In this episode, we talk about the new WordPress Attack, chat more about Niche Keyword Research, why it's important, and how to think about it. We also tackle a really tough listener question about money making potential in internet marketing. Is it worth the time? All this and more! You gotta love that.

This Week Around Late Night IM

There is a WordPress attack underway. You can read about it on the CERT site. Concern is creation of a massive high-bandwidth botnet.

Here are some things you should do right away

• Update all themes, plugins and (of course) WordPress
• Make sure that you do not have a user named “admin”
• Install Limit Login Attempts plugin

Big thing last week was the end of the Forever Affiliate 6 week coaching program. I can say without a doubt that this is the best affiliate marketing course that I have ever been involved in. It was just awesome. As a result of the course, I have a 20 site plan for 2013 with the goal of having 10 brand new profitable sites by the end of the year.

I'm slower than some of the other people in the course because in addition to my day job, I have this crazy blog and podcast to maintain. My plan is still to report all the results to you as they happen. I have this awesome master control spreadsheet complete with tasks and target dates. I need to update that for “reporting” so that I can easily and accurately tell you what is going on….but the basic snapshot is like this. I have the process broken out into five major steps:

• Niche selection — including finding an offer, finding keywords and profit testing
• Site Build — this includes getting the domain up and running with WP
• Post Content — includes ordering content and images and posting them
• Monetize site — includes link tracking, offer placement, etc
• Initial promotion — includes cheap promotion before sale for about a month
• Paid testing — includes paid testing through PPC
• Asset promotion — if the site makes sales, big promotion
• Ongoing promotion — rankings achieved, ongoing promotion

Current status

• 14 niches identified
• 4 sites built
• 3 sites have content posted
• 1 site in initial promotion

Also working on a cool experiment with another 10 sites based on this report from John Leger and Josh Spaulding.  The report shows how to make automatic sites in just 4 easy steps using Article Builder and Keyword Canine.

We have had more sniffles, fevers and other junk running around my house. I am starting to wonder if we are cursed. It's really hard to work on your internet business when you don't feel great, or when you are taking care of a sick little one. It's one of the things that gets in the way.

Listener Feedback On From Facebook

Michael Stephens

Mark -I have for some time now been going down the road of affiliate/internet marketing, but the thought that is continually nagging in the back of my mind is that is this really worth the effort? I don't mind at all working hard for something, and putting in the time, as I realize its not going to occur over night, but I don't want to do it if its all for nothing and there is no payoff.

I guess I think about it this way – there are certain activities that a person can do that have higher values in an economy than other things. For example a doctor usually demands a higher salary than a clerk in a department store. And I know that if I want to make that higher salary of a doctor, I need to get the education etc. and thus there is a payoff for the effort.

But for internet marketing – there doesn't appear to be any comparisons – to some extent it feels like I'm rolling dice – it might work and it might not – its a chance. I'm not looking for a guarantee – I just want to make sure I'm using my time wisely and not wasting it. Even if I develop a website that is in the center of my passion and interests, if its not making money and I'm not providing for my family, then its not a business, its a hobby. I heard it said that if you want to catch a whale then you have to go out to the sea where the whales are at- with internet marketing – I can't figure out whether I'm fishing in the Pacific or fishing in a kiddie pool.

Do you have any thoughts on it??

Thanks
Mike

About Keyword Research

After listening back to the last several episodes about finding niches online, I was reminded about the critical importance of keyword research to everything we do in internet marketing. When it comes to selecting niches for affiliate marketing, one of the most critical criteria is whether or not your've going to have an audience for whatever project that you are about to undertake. SEMoz says it really well:

Keyword research is one of the most important, valuable, and high return activities in the search marketing field. Ranking for the “right” keywords can make or break your website. Through the detective work of puzzling out your market's keyword demand, you not only learn which terms and phrases to target with SEO, but also learn more about your customers as a whole.

It's not always about getting visitors to your site, but about getting the right kind of visitors. The usefulness of this intelligence cannot be overstated – with keyword research you can predict shifts in demand, respond to changing market conditions, and produce the products, services, and content that web searchers are already actively seeking. In the history of marketing, there has never been such a low barrier to entry in understanding the motivations of consumers in virtually every niche.

Patrick M Matherne from a Facebook thread here

Hey Mark got a question. I have a site I am staring up that will be based on providing free test questions for people. I am getting really close to having my first mini test out. What I was wondering is how to promote the site on the search engines. Would it be better to go after the test itself or have each page target the question content?

That is a keyword research question fundamentally. You need to put yourself in the shoes of the person that you are targeting. They are trying to prepare for a test — and they are looking for sample questions. What are they typing in Google? Check those phrases. You probably want to target those initially unless you find them too low a volume or too competitive. In your thinking you need to consider what you plan to do with this “prospect” that you give free test questions to. Are you going to sell them a course on passing the test? If so, you'll want to look at those keywords about studying for the test as well.

Regarding your specific question — again this is a question of intent. If there is search traffic for the question content AND that traffic is part of your target audience, they yes. BUT I expect this is NOT the case for you. Take the example of a computer technician exam. 99% of people searching for “How To Format A Hard Drive” are not searching for that because they are preparing for an exam. They are searching for that because they need to format their hard drive — so they are not your target market. Make sense?

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As always, I'd love to hear what you think about the podcast. Better yet, I’d love to answer your question about Internet marketing on the show. Just drop me a line here on the blog or on the digital recorder at 214-444-8655. Don’t worry, there are no stupid questions. Unless you tell me not to, when you ask a question or leave a comment might even use it on the show.

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Episode 055 Transcript

Crazy busy around here. I know I always say that, but it’s only because it’s true. Lots of craziness going on.

WordPress Under Attack

In fact, this week there has been a lot of craziness going on in the world of WordPress. You may have heard around the 10th of April an announcement from one of the government agencies that there was a WordPress attack underway. So I’ve been busy locking down some WordPress sites that I was being a little lazy about and I thought we would talk about this.

You can read about this by Googling “Wordpress Attack 2013,” you can read about it on the CERT website, the Computer Emergency Response Team for the U.S. government.

The concern of this and what’s happening is that evil doers – it amazes me that they have time to go do this stuff, but that’s a whole other topic – have written software that attempts a brute force attack. They seek out WordPress installations and attempt a brute force attack on WordPress. The way this attack is working is they are trying to guess the password assuming that the username is the default username that Fantastico and other installation scripts, which is admin.

A lot of people in the world use weak passwords, dictionary words and so forth. Computers have gotten fast and sophisticated enough that you can pretty rapidly go through a list of high probability combinations and try to guess someone’s password algorithmically. That’s what is going on right now with this attack.

If you have WordPress installations you need to do a few very simple things to protect your WordPress installation. I’m bringing this up at the top of the show because I recommend the use of WordPress, I still recommend the use of WordPress, and this actually isn’t exposing a security vulnerability in WordPress but it’s exposing a security vulnerability in humans who tend to use weak passwords.

Once this software gets control of your WordPress installation what it’s likely that they’ll be using this for is to create a giant bot-net. These bot-nets are groups of computers that work together that can do terrible things, like take down websites with denial of service attacks. That’s what happened to Pat Flynn. Although, if you’re a terrorist you might want to disrupt something more interesting, like a bank or some critical part of info structure.

Transcript continued from the Episode 055 Show notes