I am happy to report that I am back on my regular posting schedule after winning 2nd prize in Colleen Slater’s 30 day blogging challenge she started over at the Warrior Forum (Colleen is a wildly successful affiliate marketer and author of Blog Inferno). One of the prizes is a month of 1:1 coaching with Colleen and I am really excited about that). I hope I am teachable.
I Won The Micro Niche Finder Video Contest
Colleen’s contest is actually the second contest that I have won recently. In December, I won second prize in the Micro Niche Finder video contest with my video about building eBay affiliate sites. (In case you missed it, you can see my original post about my Micro Niche Finder video contest entry here). I that video, I show how I created this BMW Car Parts site.
Part of the agreement in the contest was that James Jones would be able to use my video however he wanted as promotional material for his tool. He did just that. He set up a page showcasing my video, sent his list to the page, a promptly crashed my video hosting account. 🙂 I got that fixed quickly, so it was not big deal (but boy was I impressed with the amount of traffic that he can throw around). Sheesh. No doubt, the money is in the list.
Micro Niche Finder Video Frequently Asked Questions
As you can imagine, with all that traffic I got a load of email asking me questions about the video. I love that, because I love helping people that are trying to figure stuff out. Based on those emails, I thought it might be useful to list and answer some frequently asked questions about the video and the site.
Q: What did you use to make the video. I love the picture-in-picture.
A: Camtasia Studio. Expensive but worth it. Try it for free for 30 days by going to the Camtasia website. It is $299 there, but I found a Camtasia Studio discount at PC Mall where they have it for $249.
Q: Are you selling from your own eBay store? Do you own a real auto parts store? Are you storing BMW parts in your spare bedroom?
A: No, I use a plugin for WordPress called phpBay to show items that are currently listed for sale in eBay. I am a eBay affiliate through the PepperJam Network (registration is free).
Q: How is the site doing? Have you retired from your day job yet? Can you make the payment on a new BMW using proceeds from the site?
A: Depends on your point of view. To be completely honest, I have not promoted it (I created it just for the contest). Still, it has 80+ pages indexed and is getting some very light search traffic. I have some clicks through to eBay but no sales yet. I suspect that the direct traffic is from the video, but the trickle of search traffic is real. Looks like I need to promote this one with article marketing or 1-Way-Links or something like that.
Here are a couple of screen shots of the traffic.
Q. What WordPress Theme are you using? Can I use my favorite blah blah blah theme? Do I have to use a premium theme? Is there a best theme for this sort of thing? What’s a WordPress theme anyway?
A. Well, that is an easy one. A WordPress theme is a “skin” for WordPress that controls the way your WordPress site looks. I use my own product, Niche AdSense Themes for WordPress. You can use any WordPress theme — but I like a clean look, so I used mine.
I hope you find all of that helpful. If you have additional questions about the site or the techniques used to create it, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment.
Thanks,
Mark
