The Niche Blogger Review
In my last post I mentioned I had been exploring blogging for money. In this post I’m providing The Niche Blogger review, and in being completely unbiased I can state at the outset that so far this has been one of the better online tutorial membership sites I’ve come accross.
NOTE - I’ll be updating this review as I progress in the program month by month so bookmark the page and keep checking back.
I’m always looking for ways to expand my skill set, and if that means poking into the wallet to get tools useful to me I rarely think twice. In my experience many of these types of sites fail to deliver on many promises of easy traffic, flowing sales and untold riches, but there’s always the odd diamond amongst the rough which makes it worthwhile.
I joined The Niche Blogger through the Warrior Forum as a special offer. I’d had plenty of exposure to Amy, who runs the membership site through the forum previously and the positive feedback from existing members made it a no brainer. Amy’s personal story is an interesting one in itself, as she attempts to pay off over 75k in debt in 12 months using nothing but online marketing.
My first impressions of The Niche Blogger are excellent. The membership content (which, not surprisingly, is set up in blog fashion) provides a day by day, step by step plan for setting up a money making blog. Now, even though I wasn’t an expert blogger, some of the first months content wasn’t new to me. Having said that, in the first months content Amy has set out in a foolproof manner the steps that need to be taken to set up a streamlined wordpress blog, which plugins to adopt, which settings will earn you massive rankings, and provides video tutorials for some of the more difficult scripting adjustments for the technologically dense among us. Many of the ‘days’ won’t actually require a days effort. In fact I was able to rip through the first three weeks in as many days. However, it’s wonderful to have everything layed out for you, and in the unlikely event you have any questions, Amy answers them within hours (often minutes). Being able to set up hosting and domain registration is made to be a cinch with Amy’s advice, as is being able to ’tweak’ your blog for maximum effect. The value here is in duplication. Had I tried to set up half a dozen monetized blogs this time last month, I’d still be working on it.
What I also really appreciated was that in laying out long term money making strategies, Amy sets out parameters for things like keyword research (you’ll be surprised and delighted by what she recommends), article writing, blog management and stresses the importance of quality content. Her techniques are managable, well defined, and exciting to implement.
One of the BEST things to come from The Niche Blogger so far is the templates you get access to for a small pittance which make setting up a monetizable blog super simple. Check out Texas Holdem Rules Poker, which is a blog I have set up using Amy’s pre-adsense primed templates. Another is Energy 4 Living. There’s one for just about every type of blog you could need, but they are easy to customize as I have done, and they are simply a breeze to use. One step, and the whole thing is linked in to your adsense account. Brilliant.
Amy earns (at present) about 5k a month from 20 blogs, and her self professed goal is to get each of her members to that same level. With over 400 members, she sets high expectations…but if her determination is anything to go by, they are realistic ones. Her integrity is beyond reproach and the monthly membership is an extremely competitive price (under $15). Simply as a resource this is highly valuable information to anyone other than the most experienced bloggers. For those wanting to make money from blogging, it’s gold. For newbies, it’s a godsend. In the first month, there were quite a few processes I already knew how to do, but at the same time there were fiddly little things that whilst I am sure I could have figured them out, it would have taken valuable time. The Niche Blogger lays it all out in a step by step fashion, so much so that the only real excuse we have for failure is not doing it.
Let’s take a more detailed look at The Niche Blogger:
Month 1 - Covered the importance of keyword and niche research, snapping up some domains and dirt cheap hosting, and getting the nuts and bolts of our blog empire in place. Amy demonstrates how to maximise our blog for SEO potential and to ensure that once we do start posting, everyone out in the blue yonder knows about it. There were some tweaks she suggested which took seconds to implement and have made a huge difference to traffic. I’ve made those same small changes to another blog and they alone have contributed to a 20% increase in traffic. Amy touches on social bookmarking and other forms of traffic generation and backlinking. It also focuses on content creation, latent semantic indexing, and keeps us focused on developing a content rich blog.
Month 2 - We’re now looking primarily to monetization and setting up our blog so that it has well structured and complementary methods of generating income from our sites traffic. Amy introduces numerous affiliate and pay per lead organizations as well as more classic methods of monetization such as adsense for search. Think you can’t be taught anything in this area? Me too…I thought this month would be a dry patch for me, but I discovered some juicy sources of income I wasn’t previously aware of. Amy’s coordination of these techniques to monetize a blog is well layed out and culminates in a site which is maximised for earning potential. As if that isn’t enough, she then sets out demonstrating the power of RSS and how to utilize the power of syndicated content in conjunction with article marketing to generate multiple backlinks.
Month 3 - This month is really about marketing and promotion, and getting some solid traffic to our established sites. We revisit alternative uses for RSS and the power of widget marketing to drive traffic and generate interest. We looked at more established backlinking through lenses, hub pages, knols, yahoo answers, and wikipedia. Amy also introduces some novel collective approaches to traffic generation and shows us a great site for quickly and easily generating video’s to submit to directories, furthering our sites reach and readership. It’s at this point that our efforts start to pay off, as the incomming traffic meets with our established monetization methods to generate the income we’re striving for. I have started to see a return on the time investment, and I’m looking forward to subsequent months to monitor progress. Hate niche research? Amy also throws in a couple of easy money niche’s with some helpful suggestions on where to focus our efforts.
So is everyone making squillions? No, but if the forum is anything to go by there are a fair share of success stories already. It’s to be expected that there will be mixed success with any particular blog. I have developed 4 to date using Amy’s methods but am yet to complete all tasks up to month 3. One generates quite substantial traffic for a 6 week blog, and has made quite a few affiliate sales, but the other earnings are paltry. On the other hand, the second blog I’ve set up, which I’ve hardly marketed at all, get’s only average traffic but has a pretty decent daily adsense CTR. Quite a few bloggers are already making $5-$10 a day just on adsense. It might not be earth shattering, but multiply that by just 10 and you’re on a steady path to an alternative income.
Want an additional incentive to join. Sign up and become a member of The Niche Blogger and I’ll do your first custom blog header for you.
This one is a winner. Get on it.
