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.
Last week, an SPI reader asked me the following question:
“Pat. You seem to be EVERYWHERE online. Everywhere I go, people are talking about you and your name always comes up. How do you do it?”
To be honest, I never believed I would become this successful online, especially with SPI – a blog in the “make money online” niche, which as you probably know is wildly over saturated. Although my success is partially accidental I know exactly why I’m here.
What it really comes down to is this:
If you want to become successful online, you must think about what you do as building a brand. In order to build a brand, you must do what you can to be everywhere.
A successful blogger is not just a blogger. True – it’s the blog where things get started. It’s where authority is constructed and content is published. But if you stick to just a blog, you’ll be just that – stuck to your blog.
Your blog or your website is only the beginning. It’s your hub, your homebase where people can go to find out more about who you are and what you do, but it’s also just one piece of the giant puzzle that is your brand – your omnipresent, influential and (if applicable), money making brand.
This is the final installment of my YouTube marketing tactics series. In part 1, we covered how to approach video marketing, as well as what to include in your recordings for maximum impact. In part 2, we discussed the importance of optimizing the Title, Description and Tags of your video, and I included a few cool tricks to help you “snipe” traffic from other popular videos.
In part 3, we’re going to cover some tips and tricks that you can do with your video after it’s uploaded. Much like with blogging (and iPhone apps), the work should not stop once your content is live. There are a few things you should do before you can just let YouTube and the Internet do it’s thing and drive traffic to your videos and ultimately your blog automatically. Again, it’s about putting in the hard work now, so you can continuously reap the benefits later.
It’s been around for over 5 years, yet for some reason most bloggers still haven’t explored the video sharing platform where millions of people around the world are watching over 2 billion videos a day.
I took the SPI brand onto YouTube on September 26th, 2009 for the same reason I do everything else I report on this blog – to see if it’s a worth while place to invest my time.
276 days later, I can truthfully say that I’m more than pleased with the results of my experiment with YouTube to expand the SPI brand and audience base. Here are some quick numbers from my account as of today:
15 Uploaded Videos
59,582 Total Views
720 Subscribers
That’s an average of about 1 new video every 2 to 3 weeks. Considering that the average length of my videos is about 6 minutes in length, you can get a feel for just how much time I’ve really dedicated to this “experiment” – 6 minutes every 3 weeks.
Not a huge amount of time invested, but you can see that I’ve earned a considerable number of views and a good amount of subscribers as a result, which has ultimately increased traffic to my blog as well as helped to earn a few affiliate sales here and there. Without much additional effort, my daily viewership continues to grow as you can see below:
By no means would I call myself a YouTube expert, but I’ve picked up a few tips and tricks along the way that may help you expand your brand, increase your views and grab more subscribers if you do decide to expand onto YouTube, if you’re not on the platform already.
Here’s a quick two and a half minute YouTube video which explains why it’s so much easier to earn more money working for yourself online, versus working for someone else.
I’ve been doing a lot this past week as far as expanding the Smart Passive Income brand. I created a Facebook Fan Page, which has nearly 100 fans already. Today, I setup a YouTube Channel and decided to post my first video, which I’ve embedded here on the blog for you below.
Part of branding is staying consistent with how you present yourself and your products/blogs/business/whatever. So, in an effort to do this, I’ve tried to create some continuity in the web addresses where people can connect with me. Here are some examples below:
It doesn’t matter what industry or niche you’re in – different people prefer different ways of learning. If you can cater to each of these types of people, you will not only expand your customer base to those who wouldn’t normally purchase from you, but you’ll give those who would of purchased from you anyways the tempting option to send a little more cash your way.
There are three basic methods to learn new material: reading, listening, and watching. Keep in mind that particular order. While doing business online, we can cater to those who prefer each of these methods by creating eBooks, audio products, and video, respectively.
I thought it would be helpful to create a resource page that you can always come to for all of your passive income needs. I’ll add to it as I learn more, but you’ll notice that in the future I will reference this page quite often. I recommend bookmarking it for your reference and convenience. Enjoy!
Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links to products that will earn me a commission. These are all things that I have experience with that I am recommending because they are helpful and are companies that I trust, not because of the commissions that I may earn from you using these products.
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
This is the final installment of my YouTube marketing tactics series. In 
In part 1 of this mini series about 
It doesn’t matter what industry or niche you’re in – different people prefer different ways of learning. If you can cater to each of these types of people, you will not only expand your customer base to those who wouldn’t normally purchase from you, but you’ll give those who would of purchased from you anyways the tempting option to send a little more cash your way.
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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