Warning: This post is a comparatively new one. However make sure to read it as I share a step by step method of finding profitable niche (used bikes) with a real example. This is my most successful strategy through which I have been making good amount of money.

Niche sites are a great and popular way to earn some really good passive income. The most critical part is the process of identifying the niche. There is no dearth of sites that talk about the concepts in a theoretical manner. However most of these sites do not share the real niche sites from which they have been making money for the fear of attracting competition. In this post I am going to share a niche site about used bikes for sale that I am starting to work upon and most importantly I shall share the exact process of how I zeroed down to this particular niche.

In this post I shall talk about

1. Requirements of a good niche
2. Identifying the broad industry
3. How to find out potential niches inside the broad industry
4. Competition analysis
5. Identifying the income potential
6. Selecting the niche to work upon
7. Designing a niche site
8. Preparing for niche domination

» Read more

When it comes to one of the most important question, there are two distinct schools of thought and a large number of confused bloggers. How should one select the topic to blog about?

• Option 1: Blog about a topic you are passionate about. You enjoy learning new things about this topic. It will be easier for you to excel on the topic. And if you become the best in any topic the readers will eventually come
•  Option 2: Blog about a topic that has the potential to earn big bucks. Do proper keyword research, study the competition. Don’t worry if you know zilch about the topic, you can always learn these things later.

To be honest I have been searching for the answer for quite sometime now and have used both the methods. While keyword research driven method got me more traffic and hence adsense revenue, my blog posts about blogging (my passion) has earned me some really valuable friends and backlinks.

It will be interesting to listen to what you think about this topic and hence I have setup a forum on binaryday for this purpose only.  Head over to the forum and let me know your views about Passion or Potential : How to select the topic for your blog?

I have been confused on a number of times thinking what should I do next? Should I write another post or should I concentrate on getting more traffic or do I try out different advertising networks. Even after I have decided to get traffic which method should I use? Blog commenting or article marketing or link building or social media marketing? Do I write keyword driven posts or posts that will do good on social media. The confusion meant I ended up spending more time reading other blogs and less time working on this blog.

» Read more

The importance of feedburner is evident from the fact that it is rare to find a blog that does not have a feedburner subscription box. So I will directly get into how you can get the maximum out of it. I shall be dealing with 3 broad topics  in this article

1. How to get more visitors to subscribe to your feed
2. How to make more % of subscribers to actually click into your article
3. How to get more benefit out of the subscribers once they land on your page

» Read more

Ajith just published a really intelligent way of exchanging deep links. That just got me thinking. Can we not do more together that does not risk the wrath of Google.

1. Tweet my post and I will tweet yours in return. Not only increases traffic to both the blogs, it increases followers and makes your twitter page more valuable as well.
2. Stumbleupon: Increases the profile strength and gets more traffic
3. Social bookmarking
4. Nofollow linking : A nofollow link from the body of the post gets traffic.

What do you think. Hope you will give me a tweet or stumble.

The sixes are sexy, macho and unsurprisingly fans adore the batsmen who have a capability to hit those large strokes. But then singles are more important than the sixes. More importantly there is a time to try those sixes. Too early and you do not get to play 50 overs. Too late and you end up with too low a score.

Why am I blabbering about cricket on a blog about blogging

Because I just realized that there are singles and sixes in getting traffic to your blog as well. Blog commenting, twitting, stumbling, enabling people to email your awesome posts to their friends are the singles of getting traffic to your blog. They are not sexy and hence no big blogger talks about how he gets 30 visitors a day from the comments he leaves on other blogs. It is not fashionable to talk about the second page rankings for long tail keywords.

Hitting the digg homepage, sphinn home page or number 1 rank for “make money online” on Google are the sixes. They get a lot of traffic at one go, get you 300 backlinks in a single day.

Both the singles and sixes are important. But they have an appropriate timing. Many bloggers start trying to hit the digg homepage and get frustrated because of the failure. And many people get so addicted to the singles that they just forget to accelerate. They get frustrated as well.

Start by concentrating on the singles. Build up your twitter follower base, stumbleupon friends list, the first few hundred backlinks and a handful of loyal users. Celebrate each landmark. It helps you stay motivated and it helps you get that all important user base which will hopefully drive your awesome posts to the homepage of digg.

Having done that do not stop at the singles though. Rather do not get content with increamental growth. Move in to the big league once your blog is ready. Aim for super competitive keywords, digg homepage and so on.

Let me know your views on the topic and do not forget to stumble and tweet my post.

There is no point in reinventing the wheel. The internet is full of people who have already done all hit and trial and figure out how to make money, build a successful blog, do affiliate marketing etc. No matter which part of the MMO world, you choose there are some gurus who are way ahead of them. It is really intelligent to learn from these gurus and then use the steps to build your blog / make money etc.

Having said that I don’t listen to what they are saying or writing on their blog. What the gurus say is marketing (well most of that). Because typically they have got a product/ a programme to sell to you. The blog posts are just commercials to sell that product/programmeto you.

A far more effective way to learn from the gurus is to observe what they are doing. The expert blogger may tell you about 100 methods to monetize your blog but he is using only 2 or 3. Obviously he is using them because they are the best. So what should you do? Try out all the 100 or go for the 3 being used by the master himself?

Look at their email marketing campaigns. Many of them use a single product. Do I need to read their articles about the best email marketing product? Think again.

• How did they get you to signup for their newsletter?
• What is the advertisement format that they are using?
• Which blogging theme are they using
• Look at the adsense block placement on their website if they have one
• What does the fact that most experts don’t have adsense on their site tell you?

What is your take? Do you listen to the gurus or observe them?

Blogging does not come naturally to me. But I want to succeed as a blogger. So this weekend I did what I do really well. Breakdown a goal to smaller steps and then go about getting each of those tasks done. That is how I came up with my roadmap to blogging success.

Having done so I realized that many of my regular readers may find it useful, it can be improved further with your comments and publishing it online will motivate me to stick to it longer. Hence here is the roadmap that I have created for myself. Detailed breakdown is available below the fold.

1. Create great/ useful content
2. Make the posts interesting and easy to read
3. Use tools to improve efficiency
4. Participate on other blogs
5. Make efforts to get more readers to the blog
6. Even more effort to convert them to long term users
7. Think beyond adsense

» Read more

It has been close to a month since I wrote the last post. Everyday I think that I must write a post today. Then I sit down infront of the laptop, log onto the admin page and start thinking about a topic to blog about. Then it happens. My mind comes out without any idea. It feels like torture after sometime and then I decide to postpone the process to the nextday. I am afraid I am suffering from the dreaded writer’s block.

How did I get the writer’s block?

I think I got to this condition by reading too much advice about how to become a better blogger. I was never a blogger in true sense. I am good at creating websites that solve a specific need like the website for walkins in India, sending sms through resume and a website for buying and selling used mobiles. Binaryday was started to help me prepare for the second hand mobile website. I started writing about mobile phones and related stuff to understand popularity of keywords and other market study related thing while the website was being developed.

However while blogging I got to know many wonderful bloggers and I started to like the blogosphere. Unlike the website world where another person with a similar website becomes a competition, in blogosphere others writing about the same topic become your friend. Then I started writing about my experience about doing seo for my own website. However all along I did not follow any rule. I wrote about anything I wanted to write about.

Then I started to read about how to become a better blogger, because I believe in being the best in whatever I do. People suggested focus, so I started to focus the blog on a particular topic. That is where the problem started. I started to enjoy blogging less and less. That started showing up in the results. To solve that problem I took the path that had always helped me in the past i.e the technical way. I started focusing on keyword research and seo to become successful at blogging.

That is when I got into the writer’s block. I am still trying to solve the problem and this post is an attempt at the same. Let us see how things move from here.