after another long period of silence, I have some interesting news for you: a new product review and new WordPress themes.

In today´s issue:

1. Review of Neil Sharing´s “ten day cash secret”
2. New Web2.0 WordPress Themes
3. A New PLR Package with Great Content

Ten Day Cash Secrets - Review

There´s no secret to earning money the easy way within ten days. In fact, it can be done much faster. The technique used by Neil Sharing in his “ten day cash secret” is nothing new, it´s been around for a while in a similar way.

And let me warn you upfront. It´s another “thin affiliate” strategy, so I don´t endorse it at all.

Here is how this technique works:

You - the affiliate marketer - take a product feed from a merchant, install a WordPress blog and use Neil´s script to automatically create blog posts based on the products in the feed, one post per product.

Within days, the new site gets indexed in the major search engines and will most probably also attract some visitors. If you are lucky, your pages will rank well for specific product searches since all the pages are built around the products. So the visitors you get via the search engines are likely to be buyers.

Almost 3.850 US$ in sales in the first month after Neil´s test site got live, that sounds like very much. But “sales” just means the money received by the merchant. If you find out that this particular affiliate program only pays 2% commission, you can quickly calculate that the revenue of the site was only 77 US$.

Well, 77 US$ is still good for an affiliate site which is purely built with the content of a product feed.

It´s no surprise that a brand new site does well in the search engines right from the beginning. Similar figures can be achieved with a new blog and a bunch of articles on it, using Google AdSense or other affiliate products to monetize the traffic.

What´s much more important though is how a site will be doing in the months and years to come. I don´t see a good potential in sites that are built purely on product feeds. They lack of quality, original content. They are very thin affiliate sites.

My prediction is that Neil´s product feed strategy only works if you find a feed that …

1. almost nobody else uses

2. contains more than just the product title and an image (at least a bit of a descripton would be good or you don´t have any content than a title and a picture for each post).

3. contains products people are looking for to buy.

Valuable product feeds that meet these requirements are rare. Even IF you find an awesome product feed somewhere, how long do you think you will be the only one using it?

When you look at Neil´s sales page you´ll see an interesting note right on top: today (03/17/2008) it says “over 1.000 copies sold”. So there are over 1.000 webmasters using this script on probably several thousand sites already. Over 1.000 webmasters looking out for great product feeds to use.

Sorry, but I won´t jump on this bandwaggon just for a few extra bucks this and maybe the next month and I surely won´t use this script on my mini-sites that have valuable, unique content. It´s not worth taking the risk of getting flagged as “thin affiliate”.

Just in case you are curious and want to take a quick look at the sales page: 10 Day Cash Secrets

And Neil´s “thin affiliate” site: Wine Buyers UK

New Web2.0 WordPress Themes

These weeks, I´m trying to develop the ultimate SEO, Web2.0, user-friendly, easily customizable WordPress theme. Many of you are familiar with my older SEO WordPress themes.

For the web2.0 design, I´ve got inspired by the tigopedia reloaded theme, which can be downloaded here:
http://www.sizlopedia.com/tigopedia/

However, there are some things I don´t like in tigopedia:

1. lack of flexibility - just one fixed design.
2. lack of SEO, sidebars come above the content.

Therefore, I started to create a similar theme but with much more flexibility and features. You can read more details about the current state of development and also submit your ideas and wishes for features here:

WordPress 2.0 Theme Development

Once the themes are ready, I´ll let you know about and you can download and use them. These will be the best themes for SEO niche blogs you can find.

A New PLR Package with Great Content

I´m not always in favor of PLR (private label rights) content. I especially don´t like PLR articles because they are frequently overused and don´t give you much value.

However, I do like certain PLR packages that contain good quality ebooks. I like PLR ebooks because they allow me to use the content in a couple of different ways, f.ex. selling the ebooks as they are with my name on them, extracting articles, create e-courses for my niche sites to gain subscribers, package with other products, etc …

Peter Sherman just released “Niche Box Bonanza”, a package with 5 brand-new PLR e-books, including graphics, website headers, pre-written sales letters and other marketing materials, so if you want to sell these books, you can start very quickly.

The e-books are in the following niches:

play black jack
quit smoking
herbal remedies
debt-free lifestyle
creating online business

If you already have a site or if you are planning to start a new website in any of these niches, Niche Box Bonanza is good for you. Go check it out.

have you ever tried to attract more visitors from search engines by writing and publishing keyword focused articles?

Actually, I don´t write many articles myself, most articles are written for me by ghostwriters. But it doesn´t matter if you are hiring ghostwriters or writing yourself. If you want your articles to do well in the search engines, you or your ghostwriter must know how to create the perfect article.

In order to give you an edge over other internet marketers, I´ll tell you today how SEO articles used to be written in the past and how they should be written today.

This is how it used to be done:

After a keyword research at Wordtracker, I got a list of thousands of keyphrases. Then, I filtered the list for long keyphrases with few competing pages and a reasonable search count.

The next step was to select between 20 and 50 keyphrases and write one article for each keyphrase, trying to optimize each article to rank well for the given phrase.

How an article used to be optimized in the past (this is how many SEO ghostwriters and internet marketers still do it):

- keyphrase in the title
- keyphrase once or twice in the opening paragraph
- keyphrase again in the middle and once towards the bottom

Unfortunately, repeating the exact keyphrase several times throughout the article doesn´t work anymore to optimize an article. And in many cases, an article like that doesn´t read well. Though it might be unique (remember: uniqueness is one important criteria for an article to do well in the search engines), it´s still a poor article.

The future of writing seo articles:

Well, this future has already begun some time ago, when major search engines started to apply “latent semantic indexing” to their algorithms. LSI or LSA (latent semantic analysis) is quite an old technology - patented in 1988.

Simply put, a search engine that applies this technology doesn´t only look for words that make up the keyphrase for which an article is written, but also looks for other words that are closely related to the topic.

For example: in an article about “professional tooth whitening”, closely related words would be:

- bleaching
- zoom
- teeth
- dental
- gel
- kit
- laser

Though they do not directly appear in the keyphrase, these words are relevant to the topic of “professional tooth whitening” and therefore, a search engine which uses LSI in its algorithm will give an article containing those related words a better ranking than a poorly written seo article focusing mainly on the primary keyphrase.

I have a short PDF report for you that talks about the advantages of writing quality articles and compares the quality of the content on webpages that rank well and those that rank poorly for the same keyphrases. You can read it online or download it here:

The Past and Future of Affiliate Marketing

You will notice that writing quality content is pretty easy for you if you know well the topic you write about. Because when you naturally write an article about something you know well, many of those secondary words will be automatically included.

But what about your ghostwriters or articles about topics you don´t know well enough?

Many ghostwriters do a little bit of research on the topics they are not familiar with before they write your articles, but most of them will still try to optimize their articles around primary keyphrases. If you hire ghostwriters, there´s a great tool you can use to analyse the ghost-written articles for their quality and easily improve them - Dr. Andrew William´s “Fat Content Creator“.

“Fat Content Creator” is a great article writing software with many built-in tools that help you to improve ghost-written articles and write high quality articles from scratch by yourself even on topics you don´t know much about.

In combination with Andy´s “Internet Search Browser”, a compact information research browser, writing quality articles has become quite easy.

Both tools are included in Andy´s brand new “Creating Fat Content” course. I bought the course during pre-release and I recommend you get your hands on this course and the tools.

The manual teaches you step by step with specific examples how to use both tools to find the right “theme words” related to your article topics and create articles that can rank well for not only one but many different keyphrases.

Check it out here:

Creating Fat Content Course

Now it´s time to put the tools to a test. I have some fresh ghostwritten articles for a brand new site. First, I´m going to check their “quality score” with Andy´s “Fat Content Creator“. Gonna post the articles then unchanged to the new site and promote to get the site indexed.

Once indexed, I´ll pick out one or more keyword focused articles and see where they stand in Google, analyse the competition and see what I need to move to the top. You know, writing the perfect article is only one thing you need to make it to the top. In a competitive niche, we also need enough incoming links.

I hope to have some good results for you in one of the coming newsletters. Talk to you soon again.

best regards,

Guido W. Stiehle
TheJungleMarketer

The videos seem to be made only to make this infoproduct a video course (adding perceived value to the product). A lot of video time, Neil is wasting to draw ugly graphs on a white background. There´s some very basic information about the meaning of “passive income” or “passive cash flow” explained in long videos that could be explained in 3 short paragraphs.

Apart from the very basic information which seems to be targeted to newbies, Neil talks about some of his more or less passive ways to earn money online. One way is AdSense, of course. The site he brags about on his sales page that earned him about 80 dollars in one day (from over 3000 visits that day) is actually a very poor site. I can´t tell you details from inside the course, but I can tell you this: that day has been a VERY (!!) exceptional day.

And more: I earn the same money with AdSense with a site that has 1000 times less articles on it compared to Neil´s example.

A very big disappointment was the 102 $ mystery bonus. I believe Neil is going to piss off a lot of customers with that. This bonus is actually only a 102 $ discount on a 299 $ script. In other words: you are misled into looking forward to a valuable bonus just to find out that it´s actually something you need to buy for 197 $.

So what about the passive income “secrets” or let´s say “tips for creating passive cash flow”? If you are a complete newbie, you will at least learn some of the possibilities you have for creating a passive income through the internet. But you will also be left in the dark about many more details you need to know in order to really setup those income streams (note: I said “if you are a complete newbie”). This course is not for you.

If you are doing business online for a while now and heave read a few good newsletters or forum posts on the topic, you won´t really find much information. Your money will be better spent in other things like having unique content (articles, ebook, …) created for you. I mean, I don´t need to tell you that you can make money online selling e-books through your website. You already know this option exists. But do you know EXACTLY all the steps you need to go through before you make your first sale? Neil´s video course won´t teach you these details.

Hence, I don´t recommend Neil Sharing´s “passive cashflow secrets”.

Rating: 0 (of 5)

Total time spent (from the beginning): 11 hours 30 minutes
Total money spent: 159,40 $
Total money earned: 547,33 $
Revenue: 387,93 $

So that´s an hourly “wage” of ( 387,93 / 11.5 = 33.73 ) $33.73

One important point is the unique content that I have used to build the site and the unique articles that I have submitted to ezinearticles.com and a few other directories to promote the site. Without these unique quality articles, I wouldn´t have earned that much. How do I know? Well, in the same time, I have built 5 (!) other WordPress minisites in the weight loss / fitness niche, using only PLR articles and content copied out from PLR e-books.

While the PLR articles are good in quality, they are NOT unique. To promote the sites, I have rewritten 3 articles and thought they would be unique enough to be accepted by ezinearticles.com and other directories. Well, only 1 article was accepted, the other 2 articles got my ezinearticles.com account suspended.

Only some lower-quality, non-authority article directories accepted the articles and therefore the 5 minisites finally got indexed. All 5 sites combined have about 500 pages, 20 times as much as the home cleaning minisite. And I have promoted the 5 weight loss sites in the same way.

In the same time period (October 2006 - September 2007), those 5 sites combined have only earned $57.35 in AdSense clicks.

You see how far better it is to use unique content !

But hey - 350 $ in a year, that means I would have to build about 100 minisites in order to earn a fair yearly income of 35.000 USD ? Well, the answer is: Yes, IF you do nothing but posting 20-30 articles to each site and submit only 1 or 2 articles to half a dozen of good article directories to promote each site … and IF AdSense is the only way you use to monetize your web traffic.

A better option is to build only 10 sites, but to invest more time and money in continuously adding content to them and also very important: promote the sites !

Then, you shouldn´t rely on AdSense alone to monetize your sites. You should search for affiliate programs and write articles to promote products and services. Or if your niche has local service providers, you could generate business leads for them. And of course, the more popular your sites become, the better you can sell advertising in form of banner impressions or static text links.

1. The 2 main reasons for my absence.

2. What I´ll be doing in the coming months

2 Reasons for my Absence

A) Lazyness?

Well, I can´t say I´m a lazy person. I´m still a full-time dentist and father of 3 little kids to whom I dedicate a good amount of time. Usually I have between 1 and 2 hours every day left for my internet business, early in the morning or late in the evening.

But until the mid of July, I didn´t use that time to care about my internet business, doing other unproductive things like watching TV or sleeping too long in the morning. There´s no excuse for that.

B) Lack of Time

Then, in July, I re-opened my custom WordPress themes design service offered from my other site “EasyWebTutorials.com”. I had noticed in my site statistics that a reasonable number of people were finding this page through the search term “custom wordpress themes”, which appears in the top 3 results on Google for this search term.

I like doing the custom themes, but it´s another trade of time for money … time that could be better invested in increasing passive income streams. Therefore, I raised the price for a custom design from $80 to 150$ in order to reduce the number of orders and free up my time to care about passive income projects and this newsletter (again).

Last month, I had to spend a lot of time updating a couple of things like my video tutorials, moving TheJungleMarketer from ThirdSphere (I had reached the disk space limit) to a new webhost and writing content for a new niche site project.

But now I´m glad to be back on track again.

What I´ll be doing in the next few months

First of all, I will add more unique content to my mini-sites that are earning me a passive income and that I haven´t touched for a long time and also continue to steadily promote these sites in order to increase my passive income.

I´ve built sites using unique articles and others using PLR articles, but only those sites with unique content are doing well. Even when you spend money for having the articles written for you, this money is better spent as the low fee you pay for a PLR article membership site.

And sites with unique content are here to stay for a long time, even if you don´t touch them for a while, i.e. you don´t add new content nor submit articles to directories to get more incoming links for over a year, these sites continue to produce income.

I´ll talk to you more about passive income in the next newsletter. Just bought Neil Sharing´s “passive cashflow secrets” course to see if it gives me some new ideas, but I was very disappointed. More about this course in a detailed review … by the end of this week.

In addition to the passive affiliate and AdSense income from my minisites, I´ll invest more time in building up another quite passive, residual income stream: building, hosting and maintaining websites for certain professions, f.ex. dentists, attorneys, …

I´ll continue my newsletter on a monthly publishing schedule and share my experiences and progresses with you. However, the newsletters will be shorter, only a summary of what happened during the month and the articles / reviews that are new on my blog. If you are using a feed reader, you should subscribe to my blog´s RSS feed in order to receive all the news as soon as they are published.

New internet marketing products you can expect to be reviewed within the next 10 days:

Neil Sharing´s “passive cashflow secrets”
Andy William´s “creating fat content” course
Michael Green´s “20/20 challenge”

Yours,

Guido W. Stiehle
TheJungleMarketer