The reason most blogs are not well known is because they stuff many information into one blog. To make a famous blog, we need to focus on one thing only that is also call niche blog. By making a niche blog, we can show to readers that we are really expert in that area and not just junk writing.

However, we need to know how to choose the right niche before decided to make any niche blog.

1. Find keyword relating to the niche:

Firstly, I will use Google Adwords Keyword to find the keyword with high hits per month. Then I will search at Google the keywords to find the overall results for the keyword. The overall results will symbolize how many your competitors. If the overall results are lower than 100 thousand, than the keyword is suitable to be optimize into niche blog. 

2. Find niche with high paying keyword:

You can also use other services such as keyword country or wordtracker but I prefer Google Adwords Keyword because you can filter the results based on country and you can also see the estimate Cost Per Click that you will get. This thing is not a mandatory but it is better to have a niche with high paying keywords.

If your niche is not a high paying keyword, you can write article that contains high paying keyword. For example, your niche blog is about how to fish trout. Then you can make article about buying insurance before going fishing since ‘insurance’ is a high paying keyword.

3. Killer tactic, list the titles first:

The drawback of niche blog is that you need to concentrate on one area only. If you really do not expertise in that area, sometime you will lack idea to write. If you still insist to write, the produce article will be reduce in quality and thus will affect your readers’ perception towards you.

To avoid this, I really suggest that you write at least 30 titles of relating niche. Titles are important, the contents are second. Logically, our way of thinking always change by time and our knowledge always increase. If you can list the titles, it will be easy to write the contents anytime since you already know the main idea. Besides, you can arrange the titles according to it sequence so that your blog posts will look related to each other.

If you think that producing article will consume your time, you can always ask freelancer to do the dirty work. It is also best if you can find team members for blogging.

Once you have setup the niche blog and have a few posts, you can try to be an affiliate partner of someone selling products related to your niche. For easy access of affiliate products, you can register with clickbank.

In order for Google to send web crawlers to your site, Google need to  know the address (or URL) of your site. This can be done in two ways, the first way is too submit your site at Google Add URL, while the second way is by placing your website link at website that most likely to be visited by web crawlers. In this case, social bookmarking sites like Digg and Magnolia are  good choices.

After Google has indexed your site, it needs a few time for your site to appear in search engine. Meanwhile, make sure that you updates your blog or website frequently because Google loves it. And please don’t put duplicate contents in your website because Google is smart enough to differentiate duplicate contents.

If there are too much duplicate contents in your website, Google might consider your website as spam blog or website. If this happen, you never need to dream about getting your website appears in Google anymore.

Just some webmaster putting a lot in SEO to get good ranking in Google. They spam the post with certain keywords like spoiler, chapter, and episode so that they will rank high in Google. Indeed they are.

If there is only one person that do like that, I am sure there are visitors that would click their ads. Somehow when there are more than one, I would not bother to read at all.

I will just give them an ‘X’.

But that’s just during the honeymoon period. After some times, your ranking would going low and lower. To keep your ranking at the first page, link building is an option. There is another way to go that is by getting back in the Google honeymoon period.

How to do that?

That’s really easy. You just need to update the blog post by adding a few new lines. You also need to change the old published date to a new date. Once you re-publish the post, there is a high chance for Google to treat the post as new release entry.

The proof:

• My third post (date December 2008) in this blog has no where to be in Yahoo and Google SERP. I just use the above method and suddenly the post ‘POP’ out in the first page of Google SERP.
• Look at the date. Google even show that the post is just released for not more than 1 hour despite the fact that I was just re-published old entry.

Ps: I am using the Malaysia search function. The web function is too tense full of competitors to beat.

I agree that niche blog is far better in earning revenue but somehow I disagree that personal blog is useless. I recommend that every blogger has at least two blogs, one personal, and the other is focus on the main subject.

At first, I decided to blog about gadget at one of my blog. After a while I run of idea and something new get to my eyes. The blog that was supposed for gadgets had turned into a sports blog. And after a while I feel bored with sports, and then I wrote about movies.

At last the supposed to be niche blog contains too many niches. That is the time that I put in my mind to just make the blog as a blog to put irrelevant stuffs. I would go to that blog whenever I feel attracted to something new and got something to share. By having a jumble blog, my other niche blog is saved from irrelevant stuff.

That’s not all. Personal blog is also good in doing keyword research and choosing profitable niche that has high demands. Since I jumbled all stuffs into one blog, I can compare the traffics that I received for certain niches. Sometimes I feel really surprised when something so short that I post gain more traffics from SE compare to a long one. And sometimes I fell surprised when the keyword that I think had no value turn to be a diamond.

Ahmad is an internet entrepreneur in Malaysia. As there is no online store for shoes yet, he took the first step by selling shoes online. He started his business with an online store. Too bad the online stores didn’t receive good amount of targeted traffics and that leads to less conversion.

Later he found that targeted traffics is important to convert visitors to customers. That’s why he created a blog about shoes. He made keyword research so that football fanatics reach his blog through search engine. In the blog there is good article related to shoes and good tips for buying shoes. Readers isn’t animal. They know when you treat them as fish or as friend. That’s why honesty is important. Once his readers trust him, there is a high chance for them to buy something that Ahmad promotes or sells.

Now Ahmad made a lot of money by selling shoes. The real problem occurs when other people noticed his success and try to be a copycat. Later they will be huge number of copycats to compete in the same niche as Ahmad (this explained why the number of gossip blogs increase drastically).

Since the competitors is increasing, his customers is split too. Now he need to think of a strategy to outstand his competitors. Feel needed, Ahmad has created a few more blogs that related to shoes niche. He made a blog just for Adidas shoes, a blog just for Bata shoes, and a blog just for Asadi shoes. Since he has quite a numbers of blog, the probability for internet users to end up at his online store also increase. Thus increase the conversion rates.

Some might think that it’s stupid to make a lot of blogs. It’s better to place all of them in one place. But somehow there are some professional that do the method. You can go to this blogspot blog and see how many other movie.blogspot links are located at the right sidebar. Among the sidebar links at those blogspot blogs, there is a link to a non-blogspot site. See, the major purpose of all that free blogspot sites is just to give link juice to the main website.

This method is also used by NSTP Malaysia. Instead of putting all news in the same newspaper, they created two Malay newspaper that is Berita Harian and Harian Metro. By doing that, the chance of people to buy their newspaper over Utusan just increased. They even create separate websites for those newspaper although in reality both of Bharian and Hmetro come from the same company.

Since Ahmad need to maintain a lot of blogs by himself, his post quality decrease. He also rarely update a blog because the numbers of blog that he need to maintain has increase.

In order for Ahmad to create successful blogs network, he need to pay for freelance writer so that his network blogs keep update with latest content. He need to do that for SEO purpose or the blog will have low ranking in SERP. For that, he need to spend around USD50 for a blog every month.

Now back to the real question, are you willing to pay USD50 for that or you are more willing to just buy a link at less price per month?

That’s lead to a spam portal at which all of the content is stolen from other blogs and online newspaper. For some reason, the portal is well ranked in Google despite all of the duplicate contents. It even was listed in Dmoz directory. This maybe due to the efforts I put for link building. I even manage to detect some government forum and blog that have do-follow and then put a few comment just for link juices.

Perhaps this lead to Google think the portal to have some kind of relation with government and thus treat it has priority site. In just one month I easily get PR 2. Being a naive and selfish, I submitted the portal to Text Link Ads and got approved. I am sure you would be amazed for the price that some advertisers are willing to pay for a PR2 spam portal. I managed to get USD 15 for three links. That is quite cheap but somehow this is more than I expect for

a website with duplicate contents.

This is also the reason of increasing number of spam blogs in nowadays blogosphere. To reduce the risk of duplicate content, those sp bloggers use ‘article spinner’ software that can any article with different terms. Those sp bloggers become lazier when they use automated plug-in to automate their job.

Within a few months, Google bots start give page ranking to websites. And once their website got PR, that is the time to harvest their ‘hard efforts’ of using automated task.

Lets say that they get USD 15 for a website, how much do you think they can get for 10 websites?

The tips to pull this trick is just to find a niche that has high demand but less number of competitors (websites) out there.

You might feel weird why advertisers willing to spend dollars for just for a link, read my next post.

Have you heard about Flippa? Some bloggers that are not really into web flipping maybe never heard about it. Flippa is actually a source of income for webmaster who like to build websites just for sake to sell them for quick money. Yes, there are actually exist some webmasters that do that.

So I just tried wandering around Flippa.com so that I can learn more about Flippa. To enter Flippa marketplace is not free but I am sure that you would be expose to a lot of opportunity because there are a lot of potential buyers that like to visit Flippa.

I feel quite shock when I look some website that doesn’t really have enough value is bid for quite a good price at Flippa. How come there is someone that are willing to bid USD 260 for a PR0 and just 300 unique views per month website? Not only, the content is not original since it use auto-blog. But that’s what make Flippa the best web flipping platform.

In Flippa, website layout is one of the major factors in determining how much your website worth. That’s why some website with low traffics and low PR managed to be sold at quite a high price.

As what I see, most websites that receive good number of bids at Flippa are static websites. If you decided to stop blogging and sell your site, it’s good thing if you tweak your front page first so that it looks like a static website. However that’s just the rough view. Every buyers have their own thinking. Just depends on your luck.

Currently there is a webhosting review site that still in bidding. Even with just 10 webhosting as comparison and quite a simple layout, the website still managed to get hundred dollars. Even Hostipedia is better than that.

If you are a blogger wannabe or you want to add another blog, visiting and researching the websites at Flippa is good thing to do. Since you would know how much a website being bid or sold, of course you can easily detect how valuable is the niche. If you choose a good niche, I am sure you would have easy time selling your blog at Flippa once you feel that you want to stop the blog.

If you are interested in web flipping, you can buy a commercial Malay e-book called “Rahsia Flippa” that focus solely on Flippa. I am not reading the e-book yet so I cannot give any words about it. Check it yourself.

Resources:

Don’t want to spend money for commercial E-Book? I hope those resources below would help you. I find most of the information interesting despite free.

Bestblogs.asia (Flippa to make money) and Bestblogs.asia (flipping-flippa)

• Learn how to sell effectively in Flippa.
• How to put more value on your site.
• How to use Flippa tags to determine good niches

Other resources:

• Other places to sell website
• Selling domain names at Flippa
• How Flippa setting can increase bids
• How to increase sell through rate at Flippa

Webmaster Dilemma:

As final word, here are some dilemmas that you webmaster would face once you decided to participate in Flippa.

• Sedo vs Flippa
• Static web vs Blog
• Automated vs Manual Post

Currently I am using offline blogging for blogging purpose. Not because my place don’t have internet connection but I think that offline blogging tool such as Window Live Writer make my job easier. Most offline blogging tools support a lot of blogging platforms such as WordPress, Blogger, Type-Pad, Drupal, and Xanga. But currently I am not seeing any that supports Joomla yet. Perhaps Joomla isn’t a blogging platform.

Why you should use offline blogging tool

For a blogspot user, I am sure you are not satisfied with the current blogspot editor. Unlike WordPress, blogspot has no plugin. That’s why offline blogging tool like Windows Live Writer is great. You can easily do auto-linking by customizing the option at Windows Live Writer.

Internet speed play important role in blogging. If your internet connection is slow, I am sure your mode to blog would going down. Blogging offline means that you do not need to worry about internet speed. If you feel tired, you can save the post as draft and resume writing once you feel ready.

If you want to use these offline blogging tools in WordPress, made sure that you already enable the protocol for it at Writing option (can be found at WP-Admin Dashboard).

Free offline blogging tools

Windows Live Writer :

I am using Windows Live Writer for blogging. Windows Live Writer enable me to publish and edit post from my blog at ease. There is also a lot of plugins enable for Windows Live Writer. However the default Windows Live Writer already made me satisfied. Windows Live Writer also offers watermarking and applying certain effects to your picture. I recommend Windows Live Writer for bloggers that need faster blogging solution.

Besides that, you can easily put a lot images in Windows Live Writer by dragging the folder of the images inside your Live Writer. I am sure you would have a hard time of inserting image in WordPress.

ScribeFire :

ScribeFire is a Mozilla Firefox Add-On. If you’re really into Firefox, ScribesFire should make you satisfied. ScribeFire is light weight compare to Live Writer but its feature still far from Live Writer.

Portable WBloggar :

WBloggar is now available in portable version. Portable WBloggar should benefit bloggers with no internet connection at home. With WBloggar, you can blog offline at home and then publish the draft post at computer cafe or office.

Post2Blog :

I never try Post2Blog yet. You can try it and tell me your opinion.

I installed Search Status add-on in my Mozilla Firefox so that I can easily track Page Rank and Alexa rank status of any website. Suddenly this blog that was supposed to be a PR 0 showed PR 2. However the Page Rank value is still unstable and may change any time. Lets hope that Page Rank of Hostipedia.com remains PR 2. Right now I am feeling like a husband that knows her wife is pregnant.

So what would you do once you have a PR?

Some web masters would think to sell link but this is indeed a bad decision if you love your blog ranking in SERP. Google is smart enough to detect something fishy like paid links. That’s why I would not doing such dangerous thing in this blog.

If so, why bother to have high PR? Some claims that high PR means you can rank better in Google SERP. I don’t know how much of this is true but my other blog with PR 2 easily rank in Google. My post about PC Buying Guide managed to get in Google first page for “PC buying guide” keyword that has 30 millions total results although just published within a month. SEO is a part of them, but Page Rank helps a lot.

That’s why although Hostipedia is SEO optimized, it’s hard to rank well in Google although for long tails keyword and few total results. Lets hope that Hostipedia will rank better in Google once it got PR 2.