Niche Space is a brand new free service that allows you to build your own niche sites in about five minutes. I was quite skeptical about how easy it would actually be considering its nonexistent price tag. Niche Space’s revenue is based on collecting 50% of advertising on all sites built through the service. This might seem a bit steep, but it really is worth it and I’ll get to that shortly.

As someone who manages many Adsense sites that I build mostly manually, this service interested my greatly. I use Wordpress because even the paid applications aren’t usually as easy as they claim to be (with the exception of BANS which really is super-easy). Niche Space was something I had to check out.

The sign-up process consists of your usual sign-in information, followed by the entry of several advertising network/affiliate IDs. Niche Space uses these IDs to give you your revenue share. So rather than seeing profits within Niche Space itself, you will see them within your regular programs. These programs are:

• Adsense
• Ebay
• Revver
• Amazon

You will want to be sure you sign up for all the networks or you will be forfeiting some of your ad revenue. If you don’t know how to sign up, you can click question marks on the Niche Space Account Settings page and it will give you the sign-up link. This is very handy and makes the process much faster for those of you who may not be signed up for all the programs.

This input process - even if you include sign-up time - should take only about 15 minutes maximum. After that, you are ready to go. You’ll need to have a site set up for Niche Space to install to - and they even provide instructions for using Cpanel to set up a new domain if you don’t know how. The last step is to add your site.

When you are adding your site information, make sure you read all the instructions carefully - especially for entering document and web root paths. Entering these incorrectly can result in a failed deployment. If you are fuzzy on your document path, I recommend you follow the easy instructions on creating a .php file that will print the root out for you. This might seem a bit confusing in explanation, but it’s actually very easy becasue Niche Space explains it so well and walks you through the process.

You will see that all of your ad information is automatically entered (yet editable so that you can change Adsense or Ebay campaign IDs if you want) for you. The other step on the “add a site” page is to enter keywords. These will be used to populate your site with related information and create pages for the site. When you’ve done this - which takes about five minutes all tolled - you simply click Deploy and wait.

The deployment generally takes just a few minutes and then you will have a beautiful new site that looks like this: Thomas Kinkade Paintings. I don’t usually share my niches, but this isn’t one I am particularly attached to so I thought it’d make a good example.

If you need to make changes to your Niche Space site, you can edit and redeploy at any time.

And that is really all there is to it. It is that easy. And here is where the math comes in.

When I build a Wordpress site from scratch I generally find a theme, edit it a bit to place my ads where I want them and then write 10-12 articles to use as pages of the site. This process takes about 2 hours. I take the time to write helpful, optimized articles so I end up with a very high quality site and the search engines love it, but it is quite time consuming.

When I use BANS to create a site, I choose a theme, sometimes create a header from scratch, add some keywords and descriptions and publish. This takes about thirty minutes.

With Niche Space, I simply choose a header, add some keywords and publish. At the very most it takes ten minutes.

So let’s say I can devote four hours of my day to building these sites. That means:

Wordpress: 2 hours building / 4 work hours = 2 sites/day

BANS: 30 minutes building / 4 work hours = 8 sites/day

Niche Space: 10 minutes building / 4 work hours = 24 sites/day

As you can see, in terms of sheer volume of site creation, you can go bananas with Niche Space. In less than a week you could have over 100 keyword and ad rich sites just waiting for the hungry search engines to pick them up. I think it’s an excellent model.

I plan to try this out on a few more sites that I’m just parking right now. Once I have had them going for awhile I’ll get back to you and let you know how the revenue compares to my other two main site-building methods. For now, I highly suggest you try out Niche Space for yourself and let me know how it goes!

Thanks for Giving: Thanksgiving Giveaway

I haven’t been through the whole thing yet, but it appears to have a nice mix of ebooks, training materials and membership sites.

Self Improvement Gifts 3

This giveaway is huge and full of stuff I haven’t seen before. Definitely worth your time.

Have fun!

“not looking younger?”

You can easily create a readable sentence for that: “Trying all the products but still not looking younger?” The problem comes when you try to include that phrase again. Since I have already asked the question, it sounds awkward to suddenly ask it again, even in a different way or separated by a few paragraphs. Clients don’t need to know SEO, but they do expect articles to match what they request and to make sense when they are read by actual people.

I knew I could probably get away with omitting the question mark without complaint, but I figured that I probably wasn’t the first person to ask this question and now I was curious.

As it turns out - aside from @ and ” - search engines ignore punctuation. It is simply treated as a space in the text. In fact, one of the reasons for this is in order to allow for both optimization and readability when it comes to awkward keyword phrases. For example, let’s take the keyword phrase:

“dentist wisconsin”

Without altering the keyword by adding “in,” this keyword isn’t going to make any sense. However, because search engines are going to ignore punctuation, I can do something like this:

It is always a challenge to find a good dentist. Wisconsin has no shortage of choices.

See how sneaky that is? I got my keyword phrase in there, but still made it sound natural.

That being said, did I miss any punctuation that search engines do recognize? Also, are there any search engines that consider all punctuation?

I’m very busy finishing up a project this weekend, but I received an excellent deal in my inbox and I had to jump on it. The Wacky Wednesday sales team are offering The Definitive Guide to Video Marketing for just $4.95. This guide and the extras that come with it are created for newbies.

The guide was written by the Wacky Wednesday team because they were sick of spending money on information products about video marketing that didn’t really teach anything. They had purchased several products that were essentially just sales tools for software or hardware packages. So they decided to write their own.

Rather than trying to sell you something within the product, this guide introduces you to the world of online video and why - if you want to make money online - you need to be using it. If you have been thinking about using video, but weren’t sure where to start or you felt overwhelmed by all the information available, The Definitive Guide to Video Marketing is a great jumping-off point.

You don’t just get the guide, though, you get a package of information products with it that will help you begin stepping up to the next level.

The first extra is Affiliate Video Branding, a seven-video series teaching you how to create affiliate marketing videos easily with free tools. The series is for newbies, so if you haven’t a clue about branding videos for affiliate products, this is definitely for you.

The second extra is a six video series called Video Marketing for Newbies. These videos will walk you through the process of creating viral videos, uploading them to video sharing sites, putting them on your own website, tracking your statistics and - here comes the good stuff - how to make money with your videos.

Even though I’m not a newbie with videos, I watched and read everything included in this package and I think it’s truly a killer deal at $4.95. Yes, you could probably find all the information in these products for free online, but you’d spend a week or two searching and then another week or two trying to sort it all out and put the pieces together.

The great thing about beginners’ packages like this is that all the searching and sorting has been done for you. For less than $5 you will have everything you need to learn in order to start creating, branding, promoting, tracking and monetizing viral marketing videos.

Again, this is definitely a newbie package and also great for those of you who might be a little technophobic. Here’s the link one more time: The Definitive Guide to Video Marketing