon S3 server that I setup for it. One of the mini projects I am going to do shortly is to distribute the videos that accompany the free lessons to a whole bunch of video sharing sites such as YouTube, Revver etc so I’ll re-encode them with a new watermark when I do that. However, where I’ve talked about Stumble Rush I can’t change that heh - well I could do a voice over but I won’t bother lol!
Technical Details
The first job was to transfer the actual website to the new domain. This was simplicity itself - from the WordPress dashboard, click Manage and then Export. This allows you to export your entire website as a single file and then you import that to your new installation. This only took a few minutes and everything was preserved including things like the password on the lessons.
The second step was to point the old url’s to the new ones. For this I used something called a 301 redirect which says to Google that this redirection is permanent. This is achieved using an .htaccess file.
I used this in two ways. Firstly for each of the lessons I did an explcit redirect just to make sure that a lesson link from the Stumble Rush domain would automatically load the same lesson from the Traffic Rush domain. Here is the redirection rule for the first lesson:
I’ve not really posted as much as I thought I would about this year’s Thirty Day Challenge. In this post I’ll explain a little more about the philosophy of the 30DC, what you can expect to learn if you take part and what my plans are from this point on.
What is the 30DC Business Model?
In a nutshell - find a niche, test the profitability of that niche by driving traffic initially to a website which is monetized with an affiliate program, and then if it is profitable build a business in that niche by developing your own product.
The ultimate end game of the 30DC is to create your own product in the niche. This is often an infoproduct such as an ebook, course, membership site etc. The idea is that once you are able to drive traffic to a website, you can earn more money by selling your own product than by selling somebody else’s as an affiliate or by monetizing with something like AdSense.
The Art of Product Creation
To be at the top of the field as an Internet marketer you need to be able to enter any niche and be able to create a product in that niche. If you follow the money by going after lucrative niches where people actually spend real money as opposed to hobby niches where people like to read but don’t buy, then you can make some serious money.
The question is, HOW do you create your own product? There are usually two choices. The first and most obvious is to create it entirely yourself. You write the content. This is what I have done with my own products that you see promoted at the top of this blog. You might be wondering why you wouldn’t want to create your own product?
The main reason why people don’t want to create products themselves is that they might not have any personal interest or knowledge in the niche. It is damn hard to create a product around something you don’t know much about and have no desire to learn about. So the second option is to either hire somebody else to create it for you or to work with somebody who has the knowledge and find a way to tap into that knowledge to create the product.
My Niche Selection and Product Situation
Last year when I did the 30DC in 2007, I brainstormed every possible topic that I had any interest in and not one of them is a profitable niche. Therefore this year I already knew that if I was to find a profitable niche, it would be in an area that I don’t care about which also means that I would struggle if I wanted to create my own product.
What I decided to do this year was approach my niche research from the perspective of trying to find a problem to solve. I recently published a post about finding high paying niches and I used those techniques to pick a niche to use for this year and it is in an area that not only am I not interested in, but it is something that I can never experience first hand.
Let me give you an example of what I mean by that: a man can learn everything there is to know about pregnancy and he can become very knowledgeable in that area but he can never experience it first hand for himself so when he writes or talks about the subject, his words come from knowledge only and not experience.
It is my belief that the best products come from real first-hand experience. Also, for me personally, I just find writing about a subject I don’t care about to be boring as hell! I find it quite easy to write a 300-500 word article but creating an entire product would just be too much effort if I was not interested in the area.
Therefore when I started this year’s 30DC I knew that I would not see it through to it’s conclusion and create my own product so I decided at the outset to create more than one site in the niche and use purely 30DC techniques on one and then build the second one with AdSense income in mind and then compare the two.
Progress of my Niche Sites
I have 2 sites in development and two others ‘on hold’. For the two on hold I’ve registered a domain name, built the site, published a single post and bookmarked it. This allows the site to get indexed in Google and the domain to start ageing until such time as I go to work on it properly.
Both my niche sites are indexed but they are ranking very low in the serps - around position 400-500! Thus I’m not getting much traffic yet hehe! I am working on both at the same time. The aim is to create up to 10 articles on each site and build backlinks to allow it to rank. However, due to the Google Sandbox effect, it may take several months for them to rank properly as both sites have been built on brand new domains.
What’s Next?
I’m continuing with the 30DC however as I have not yet had my magic 200 visitors I cannot make any decisions as to the profitability of the niche which means that I have not followed through on the lessons about Google AdWords. I have seen the particular affiliate program that I have chosen to promote all over the place. I haven’t bought it so I have no idea if it’s any good.
The idea of the 30DC number 200 is that even with a bad website, bad articles and a bad sales letter you should still be able to make a sale with 200 visitors in a buying market. This means that if you’ve had 200 visitors to your website and you’ve still not made a sale of the product (whether it is an affiliate product or your own is irrelevant) then your market is no good or there is something seriously wrong with your site or product.
Until I get 200 visitors I can’t make that decision.
About AdSense
I crunched some numbers about AdSense recently and I was quite excited but here’s the thing… I did a calculation that assumed 100 visitors a day, a 5% clickthrough and an AdSense payout of $1.50 per click. That worked out at a monthly income for one site of $225. If instead, those 100 visitors a day were being sold my own product that was priced quite high at say $97, then with one sale in 200 visitors that site would generate a monthly income of $1,455 - quite a difference!
That is precisely why the 30DC boys encourage the creation of your own product. There’s another advantage too - those AdSense numbers are based on rather high payouts and not all keywords pay those amounts. I picked a niche for the 30DC that also did well in AdSense but of course there is no real correlation between AdSense and what you charge for your product. This means that in general, if you are up to the challenge of creating your own product then you’ll be able to find find more niches in which you can make money than if you rely purely on AdSense.
For me personally, I simply don’t want to create a product about a topic that I don’t have first have experience with. I can write about WordPress and about StumbleUpon but not about vintage electric guitars :-) That is why I am using AdSense - it’s easy.
I’m going to close the 30DC project at the end of this month and launch a new AdSense project which should run for several months.
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8 CommentsAugust 22, 2008 Posted under: Personal by Caroline Middlebrook
Tomorrow I am going to be swinging from the trees at a Go-Ape center and I am away for almost 4 days until next Tuesday 26th August. I’m not even going to have my laptop with me which I think will be the longest I have been away from a computer in a very long time! I’ve scheduled this post to appear Friday night but I will already be long gone by the time it appears!
Obviously I won’t be responding to comments or email during this time. Have a nice weekend :-)
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This is part #10 of a series of 10 videos. Click here to access the full series. The PDF download of the original ebook is also still available.
This is the final video in this series on using WordPress to develop money making niche sites. I clear up some things I forgot to mention in the earlier videos and leave you with some final thoughts. Basically, these videos and the earlier ebook version will always remain free and won’t require an email address so please feel free to spread them around as much as you like.
I hope you’ve enjoyed the videos and found them useful!
This video shows you how to setup your link structure so that you can finely control the links that appear in the sidebar of your niche site. This is only really necessary if you want to put links to URLs other than your site pages & posts such as by putting in an affiliate link which is what I did in the original ebook version. If you’re just building basic articles then you really don’t need this video at all!
I show you how to use WordPress widgets and show you how you can use a plugin to order links in a special links widget. This is probably the most technical of all the videos so far but don’t panic because it’s really not necessary unless you really want fine control over the links on your page. If you’ve chosen to use blog posts for your articles you can just use a recent posts widget instead.
This video was supposed to be number 8 so I’m not sure how I managed to mix that up but never mind :-)
This is part #10 of a series of 10 videos. 