Build My Rank Review - An In Depth Three Month Report - Part 2

So, you may have been wondering why I waited a full month to post my BMR results. Unfortunately, right when I had posted part one of this review, Build My Rank had decided to temporarily not allow any new sign-ups until their blog network is improved. Then, to my ultimate astonishment, Google de-indexed all of BMR's sites as of March 19th!! What an incredible shame!!  I'm very disappointed.

However, with that news I'll talk a bit as to why blog networks are a bit 'gray-hat' in nature but that you could mimic BMR in a more personal way (just that it will take you much more time and effort) to earn more online. Anyway, let's look first at my results.

Build My Rank Results

I'm not going to put a lot of effort into this post considering BMR's status at this point. But, let's see just how well it worked (you can find descriptions of these sites in the previous post).

Build My Rank Review - An In Depth Three Month Report

Part of what I do with The Agile Marketer is to evaluate products and services that help you extend your options so that you can learn how to make money online. Over the summer I was very intrigued by many reports about the service, Build My Rank (or BMR for short), that from others seems to be an excellent page rank building option.

Build My Rank is bascially a network of content blogs designed to give you increased page rank as their blogs naturally improve their own page ranking by subscribers posting content within their system. To use it you must first subscribe to their montly plan that then allows you to write and post articles within their network.

I knew that the only way to really test this service was to truly devote an extended period of time to testing the waters with some different sites of my own to see just how much my sites would improve in page rank. Knowing that Google takes weeks to alter rankings this test would have to span at least two months.

My hope going in was that I would gain enough back in revenue from passive income (such as ads and affiliate products) that the monthly fee ($59/month at time of this writing) would be easily offset.

Build My Rank Test Cases

I decided to use three specific test cases that would represent different levels of site age, varying traffic levels and specific keyword strategies (note - all rankings are from Google search results):

Underground Traffic Secrets - Review

What if you could get as many of your favorite internet marketers into the same room to discuss their opinions on what they would do if they could go back in time with the knowledge they have now?
Phill Turner (yes, with 2 Ls) of Underground Traffic Secrets has done just that with his packaged collection of interviews with a variety of successful online experts and asked them "If you were starting again today and you had absolutely no traffic, which traffic strategy would you use to make $1000 in profit after 30 days?"

Being experienced in internet traffic myself I just about skipped over this gem - but saw the names in the list and the price and decided to purchase a copy. I've got to tell you I was pleasantly surprised to find this to be an incredible deal and wealth of information. When you get to hear experienced marketers talk candidly about their strategies to drive traffic, you'll find that they tend to give away much more information than they would in a written ebook or article.

One on one interviews work so well since the interviewee typically doesn't have time to filter their thoughts and they're so excited to help others.  What is so revealing in these audio reports is that they cover so many different traffic strategies which is so important for any type of online site - plus, they really demonstrate how to make money online. Most of Phill's interviews are about 20 to 30 minutes long making this offer an even better value.  With that single question offered up - the responses stay very focused on traffic with what I think were some deep, hidden slips of the tongue by these guys.

Here's a brief list of the interviews (my ratings) and some of the topics discussed:


1. Dean Hunt (very good) - an expert in buzz marketing, he focused on becoming an authority much in the same way as a talk show host or interview might do it. If you focus on learning a topic at no cost and associate your name with experts you can build a level of respect. Lots of good details on how to build out this method.

2. Kim Roach (amazing) - is one of the most successful female marketers online, she is best known for her products Traffic Dashboard, Instant Affiliate Payday and Super Affiliate Club.  She focused on the very basics of marketing online - but manages to lay it out in simple terms of traffic, offer and conversion. Using solo ads, newsletters, WSOs and more, she provides an amazing wealth of information in 30 minutes.

Powerful Niche Examples - Some Final Thoughts

I wanted to give you some final thoughts on my series of articles How to Find the Most Profitable Affiliate that you should think about before diving in on my tutorial. Looking for a great paying niche is a techniques that works. But, you might want to consider a few pointers about earning money online with certain topics that might affect your long term strategy.  (Wondering about a strategy?  Take a look at Why You Need a Strategy to Earn Money Online ).

Get Excited About These Visual Niche Examples!

Alright, I'm going to show you two fantastic examples of how you could put together niche sites. Be it an affiliate or a core product - here's how you do it!  Study these over and over to see just how content is mixed with a product to get you there.  I know that both of these are making huge amounts of money (these are NOT my sites nor am I making any money by showing you these examples) and if you model your product and content and promote them in the same way you can drive to some real profits:

1. Security Guard Training HQ Niche Example

2. Double Your Dating Promotion Example

 

Choosing the Right Affiliate for You

Ok, you're all excited about a high paying niche and you're ready to start building.  You should consider a couple of points -- take extra care when looking at niches in the following categories: Health and Fitness, Betting Systems, and Business / Investing. Certain products may cause you issues in the future if related to dubious claims of health benefits, gambling, and making money.

Recently, the government has been cracking down on information products making false claims that have negative impact on people - something you should be aware of.  For example, health product that claim to fix certain problems can reflect back on you if you don't have the proper Disclaimers or Affiliate relationship clearly called out. You might get backlash from Google, Wordpress, Yahoo, etc. for promoting these types of sites -- Adwords or Adsense accounts banned, Blogger banned, Wordpress blogs dropped, etc.  Or, gambling sites are prohibited on certain traffic promotional tools My only advice is to pay special attention to the product you're promoting if in these niches.

Take a look at the Federal Trade Commission site on consumer protection on health products. It will help you work through your niche.

Mingling Your Niche with Your Business - Good Idea? Bad Idea?

Another consideration for your niche site is how closely you want it related to your main business. If your goal is to create many niches for a variety of topics then you should consider keeping these independent of your core internet marketing business.  By that I mean that you should create separate domains, email accounts and tools/traffic generation payments instead of a single account.

My article, Establish Your Differentiating Email IDs, will show you an example.  When you mingle your core business with niches, a single mistake might cost you getting banned from some critical tools or services you might want to use for future work.  If you're going to use a single topic and strategy - go ahead and use a single common business.

Getting Started to Build Profits

I've given you all of the necessary ammunition to get your affiliate niche sites started to really learn how to make money online. Be sure you understand the affiliate product you're promoting, the industry topic you're supporting and what the main, helpful ideas are coming from product that you can use to build content around the site.  Remember, your core buyers are looking to answer specific questions by using the search engines.  Your goal is to guide the engines to your niche site so that the product will satisfy their need.  Always think that way by writing content, using headers and giving them snippets of information that will drive them to want more.

You don't have to be a complete expert in any product -- just well informed and a guide to the buyer.  Take the attitude that you're helping them, not selling them and you'll see results!  In future posts I'll talk about promoting sites and traffic.

How to Find the Most Profitable Affiliate Product - Part 3

In Part 1 I talked about the general concepts surrounding Clickbank affiliate products and in Part 2 showed you how to use the free online tool CBEngine.com to narrow down your niche choices. In this post I'll talk about how to research the competition to select your final product.

Even though I noted two good choices for a niche informational product, the final choice is really going to rely on what keyword phrase or phrases you'll use to promote the product and the competition for those phrases in the search engines. A lesson for any internet marketer trying to make money online is that it all comes down to traffic and copy. I don't care what your site looks like as long as you get loads of traffic and can convert it.

If you've watched a master like Frank Kern he notes time and again that you must find hungry markets and convert then with control through your copy. In fact, I would suggest watching this video - 'I Can't Believe How Well This Worked' (wow, he is good) to see first hand what I mean. His style is so simple yet so powerful - using straight forward marketing videos and short emails from his lists. Think carefully about how you might connect to a niche using his mindset.

Why Niche Sites Need Good Keywords

The single most important step in promoting a niche site are the keyword phrases you're going to use to rank your niche site in the search engines. (I had mentioned some basic thoughts about this in an older post - Tuning Your Affiliate Keywords). The problem with products is that initially you can rank well in Google for new products because the competition is very low. But, what typically happens is that a product will start to grow in popularity and keeping your search result rankings high gets harder and harder as some of the more powerful marketers start jumping in.

Most affiliate marketers will try to use the product name as the main keyword phrase. As in Part 2's example of 'The Lottery Blueprint' - marketers will use 'The Lottery Blueprint Review', or, 'The Lottery Blueprint Winner', etc.  However, you could look at other keyword phrases such as 'How to Win the Lottery' or 'How to Pick Winning Lottery Tickets'. We'll look at this in the next sections.

Picking Your Niche Keyword Phrase

So, the next step in narrowing down the field of choices is to take a peak at the competition on the search engines. Since we looked at two products yesterday (August 23rd), let's see how the results look in Google. I'll start with The Lottery Blueprint - let's do a quick search:

This doesn't tell me a lot - but, it does show that the direct search results for the key product phrase, "The Lottery Blueprint" totals 224,000 - which means there's not a lot of sites competing for this keyword (this method is very rough to get only a 'feel' for search results - very popular Clickbank products will return over 5 million results).  Let's compare that to Shapeshifter Body Redesign:

How to Find the Most Profitable Affiliate Product - Part 2

From Part 1 you learned about the popular niche categories that are available in Clickbank that should provide your niche site with the highest profitability. I mentioned that you could dig deeper into Clickbank directly or use a great online tool called CBEngine.com that is free for basic research.

The best part of CBEngine is that you can easily search and sort through the Clickbank parameters such as Popularity, Gravity, Date Added, Category, Subcategory, and Affiliate Payment level.  With only these search criteria you can finalize your niche pick usually within one to three hours depending on the niche popularity.

The main CBEngine search window is located on the far right side of the main page screen. Each of the search parameters means the following:

Top Category - these are the same categories in Clickbank I showed you in Part 1.

Sub Category - within each category are smaller subsets - for example, in Sports there would be a Golf sub category.

Ranked In - these are the top products ranked in a category or sub category if picked.

Keywords - any words within the products you are searching for.

Look In - what part of the product description you want to find a keyword.

Newer Than - how new the product is since its release on Clickbank.

Pays More Than -  the payout to affiliate for each product sold.

Order By - in the free version you can only order by Rank, Earn% and Gravity.

Choosing a Product

My own personal secret to finding a product is to start with ONLY the last three search criteria - Newer Than, Pays More Than and Order By.  I'm not too worried yet about the categories until I can see the first list.  Here's the trick - be sure to start by choosing products newer than 6 months. This is critical! The reason why you want to do this is because the competition for other affiliate niche sites will be much less than if you pick a product with high popularity that has been out for over a year.

How to Find the Most Profitable Affiliate Product - Part 1

For most of my internet marketing career I've been an affiliate or niche marketer. I've found that this is the easiest way to get something out the door to get some online income with a busy schedule (as I was when I started out).  Being new to this game can be daunting if you are caught up in many internet marketing or affiliate marketing products and trying to learn how to make money online.  And, as I mentioned in my last post, if you don't have a strategy then you'll find making those first dollars online few and far between.

So, here's your strategic goal - build one highly profitable affiliate niche site as fast and as easily as you can. If you are a new internet marketer or feel like you're struggling to find a niche this is where you need to start.  I've built niche sites in as little as five hours and made thousands on them.

The good news is that building a niche site quickly isn't really that difficult and to start to see some returns. I use some pretty simple methods that get me results fast without the pain and suffering of building something that doesn't convert.  My method is going to be focused strictly on Clickbank informational products in this article but could be extended to other markets.  If you follow these easy steps you should be able to find a product to market in one night.

Affiliate Product Principles

So, let's get started!  The basic principles for any niche affiliate product site are:

1. Choosing a popular subject area - if you scan through the Clickbank marketplace you'll see quite a few categories such as Sports, Travel and Health.  It's just a fact that some markets are going to have a much larger audience than others.  I'll talk about that in the next section.

2. Finding a product with low competition - this principle is the tough nut to crack, because, if you choose a popular subject area to market chances are the competition is very high.  This is where most of your time will be spent.

3. Picking products with higher payouts - I have found that many forget this basic rule of thumb which seems to work against common sense. You'll find yourself drawn to lower cost products initially.  I'll talk to this point later.

Basic Product Categories

As I noted before there are many Clickbank categories to choose from many of which are very narrow in interest. If you go to the Clickbank site and click on 'Marketplace' at the very top of the screen: