I went through the course myself 18 months ago and it literally transformed my business, and since then the course has been tweaked, expanded and improved to be what I believe is one of the best and most comprehensive courses available for building a sustainable online business.

Now here’s the good news, the course is being relaunched with a bunch of new modules and for the next few days only you can get access for just $1.  Believe me, if you want to learn how to really make money online it will be the best dollar you ever spent.

It’s not a “magic bullet” or “get rich quick scheme”, but a solid plan to get you up and running online as quickly as possible.  You’ll need to put some real work in to make it really profitable, but the course, which includes coaching sessions, an excellent forum and a HUGE amount of video based lesson content will take you by the hand every step of the way.

Do yourself a favour, and check out Niche Profit Classroom today.

Six years ago, Stompernet faculty member Ed Dale released a free trianing program called The 30 Day Challenge. He wanted to share some of his expertise in online business, not to make money but rather to build up his own authority in the subject.  You see, Ed knows full well that the best way to get people to trust you, like you, and maybe eventually pay you large sums of money for personal coaching is to give them the absolute best quality free materials possible.  That’s exactly what he did with 30DC, and it was so successful that he’s done it again each year, and each year it gets better and better.

Now along with Dan Raine, he’s developed it into bar none the best free training for anyone wanting to start an online business, or increase traffic, conversions and profits for any existing business.  Over the years the coursehas expanded and changed to keep up to date with the latest trends and technology, and both the quality and quantity of the training really is second to none.  While it’s suitable for complete beginners, seasoned veterans are sure to find some gems of wisdom in there too.  In fact, I’ve been making money online since 1999 and every year I learn a bunch of new techniques through the challenge.  It’s broken down into easy to consume lessons, so simply skip over the things you know and get stuck into any new material you want to learn!

Now – if you are a 30DC veteran then you may already know that there is a BIG change this year, in fact it’s no longer a 30 day challenge at all.  This year it’s simply The Challenge, and the reason was that in previous years many people struggled to get through all the lessons.  They fell behind a day, then 2 days, and by the end they were struggling to keep up and gave up.

This year the lessons are split into modules, each one is 7 days in length and each module is then followed by 7 days off giving people a chance to catch up, while also giving more time for SEO and allowing Google and other search engines to rank new sites.

Well, I guess there’s no point in me saying any more.  If you want to take part, or just find out more head over to www.TheChallenge.co

Well typically, white hat is all the 100% above board stuff like creating great content, keeping your HTML and CSS clean and tidy, and letting people link to you naturally.  Black hat is stuff like keyword stuffing and other “sneaky” techniques which the search engines frown upon, and grey hat is somewhere in between…

Now one of my favorite “gurus” for want of a better word, Russell Brunson, is currently teaching some awesome techniques which he is calling “The Darkside or DotComSecrets” which has a real grey hat feel to it, but in essence it’s just some really seriously cool techniques for getting a ton of free traffic.

Now let me warn you, this is not total newbie stuff.  You will need a little computing skill to work these techniques, but trust me you won’t have seen stuff like this before.  He’s curretly giving away 3 videos (I’ve only watched the first 2 so far) and they are stuffed full of really powerful content, stuff which I’m 99% sure you won’t have heard about before, and which most of your competitors won’t be using.

The first video shows some awesome techniques to get indexed and ranked super fast leveraging social media, content syndication, RSS and some very cool tricks which include a way to get free dofollow PR8 links!!!

Anyway, if you’re interested I strongly recommend clicking below and watching the videos…

The problem is that people focus on all the wrong things, fall flat on their face with virtually nobody watching their videos and then give up! Sound familiar? Well don’t worry, let me show you what you’re doing wrong, and how to solve the problem immediately!

Success breeds success

Let’s say you’re searching YouTube for video tutorials on using Google’s Adwords. You enter your search term, click the search button, and among the results you see these 2 videos. Which one would YOU click on?

I bet you picked the first video right?  Well most people would and it’s not hard to see why.  At this point we have very limited information about each video – a small screenshot, a title, a short description, the username of the poster, the age of the video and how many views it has had.

Now while all of these will affect our decision in some way, that last piece of information – how many times the video has already been viewed, is what will make most people click on the first video.

Whether conciously or subconciously, we realise that both videos have been online for roughly the same amount of time and yet one of them has been viewed many, many more times.  We assume (rightly or wrongly) that since it has been more popular it’s probably a better video, and we follow the herd and click on the link.

So, the answer to getting more views is getting more views right?  Well hold on, it gets a little more complicated than that!

YouTube rankings

Ever noticed what YouTube shows you after watching one of their videos?  That’s right, links to more videos!

YouTube want to keep you on their site as long as possible, since that allows them more opportunities to show you advertising and generate them revenue.  So after watching a video (and in the sidebar while viewing) you’ll see links to “related video”, essentially other content which YouTube believes you’ll also be interested in watching.

So how does YouTube determine which “other videos” to link to?  Well again, they use the number of views as one of their factors, but others include number of comments, and user ratings.  So not only does a video need lots of views, but also lots of comments and a high user rating in order to attract more viewers – a classic “chicken and egg” situation.  To get more views, you need more views!

There is a solution

So the reason most people fail at video marketing is because they spend hours crafting the best video they can produce.  They buy a new camera, editing software, lighting, a book on “video production” and pour their heart and soul into their masterpiece.  Then they upload to YouTube and wait for that torrent of traffic which never comes, and give up thinking nobody likes their video!

The problem of course is that they didn’t get traffic to their video, and with no traffic they get no views, no comments and no ratings.  When their video appears in search results they get no clicks, because nobody wants to click on a video with only 12 views!

So how do we set the ball rolling, and give our videos the boost they deserve?

Step 1 – send visitors

Whenever you upload a new video you YouTube you should send traffic direct to the video.  Make a blog post and link to the video, post the link on Twitter and Facebook, send an email out to your list…

Your subscribers, followers and readers already know you, trust you, and are interested in your niche so they are likely to be interested in your video.  That initial rush of visitors will bump up your views, which will start to attract more “cold” visitors direct from YouTube.

Step 2 – ask for interaction

Don’t just direct people to your video – ask them to join in the conversation.  Ask a question and tell them to reply in the comments, and ask them to rate the video.  That will start a commotion around your video, get the conversation started, and increase your rankings on YouTube and the liklihood of your video showing up in the “similar videos” lists driving yet more traffic.

Step 3 – embed

Your view count increases from views on YouTube and on embedded videos, so embed your video into your blog, landing page, website, in fact anywhere you think your visitors will be interested in watching it.  Set the video to autoplay and you increase your views with every new video, and more views means more traffic!

Got any more tips of your own on getting more eyeballs on your YouTube videos?  Then leave a comment below…

Well let me tell you something about Twitter.  If you want to use Twitter to really help your business, you shouldn’t be talking – you should be LISTENING!

That’s right, while Twitter is a great tool for getting your message across to your customers, it’s an even better tool for getting valuable information FROM your customers.  A few minutes spent searching on selective key phrases on Twitter and you’ll know exactly what your customers are thinking, what they want, what they are concerned about, and how you can improve your products or services to best meet their demands.

Since 2006 Twitter has grown to be a major player in both social media and real time search.  With over 4 BILLION Tweets in the first quarter of 2010, there is an absolute goldmine of information just waiting for you in the archives.

Planning on promoting that new product launch this week?  Then user Twitter to find out what your customers think about it, what other affiliates are giving away as bonuses, and what the reviewers are saying.

Thinking of adding a new feature to your main product?  Then ASK your followers what changes they want!

Twitter is an incredibly powerful tool, far too powerful to be used only for spewing out a constant stream of updates in 140 character snippets.  Use it to really listen to what the market wants, then align your offers to the market’s needs and you can’t fail!

Google makes hundreds of changes to its algorthms thoughout the year, but the so called May Day Update has caused quite a stir because it has caused immediate and far reaching changes in rankings, especially for long tail terms.  As usual, nobody outside of Google is 100% sure exactly what was changes, why or how, but there have been many theories.  What is certain though is that rnakings have altered, quite significantly in some cases.

While the exact changes and causes aren’t known for sure, one thing which does seem certain is that long tail terms have been affected to a large degree.  It appears that Google wants bigger authority sites to rank better than micro-niche sites for longtail terms.  This would seem to follow their recent trend towards attempting to improve its index for long tail terms to weed out “thin affiliate” sites and micro niche, keyword domain sites with no real content.

Straight from the horses mouth

While we can speculate about the exact nature of the algorithm changes, there are some things we do know for certain.  Google’s own Matt Cutts has answered a number of questions regarding the update, confirming that it is a permanent algorithm change which does affect long tail more than other searches, and it was done to increase the value of the SERPS for those long tail terms.  Here’s a quick video where Matt answers some questions about the update:

What does this mean in real terms?

Well the first thing is to take advice from The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy – don’t panic!

First you want to check your stats and find out whether your sites have been affected.  Take a look at your stats from a couple of days before May 1st and a couple of days after, paying specific attention to your long tail referrals.  If they are significantly down then you may want to take action, but don’t start randomly changing things all over the place.  Try to figure out what has been affected, and then take logical action.  It may be that you’ll need to buid new links to certain pages, or redirect some link juice from other parts of your sites.

If your business model relies heavily on long tail, and specifically if you’re building lots of “thin affiliate” sites then you might want to think about your business model, not just because of the Mayday update but due to Google’s trend towards giving less and less rankings to small micro niche sites.  So called “sniper” sites and “Made For Adsense” mini sites appear to be dropping in rankings, and they are likely to continue on that trend.

So what can you do about it?  Well, if you do have a portfolio of micro sites, consider bulking them up.  Build more pages, real content, and more backlinks.  Google likes authority sites, so adding more content to a site, perhaps integrating a blog and some social features, and generally turning your mini sites into valuable resoruces will not only help keep Google on your side, but will likely please your visitors too.  As usual, ask yourself what you can do to add value and generally that will help both your visitors and your rankings – a win-win situation!

You might have read my posts last year about a system called Niche Profit Classroom, well I went through that entire program almost a year ago and while it wasn’t perfect, I did learn enough from it to start building profitable niche websites.  I’m tweaked that system since, and have been spending most of my time over recent months building and promoting mini sites, and also a couple of authority sites in varous niches.

There’s one major piece of the puzzle that Niche Profit Classroom didn’t cover in enough detail though, driving decent levels of targetted traffic.  Well, truth be told a sizable amount of the NPC system did cover traffic generation, but it mostly involved article marketing which works great, but it takes a lot of time and effort.

Well, about a month ago I stumbled upon a service called Unique Article Wizard which has literally changed the way I work.  I’ve been using it on some of my sites, and I’ve had pages go from less than 10 backlinks to over 500 backlinks in just a few weeks, so let me explain how it works…

Unique Article Wizard Review

Unique Article Wizard (from now on I’ll just call it UAW) is an article rewriting and submission service, but like no other I’ve come across.  It doesn’t “spin” articles algorithmically which creates that broken, artificial sounding writing which can be really off putting.  Instead, it takes 3 copies of the same article as an input, restructures them to form a unique version, adds a title and a resource box (again semi-unique based on your settings) and then submits it to an article directory, blog or site.  Then it does the whole process again, and again sending out 50 or more unique articles daily and slowly building up backlinks for you.

The restructured articles read perfectly, since they are essentially human writen rather than spun, but the search engines see unique content so the linkbacks carry much more weight than if you submitted the same article to hundreds of sites.  Also, since the service can be scheduled you can loads up several articles, with backlinks pointing to many pages on your sites, and set them to drip feed the articles over several days or weeks which makes the backlinks appear much more natural.

As I’ve already mentioned, I’ve been using this as one of my primary sources of backlinks for the past few weeks and I’ve found it to be one of the best backlink builders ever.  The interface takes a few minutes to get used to, but is actually very quick and easy to use once you get the hang of it.  You can also use their plugin to get automated unique content for your own blogs and sites which is a real bonus.

If you are looking to increase traffic to your own sites, blogs and even build backlinks to your Web 2.0 properties, this is one of the best ways to do it.  You will need to invest a little time in the initial article submissions, but that effort will be multiplied ten-fold by the software and you’ll see real world results very quickly – I really can’t recommend it enough.

If you want to learn more and try Unique Article Wizard for yourself you can visit the site here

So yesterday afternoon I posted an article on Flash Games Classroom. (Note – This was actually an article I wrote a few weeks ago and submitted to Ezinearticles. It has had a 14% clickthrough rate and a reasonable number of views, so I rewrote that article, updating it slightly for a different audience, so it took about 5 minutes to do the whole post!)

You’ll notice that page has a Tweet Meme “Retweet” widget right at the top, so after posting I used that to Tweet the article to my Flash games Twitter account (about 700 followers). Since then, the page has been retweeted a further 4 times by visitors, and so far over 100 unique visitors have come to the article from Twitter, so 100+ targetted visitors in the first 24 hours for 5 minutes work – not too shabby!

Note that the retweet widget is key – I sent my tweet out to only a small number of followers, but it has the potential for being retweeted by someone with a massive list! You can increase the chances of this happening:

1. Make the content high quality and unique
2. Make it easy for the retweet – have a retweet widget on the page, and keep your own original tweet short (leave room for “RT @yourname ” !!!)
3. Use the retweet widget yourself to send the first tweet
4. Retweet other people’s content – they will be more likely to retweet back!
5. Get follwers who like to retweet! I do this by adding active retweeters myself (I search for “RT learn flash games” for example to find people who have retweeted content containing the terms “learn” “flash” and “games”)

So there you go, a very quick and easy method for getting highly targetted traffic from Twitter on demand!

Anyone got more tips, post them here!

Do you (re)tweet?  There’s no denying the massive growth in popularity and power of Twitter in recent months, and as more and more people become Twitter-savvy they are starting to use the service in new and better ways.

One type of tweet which is definitely on the increase in the reTweet (RT) which is where a user likes your tweet so much that they send it out again, to all their followers!  This is not only a massive compliment, but it means extra exposure and often new followers.

Format of a retweet

The usual format for a retweet is to start with the word Retweet, or more commonly just RT, then @username (the person who you are retweeting), then the original tweet.

If the original tweet is short enough that you have a few characters to spare then you can add a comment before the RT:

Comment here RT: @username original tweet goes here

Why retweet?

Retweeting is good for you, your followers, and the person you retweet, here’s why…

When you retweet you’re taking a useful/interesting tweet that many of your followers won’t have read, and allowing them to see it.  Since you found is useful/interesting/funny/etc and your followers by definition are interested in similar subjects to you, chances are they will like it too!

So you’re helping your followers by giving them content, you’re helping the person you retweet by exposing them to your followers who will likely be interested in what they have to say.  This in turn helps you by increasing your own followers loyalty, and probably getting the attention (and probably a follow) from the person you reteweeded (is that a word??) A win, win, win situation!

Getting retweeted

Of course the most value when someone retweets is for the original tweeter, so how do you get more of your own content reteweeted?  Here are 4 top tips to get more retweets…

1. Firstly, post high value tweets which help people.  Usually tweets which link to useful articles, videos, blogs or software tend to get retweeted often – any links to free things tend to get retweeted!
2. Use keywords in your tweets.  The more targetted your keywords the more chance they will get picked up and retweeted by new followers.
3. Keep your tweet short.  With only 140 characters, if your tweet is too long there won’t be enough room to add RT @username at the beginning which means people will have to edit your tweet… and people are lazy!  make sure you use shortened URLs for links and leave at least enough characters for your username and four extra (for “RT @”)
4. Lastly – don’t be shy about retweeting other people.  If you retweet often you’ll probably find that other people retweet you back!

So what are you waiting for?  Get out there and start reTweeting!

Now guessing is a great starting point.  You need to put yourself into your user’s shoes, think about what they are likely to be searching for, and that is your starting point for your keyword research – but it really is the start, not the end!

The next step is to take that list of what you think your visitors will be searching for, and plug them into a keyword tool to find out which ones are getting searched in decent volume, and then also to see how competitive those terms are and whether you think it’s worth trying to rank for them.

Choosing the right keywords

Sometimes the difference between a good search phrase, that will get you loads of traffic, and a bad one which won’t can be just a single word – or even a single letter!  Let me give you an example…

One of my websites, Kwikgames, offers free Flash games to visitors.  Each month I take a look at my stats and keywords to see if things need adjusting, or if I can spot a gap in the market which is worth trying to rank for.

Recently I decided to try and rank for “Free word games“.  I had already identified it as potentially viable, with a reasonable amount of monthly traffic, and it looked like I would be able to rank for the term over time with a little work.  According to Google’s keyword tool the term gets around 110,000 searches each month – not too shabby!

But look what happens if I accidentally miss the S off of games… “Free word game” only shows 18,100 monthly searches – almost one tenth of the volume!  And adding one extra word so it becomes “free Flash word games” drops down to less than 1000 searches per month!

Now if I had only guessed at my keywords, and thought that my visitors might be searching “free word game” rather than “free word games” I would have missed out on a slice of almost 100,000 visitors each month, yet all 3 of these variations are relevant to my visitors!

How to find good keywords

Thankfully you don’t have to guess… and you don’t even have to spend any money!  There are some great paid keyword tools out there, and I use one of them myself, but the one I’m recommending you start with if Google’s free tool at https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal

You can use the tool in 2 different ways.  Firstly, you can type one or more keyphrases in and hit the “Get keyword ideas” button to get a list of related terms along with their respective monthly search volumes, and an indicator of how competitive they are.

Secondly, you can enter one of your cometitor’s website URLs and you’ll see a list of the keywords they rank for, along with the search volumes.

If you’ve not done much in the way of keyword research in the past this is a great way to start.  Look for phrases which have a reasonable monthly search volume, but don’t look too competitive.  It’s tempting to see phrases with massive numbers and try to rank for them, but unless you can rank for a term the number of monthly searches are irrelevant.

As an example, of I take “word” out of my example phrase above and just try “free games” the keyword tool returns over 30 million monthly searches!  While it might be tempting to try and rank for that, I know that the competition is just way too fierce – I’ll never in a million years rank above sites like yahoo games or Miniclip!

So spend some time looking for terms with good volume, and less competition where you can “slip under the radar” and get a piece of the action.  As a very rough guide, a site in the number 1 spot in Google can expect to get around one third of the clicks – so if you rank #1 for a term which gets 1000 searches a month you can expect to get around 300 – 350 clicks from that.  The number 2 spot tends to get significantly less and so on, with the number 10 spot getting only 1 – 2% of the clicks.  Knowing that you can work out roughly what volume of traffic to expect from the keywords you’re aiming to rank for depending on where you rank!

Watch out for a follow-up to this post in the near future where I’ll be talking about how to closely track your own rankings, and analyse your competition!