One of my favorite books of all time is Purple Cow, by Seth Godin.
In it, Seth describes that the key to success is to find a way to stand out – to be the purple cow in a field of monochrome Holsteins. (A Holstein is a breed of cow. I looked it up.)
Seth’s description really resonates with me because looking back at my entrepreneurial journey, that’s exactly what I’ve always done – I have always purposely tried to stand out from the crowd.
In fact, you may be reading this post today because there was something I did, or something on my blog that one day made you think that it was different from the hundreds of thousands of other blogs talking about entrepreneurship and making money online.
Here are some examples of how I purposely try to stand out from the crowd:
One day I was shopping for groceries and as I walked through the magazine section, I was stopped in my tracks. A title on one of the magazines had caught my eye and it read “One Wedding secret Prince Charles must take to his grave”. I just had to stop to pick it up to find out what they were on about. If you live in the UK, you always are interested in some crazy thing the royal family does. This moment reminded me of how powerful a great headline can be.
The Power of a Headline.
In a previous post, Pat explained why an incomplete headline will help you get more traffic to your blog and this post is a follow up to expand on that idea. In the age of social media and millions of other blogs competing for your audiences attention, it has become a noisy world out there. Today it is not who shouts the loudest that gets the most attention but who shouts the smartest. Especially if you are a new blogger, you could write all the great content you want, but to get that content read, you need to have a great headline that pulls people in from the RSS readers, Twitter or wherever you may be promoting it.
How to Learn to Write Great Headlines
Writing great headlines is not hard at all, you just need to know what works, the psychology behind why it works and put that into practice.
As many of you know, I’ve been doing my best to keep you up to date on the latest going-ons with my niche site challenge with Tyrone Shum. To make things easier for you, I recently created a niche site duel hub that will list all of the posts surrounding this challenge, from all of the competitors’ blogs.
Currently, it’s just me, Tyrone Shum and Mark Mason, but I’m happy to add anyone else’s case studies to the list who may be participating in this challenge too. All I ask is that you do not hide your niche and url in your reports, since the purpose of this challenge is to be as transparent as possible so our audiences can learn as much as they can.
If you’re participating, just contact me with a link to your first report and I’ll add it to the hub.
This post isn’t an official niche site duel update, but I am happy to say that as of 10:30pm PST on August 29th, I am currently ranked #186 in Google for my target keyword.
I definitely still have a long way to go to reach the first page, but for a brand new, one-week old site and 46,000 competing webpages, that’s not bad at all, and I expect to quickly climb much higher.
I’ll go over my exact strategy, in detail, in the next niche site duel update, but today, I wanted to share with you how you can track your website’s rank in the search engines for your target keywords.
It can be tough, especially right when you’re starting a new site, to know where you are on the radar. You don’t want to spend time flipping through each page of Google to find your site.
That’s why I recommend using one of the three methods I show you in the video below:
Hopefully, we’ll all get to a point where we’re all sitting in the number 1 position for our target keyword, in which case, these techniques wouldn’t be necessary. But until then, I hope you find these techniques useful.
Last year, I made a conscious decision to turn my growing Smart Passive Income blog into the Smart Passive Income brand.
I knew nothing about “branding” at the time, except that I knew that successful brands utilized all different mediums to reach their audience. Stick to one medium, and you’ll limit your reach to only those who use that medium.
That’s why you see major brands on television and on the radio (and everywhere else it seems), or why you see many of the top bloggers syndicate and expand their written content with videos and podcasts too.
There are hundreds of different ways to setup a niche website – you know this, but I’ll outline my process for you below because it’s easy to follow and it doesn’t require much know-how. If you have anything to add, I’m sure the people here who are unfamiliar with this process will appreciate your insight in the comment section.
In the past, niche sites were almost always static sites, and blogs were just a way to keep your friends informed about the shenanigans from last weekend’s party. They weren’t given much in terms of priority and ranking in Google’s search engine algorithm.
Now, as I’m sure you’ll know, blogs can rank high – really high.
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In this session of The Smart Passive Income Podcast, I go over 5 powerful ways that you can create profitable passive income products. There’s a ton of info out there about what kinds of products you can make (i.e. eBooks, membership websites, etc.), but there isn’t much about the creative methods that you can easily create them, which is why I’m excited to share these methods with you today.
I guarantee that after you listen to this, you’ll probably have a ton of ideas about what you can do and you should be well on your way to creating some kind of passive income info product.
I’m not an expert at niche sites. Tyrone Shum, my challenger for this little competition, is not an expert either. We’re both fairly brand new to the niche site scene, so we’re going to make mistakes. The reason why we’re making this challenge public is to show you what those mistakes are, so you don’t do them yourself.
I just wanted to make that clear here in the beginning stages of our duel.
Now that I’ve said that, I’ve already made a mistake that I’m happy to share with you, because there’s a big lesson that goes along with it.
Who needs mixed martial arts or the World Cup when you’ve got a friendly Niche Site Competition to get your adrenaline pumping?
After announcing Monday that fellow blogger and good friend of mine, Tyrone Shum, challenged me to a Niche Site Competition, the response has been amazing. I didn’t expect this many people to get excited about it, and it actually makes me want to do something more than a tiny little product niche site, which I had originally planned. I want bigger results – something comparable to the results I had with my site at GreenExamAcademy.com.
I’ve done it before – and I know I can do it again.
My recent minor success with niche sites (as shown in my latest monthly report) caught the attention of fellow blogger, Tyrone Shum. The other day, he sent me this message on my Facebook page:
I’m always up for a little friendly competition, so I accepted Tyrone’s challenge.
Both Tyrone and I are going to document and report our progress on building a profitable niche site from scratch. We’re going to give you front row seats in our little competition, revealing exactly how we select a potentially profitable niche (which we’ll reveal to you), how we build a website around that market, how we send traffic to that site, and finally how we begin to earn an income form it.
I don’t really know why I had purchased it. I was still working my 9 to 5 job, and it’s a book that’s mainly geared toward those in advertising.
I was in architecture.
Sadly, I never had the chance to read it, but when I was flipping through the pages today, I randomly opened up to page 205, which was a chapter entitled: 43. Blogs – Still Lots of Learning to be Done.
Since I have a blog, I was interested and read on.
No, I'm not a millionaire, but I am living off of passive income made online. I'm here to show you what I've learned...
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Listening to classical music while feeding by baby boy some oatmeal mixed with pears, apples and bananas. Now I'm hungry!about 20 hours agofrom TweetDeck
Doing some hard core mind mapping on the home office whiteboard wall.about 1 day agofrom TweetDeck
One of my favorite books of all time is Purple Cow, by Seth Godin.
Before anything, I want to say this:
I’m always up for a little friendly competition, so I accepted Tyrone’s challenge.
As I was cleaning the house today, I found a book that I had purchased a couple of years ago, called 
No, I'm not a millionaire, but I am living off of passive income made online. I'm here to show 
Enter your name and email below to get Free Instant Access to the most comprehensive guide available on how to Publish, Market, and automate a killer eBook. 
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