Looking through iTunes, I can find tons of untapped niche markets that could bring old advertisers to new media. Want to test the waters before you start down the road of video podcasting? Start a blog.

This sounds like old school marketing but this is your petri dish to start building relationships with companys and PR agencies. If you become a small “professional” in your field of blogging, from yarn, wood, tools, clocks to gardening you’ll start receiving e-mails asking to post reviews, news and events for people in the industry. Once you grab a few PR agencies and establish relationships with them, they’ll send you press releases, product demonstrations and perhaps hook you up with interviews with company owners.

As you build your reputation over the course of three to six months you can start experimenting with some video content as you roll your blog into a vlog. Now, you can push out new shows and begin to build a small viewership of a few dozen or a few hundred downloads. Once you’ve got your fan base started, four months after producing some video shows and providing evidence that people care enough to come back and watch your episodes, you can start pitching to sponsors.

Some people will say you need 1,000 to 2,000 views a day to get sponsorship but that’s highly dependent on your industry. You can get sponsorship with as low as 450 views per show if you price it right and provide content that’s so niche and specific that your viewers actually desire the products of your sponsor.

Using a $30.00 CPM ($30 per 1,000 viewers) model, you can sell a sponsor a full episode of your video show for around $12 (considering you don’t have 1,000 viewers yet) and still get them interested. Why? Because $12 to gain 450 highly focused eyes on a brand is huge value to anyone that understands new media. Plus, when six months down the line their ad is still in the old video and new viewers typically drive through old archives to catch up and see what you have covered in the past. Their old sponsorship grows with the audience of your show, long after they paid the measly $12.

Companies will spend millions of dollars to reach 2% of a large pool of viewership. You’re just asking for $12 to gain 100% attention of the viewership pool, sounds tempting, no? A single episode will not build huge brand awareness and your sponsor knows this; they will buy a block of episodes to test the waters. Realistically, without at least three to four episodes on your show there is no way to track the impact. So, even if they decide not to renew, they’re probably already in it for $36 to $48 which goes into your pocket for your hard work.

It is hard work. Don’t expect to toss your mug on a camera and get people to throw money your way. You’re going to have to prove to them that you’re energetic, consistent, trustworthy and have the passion to get the job done. Of course, $12 an episode isn’t going to make you rich, but everyone has to start somewhere.

You start at the bottom and work your way to the top. If you think there is an easier way, show us. Otherwise, get out there and produce great content and watch your community grow.

After consulting firms told me “how” and “what” I need to do to get my site “ranked” I had all the knowledge I needed to start working the magic, right? Lots of blogging, lots of keyword use and formulating my messages so google would absorb and make my data available to everyone who organically searched… why spend money on advertisement when you can get it for free with google?

Because life’s too short and a ton of people are playing the same game of SEO. If you’re in a niche market with little competition you can utilize google and other search engines to rank #1 for many things, but video games is not one of them. Mainly because their are so many game review sites and fan blogs that you’ll have a hard time generating enough specific content to rank first. Think on this, if I want to rank for “Saints Row” for the “Xbox 360″ I need to chat about the keywords a lot but I really just want to sell a game.

When people search for those keywords they’re probably also including “tips and tricks” or “howto” or other things to get ahead in the game; people aren’t really searching for buying the title. On top of this challenge, journalists and bloggers have talked about the game for months (or years) before the title was released so they’ve already ranked on the first page, leaving you to clean up on page two or three (or fifty or sixty).

How, then, does one make money on E-Commerce sites? Unfortunately, you have to spend money to make money. You’re going to want to look at shopping sites like shopping.com or pricegrabber.com. These sites are “pay per click” systems where you’ll pay them anywhere from 10 cents to 45 cents (or more) when a customer of theirs clicks on your product and is sent to your page. Believe it or not, it’s worthwhile because you’ll have a tough time ranking organically based on obscure and unknown match criteria but these product search systems are pretty basic: you got a low price? You rank first.

Over the course of a year or more sales on video games from our site weren’t so great using standard organic searching. The competition was high and we spent more money housing products that didn’t sell (as drop shipping video games is cost prohibitive) and products were being reduced in prices while ours didn’t move…making it nearly impossible. Around the holiday season we’d make some money from Google’s product search, Froogle, but not enough to justify a business. It was time to either close the doors as a loss or try something new.

Shopping.com was our next step but their customer service was lacking, their product integration was a bear and extremely tedious to do product matching so we ended up on pricegrabber.com. They gave us a single point of contact person for all our needs and have been available whenever we had an issue. With .35 cents a click, it was still risky (minimum deposit is USD $250.00) but it was all worthwhile because product sales jumped from 0 sales per month to about one a day… still way off from a “success” but a hell of a lot better than nothing!

Over time our rating has increased (it’s only been a month!) so we’ll slowly get more customers taking a look at our products. In the end, we can call it a lesson learned, sometimes SEO isn’t the right idea, sometime you have to swallow your pride and spend money to make money by marketing it on a site which as done this for years and has departments that spend time and money getting your products to customers easily.

If you’re planning on selling products, take some time to invest some research in a site that assists users with finding products for their customers and see how hard it is to get on their list of search results. You may also need to get a developer to write in hooks to get your products on their site easily or use excel to upload your products on a daily/weekly basis so customers get the most recent prices from your site.

No matter how great your writing is, no matter how awesome your site looks, you may still have issues gaining traffic to your site because you’re on page 99 of google’s search results. Let’s face it, if you’re on page-3 of the google search results you might as well be on page 300. I’ve had plenty of pages arrive on page six and seven and I’ve had some clicks… but it’s never relevant. If they’ve not found a site to service their needs in the first five pages… you’re probably way off from what they are looking for, or a re-hash of something they already don’t care about.

Problem One: Effort

You’ll have to put in a lot of effort to receive page-1 or even page-2 results in google. It doesn’t happen over night, so be patient. In a highly competitive keyword space it also won’t happen on a single blog post.

Here are two scenarios, you are considering a site to write about “video games” because you know a lot about them, or “baby carriages” because you’ve recently had a kid and you feel you know enough about them to write articles involving baby transportation in the way of a carriage. Which one will be more profitable?

The average cost-per-click for a video game keyword ad is:

The average cost-per-click for a baby carriage ad is:

So, technically you’ll make more money on the keyword baby carriage as long as you realize the total searches are going to be much less (almost half says adwords traffic estimator). I don’t think it’s any surprise that more people are interested in search for video games than they are for baby carriages.

So, video games is the place to apply all our efforts, right? Maybe not. Do a quick search for video games and you’ll see something like this:

If you do a search for baby carriage you’ll see something like this:

You may discover, as I did, there are many less competitive pages for baby carriages, 323,000 compared to 799,000,000 for video games. Judging your competitive marketplace you’ll see it will be far easier to rank on page-1 on google for baby carriages and they’re going to give you better ad pricing (in general) using adsense.

What does this mean to you, the blogger? The market space is less competitive for baby carriages and thus you’ll have an easier time ranking on the first page of google’s organic search results. Less people are searching for baby carriages, however, you’re more likely to be the one getting clicks if you try hard enough because ranking for video games on any of the initial google page results is going to be a rough road. In the end, you’re effort will pay off much higher for something with less search results.

Problem Two: Luck

There is some luck involved with organic search. Some days people won’t do that many searches for your content, or, if it’s season dependent, some seasons may receive less organic search results. The next nature of luck… are the competitive sites trying to rank for your keywords any good at it?

To change your luck, you can do some deeper research and check the top ranked sites to see if they use the meta-keywords field or have content that’s really relevant to the search keywords. You can take what could be random luck and focus it into a well thought out plan and avoid having to rely on a lucky roll of the keyword.

Luck also plays into the niche field you’re getting into when writing content. You can start writing about a topic that’s rarely talked about on the Internet and then, one day, it becomes a huge hot button topic and you find yourself getting traffic you never though you’d get. Luck can be awesome at times.

Problem Three: Google Magic Sauce

How organic searching works is a mystery, a well-understood mystery, but it’s still a mystery none-the-less. SEO experts have found ways to “game the system” by making your content more relevant to google; crafting your text in a specific manner…using good keyword density but not overdoing it, is a good example of some basic SEO practices. You can take their advice and follow it like the SEO bible and google can change their sauce at any time and all your effort goes to the gutter.

Luckily for you, google tries to make subtle changes to their system and not revamp their organic search system from the ground up. Some subtle changes may indeed change how you rank in search results but those are the issues a Search Engine Optimizer deals with on a quarterly basis (usually google updates their ranks and such every three months, “big changes” will probably come at this time).

Problem Four: Relevance

Your content will have a specific relevance when it comes to how google views your site since an automated system is scanning your words, not a human. When writing content focus on what your site is about and less about other random stories. If you’re making a blog about baby carriages you probably want to shy away from talking too much about products outside the space or writing articles about other industries.

If you start changing your topics you may start arriving on page results not truly pertaining to your overall content. It will be hard to keep subscribers coming back if they think you’re about one thing but you’re really a site about something entirely different. And, adsense will start giving you ads that aren’t related to the keywords you originally did research on. You don’t want ad’s that are low pay CPC when your research ads that are high CPC.

Problem Five: Patience

Don’t expect to rank the day your site opens up. It may take a few weeks or a month before you see a single organic search arrive on your site. Using google analytics or 103bees to monitor your organic searches will allow you to see what’s going on in terms of search traffic. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, patience is key to so many areas of a good blog or website.

Google likes sites that grow slowly, over time, they also give higher weight (or so people say) to sites that are well aged, so your competitors whom have been around for six years or more will usually show higher than you for the same keywords. That’s okay, people don’t always click on the first result in google, they’ll read the meta-description that google presents before clicking (usually) or at least the title of the result. They also may click on many of the first page results while doing research.

Keep at it for six months or so and see what you can do with your site. Watch the search results to see how people are finding your site and focus on what’s working. It’s important to realize this may not be what you want to work in all cases, but making money sometimes requires you to do things you may not want to do (in moderation anyway).

Problem Six: Niche Market

This is, by far, the most lectured topic in search engine optimization and web marketing in general. Selling a product someone else already has market dominance over is going to be frustrating and if you’re a low-budget shop (or have little time) try sticking to something that’s not so overdone…baby carriages for instance. If you’re not passionate about the topic you can look around for something else or do some research and learn the topic anyway, perhaps you’ll grow fond of it.

If you really want to do video games or something like that, pick a specific genre of video games (Role Playing Games, Racing Games) or a single video game fan site and dedicate your time to it. Just remember, if you grow bored of that video game you’re still going to have to maintain the site if you want to bring in ad revenue. As a blogger who writes about video games I’ll tell you up front: it’s a long frustrating road before you gain any type of search hits that net you revenue.

If you want to write about “news” on your topic make sure their is a lot of news going around because you don’t want it to dry up and go stale. News sites also require much more effort and consistently daily blogging (hourly is best) to keep people interested. News, on the Net, doesn’t last long so you’ll always be searching for the next hot story.

You can pay USD $5,000 in consulting fees to learn this, or take my word for it… targeting a niche market is going to be the difference between making some money and making nothing. Affiliating with a niche market is also a great idea if you don’t plan on selling products yourself and play to rely on ad-revenue to make a dime (more dimes with affiliating + ad’s than doing only one). Provide niche market content to help your readers make an intelligent decision about a product and continue to update it to keep those fans coming back for more.

Have Fun!

If you want to write daily content you must enjoy it or it will grow more like a “real job” that you hate to commute to each day. Enjoy yourself, have fun writing content and be smart about what you’re doing.

Good Luck!

If you’re providing content there is a good chance you could pimp someone else’s products to your advantage. Unless you’re considering creating your own physical product you may want to consider selling someones product for some type of return. Affiliation is always a good outlet for a bit of extra money.

Don’t expect to become a millionaire selling someones product, even if they, themselves, are millionaires because you’re just one of many people trying to sell their products. However, if people do buy from you over someone else you do stand to make a bit of cash. Let us assume you have google adsense giving you a bit of money in your pocket, what does it hurt to have a few affiliate advertisements pushing a product?

Their not ad’s per se, they’re suggestions you provided to your readers because you like the products yourself. I guess you can never have used them or just try to push some random products but having used them gives you a bit of experience that you can talk to your viewers with telling them why they should buy them as well and more importantly, buy them from you.

People buy products all the time and if they’re on your site there is a good chance they found you because they’re looking for services or products that which align with their needs. If someone is coming to your site via organic search with a casino game product and you’re chatting about childcare safety devices then you managed to rank for keywords you didn’t intend to…that person probably isn’t interested in your content. As a matter of fact, they probably clicked the back button two seconds after loading.

Will people buy from you? Maybe, maybe not, but what’s the risk in trying? If it doesn’t work out after six months or so, try affiliating with a different product or resource, no harm no foul. If you managed to make a few bucks then it’s better yours than another content provider! If you manage to bring in enough income to consider it a great hobby or part-time job (or better) than you’ve done well, give yourself a pat on the back.

If you’re a content writer you might as well get used to writing content and providing users with what they want: products aligned to their needs. Affiliate Baby!

If you write one blog a day about a given topic you’ll give google an idea about what you like to write about and soon it will send readers to your site when they search about topics you like to write about. Sometimes you’ll get users that are irrelevant to your site, based on some keywords that google couldn’t find a better result for – that’s okay, just consider them as “impressions” for your ads, maybe you’ll get lucky.

If the topic you choose to consistently write about isn’t ‘highly competitive’ (not too many millions of people writing about your topics) you’ll start to arrive on the first, second or third page of the google results. If it’s a highly competitive topic you may arrive far down in the results. If you’re not on page one or two you’ll see very few hits a day. I track my sites with both Google Analytics and 103bees to try to capture where my traffic is coming from in terms of organic searching.

For my newer site about drinking, everydaydrinkers.com, 79% of my organic searches arrives from my first-page results in google. Granted, the site is young and isn’t getting massive traffic but it’s easy to tell where I’ve been successful: page one. This isn’t a revolutionary idea, all SEO manuals will say you must be on page one to bring traffic to your site; the trick is getting on the first page of results.

If you can find an idea that can land you on the first page of google, you’ll also want people to search for it. If it was easy to hit page one it was probably because nobody else has done it…because nobody cares. Once you pickup a few page-one hits with consistent traffic, you can start getting an idea what your viewers likes to search for and react to it by writing about that type of content more often!

Some websites choose to try and hit social networks hard, posting all their articles on digg.com to drive traffic to your site. That may lead you down a rats nest of issues. Sure, you’ll get traffic if you can get on the homepage of a social network, but can your hosting provider handle the flood of users all hitting your one popular article? You won’t get ad revenue from clicks if your site is down due to traffic slamming your web server too hard.

A casual blogger may try to ramp up slowly (crawl before you run) using organic search hits to slowly build site impressions and page hits.

If you’re running a news related site, reviews of movies, games, cars, boats or whatever, you must remember one thing: your content is only as good as the product you are reviewing. For a new site, you’ll find yourself living and dying by organic search results. You may find you’ve received 200% more impressions on some new product you reviewed than you had yesterday because that’s what users are searching for today. Tomorrow, or the next day… the hype may die down and you’re back down 200% in traffic.

Don’t become frustrated when users arrive for a week in droves and then disappear to never return. Continue to write about products and hope that you’ll get a few more “big hit” product keywords that draw traffic. You may lose 99% of those visitors after a product loses its hype, but a few may stick around and re-visit again if your writing was good or their products align greatly with the reviews you write. Over time, this will build you an audience of loyal readers. If your writing is good.
If there is one bit of advice I can suggest to you, build your audience at a normal pace, slow and steady wins the race. Don’t become frustrated when you’ve got 30 visitors a day and no click-thru on any ads you’ve placed. Click rate is going to be based mostly on impressions, if you have a chance at 2% click-thru rate but only have 30 visitors the chances are good you’ll get very few (or no) clicks until you get up your page views. Keep writing content to build your relevance in search engines and broaden your chances a few articles will be front-page results for Google or another search engine. The more content you have, that’s good, the better chance you’ll receive organic traffic hits.

You’ll probably spend six months trying to establish your blog in the blog-o-sphere. If, after six months, you still receive less than 30 hits a day you may either want to pick a new topic or work harder to publish more content to chew on. If you pick a new topic, you’ve got to reset your internal clock another three to six months to see if your new idea is something grand.

Or, plan ahead, use some basic tools to find a market worth writing about which has a growing audience. It will always be easier to write about something you care about, don’t choose a topic that’s got a large demand that you’ve got no interest in writing about. Who wants to be a part time blogger if it feels more like a job and not a lifestyle?

How long can that take? Let’s be realistic, you’ve got a blog and you start writing but you have no fans of your website… as a matter of fact, nobody even knows your website exists. This is going to be your first challenge.

Don’t think about making money right away, think about marketing your site. Name a single startup company that jumped into the market and was instantly making piles of cash. Can you think of any? Probably very few, if any because making money does indeed require you to put in a bit of effort.

Pinning up a blog with a few cool articles isn’t going to rake in mad cash for the average person. Those that claim they make over $100.00 a month on ad revenue probably forget to mention they work at it on a daily basis. Over the coming months I hope to explain a few techniques to making a bit of money off ad revenue by bringing content to users that is relatively interesting.

You can try to cheat the system, you can try to brute for a search-engine-optimization solution but, in the end, effort, creativity and inspiration will pay you more than any shortcuts you’ll find on the internet.

Like any good company, you should start slow and build up a theme of content and work towards providing users with information they can you. I, like many people on the Net, plan to explain to users my experience with growing web presence and how to get some exposure. Am I a success story? I’m not sitting at home on piles of money if that’s what you think, but I can tell you a few ways to start making some supplemental cash with a little bit of effort.

If you’re starting up a blog, don’t think about money and monotizing your blog unless you’re planning on living it as a lifestyle. My method is to live it as a hobby with a dream to live it as a lifestyle. Not every idea is going to make you tons of money in ad revenue and attention so think small and hope big.

With Adsense, you can plan to make little to no money for a few months as you start building your web presence and gaining impressions on your site (aka “web hits”). Once you start getting 30 or more hits a day you can start looking to make some adsense revenue (if you’re articles are written well and provide good keyword content for adsense). When I say “making money” I’m measuring in pennies, not dollars.

There is no get rich scheme, start with pennies and work to dollars over time. It may take three to six months for you to see a USD $1.00 a day adsense revenue.

Later, we’ll talk about finding something interesting to write about that also may provide good adsense revenue. A little research will be required, stay tuned.