The Early Bird Special for NAMS5 ends tonight at 11:59pm. The organizers of NAMS are giving a whooping $500 discount if you sign up by this deadline. You simply cannot beat that. Check out the NAMS sign-up page and then I’ll narrate to you what I learned from my experience.

NAMS stands for Niche Affiliate Marketing System. The organizers of NAMS hold the workshop twice a year, in August and in January in Atlanta, GA. This workshop is designed for anyone in the Internet Marketing field.

From the day I arrived for the workshop, I could feel the camaraderie. It was like, “Wow, I don’t believe am sitting next to Bob the Teacher” or “I know you from Facebook” or “I know your Twitter handle, give me a second and I’ll figure out your real name too”. It was just too amazing. My first NAMS workshop presented the opportunity to meet in person people that I’ve known in the online world, such as on Twitter, Facebook, Internet Marketing Classes, Forums etc. Special mention here goes to Leigha Baer.

Before the first workshop even started, I was already thinking about how I was going to attend NAMS5. Why? Because the organizers of this event just made it AWESOME. It was not like your ordinary workshop or other live events. What makes NAMS so different? You ever hear of a workshop to promote a book, and the author of the book is not even going to be at the event? How about those workshops with one or more speakers, all of whom are just basically there to pitch their products and make a killing at the workshop? Sound familiar? Listen to what my fellow attendees had to say about NAMS.

Just check out this list of the NAMS faculty: Willie Crawford, Kathleen Gage, Jeff Herring, Maritza Parra, Lynn Terry, Bob “The Teacher” Jenkins, Nicole Dean, Denise Wakeman, Paul Evans, Mark Hendricks, Dan Morris, Karon Thackston, Sid Hale, Joe Marsh, Doug Hudiberg and of course the man behind this, David Perdew. How could you possibly go wrong with this crew. What’s even more amazing is that all attendees had access throughout the duration of the workshop to these instructors. Honestly, I was still hit by that “am meeting a celebrity” syndrome. But then again, they’re not just celebrities, they are people in their fields that have done it, and showing you how they got to where they are.

And what can I say about my fellow attendees? I was honestly touched by the spirit with which the attendees were more than willing to help each other out, whether it was helping each other installing a blog, brainstorming on how to improve each other sites etc. It was just absolutely incredible.

There are three learning tracks, that is the Beginner, the Intermediate and the Advanced Levels. So whether you’ve never done anything in internet marketing, got some knowledge but can’t quite piece it together, making some sales but would like to aim higher, or you are looking to make an empire, then this is the place for you.

Am I in a better position because of NAMS? Absolutely. NAMS made me realize that I know so much more than I think I did. It made me realize that I have to have a clarity in purpose. It made me realize that I need to focus. It made me realize a lot more than i can fill in this space. Am coming out of NAMS so much better than when I went in. I have set goals for myself that I have to meet before NAMS5. I have made a promise to myself that I will not be unprepared for NAMS5 as I was for NAMS4. NAMS5 will be my measure of progress.

Will you join me on this journey? If so, please go the the NAMS5 sign up page. Hope to see you there.

To acquire content, you can either write your own content, outsource the task to someone else or republish someone else’s content [from websites that allow you to do that].

Writing your own content requires you to do a little research, especially if you are not well versed on your niche. If you are using Market Samurai, you will be able to use the Find Content module to choose preferred sources e.g. blogs, articles, YouTube videos etc. You will be able to do that manually if you didn’t have Market Samurai, however this incredible piece of software also allows you to compare the authority of the content you are considering.Comparing content involves analyzing elements such as the backlinks, page rank and number of times an article has been republished. Article directories allow users to republish other people’s content while at the same time granting recognition to the original author via the biography box and a back link.

You’ll have to remember that when writing an article from source, you never blatantly cut, copy & paste. If you have to use word for word, you need to credit the original author. Another good idea is to always read the information you intend to republish yourself. Attempt to be more knowledgeable in your field and type out your content from memory.

A lot of times when people start out blogging, they tend to use free services such as Blogger or WordPress. The one downfall of these free services is that you do not control your own content and ran the risk of being shut down for any reason without notice. However, when you own your domain & your own hosting, the risks are significantly less.

When considering domain names, please keep in mind that having your theme keyword in the domain name is a very important on-page SEO factor. Having the theme keyword in the domain name is preferable to having it in just the URL (www.howtoplayscrabble.com is preferable to www.about.com/howtoplayscrabble.html). To help find a suitable domain, you might consider a service such as http://www.domainsbot.com. If the .com domain you are seeking is not available, you might consider a .net or a .org, using hyphens, or adding a suffix or a prefix.

A very good cPanel based hosting service to consider is Hostgator. Hostgator allows you to host unlimited websites with unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth. They also offer free domain and hosting transfers. You can check them out here.

The Thirty Day Challenge came to an end on August 31st. The education doesn’t. My perception is that it doesn’t matter if you finished The Challenge within the month. What matters is that you grasped the concepts that were taught and that you use them going forward. There’s an adage that says “give a man a fish and you feed him for a day…teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”.

The Thirty Day Challenge was definitely an exciting journey and we’ll pick up where we left off. Stay tuned.

Affiliate products in this instance are used to test the commercial value of the micro-niche you’re interested in. It tells you whether people in that micro-niche are willing to spend their money.While you may very well end up earning commissions from affiliate products, remember that the end result of the Thirty Day Challenge will be to create your own product.

You are going to have to find suitable affiliate products, write some ad copy to promote the affiliate products and put your ads online. The four main sources of affiliate products are Amazon, Clickbank, Commission Junction and PayDotCom. Some affiliate programs may require you to have a website before you can register.

When gauging affiliate products, there are a couple of factors to take into consideration; 1) Availability – if no affiliate products exist, you should probably explore another micro-niche. 2) Prices – give you an idea of how much people in this niche are willing to spend. 3) Commissions – help you find out how much you could potentially get paid  and also the most profitable affiliate products to promote. 4) Popularity – finding out which products are the most popular. 5) Recurring – such as subscriptions – who wouldn’t love on-going commissions?

Contrary to what you may have heard, competition in  niche is actually a good thing…it shows that people in that niche are actually buying. Lack of competition could potentially mean that there is no market. The fact that there are plenty of affiliate products being offered for that niche is a good indicator of the fact that people are buying.

Another way to test the commercial viability of a niche is the presence of Google Adwords (i.e. people are paying to advertise). When you look at the Adwords, you also get a feel as to the kind of products that are on sale in that niche.

Google’s automated robot or Googlebot reviews your website to determine how relevant your site is to its users. It does this by looking at what is called On-Page and Off-Page factors.

On-page factors are components such as the Title, the URL, the Description and the Header tags. If your keyword appears in these components, then your page is said to be on-page optimized for that keyword. Off-page factors on the other hand are components such as the age of your domain and the number & quality of incoming links to your page. If you have a lot of high authority sites linking to your page, then it is taken that you must be delivering valuable content.

Google therefore uses both on-page and off-page factors to determine how valuable your website is, which in turn determines where it will appear in the search results pages for the keyword.

Conducting an SEO Analysis of  the top 10 websites that are currently competing for the keywords you’re interested in saves you the time and effort of trying to compete in niches that are extremely competitive and that might not be accessible to you and your online business.

Looking at the off-page factors that you consider when evaluating your competition:

Domain Age: Google tends to give preference to websites that have been online for a number of years. Younger websites could be an indication of accessibility.

Page Rank: Google’s estimation of the authority of a domain. The lower the page rank, the more accessibility the website could be.

Back Links to Page: The number of back links to the specific page listed in Google. Fewer back links means that you have a good chance to compete.

Back Links to Domain: The number of links pointing to the domain as a whole. Again, fewer back links means that you have a good chance to compete.

Back Links from .EDU and .GOV: The number of back links from .EDU (education institutions) and .GOV (government institutions). Back links from these domains command a greater authority than links from other domains.

Listing in the DMOZ/Yahoo Directory: DMOZ is one of the largest human review directories while Yahoo is a paid directory. Sites listed in these directories command higher authority.

And now for the on-page factors:

Title: Web pages that have the keyword in the title tag tend to rank higher.

URL: Web pages that have the keyword in the URL tend to rank higher.

Description: Web pages that have the keyword in the description tag tend to rank higher.

Header: Web pages that have the keyword in the header tags tend to rank higher

Cache Age: Cache Age indicates the number of ages since the Googlebot re-indexed the website.

This article assumes that you are using Market Samurai. For you free trial, click here. Another alternative is the SEO plugin for Firefox.

Just to be on the same page, a market is a group of individuals that:

• share a common need
• have the ability to pay
• are motivated to buy

A niche on the other hand is a subset of a larger market e.g.

• market = Dell
• niche = Dell printers
• micro-niche = Dell multifunctional printers

People define their interest by the keywords they type into a search engine. Some phrases are used more frequently than others, meaning they have more commercial viability as well as more competing pages. There are two types of keyword searches that can be performed. Say for instance I was searching the keyword phrase digital camera, a broad match search would return pages that had the keywords digital and/or camera anywhere on them. A phrase match on the other hand would return pages that had the keywords digital camera in that precise order.

For our purposes, keywords that have over 1 million competing pages are defined as market keywords, those with 30, 000 – 1 million com competing pages are defined as niche keywords and those with less than 30, 000 pages are defined  as micro-niche keywords.

Our goal here is to find keywords for which there is an acceptable level of competition. Aside from just an acceptable number of competing pages, we also want to look for phrases that generate traffic. We will do this by using a tool called Market Samurai. You can get you free trial during the Thirty Day Challenge by clicking here.  The thing I like about Market Samurai is that it:

• enables you to explore market level keywords and find niches/micro-niches
• enables you to analyze traffic/competing page data for different keywords
• enables you to find category keywords

We cannot emphasize enough the importance of keyword research. If there is no traffic, there is no demand, no searches, no visitors, no buyers and ultimately no money. If there are too many competing pages, you will probably have no chance of rankings, no visibility, no rankings. Thus, our aim to to find keywords that have high traffic and low competition. This will provide you with high potential demand, high potential rankings, high potential visibility, high potential traffic, high potential buyers, high potential profit.

For the purpose of the Thirty Day Challenge, our acceptable keyword phrases are those that have at least 80 searches a day for the #1 ranked page on Google, less than 30, 000 competing pages and a phrase to broad match ratio greater than 15%. Phrase to broad match ratio is defined as the ratio between the traffic for the keyword in phrase match compared to broad match, and the higher the score, the more likely the phrase is listed in the precise order e.g digital camera).

As you do your keyword research, you will come up with a theme keyword, which is the phrase you will build your sites around. You will also come up with category keywords, which are phrases that are related to your theme keyword and meet the same traffic and competition criteria mentioned earlier. Category keywords help your search engine rankings. This is because you don’t get ranked solely for your theme keyword, you get ranked for related keywords as well.

When analyzing SEO Traffic, we use broad match whereas when analyzing SEO Competition we use phrase match. The big difference is that analyzing traffic using broad match gives us the deepest insights to keywords that might have great potential. Analyzing competition using phrase match on the other hand enables you to assess your true competition in terms of how many sites are optimized for your keyword.  Fewer competition means the potential to get better ranking with less time and less effort.

Remember also that broad match searches tend to include irrelevant results.  Sites that are phrase matched appear higher in rankings.

Day Two’s Mindset is about Embracing Change. People more often than not tend to resist change because it unnerves them. But you have to remember that you cannot control change. Nothing ever remains constant except change itself. Change is inevitable…embrace it.

If you ever considered creating and running a business online, then there is a concept that you will need to understand. This concept comprises of four parts, hence the title of today’s post. We’ll examine these briefly:

1. Market Research: A stage where 95% of people starting out in business go wrong. You’ll have to figure out if a market actually exists and also, if that market is interested in buying.
2. Traffic: Just like your ordinary store, if you don’t have people coming to your store (or your site in this case), you’ll never be able to make a sale, regardless of the product you have on offer.
3. Conversion: Getting the people that visit your site to perform an action, whether it is purchasing an actual product or signing up for your email list etc.
4. Product: The market will tell you what kind of product they are in need of, hence you will be looking to create/find a product that solves their problem.

Most people start with creating a product and then try to market that product that no one is willing to buy. In order to be successful you’ll have to follow the steps above in that precise order.

Before you begin with Market Research, you’ll need to have with you perhaps the most important tool ever…a notebook. Seriously. You just never know when a bright idea might strike you, even at 3am. In your notebook, you’ll be able to write down your niche ideas or other content that you will be able to refer to later on in life.

Once you have that covered then you are ready to start finding a niche. When looking for a niche, you might want to look in areas that you have a specific interest in, such as hobbies or activities you already do. It makes the process so much easier if you have an active interest in your chosen niche.

The Thirty Day Challenge gives you ideas on where to explore possible niches and a whole lot more resources. One of those resources is the Mindset segment and Day 1′s topic was procrastination. In order to eliminate procrastination, you’re going to have to 1) get rid of your fears 2)only worry about what is really important 3) make time and just do it.

You can get more of Day 1′s training here. We’ll catch up with you on the next post.

The Thirty Day Challenge only gets better with every year, just as web applications do. One of the improvements from last year’s challenge is the addition of the Thirty Day Challenge Facebook Application. Check it out below.

Now, am not going to sit here and tell you about Facebook or the numbers because I know you’re tired of hearing them already. But I will tell you how absolutely awesome it is that The Thirty Day Challenge is on the largest social network.

If you live on Facebook, and you will be participating in this year’s challenge beginning August 1st, am sure you will appreciate being able to access all the trainings & videos without leaving Facebook. It’s like having the cafeteria & the classroom all in the same room. Bad analogy, I know but you get the point.

So if you’re on Facebook and haven’t yet added the Thirty Day Challenge Application, you know what to do. If you haven’t yet registered for The Thirty Day Challenge yet, you can do it right on Facebook too. Preseason is on now.

This evening I log onto Twitter and every so often I make it a point to look at the trending topics. At the top of the trending topics was I-75. That immediately sparked my interest to make me want to find out what was happening on Interstate 75 – apparently a gasoline tanker had exploded into flames with the blaze melting the overpass.

Is it surprising that Twitter is the first source of information for a good number of people? A quick scan of the aforementioned sites had stories about Richard Jefferson getting cold feet or a 23 quadrillion credit card bill. Maybe it’s just me, but I think the collapse of a major highway that serves 160 thousand motorists a day deserves a little bit more attention than a guy deciding he wasn’t ready for marriage.

You’ll no doubt hear the critics say that Twitter cannot be trusted as a news source due to vulnerability to hoaxes, inaccuracy etc. In today’s example, we were able to see images such as this one:

Not unless this is a scene from an upcoming summer blockbuster, you can’t make this stuff up. I mean, how much verification is needed to make user accounts trustworthy. Were people still doubting when the first pics of the plane on the Hudson emerged? I don’t discount the fact that inaccurate information is going to be broadcast over social networks. Surely those thirsting for verification eventually get their satisfaction through the trusted media houses.

One thing we have to note is the change in how we receive information. We have CNN iReports for instance, which is user generated content. Critics may call it whatever they want, but in this web 2.0 age, I don’t need a detailed report on a news item. A summary works just as well for me, such as in this instance where all I needed to know was that the I-75 bridge collapsed after a tanker explosion.

Love it or hate it, Twitter is and will continue to be a source of news, providing users with information faster than traditional news sources.

I got introduced to the Thirty Day Challenge back in 2007 by my co-worker Karen’s husband, Ryan Preston. At that point in my life, I had decided that I wanted more out of life; that I needed to work smarter, not harder. I got into one of those internet speedway programs. What was I thinking, you might ask. “It looked like a good idea at the time”. When Ryan looked at my site, am sure he probably was in a combination of shock and laughter. He asked if he could be honest with me, which am glad he did – I deal well with positive criticism. The most important message of the day that day…join the Thirty Day Challenge.

My experience on there has been nothing but…awesome. Am not going to lie to you and tell you that I completed the challenge in each of the previous years. But each challenge only gets better, the learning experience all the more greater, and this year’s challenge is not going to be an exception.

In college I was a Computer Information Systems major. They didn’t teach us about blogs and web 2.0 and search engine optimization etc. What I’ve been able to learn in 30 days is just…priceless. I think it’s prudent to say that learning never stops. Even if you don’t intend on getting into a business or already have a business, don’t turn down this opportunity until you have had the chance to experience it in person. What do you have to lose? After all, it’s free.

The Thirty Day Challenge usually starts in August (even though August actually has 31 days). In the months of June & July, they have the pre-season. Some people actually find the pre-season exciting because you learn how to configure tools that are going to be of significance to you such as your browser, Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, iTunes etc. You’ll be pleasantly surprised at how much stuff you thought you knew.

This year, particularly during the month of August, I will be sharing my experiences on the Thirty Day Challenge on here. If there was one thing I could do today that could make a difference in your life, then it would be to extend this invitation to you. I know it is going to be such an amazing journey for me, one that I hope you’ll be able to join me on.