What do I mean by viral? Sites that take a life of their own, that grow completely by the input of your visitors.

I’m beginning work on a niche site project that will launch this summer. Perhaps I’ll fill everyone here in on the URL (not sure yet!)

Here’s what I’m aiming to accomplish virally with this site:

• Content - Through forums and article submissions, I want the vast majority of the site’s content to be created by the visitors. It will be essential to have a system in place for users to login, contribute the content, and allow me to approve it.

• Traffic - Search engine traffic is great (free & paid), but I expect the BULK of this site’s traffic to be repeating visitors. Makes for a more stable traffic source.

• Links - Every member will get a “profile” (no, this isn’t some dating site) that they’ll be encouraged to link to in their signature files on related niche forums they frequent. This will help build the link popularity of this site automatically. The most popular sites are ones where the links come freely with no need for link exchanges, article submissions, paid links, etc.

That’s it in a nutshell.

For any site you’re launching from now on, think how you can incorporate the above three viral factors and you’ll be off to a running start!

Welp, the hard work as finally paid off! Our Ebook Niches membership PLR site has finally launched.

We’ve also created a special discount coupon code. On the first order page, simply enter “special” as your coupon code and you’ll receive 10% off each and every month! However, this coupon will only work for the next 2 days.

Check it out if you’re interested in 4 PLR ebooks created for you each month:

http://www.ebookniches.com

Hope to see you on the inside!

When it comes to your IRS tax documentation, you’ll need to know your IRS Business Activity Code. What in the world is that?

It’s a string of numbers that exists for nearly every specific business type out there.

I use 516110 which is for “Internet Publishing.”

You can look up other codes by searching their database here:
http://www.naicscode.com

I’m not a big fan of “Sorry for not posting lately” posts, but I’ll make this the one exception!

I’ve been hard at work with Adam Maywald (VOASI) to create a new membership site called Ebook Niches at, you guessed it, http://www.ebookniches.com/

For the full details, check out the site. In a nutshell, members will get 4 Ebook packages each month valued at over $4,400. These will be private label rights packages on hot niches where members can sell the ebooks as-is, generate content sites around them, create mini reports, etc. The packages will be top-shelf stuff.

The site is set to launch on April 3rd with only 300 members, much less than similiar private label ebook sites that offer far less and have upwards of 750 to 1500 members.

Again, the site is http://www.ebookniches.com/ and I highly recommend you sign up on the pre-release email list.

Here’s a cool free service I recommend everyone check out. Phil Tanny has launched his site Bookkeeper For You.

It’s an online service similiar to QuickBooks Online that allows you to track your income and expenses for your business and access them anywhere. Don’t expect all the bells and whistles QuickBooks offers, however as a free service, this can’t be beat if you’re using paper or a basic spreadsheet to keep track of everything.

Go check it out: http://www.bookkeeper-for-you.com/

Well, it’s been a week since I first launched my aWeber pop-up test to get more newsletter subscribers.

I won’t share all the details again; those are at the link just above.

After adding the new sliding javascript pop-up to just my homepage, I had 89 people subscribe to my newsletter in a week. That’s more than triple the amount I was getting before (25 a week) with a traditional pop-up that all the browsers block today.

The next step is for me to add the pop-up code across all of my pages, since the vast majority of my visitors never see my homepage. I’ll be sure to update you after I’ve ran that test for a week. But don’t set on the edge of your seats for this, I probably won’t begin testing this until a week or two.

I can’t stress it enough; if you’re not collecting email addresses on your site you’re really missing out on a huge revenue stream. If you don’t currently use aWeber, I highly recommend that you sign up here.

While 5 years certainly sounds like a long time (gessh, I’ll be 25 then) , there’s no reason why you shouldn’t plan that long ahead.

VOASI made a great point the other day about planning ahead.

“The internet isn’t going anywhere and you’ll always need cash. I like to tell people this: 5 years is going to come whether you like it or not. Would you rather have 500 sites in 5 years (100 a year/8 a month) that are generating $600 a day or have a few sites that you gave up on…”

If you follow a plan like that, what you’ll end up seeing is 80% of your revenue coming from 20% of your sites (the 80:20 principle). Based on that logic, let’s say I’m aiming for $100 a day with 10 sites: 2 of your sites will make $80 a day combined, while the other 8 sites will make the remaining $20 each day. You’ll never get to those big per-day earning sites if you stop at the ones that only make you a couple bucks a day (or less).

Keep building. Not for short term gains, but for long term stability.

A little experiment I’ve been doing with aWeber inspired me to share this with you. If you’ve never heard of aWeber, it’s a service that allows you to generate forms to capture email addresses on your sites. You can store these email addresses in as many different lists as you want. Once someone joins one of your lists, you can automatically send them an autoresponder email series and then follow up with random messages whenever you want.

If you don’t have it yet, I highly recommend it. My business couldn’t function with out it.

On one of my sites that gets a good amount of traffic ( about 600 visitors a day ) I collect email addresses for a newsletter. It currently has about 4,200 subscribers, but I’ve been only adding about 25 new subscribers per week. That’s because the only way I’ve been collecting email addresses is via a traditional pop-up window that only displays on my homepage.

Well, since the latest version of Explorer and FireFox automatically block pop-ups, my list signup form hasn’t been showing to too many people.

I decided to get off my lazy ass and try something new. Here’s what I did yesterday. (more…)

About 2 weeks ago I submitted 3 articles to iSnare’s article distribution service. I was attempting to get a new site spidered, indexed, and some initial backlinks.

So, what happened? (more…)

My cat named Guidey (pronounced Guide-E) is around 15 or 16 years old. He’s gotten a little thin lately and gets sick every once and a while, but that’s understandable for a cat his age. I’ve had my fair share of scares when he goes missing, that maybe he crawled somewhere to die, yet he always manages to be okay.

Why am I telling you this?

Well, there’s a valuable lesson here. That’s why!
(more…)