As my long time online friends and subscribers know, I don’t recommend very many products. I ONLY recommend products I personally use. With that said I’d like to introduce what is now at the top of my recommended products – The Keyword Academy.

I’ve been a member of The Keyword Academy for a little over two months now and I’ve been able to turn what I’ve learned there into profit. There have been very few products I’ve been able to make that statement about. I HIGHLY recommend this program!

The Keyword Academy is a paid membership site that teaches everything from keyword research to AdSense site building using a step-by-step approach with videos and other tools. Run by Court Tuttle and Mark Butler, TKA is hands down the most important step I have taken to advance my understanding of AdSense, keywords, link building, niche websites and judging the competition. Yes, all the things we think we know as Internet Marketers. There’s always room for learning and this is certainly proof of that.

Mark and Court teach EVERY detail needed using video, transcripts, tutorials, webinars, Q&A sessions, a blog and an awesome forum.

Here’s the deal: The Keyword Academy costs $33 per month and you can try your first month for just $1. If you are still struggling to make a profit online you need this. A dollar isn’t much to risk to try it out but I’m going to make completely risk free for you…

Sign up with my affiliate link and watch the core videos. If you don’t think it was worth the investment, cancel before the first thirty days and I will refund your dollar personally. Enough said, try The Keyword Academy for just $1 dollar today.

In August I posted about using certain recent news stories to guide your AdSense site creations: How The News Can Help Guide Your Niche Sites. Around the time of that post I registered the domain GovernmentApplianceRebates.com from a NPR radio report talking about a new Government appliance rebate program that was going into effect in the late fall.

I sat on my hands until about a month ago when I setup the AdSense site. I actually outsourced the content writing with someone I found on Craigslist. Other than getting the site indexed by Google I did nothing. No article marketing, no back linking, nothing!

I decided to use that same article writer for another niche AdSense site but I wanted to check his work fist. I checked the blog content on Copyscape ^© and was very disappointed to discover every article was stolen word for word from Government sites. The site has absolutely no unique content! Needless to say I won’t be using this author again but things are actually going very well.

One Site – One Month – One Hundred Dollars
I’m pretty impressed after just 30 days with a small blog and no unique content, no marketing effort and zero backlinks. The blog actually generated $110.77 in AdSense revenue. Not bad for a single AdSense site that just started with no time invested.

In the comments section of How The News Can Help Guide Your Niche Sites I said “I fully expect the search traffic to dry up on most breaking news type domains“. I still believe this so it’s important to generate as much revenue as fast as possible from these recent news related niche sites. I think I have four months or more left on GovernmentApplianceRebates.com before traffic begins to drop off with a big surge coming up when the mainstream media starts reporting on the rebate program. By the end of it’s short life span I fully expect to profit between $500 and $1,000 or more for this single site.

Like I said, I have done nothing to promote most of my niche sites. I’m working with an article marketing membership site on the recommendation of my friend Peter Lee on other niche blogs and I’m very impressed so far. I’ll be posting a review on that soon but I think it’s time to start a decent article marketing campaign on GovernmentApplianceRebates.com and my other niche blogs.

A note on keywords. I enrolled myself in The Keyword Academy about six weeks ago. I am learning a lot about keyword research. This may be one of the best investments I’ve made in a while. Again, more on that in a future post but I want to point out that I have not researched keywords for niche sites from breaking news stories. There’s simply no way to research the keywords because no one is searching for the keyword phrases that early in the game and that is when you want your site live with content and indexed by Google – before the news is widespread. Keyword terms are more or less hit or miss at this point. About the best you can do is see how competitive certain keyword phrases already are. If the news is about a niche already dominated by high ranking sites it’s probably one to pass on and find something a little more realistic. An example of this is the United State’s national health care debate. My two sites National Healthcare Facts and Universal Healthcare Facts are doing very poorly. The niche is too competitive for short term niche sites. My only hope for those sites are to find better long-tail keyword phrases to bring in a little traffic or to convert them to long term niche blogs that are updated regularly.

There you have it, the potential is huge when creating news-related AdSense sites when planned right and acted on quickly. I will continue to build these sites and blogs trying different things and report my test results back to you. Be sure you are subscribed so you don’t miss a thing. I’m in this to make money and I’m bringing you with me.

FTC Disclaimer: I may profit from this post (hopefully) if I’m doing things right. I have two affiliate links [The Keyword Academy and The Free Traffic System] embedded in the post above and I recommend you will check them out. Why? Because I actually promote what I use and like. See why you can trust my recommendations.

I’ve been building niche blogs and static sites and I thought I’d share how quick and easy it is to setup a one-page AdSense site.

1. Find a template
Assuming you already have the niche figured out, the domain, keywords and the content ready I recommend searching Google for free CSS templates. There are thousands of great looking free templates out there and most just want a link in the footer.

‘CSS‘ stands for Cascading Style Sheets and if that’s new to you don’t be intimidated. CSS is basically just a way to control the structure and appearance of the site you are designing, in this case I’m referring to simple HTML sites. CSS templates allow easy changes of colors, font and layout. Most are ‘tableless‘ helping them load quickly.

I recommend a nice and simple template. A header, footer and one, two or three columns is about all you need.

2. Edit the images
Change or edit the graphics to fit your niche if necessary. Keep in mind we’re creating a fast and easy niche site so perfection is not needed. Keeping it simple is the best bet. Don’t use too many graphics and keep the file sizes low. Fast loading pages are much more important than impressing people with our images. The goal is to guide visitors interested in the topic to the next step (action) by clicking an ad link for more information.

3. Ad Placement
AdSense allows up to three ads on a single page. Problogger has a three part post on Positioning your Adsense Ads that’s worth reading.

Don’t place AdSense ads next to images to ‘enhance‘ them in any way and don’t try to hide the fact they are advertisements. All of the ad must be readable including the ‘Ads by Google‘ statement.

I will often toss in a ClickBank or Market Leverage ad into the mix to help monetize the page.

4. Adding Content
Content is an important part of an AdSense site. You MUST have content and it needs to be relevant to the niche. Pages with just ads are in violation of the AdSense terms. It’s important to give visitors valuable content yet you don’t want to give away the whole ball of wax. You want to leave them wanting more but give them enough to want it from your links. It takes practice but use the content as a guide or call to action. NEVER EVER ask visitors to click on an ad. This is another big AdSense terms violation.

5. Promoting Your Niche Site
Once you have your site up and optimized with key word rich content it’s time to start promoting it. One of the easiest methods of promoting and gaining backlinks is by commenting on related blogs.

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been working with a couple of article marketing tools that I am very impressed with. I’ll be writing a review very soon but I’ll give you a ‘heads up‘ now.

1. The first is Free Traffic System. Free Traffic System is a powerful way to submit articles to many blogs at once and they have a system to help make the content somewhat unique for each blog.
2. The second tool is Magic ArticleRewriter. This as an incredible tool. I just purchased it and it’s very easy to use. Be sure to watch the video, it’s amazing. Magic Article Rewriter works with Free Traffic System and the two together should move your article marketing to the next level.

Do it again, and again…
One AdSense site isn’t going to get you anywhere. I recommend setting an initial goal of 100 sites. If you only earn $3 a month per site you are still doing pretty well. That will cover the ten dollars a year for domain registration, cheap hosting and you will gross $300 a month. You should do much better than three dollars a month but that’s just an example. Once you have those hundred sites running and doing well on Google just double it. You can see how quickly this can add up.

Key word research is an important part of seeking out lucrative niche domains. I’ve been working with domains targeted to specific topics that we see and hear in the news. I have many news based domains but I’ll just list a few.

Last week I blogged about Sarah Palin. A niche domain about Sarah Palin would have been a great idea at the beginning of the last presidential campaigns.

So what’s in the news today? You can’t watch a news segment without hearing about Cash For Clunkers. Just this morning I decided to take advantage of this to be short lived news topic with a small AdSense site: Cash For Clunkers Facts

National healthcare reform also dominates the news on a daily basis. I believe this one will be around for a while. I just built two AdSense sites geared toward the topic of National health-care reform: National Healthcare Facts and Universal Healthcare Facts

All three AdSense sites are key-word rich and search engine optimized. Each are just hours old at the time of this post and not even included in Google yet. Some will say these niches are too competitive and they may be correct. Time will tell as I begin to promote them.

I’m running a little late on both of these ‘news niches‘ yet I was able to find a decent domain name. Wouldn’t it be great to jump on the next big national or international news topic? If you could register within minutes of big breaking news you would certainly end up with a premium domain worth it’s weight in gold. Another reason to watch the news?

Subscriber and long time friend Janice Willingham has left a question on our Just Ask page. There’s a wealth of experience and knowledge in our subscribers and site visitors. I’m hoping you can help Janice by answering her questions or giving a little advice.

Here’s what Janice wrote:

I have a blog about dental care. PersonalDentalCareInfo.com I am a member of a social bookmarking site where the members are responsible for bookmarking each other’s websites. I recently found out from one of the members I should be bookmarking my posts from the blog and not the actual blog. So, I changed that. I also write articles to promote my site. I’ve submitted six. I am going to do four more and I guess just promote the articles and continue with the bookmarking.

My questions:

1. How many articles are enough? I was thinking 10 should suffice.
2. What do you do next to promote your site. At what point do you promote and start on another niche. I feel as though I am missing a step in promoting my site.
3. Although, I’ve done all this I have yet to sell any of the  affiliate products located on my blog. One guy stated I should just focus on one product. However, I have a choice of products all focused on the dental care niche.

Any suggestions?

Below is a quick video tutorial on building quick do-it-yourself niche domains using ClickBank.

Eventually I will add more Affiliate, Ad Sense and Pay Per Action (PPA) sites to my arsenal. Monetizing domains and driving traffic to them is an easy and very common method of making money online. A few hundred sites each generating ten to fifty dollars a week really adds up and it’s not unrealistic at all.

One note of caution, I’m framing these ClickBank splash pages using the free online tool Cloaked HTML Source Code I’m not certain this is wise or the best method so if one of my Internet Marketing friends can help me out on the subject it would be great. I know Garry Conn and Yan are experts on the subject so perhaps we can hear from them. I’m certain it’s not going to draw any search engine traffic by framing the splash pages and there is no room for search engine optimization (SEO) so traffic will need to come from other sources.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCnSODu2Dso

The niche domains set-up today:

• PostBailout.com
• RecessionSafe.com
• USGG.org
• NewCreditHope.com
• SubPrimeRepair101.com
• MustReadEbooks.com
• GreatChocolateBusiness.com
• GasStruggle.com
• BlogDownloads.com
• CreativePhotoGuide.com

Finding popular products and/or keywords for your affiliate and niche sites couldn’t be easier than with eBay Pulse. eBay Pulse will show you the top 10 searched products in any given category. The short video below will show you how to search for your products using eBay Pulse.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKeEaeVcHV0

According to InternetWorldStats.com there are over one and a half billion internet users worldwide. That’s 336.1% growth from 2000 to 2008 with 23.5% penetration by the end of 2008.

With one forth of the world having access to the internet combined with the overall world economy it’s pretty easy to understand why so many are turning to the internet for an income source.

This is hardly scientific but I have been running a small poll on our Tracker Blog asking, ‘Are You Making Money Online?‘. 49.0% admit they have not made a cent while another 33.0% say they haven’t even made enough to cover expenses. With 82% of our poll takers loosing money online while they are trying to earn a profit I have to believe there is a large need for legitimate instructional resources.

It’s sad to see internet marketing newbies slapping together a quick site or blog and filling it with affiliate and PPC ads. With average “click-through” rates of around 1/2% a lot of traffic is needed to go that route yet that seems to be standard procedure.

Why bring it up? I was a little surprised at the numbers and think it may be a huge opportunity for many. I think this trend will keep moving in the same direction for a long time with more and more newbies needing direction. A lot of our subscribers and site visitors are already working the newbie niche and providing an excellent service. It’s just something to think about.

BTW, As a side note I’m not that fond of the term ‘newbie‘ but it seems to be the most accepted name. I mean no disrespect or insult to new internet marketers.