Someone asked me an interesting question the other day.. She said:

"If you were starting again from scratch what would you do?"

I didn't have to much thinking, my answer was easy..

"I'd build a niche mareketing business".

While I have a lot of fun with the Internet Marketing niche, it's not where I make my real money.

The vast majority of my income comes from the Personal Development niche. After all, that's my background.. working with individuals, teams and organisations to improve their effectiveness.

So, if I was starting out again.. I'd build a niche maketing business.

However, I'd want to learn fast and to do that I'd look for someone who was already a highly successful niche marketing expert.

In fact, I'd go for Chris Freville's Dominiche.

List Viral is a new and innovative viral list building system from Matt Haslem. Basically, you create a List Viral account, it takes a few short minutes to set up your unique List Viral URL and then all you need to do is to encourage other people to check out the system. Obviously, the more people that join List Viral through your unique URL, the more people you'll have in your "downline".

Because of the viral nature of the system, your list will grow as people below you promote the site.

I think it's a very clever system and Matt's done a great job.

I had a brief chat with Matt on Skype a few minutes ago and he's shared some of his ideas for improvements which will make List Viral even more viral! (You'll have to sign up to and wait and see the new features)

We've been enjoying some hot and sunny weather here in south west Scotland over the last few days. The river Esk offers lots of great places for river bank picnics; and the brave and hardy folk were even enjoying a swim in some of the deeper pools.

And of course, the ice cream man was very busy!

Over the weekend I took Muffin on lots of walks and we "bumped into" the ice cream man on several occasions..

On Saturday he was in the market square during the busy lunchtime period, then during the afternoon he was positioned near the childrens play area. Late afternoon and early evening we saw him touring around the various residential areas.

On Sunday afternoon he was spotted right next to the cricket pavillion and later in the car park used by the many tourist who drop in on their way to and from Edinburgh.

In other words the ice cream man knew where and when he was likely to find the most potential customers and he positioned himself to maximise his revenue.

Is it really much different online?

As a smart marketer I'm sure you know where your target market hangs out, you'll undoubtedly have established a presence in the most popular forums, social networking sites and on Twitter.

However, do you know the best times of day to make forum posts, send out tweets and participate in networking groups?

Do you time your email broadcasts to maximise your open rate?

Do you publish blog posts to gain the maximum readership?

Have you considered that there may be an optimum time to submit bookmarks, stumbles and diggs?

Timing can be just as important as location!

If you are based in the UK and you're market is primarly North America then I'd suggest you wait until mid afternoon before trying to get some exposure.

After all, I've never seen an ice cream man selling in the dark. Have you?

One of the most time consuming and difficult of all the niche marketing tasks is identifying a new market which will yeild a good return on our investment.

While it's relatively easy to browse through the categories on Amazon, eBay or even the Clickbank marketplace.. it's not so easy to find a niche with lots of potential and little competition.

In my experience there's not much revenue to be earned from a keyword phrase that gets less than around 500 searches per month. especially if there are over 50,000 other sites competing for traffic.

I must admit I've had to look at a lot of frogs before I've found the "princes" of niche markets.

I've probably tried dozens, if not more, keyword research tools. Most of them were what I would describe as "adequate" or "mediocre".. until now..

I received an email from long time friend Fabian the other day telling me about the latest version of Keyword Research Pro. He sent me a review copy and I've been putting it through its paces..

It rocks! Fabian's Keyword Research Pro goes so much further than any other keyword tool I have ever seen. It even measures the monthly searches and the level of competition.. which means you no longer need to waste time looking in several places to gather all the information you need to determine if it's worth digging deeper into a new niche.

Seriously, if you want to build a portfolio of niche based blogs or websites, Keyword Research Pro will help you uncover hundreds, if not thousands, of profitable niches with virtually no competition.

The good news is you can save $20 off your purchase of Keyword Research Pro, if you act fast!

Use coupon code: 20off

Check out the video demo of Keyword Research Pro now..

I've been doing quite a lot of niche research over the past few days and I've noticed two very common niche selection mistakes..

1. Choosing too broad a market, so broad that it could hardly be called a niche. For example "Gardening" isn't a niche market in which you could hope to compete unless you had a huge marketing budget. However, "Vegetable Gardening for Beginners" will have less competition and will be much more targeted. Not only that but it will be much easier to find suitable products to promote as an affiliate or to have a product created.
2. Choosing too narrow a market. Yes, it is possible to goo too deep into a niche to the point when it just isn't economical to create content or to build a site. Using the gardening example.. "Organic vegetable growing for beginners on a budget". I haven't checked, so I can't tell you how many people search for that topic. I'll wager that it's not many!

So, when researching a niche market by all means look out for long tail keyword phrases.. just make sure that the tail isn't so long that you trip over it!

Finding a wide range of targeted "long tail" keyword phrases can be very time consuming and something of a nightmare, especially if you search each of  the most popular sites one at a time.

You've probably already heard of the Google Wonder Wheel where you enter your basic search term and then click the "Show options.." link in the top left corner below the Google logo. On the Options page look down the left hand column and you'll see a link "Wonder Wheel". Click that link and you'll see lots of related keywords.

Soovle is another website that you might find useful. It interrogates several of the most popular sites and returns the top results in goups on the results page. It's an excellent site for broadening your keyword selections.

So, you want to build a six figure business?

Lets start at the low end of six figures and say that you want to make $100,000 within the next year. If we break that down, then we need to make $1,923.08 every week. But wait.. that's a daunting figure for may people. That represents a target income of $273.97 every day.

How on earth can anyone start at that level?

Isn't there an easier way?

Of course there is.

However, it requires that you begin with the end in mind, you have a clear plan and that you consistently invest in building your business week in, week out. That means you keep going for the next fifty two weeks, you invest a minimum amount of time in your business every day for the next 365 days.

Can you do that?

Let's look at building that $100,000 business from a slightly different perspective…

What if you were to invest the time it takes to select one product, create a review site, promote that site by following a plan and earning an affiliate commission on just three sales every week? What if those three sales earned you a total of $75 each week?

Let me explain…

If you were to build just one of those websites every week, by the time you'd got to week 52 you'd have made $103,350. I'd like you to take a minute and work out the numbers for yourself. More importantly, I'd like you to consider the possibility of building one website a week for the next year.

Would you be willing to make that commitment?

Would you be willing to follow a blueprint that showed you how to:

• Find a new niche product
• Build a review site
• Create the right content
• Get that site ranked in the search engines
• Set up essential automation
• Drive targeted traffic to your site
• Monitor your site's performance

So, do you have what it takes to research, build and promote one site every week for the next 52 weeks?

The first step is to declare your intent by posting a comment below.. If I get enough comments, I'll reveal my six figure blueprint over the next few days.

So, add your own comment, bookmark this post, tell your friends and send out a tweet.. the more people that comment, the more detail I'll reveal.

All you have to do is look on YouTube or any of the other video sites, especially the specialists sites that focus on funny videos, to see just how much exposure an entertaining or amusing video will get.

If you can tie a joke, a funny situation or some other form of entertainment to your brand or your product and if you can get enough initial exposure, you'll see a huge spike in traffic from your viral video.

Here's an elegant example of a well thought through video/brand tie in:

Of course, the trick is to get lots of eyeballs to watch the video and then to encourage those people to spread the word. Although, the most successful viral videos tend to get passed on naturally.

Getting traffic from successful viral viddeos also requires some planning to make sure that there's at least one link for viewers to click!

A few years ago I found myself well and truly backed into a financial corner. I had to find some cash and I had to find it fast.

I'd noticed a few people were selling websites on eBay and I came to the rapid conclusion that I could replicate that process quite easily.

I bought a couple of domain names and I joined the "Boxed Art" membership site to get access to some professional looking templates.

I went a step further than most of the eBay sellers at the time by adding some unique content to each site; and I invested some extra time of some basic onsite SEO and a limited amount of link building.

It took me less than a day to set up the two sites. My total investment, including a full year of Boxed Art membership, was less than $100 and I sold both sites for a total of $875.

These days there's a new word for what I've been doing for years! It's now known as "Site Flipping" and, like most things, it's evolved quite a bit

You could set up a full time business Site Flipping. Especially if you new all the up to dates techniques and the extra twists.

Even if you just need to find some fast cash, I recommend that you give Site Flipping a try. It still works for me..