With so many places to buy domain names the choice for anyone new to the internet can be overwhelming.  I have no hesitation in recommending GoDaddy as they have never let me down and their prices are excellent.  Actually buying the darn things can be a bit confusing but there domain manager interface is very good.

Now the great thing about GoDaddy is that you can always pick up a discount coupon to buy for a lot less than their advertised prices.  I used to search the web before each purchase or renewal to try and secure the best deal.  However I recently came across a great site that is updated regularly and carries the best promo codes.

Check it out a here and secure yourself some great savings.

And before I forget just buy domain names you can find better value hosting elsewhere and if you intend to build mostly Wordpress sites then HostGator has to be your first port of  call.  If you don’t use HostGator and it all goes wrong don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Testing is one thing that many of us simply do not do.  The make money online niche is so over populated that everybody has a theory and 99% of theories are unproven.  Given the level of misinformation the only way to test whether a strategy is effective or not is to try it for yourself.  Now that might be a pain but until you can find sources of information that you can trust (not at all easy) it’s the only way to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

To that end I conducted a test over the last three months to see once and for all how important it is to have content on your site versus a bunch of eBay/amazon/affiliate links.  This proved very illuminating and also poses somewhat of a dilemma.   How come?  Well I have proven beyond doubt that Google really doesn’t like ranking pages with little or no content.  Build links to content packed page or post and it will rank quite well.  Build links to a page or post which contains say a dozen eBay listings and it will not only affect the page negatively but your whole site.    I have several sites that have more than enough links pointing to them to rank top 10 but they are down in the hundreds.  Google appears to label it an affiliate site (despite links being cloaked) and they really don’t like them anymore.

So where’s the dilemma?  Well I’ve been building sites using wordpress and phpBay.  I can’t get them to rank in Google (without heaps of content) and I cant get them to rank that well in Yahoo (Yahoo doesn’t seem to like wordpress that much) and as for Bing (well Bing is a big improvement on Live but the jury is still out for me).  What’s fascinating is that Yahoo appears to love old style build a niche store sites with little or no content far more than wordpress phpBay.

How much more does it love them?  Massively.  I have 4 stores in particular that are plain BANS.  They have no content, were deindexed by Google more than 18 months ago, have the standard templates and yet they have multiple keywords that rank no. 1-5 and over the last 12 months they have earned over $30,000.  I have similar stores built in Wordpress and phpBay that in comparison have made approx $3,000.  That makes BANS 10 x more effective.

Can you believe that?  And there lies the dilemma.  Do you knock out sophisticated stores that take a huge investment of time and money or do you knock out stores using the standard BANS script?  I haven’t built a standard BANS store since the beginning of the year.  In hindsight that’s looking a big mistake.  The best bet?  Balance build a couple of BANS stores per month and invest the rest of your time in trying to build stuff that Google will love.

There are all sorts of caveats that I could throw at this article but I’m not going to.  You have to prove this stuff for yourself.  BANS sites still take more than 6 months to get indexed properly in Yahoo but after that they do very well if you’ve find the right niche.   They are quick to set up and if you throw them into the 3 Way Links system they will rank.  Yeah Google is going to deindex them after a few weeks but hey $30,000 is a lot of money for little to no work!

Now that was worth reading wasn’t it?

I tried to resist but I couldn’t help myself and bought this eBook after reading many good things about it.  I have been extremely impressed and can say without hesitation that the sniper methodology George outlines in his book works. I didn’t learn too much that was new to me but do I apply 100% of what he says to every site I build? Honestly – No.  The book should make a great read if you are relatively new to internet marketing;  have yet to figure out how to make money and the amount of work it takes to make it.

The basic strategy the guide teaches is to build small niche wordpress sites (sounds familiar doesn’t it).  The product bias is towards Clickbank but the reality is that you will make money in any niche provided you follow the EXACT steps outlined in the manual.  Unlike other books the EXACT steps are provided so you will be in no doubt what you need to do to succeed.  It really is as complete a guide as I have seen to date so much credit is due to George.

Within a couple of months of launching a site George reckons you should be able to generate $1000 per month plus if you’ve picked a winner.  My own experience suggests that this will be rare and I personally think the average will be more like $250 per month.  Still, that is pretty good though when you bear in mind that you can easily knock out one of these sites every couple of days, although, the research side of things can take a couple of days on it’s own unless you buy some additional tools.

After reading countless worthless ebooks and promotions this year this is one of the best laid out and best written I have come across. I had one issue with what George recommended that I thought was a show stopper but I am delighted to say that following a recent upgrade to the Micro Niche Finder keyword tool you will save countless hours of fruitless searching trying to match the criteria that George uses to determine whether a site will be a winner or not.

One final word of caution though, be careful with this promotion as you will be signing up for a monthly membership as well (when are these guys gonna stop with that?). Just remember to cancel the subscription if you don’t want to continue with it before your 30 day trial is up. The jury is out on how good the membership site is as yet but I’ll stay a member for a couple of months to see.

To learn more and read the ridiculous long copy sales letter (does anybody really read them?) check out Google Sniper here.  Heck you’ve got nothing to lose as you get the standard 60 day money back guarantee if not satisfied and I can promise you you’ll enjoy the read.  Also, if you have any questions you’d like to ask about the product leave a comment below or send me a message via the contact form.

If you don’t know what a bounce rate is you want to start learning about it pretty quickly.  Bounce rate measures the amount of time a visitor to your site spends on a particular page before “bouncing off” to another page or site.  Why is it important?  Quite simply if you have a high bounce rate then you can point all the links in the world to your page but it will not rank in the Google SERPS as if the average visit time is less than 5 seconds Google will deem it is not serving content that your visitors expect to find.

As niche stores go this is not strictly true because the visitor may have found exactly what they want (e.g. an eBay item for sale) but in clicking on a link they are being taken straight to eBay and away from your site.

So, if you’re getting visitors but cannot rank for a keyword you are targeting despite pointing huge quantities of links at the page your bounce rate is likely to need addressing.  The only way to do this is to add relevant content to that page that will engage the visitor and delay the pontential clickthru to eBay.  If you can hold their attention for another 10 seconds or so then this could make a huge difference to where you rank in the SERPS.

You can measure your bounce rate accurately by installing Google analytics on your site.  This will also make a huge amount of additional information available to you from which you can learn much about what your visitors like and dislike.

Despite what you may read SEO is about quite a bit more than just link building.

Wow what a roller coaster of a month.  Come the end of September I was interested to see what changes might result following the introduction of QCP from 1 October 2009.   The QCP Preview reports had consistently shown my earnings 30% higher so I was optimistically expecting a nice earnings boost.  By 10 October my optimism had soured as actual earnings were 50% lower than the previous month.  It prompted me to start looking for a part time job as I was convinced the end was nigh.  Then, without warning  everything turned around.   Since the 10th my EPC has risen dramatically along with daily earnings.

As I write this there is one day of earnings to be reported but this month will be my 3rd best ever and is comfortably 20% ahead of normal.  Rather than joy I’d say I was relieved.  For a while there I was fearing the worst.  Hopefully I can hold the EPC and kick on in November.

So in the end I did make more money this month but the mysterious eBay algo remains just that.  I gotta be honest and say if I was just starting off in this business I’d really have to consider whether EPN is the way to go anymore.  I have started to diversify more and include different monetization options.  After all, if you control the traffic there are often many alternatives available and as Mark (over at thenichestorebuilder.com)  aptly demonstrated you can swap EPN for Adsense and make more money!  Makes you stop and think doesn’t it.