Picking a good domain name is pretty important, as it will permanently define your site. It’s one of the only things you can’t really change without starting all over again (SEO wise). Putting some thought into registering the best domain name possible is definitely worth while. Here are some pointers to consider before getting started.

Branding vs. Keyword Based Domains

These are the two main classes of domain names, and both have their benefits. You can occasionally find a good mix of both in one name, but those are becoming rarer and rarer.

Branding: I would recommend a “branded” domain name for those who wish to become big and well known. Examples include Google.com, Amazon.com, even Yimto.com! A good branded domain name would be something that is easily memorable; a name that if someone arrived at your site and really liked it, would be able to remember it, and tell their friends. Short is good, but long can be ok too if it’s catchy.

Keyword: A keyword based domain can be really useful for mini-sites, or more “one time visit” projects. What I mean is, search engines will give you more credit with a good main keyword in your domain, so people may be able to land on your pages easier/cheaper. But, these domains can be a bit long and unmemorable, so having them come back can be tougher. Many keyword domains are already taken, so chances are you’ll have to settle for a longer name with an extra word or two.

Domain Name Length

Pretty obviously, the shorter the better, for two reasons; first because it’s easier to remember and more concise, second because in PPC, you will have more characters to space in your display url, leaving more keyword room.

The beauty of a branded domain name is that it can really be anything, I’m pretty happy with my 5 letter domain name that you can actually say out loud, even though it isn’t a real word!

Domain Name Extension

Again, a .com domain name is top of the pecking order, only for the fact that it is the most well known extension, and therefore earns more legitimacy/respect in the eyes of the readers. A .net or .org can substitute, but always shoot for the .com

There can be benefits to using other extensions though, for example a .info can be dirt cheap, and only cost you 1 character in terms of url length. Then again, very few people know of this extension, so it is very poor in terms of memorability.

Dashes or no Dashes?

Personally, I think dashes can work ok in a keyword based domain, but will really hinder any sort of brand building. Say I were talking to you on the phone, and I wanted to tell you about a site called super-action-time.com, I probably would forget to mention the dashes (or be too lazy to say them haha), and you would probably end up at superactiontime.com, wondering what the heck I was talking about.

For keyword domains though, with the priority on SEO and PPC traffic, it’s not as much of a problem, but still does lengthen the domain. Whether it’s worth it or not depends on how bad you want those keywords

PPC is a whole different ballgame when it comes to choosing keywords. Compared to traditional SEO, where LSI allows you to rank for many related terms, with PPC you must target specific keywords and that is all you will rank for. So choosing the best keywords that are laser targeted to your campaign is crucial, now more than ever with the quality score algorithm.

That means you want to build tightly knit keyword groups with a relevant destination for many keywords, which gives you better quality score and cheaper clicks.

Building those keyword lists can be tricky though, but I’ve found a pretty neat way to do it yourself. Right now, I’m not subscribed to any major keyword service like Wordtracker, so I’ve been using the Google Keyword Tool, as well as the Wordtracker free keyword tool to gather some basic data.

They do provide you with good ideas, but the keywords you get from these are pretty much all over the map, and not practical for starting an effective ad group for PPC. They can show you some of the good short tail keywords that are getting a lot of traffic, but to generate long tail keywords, they are pretty much junk.

However you can take the short tail keywords, and adapt them yourself to create your long tail keyword possibilities. Take this for example, say you want to sell dog clothes as an affiliate (I hope not though lol), you search up “dog clothes” in the Google Keyword Tool, and get a bunch of semi-related dog clothes keywords.

Here, I see a lot of prefixes: small, large, fancy, luxury, wholesale etc. What we are going to do is generate many different permutations of target keywords using the tool at PermGen.com to create prospective long tail, low competition PPC keywords. You could enter in all of those adjectives into the first word list. Then, in the second word list, include dog, and a list of many dog breeds that you can find anywhere on the net. Finally in the third list, you could enter many different kinds of dog clothes, like sweaters, boots, muzzles etc.

So in the end, you will have a huge list of longtail keywords like luxury poodle sweater, fancy terrier boots etc. etc. Very long tail, but easy to group together, for example, ___ terrier boots, luxury poodle ___.

You can do this with as many combinations of words as you want. Now throw these back into the Adwords Keyword Tool, or better yet a Hexatrack campaign, and you can determine whether it is worth going after these markets.

Many people say that long tail keywords in PPC are dead because of quality score, but I’m not sure I believe that. I don’t have my own conclusive proof yet, but from all the information I’ve read about how to get good quality score, it shouldn’t be a problem at all with tightly knit long tail keyword groups. I’ll definitely bring results to you as I experiment further with this.

[Update:] Jonny has graciously offered a substantial discount for my readers, read on for more details or click here!

The Guru Assassin is a new membership program developed by Jonny Andrews, a very successful online entrepreneur. I’m sure you could call Jonny a “guru” himself, but the guru assassin ecourse isn’t about beating gurus, it’s about joining them. Basically, the ecourse focuses on dissecting the entire process of developing a successful business online from start to finish.

It takes a bit of a unique twist here because all of the lessons are delivered in video format. Now honestly, I have never really been a fan of video, since I prefer reading to listening, but Jonny does a good job here. He has a very personable and likable attitude, as well as an optimistic delivery. Even though it may be a little harder to absorb the material, he will pass his positive mind frame onto you. (Just watch his intro video to see what I mean)

He does include some downloadable materials with many of his videos, like a pdf file he uses in the video for example, and that’s good. Loading a video many times just to re-find information would be pretty annoying in my opinion, and this helps some. I think he may be wise to provide transcripts of his videos as well in the future, to make it easier to find information with say a ctrl+f search. Either that, or very detailed outlines of the videos, so that you can jump to specific parts easily.

Right now, this program is still in it’s earlier stages, but it’s growing quite quickly. I’ve had access to the membership area for a couple of weeks now, and the number of videos has almost doubled in this time. Some of the topics include money management, tools of the trade, finding niches, time lines, market research, sales pages, buyer psychology, SEO, and location targeting.

Jonny makes himself extremely available, in fact, this is one of his selling points. He wants to provide members with exactly what they want, and frequently reminds us that members can email him anytime, and he will make videos about topics suggested.

You might think since this membership program is still in the early stages, it might be worth waiting for more content to appear, but really, you may have a great opportunity here. As one of the newer members, Jonny will be much more accessible to you, and your questions will surely be answered. He is also arranging a lot of different content as well, such as conference calls and discussion forums.

Of course, at the same time, as the program is in the early stages, there isn’t the most content, and for the price of $97 per month, it may be a bit steep for some people. It’s definitely growing fast though, and as each video is 15 to 90 minutes long, I think it’s worth the cost.

Special Offer: Save 20% off your monthly rate! Simply enter the following coupon code when signing up: 144765820
Note: You must sign up through my affiliate link for this code to work.

Luckily, you can actually get a free 7-day trial to see for yourself what it’s like, and I highly recommend it. You’ve got nothing to lose, and a lot to learn So take a look, and see if you like this format!

Pros:
- Video format may appeal to some
- Positivity is contagious
- Accessible “teacher”
- Frequent updates

Cons:
- Video format may not appeal to some
- Would like to see transcripts or video indexes
- A bit expensive (New coupon code really helps though!)
- New program

The Yimto Verdict: In The GREEN!

The free trial and awesome coupon code puts it over the edge, give it a try for yourself!

Today I’ve been absolutely swamped in landing page reading materials, most of it from this gigantic compilation of articles found here. There are some good tips here, although I think it’s a bit of theory overkill, since really there is no perfect landing page for every niche. That’s why once again, testing and experimentation is key to success.

What you might want to do when starting to make a landing page for a new niche is look to your competitors for general ideas on what kind of basic landing page seems to be working well, whether it be something fancy, basic, list building, sales driven, etc. Then you can use some of the tips in those articles to tweak and refine these ideas into some nice new landing pages.

Of course, it’s nice to have a good base to start with, but to truly get the best results, you’re going to have to test a lot. That’s where split testing comes into play; this is when you have two or more versions of the same page, and have visitors sent to each to find out which page converts the best.

I just found this great tool called Google Web Optimizer, which can help you split test for free! Funny enough, I’ve been in the internet marketing community for a long time, and I’ve heard of at least 5-6 paid solutions before just recently finding out about this… Maybe free options are a secret

Anyways, I haven’t had any time to test it yet, but it looks great. It offers classic A/B split testing, which is definitely the best way to start. This lets you simply take 2 separate pages, and feed your traffic to each 50/50. This should be used to test 1 variable, like a different headline for example. You can get very accurate results with this form of testing.

The other way you can test, one that I’m not as familiar with, but have seen products charging $177 for, is by multivariate testing, which will change many different aspects of a page. It’s more complex, and takes more page views to see definite results, but could yield very interesting data faster.

Like I said, I haven’t really used it much yet, but I know how important split testing can be, so I just had to share this little gem with you guys. I’ll definitely be implementing this with new landing pages I’m working on, and bring more results in the future.

Choosing a niche to enter is always tricky, which I’m sure is where a lot of affiliate marketers, including myself, have gotten tripped up. The problem is, that making a site and marketing it can mean a lot of work, time, and possibly money, so you want to be sure you have the best possible niche to enter. It can be really hard for new affiliate marketers to finally take the plunge and start in a niche, unless they are absolutely sure they will make money.

In my opinion, it’s virtually impossible to predict for sure if a niche will make you money. That’s why so many people fail to get started; they just can’t be sure, and will always search for the perfect niche on the silver platter. I’ve definitely been there myself, it’s tough to put so much energy into something, with no guarantee of success.

But what I’ve been finding lately is that there are actually quite a few good ways of getting better estimates of a niche’s profitability, and therefore lowering the risk of poor to no returns. If you simply scale things down, you can get quite a bit of info before starting a super huge project right off the bat.

So here are a few tips I’ve been taking to heart in researching some potential niches of my own:

Demand - Are There Buyers?

First things first really, there has to be buyers in your niche. Making money online equates simply to selling; you need people to be willing to give you money (or their information, CPA style) to make money. So while traffic estimates and all that are good, they mean nothing without buyers.

Profile your potential visitor, and ask yourself if they fit the profile of a buyer, or better yet, a “desperate buyer”, meaning someone who is in a situation that needs an instant remedy, and is willing to pay for it. An example of a buyer would be someone searching for a TV Show DVD Box Set, a desperate buyer would be someone searching for Computer Virus Removal.

A good place to check and see if a niche has buyers, is to check forums or even Yahoo answers. You can see here the kinds of questions people are asking, and if buying something fits their solution.

What I have been doing more lately is using Hexatrack to watch and see which advertisers are constantly paying for ads. If they are advertising consistently, the chances of them making money are high, and therefore their visitors (your target market) fit the buyer profile.

PPC can offer some nice short term testing solutions, instead of investing too much time with SEO trying to get ranked, only to find your market is no good. A few months back, I wrote a 2 part post on Targeting Long Tail Keywords; this could help you find some nice easy terms to rank well for in SEO, with which you could do some SEO style market testing with articles or Squidoo lenses.

Competition - Are You Outmatched?

Competition can actually be a good thing when investigating niche markets, in moderation that is . Obviously the first thing you want to make sure is that you can actually enter the market without completely getting stomped on by super competitors. If the first page of search engine results for your niche is full of authority sites, that might be a problem. If PPC is filled with huge sites bidding dollars a click, you might be in trouble.

Sure a lot of obvious niches aren’t worth trying, especially if you aren’t someone with tens of thousands of dollars to invest (which I assume you aren’t ), but there are still plenty of good, more specific niches you can target. The best part is that these smaller niches generally have better ROI potential than broader ones!

Competition can be a great gauge of niche potential, since like I mentionned above, if people are say bidding high on PPC keywords, they are surely making money. An even better metric is if you see that these people are affiliate marketers themselves, then you really have good chances here. Hexatrack does a great job at helping you keep tabs on these ads, and sorting out which of them are affiliate marketers just like you.

No competition can be a good thing or a bad thing. It can be good if you stumble upon some untapped market (although, there may not be any affiliate opportunities), but also bad because it can just mean that people have tried and failed to make profits in this niche.

Interest - Will You Invest The Energy?

I hate to use this piece of advice, as it is a commonly used saying that top marketers will crap all over, but it’s actually something to consider, especially in the early stages of your affiliate marketing endeavors. You should target a niche that you are interested in, at least enough that you will be willing to invest the energy into it.

That’s because in the early stages, chances are you will be doing a lot of the work yourself, whereas later, you can outsource a lot of the non-marketing aspects (content creation to be specific) with your profits. It will be a lot harder to progress if you really don’t like what you are working on. If you have even the teeniest lazy bone or procrastinating tendency (which 99% of us do), you will find it 10x harder to get moving.

So hopefully these tips will give you some ideas on what to look for before starting with a new niche. The most important thing to remember from all this is that you will never know for sure if a niche can make you money. Even if all these signs point to yes, there may still be a no, and vice versa. That’s why it’s a good idea to carry out small scale tests and experiment often. You may just find yourself a goldmine!