Niche Switch

After working through a number of my notes, I have finally got around to post the How to make money of your directory guide. All and any suggestions are welcome. I hope to continue updating it as time allows and new resources and informations emerge.

I guess it would be possible to make it two or three times longer….but aimed at providing as much info in as little space possible. I for one tend to postpone reading large guides, not matter how valuable, almost indefinitely.

On directory forums and other professional discussion forums, it’s more and more being talked about low-cost bulk directory submission services that are ruining the directory owner’s joy from running their pet projects (a.k.a. directories), by submitting hundreds and hundreds of bottom quality websites, and generally doing rather poor job with submissions for their clients.

Thus The Pagerank God came forth and ruled, “though shall be your ten commandments from now on”:

1. Thou shalt not ignore each directory’s rules.
2. Thou shalt not put your interests before your client’s.
3. Thou shalt not use autosubmitters.
4. Thou shalt not promise unrealistic acceptance rates, and generally misguide the client, just to get the job.
5. Thou shalt not use one email address for all your clients jobs.
6. Thou shalt not accept clients with junk websites.
7. Thou shalt not submit to top categories, when relevant subcategories are available.
8. Ask your clients to ammend their websites, description and titles, whenever you think it is appropriate.
9. Honour the directory list you use.
10. Do not worship the Pagerank God.

Hey….you see that Pagerank God is a tough guy, but has some sense of humour at least . What? Nah, that’s not me, I just helped him transcribe for us earthlings (either telepathy or sql injection vulnerability in my brain’s operation system, not sure what it was). And no, I don’t worship him (I’m almost certain it’s him, not her).
That’s what happens to those who worship the directory devil. It has something to do with the Holy Hand Grenade, hehe.

StevePavlina.com is two years old today. Congratulations! At this occasion, Steve shares his earning stats.

Let’s take September: $7.200 revenue from Adsense, per 1,3M visitors, that makes it $0.55 per 100 visitors. His website is top quality so I bet visitors usually view plenty pages there.
Now…Steve has rather more aggressive Adsense setup. While he is covering many topics, his mainly target field is self-development. So…where’s the trouble? It seems to me that the ads that get displayed, are those 5 cents per click ones, at least judging from few pages I managed to quickly review.
Are there money in blogging? You bet. Don’t use the numbers above as a basis for your website, though. You don’t need millions of visitors! If you have a decent well-defined niche, and at least half of the article quality that Steve has, you shall be earning much more per 100 visitors, than he does. His site is of course big success, but he might suffer a bit income-wise due to the kind of ads Adsense chooses to display. He has an interesting niche, but maybe too broad one? I’m by far not an expert on Adsense optimization and tweaking, but one thing I can tell you, there are people earning close to what he does by blogging, from traffic that’s several times lower.

The difference? Very narrow, well defined and lucrative niche.

The resemblance? High quality content from leaders in their field.

How to make it? Learn from Steve Pavlina’s drive, persistance and wisdom.

Ron Garret covered top ten geek business myths very nicely.

Quick extract of my favorite myths, but do yourself a favor to visit the original post:
- brilliant ideas will make you rich

- people will come on their own if you build good product or service

- someone will steal your idea if you don’t protect it

- it’s what YOU think, not what customers thinks, that matters

- what you know matters more than who you know

- you need lot of money to get started

- the idea is the most important part of your business plan

- no competition is good thing

and, IPO will make you finally happy

This really annoys me a lot.

Well…sometimes I only laughed at it in despair.
People will purchase a domain name like free-directory.tld, guaranteed-free-submission.tld, a-free-link.tld, etc., all with the intention to start a directory, and all names presupposing it to be a free one.

Then, they only allow paid submissions.

Paid-only submissions to free directories make as much sense to me as going to a jazz concert only to get a punk rock band delivered as a last-moment subsitute.

And I don’t even believe in last-minute subsitutes (aka change of plan decisions) in this case. It’s just about tricking people.

If you see such, even if you got a budget for paid links, I highly advise you NOT to pay them a cent. Paying to tricksters will usually only benefit you for a very very short time, if ever.