4.8 Stripping All of the Default Crap from WordPress (AF)

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In this video I discuss:

  • Exactly what to delete off of WordPress’ default installation

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

4.8 Transcript Below

Alright, we’ve got WordPress installed. I have access to my WordPress account by resetting my password so I killed two birds with one stone there. I needed to reset the password anyways. And now we are ready to strip all of the default crap from WordPress because there’s a fair amount of it. But again, really quick and easy.

So what we’re going to do in this video… I’m about to show you everything on-screen… this should be really quick… but just to guide you through what we’re going to do, WordPress installs a bunch of kind of bloated stuff that you don’t need. And whenever you install it – every single time – you just got to go through and delete, delete, delete, delete. So we’re going to delete a sample page, sample post, sample comment, and some unnecessary plugins that we’re not going to use.

We’re just going to go through and do this really quickly. Like I said, follow along and if I go too fast… it shouldn’t really be an issue… but if I go too fast, feel free to pause until you do it yourself and then play until I do the next thing and then pause and do it yourself. You know how it goes.

So let’s hop on in here to WordPress.

So when you log in to WordPress, you’ll see this is kind of your default page. You know, you don’t need to do this… but I’m just going to go ‘I don’t need help’. You know, you could go through a step-by-step thing if you wanted.

But now, we’ve got all of my… this is what you would see every time you log in to WordPress, okay? So the first thing we want to do, we’ll just work our way down the list.

I’ll go Posts, I’ll go Trash for the ‘Hello world!’ post. And you have all of these notifications, because again, you’ve got all these bloatware. We’ll delete those plugins and they’ll go away.

So I’ll go to Pages – just click on Pages on the left – ‘Sample Page’, I’ll Trash. Look for comments… Oh good! There were no sample comments this time. Oh! Because I already deleted the posted page. Duh. So no sample comments because it was attached to the post that we already deleted.

So now we need to go into Plugins and we’re going to delete most of these, okay? It’s ridiculous… and Bluehost does this by default… but it’s not ridiculous because what they’re trying to do is help and some of these could be genuinely helpful.

But in my experience, some of these are also really, really bloated and they can kind of slow down your website which isn’t a good thing. And there are much better versions. These are kind of the most commonly used ones that have been around for years. And since they’ve become so established, there are competitors that are better than all of them. And in a different video, we’ll replace some of these.

But we don’t need Akismet Anti-Spam. We don’t need Hello Dolly. We damn sure don’t need Hello Dolly.

I’m going to deactivate and delete Jetpack as well which some of you may be kind of like, “Oh my God, he’s deleting Jetpack?” Because Jetpack has a lot of functionality but it is very bloated. Everyone that has development experience – programming experience – would advise you to find other ways to do things that Jetpack does because it’s just so bloated. It loads so many different things that your site doesn’t need to load which decreases your load speed which you’ll find out later is a very bad thing. It can be very bad for SEO and for user experience.

So we’re going to deactivate MOJO Marketplace as well… delete. Deactivate OptinMonster API… delete.

And we’re going to need to add a contact plugin. Technically, we could keep this one and figure out how to use it. I’m just going to choose my own. I guess it doesn’t really matter… but sometimes you get a questionnaire, a survey, when you deactivate something… and I’m going to delete.

So now we don’t have any plugins but that’s fine. We’re going to install some more in one of these next couple of videos.

And that’s it! We just stripped WordPress of all of its unnecessary default crap.

So now we need to kind of adjust our settings; install the plugins that we do want on the site for some extra functionality – that’s really helpful; and I guess then we just need to add some content; pick our theme; and we’re going to be good to go. Then you’re going to have a website up ready to rock. So we’re only a handful of lessons away from that now.

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to post them in the Facebook group, I’ll see you there or I’ll see you in the next video.

4.7 How to Install WordPress in <5 Minutes (AF)

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In this video I discuss:

  • A step-by-step explanation of how to install WordPress using Bluehost

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

 

4.6 Why WordPress Is the ONLY Platform You Should Use (AF)

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Unlock it all by getting the tools your business needs to grow.

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Important links from this video: https://stoppingscams.com/how-to-build-a-blog-from-scratch-a-comprehensive-guide/#why-wordpress-is-best

In this video I discuss:

  • An overview of why WordPress is the only platform that any internet business owner should seriously consider
  • A discussion of WordPress vs. Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, and others

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

4.6 Transcript Below

Okay!

So before we hop in and we kind of set up your domain and we install WordPress which is actually really quick and easy through Bluehost, I want to take a quick minute because this is something that comes up somewhat often. I want to take a quick minute to talk about why WordPress is the only platform you should consider using and I don’t make any money from saying any of this, okay? So this is… you know… there’s not even a chance of bias here. This is just based on experience as an internet marketer.

So in today’s day and age, you’re kind of drowning in an ocean of options. When I first started in internet marketing, you had to at least be able to manipulate HTML templates. I didn’t know how to code them from scratch and I wasn’t very good at even reading code and editing it but that’s what you had to do. You had to take templates and edit HTML. Before that, you had to hard code the HTML. So at least… you know… by the time I started, they had some options to kind of… you had visual editors but they weren’t that good.

And then along came WordPress and it’s really taken over pretty much the entire web design industry – not only affiliate marketing and internet marketing. So I know there are a lot of options out there and I know that they are easier to learn. CMS stands for ‘content management systems’ which there are a lot of them.

You know, some of WordPress’ most direct competitors are like Drupal and Joomla but even those are… you know… they’re along the same lines as kind of technically challenging to learn as WordPress. But you know, when it comes to Squarespace and Weebly and Wix and anything along those lines – there are a lot of them now – there are a lot of people that ask, “Hey, can I use this?” or “Hey, can I use GoDaddy site builder?” or Bluehost may even have their own option for a visual site builder these days. And the answer is no.

Technically, you can use them but it’s going to hurt you. Their ease of use is their downfall because you’re going to get to a point in your internet marketing business – sooner probably rather than later – where you need to edit some things that Squarespace, Weebly, Wix bury so deeply that they’re very hard to find and then you have to go through and like search Google and find… you know… it’s just so difficult because there aren’t as many users for them as there are for WordPress. But also sometimes, you just can’t edit things there. There are things you need to optimize for search engines and you just can’t do it on Squarespace, Weebly, and Wix sometimes. So they’re so simplified that it’s detrimental to someone that’s trying to build a profitable internet business.

And if for no other reason to use WordPress over using anyone else – and just hands down nobody else even comes close – it’s WordPress’ plugin selection. If you’re not familiar enough with WordPress to know what plugins are, (just really briefly) essentially they are little skills that you install on your website. Again, an oversimplification… but you can kind of install these skills on your website and these features that enhance the performance of your website.

So something that you would have had to pay a developer several hundred or several thousand dollars to code, you can simply click a couple of buttons, install that plugin, activate it, maybe adjust some really easy-to-understand settings; and voila, you have so much more capability on your site.

And we are going to work with several of those plugins. They’re all free… and not all plugins are free, I should say… the plugins that we’re going to be working with in this section are free.

And the nice thing even about paid plugins… like the other day, I was looking for a plugin to build FIMP on (to build Free Internet Marketing Project on). I guess this was a week or so ago and I needed what was called a LMS. Where CMS stands for ‘content management system’, LMS stands for ‘learning management system’ and it’s what you use to build training courses and membership areas and stuff like that. And the one I found… I think it cost me like $147 or something like that. Just not that much.

Whereas if I had had to pay to get all of these custom developed, it would have cost me several thousand dollars to have a membership area that’s nice with all these functionality. And instead, because they can sell it to a massive amount of people and those people go out on their own and install it to their WordPress site without any help from them, they can sell it at a much lower price because now they have a mass market product.

And technically, Drupal and Joomla – and even… you know, places like Wix and Weebly and Squarespace – they all have similar things to WordPress’ plugin library and marketplace but they don’t hold a candle. I mean we’re talking about like hundreds of thousands, if not millions of options versus like on WordPress versus like dozens or hundreds or maybe on the low side of thousands for the other content management systems (for the other CMS).

So bottom line is if you want to build a profitable online business, there’s no cheaper or better option than WordPress. We talk about this more in that same article that I linked last video… a little bit deeper… so if we talk about why WordPress is best and it’s the only thing you should consider using, it’s a pretty accurate description and summary if you want to know more.

But at the end of the day, that’s just what it boils down to. You’re going to be so restricted, you’re going to have less access to knowledge and help and tutorials when you Google things online. It is more difficult technically to learn (I will fully admit that) but at the end of the day, it’s a necessary evil. You have to learn how to use WordPress. You don’t have to learn how to code; the nice thing is WordPress for the most part will keep you out of ever having to code and you can hire a developer when you need to for custom functions and stuff like that that you can’t get through plugins.

But you absolutely have to learn how to use WordPress. There are just no ifs, ands, or buts. You need to learn it if you want to build a profitable business. As much as that stinks, Squarespace, Weebly, Wix are just going to tie your hands too much and it’s really going to stunt your potential and your income potential more importantly, and how much traffic you can get – stuff like that – compared to WordPress.

So it’s going to be a little bit tougher but don’t worry. That’s what I’m here for. We’re going to go through it in the training; you’re going to get really deep and into the nitty-gritty; as time goes on, I’ll show you how to do all these things step-by-step on screen or with screenshots. So don’t freak out. It’s all going to be handed to you and you’re going to see it all step-by-step. And if you do get stuck, there’s a lot of information for WordPress online.

So that’s that. That’s why you have to use WordPress over anything else if you want to be profitable online.

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to post them to the Facebook group – free for registered members. And I’ll see you there and I will also see you in the next video where we’ll talk about how to install WordPress on your domain within your hosting company. And I will see you there!

4.5 Linking Your Domain Name and Hosting Account (AF)

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Unlock it all by getting the tools your business needs to grow.

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2342″ ifallowed=”hide”]Twice the results. Half the time. Would you be interested?
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Helpful links from this video: https://stoppingscams.com/how-to-build-a-blog-from-scratch-a-comprehensive-guide/#connect-your-domain

In this video I discuss:

  • An explanation as to why this is necessary (and why it’s not for some viewers)
  • How to update nameservers for domains purchased separately from your hosting company

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

4.5 Transcript Below

Okay!

By the time you’re starting this video, you should have… as I mentioned at the end of Lesson 4.5… you should have your hosting secured and you should have your domain name registered. So if all of that’s set up, we’re ready to keep going.

So this I think is something that people are intimidated by because it can be easy to get lost but I’m going to show you step-by-step with screenshots how to do this here.

So basically, what we’re doing in this process is we’re tying your two islands together. You know, it’s kind of… again, an oversimplification… but you’ve got your domain name on one island, you’ve got your hosting on another island – we need to tie those two things together so that your browser can serve up the files to you from someone’s website when you go to their domain name. Because if they’re on two totally separate islands, nothing good’s going to happen.

So I do want to say again: skip this video if you just purchased your domain name through Bluehost. No worries. But for everyone else (I think the vast majority of people will have probably opted for NameCheap or GoDaddy) this will be really quick and painless. I promise.

So this is done – like I said – by updating our nameservers. It’s similar for all domain registrars that… you know, it’s kind of you have to click in different places to get to the settings but every domain registrar has a place where you can update nameservers. And it’s pretty easy to Google. Say, for example, for whatever reason you had hosting on HostGator and your domain was with GoDaddy. You could search ‘update GoDaddy nameservers to HostGator account’ and you’d find articles probably from HostGator and from GoDaddy directly that would walk you through that step-by-step.

The important thing is that you need to know your nameservers. It’s really simple for Bluehost because everyone has the same nameservers. But if you sign up with a company like HostGator, depending on… you know… what server you’re on in what region, you’re going to have different nameservers. So your nameservers may be ns288.hostgator.com and ns289.hostgator.com or they could be ns.1181 and ns.1182 or… yeah… ns1182.hostgator.com.

But anyways, that would be included. Your nameservers for most hosting companies (for most humping companies, my God!) for most hosting companies are going to be listed in that initial registration email that you received from your hosting company. But again, if not, it’s very easy to search and find out how you find your nameservers for your hosting account. But again, if you’re with Bluehost, it’s really simple. We all have the same nameservers.

So it’s easy: Google it. End of story. Because I’m going to show here NameCheap to Bluehost, if you have a different registrar or if you have a different hosting company, just Google it. You’ll find a good article or a good video on YouTube.

I also show how to do this in this particular link on https://stoppingscams.com/how-to-build-a-blog-from-scratch-a-comprehensive-guide/#connect-your-domain. It’s a long link so you would have to do a lot of typing. But on our article about How To Build A Blog From Scratch: A Comprehensive Guide, we talked about in there how to connect your domain name from NameCheap to Bluehost.

So I’m just going to show you how to do this in screenshots really quickly. The only reason I’m not going to do this one live is like you can see, I’ve blurred out my… you know… full name and any private domains that I don’t really want to share. Apologies, again. But it’s easier for me to do this way through screenshots if the process looks exactly like this. But if I do it live, then I have to go through and I have to blur the video and stuff. So it’s just easy blur screenshots than it is to blur videos. So I’m just going to show you how to do it in screenshots.

The screens would look exactly like this. Over time, this process may change a little bit – like if NameCheap changed the design of their website – the steps may be a little bit different but they’ll probably… even if they look slightly different… they’ll probably be the exact same steps, you may just have to go looking for them. And if they’re totally different, send me an email because it means I need to update this video. Okay? But it should be pretty self-explanatory overall.

The first thing is you need to log into your account and you need to get to the domains settings. So RueTattoo isn’t reflected here because I took these screenshots a few weeks ago for the article on stopping scams. So you would log into your account and then over here on the left-hand side, you would click ‘Domain List’ and that would take you to this page and it would kind of show you all of your different domains.

The PillPupper I’m okay sharing publicly because it’s just not anything anyone’s going to be able to replicate; it’s patented – all that stuff. So I’m not concerned about sharing this one in particular.

So what you want to do from there and once you click domain list, you see this screen, you want to hit ‘Manage’ for whatever domain name that you want to update the nameservers for. And the cool thing about this process is you don’t even have to log into Bluehost to do this. You know your nameservers already because the same thing for everyone on Bluehost. So as long as you know your nameservers, there’s no reason to log into your hosting account for this process.

So if you feel like, “Uh Ian, I never even logged into the hosting account.” That’s okay. That’s correct. It’s nothing to worry about.

So once you click ‘Manage’, you’ll be taken to this page and you’ll see this little section down here magically-named ‘Nameservers’ – that thing we’ve talked about over and over again. So you would just click right here, you would select ‘Custom DNS’ and then you’ll be able to put in ns1.bluehost.com and ns2.bluehost.com (and those are your nameservers if you’re hosting with Bluehost; they don’t have a bunch of different nameservers like other hosting companies do) so you would put those in there. That’s enough. You don’t need to hit ‘Add Nameserver’ or anything like that. That’s just going to add more lines. You just need to select ‘Custom DNS’, put in ns1.bluehost.com and ns2.bluehost.com, and then you need to click this little green checkmark and then they’ll kind of… you’ll see that it’s processing and it’ll say, okay change is saved – and that’s it! That’s how you update your nameservers.

And so now, you’ve tied those two islands together. You’ll possibly see a notification message too that says like, “Hey it could take up to 48 hours for nameservers to fully propagate.” In my experience, that’s not the case. It can happen and don’t freak out if it does. You can always contact NameCheap support or the support for your registrar if you’re concerned about it. But in my experience, it usually happens within a few minutes; it’s reflected within a few minutes. I’ve never had it really take more than a couple of hours and certainly never the full 48 hours they warned you about. So just know that. It’s probably not going to be instant, but they’ll probably propagate within the next few minutes – 15, 30 minutes at max. And if not, don’t freak out because it can take up to 48 hours.

Okay, so that’s it! That’s how you update your nameserver to tie your hosting and your domain together – at least for Bluehost and NameCheap. Again, if you have a different registrar or if you have a different hosting company, just Google it. You’ll find a YouTube video or you’ll find step-by-step documentation with screenshots from either your hosting company or your domain registrar as long as they’re fairly major, okay? So that’s that!

Now we are going to move on in to actually setting up the website, installing WordPress, and getting everything set up. So things are going to start getting really excited because if you feel like this is tangible output, within the next few lessons, you’re going to have a website with… you know… it’s going to be up and live and it’s going to have some content on it. That’ll be done by the end of Section 4 so we’re just a few videos away from that.

As always, if you have questions, feel free to post them to the Facebook group – that’s free for registered users – and I will see you there and I’ll see you in the next video.

4.4 Securing Hosting for Your Website (AF)

Thanks for stopping by and checking us out! If you like what you see, make sure to create a free account so that you can:

  • Track all of your progress and easily pick up exactly where you left off
  • Get support from me and other members whenever you get stuck using our members-only Facebook group
  • Secure your spot in a followup accountability course designed to assure you’re making progress

Or simply log in if you already have one.

=====

[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2509″ ifallowed=”hide”]Unlock more training for growing your online income — with the business tools you’ll need in the process.
PLUS, get:

  • Time-tested methods to get traffic fast with NO risk of getting Google-slapped.
  • The most profitable ways to make money—and exactly how and when to monetize.
  • Access to Ian’s expertise so that you can ask him questions every time you need to.

Unlock it all by getting the tools your business needs to grow.

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2342″ ifallowed=”hide”]Twice the results. Half the time. Would you be interested?
Be on the top 5% of online business owners who know how to maximize their online profits. Get new, actionable, and advanced training every month. Focused on more profits. 2X Faster.

WARNING: Goo-roo’s ain’t gonna like this

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

Important links from this video:

(discounted affiliate link – these commissions fund FIMP)

FIMP Members enjoy some awesome, exclusive perks at Bluehost:

  • The lowest pricing for Bluehost possible: You can’t find FIMP’s discounted prices on Bluehost’s website without using the link above
  • Exclusive, frustration-free support guarantee: if you join Bluehost through FIMP and ever need help, you have exclusive support options to make sure you always get the help you need in a quick and pain-free fashion

Alternative hosting companies (other than my #1 recommendation listed above) can be found on the members-only Links & Resources page, but unfortunately Bluehost is the only provider specifically going above-and-beyond for FIMP members.

In this video I discuss:

  • The best place to host your websites
  • The value/cost balance necessary for early-stage website hosting
  • Brief explanation of shared hosting vs. VPS hosting vs. dedicated hosting
  • Why purchasing a plan with “unlimited” domains is essential for internet marketing entrepreneurs

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

4.4 Transcript Below

Okay, on to Lesson 4.4!

So you should have your domain name by now, and hopefully, you’ve registered it with your choice – unless your choice was the hosting company in which case you would combine both of those steps here: you would register as you paid for hosting; you would also pay for the domain name. Again, it’s not my preferred or recommended route but to each their own. Totally understand.

And so now we’re going to talk about where to secure your hosting for your website, what that means – all that stuff. You’ve probably heard it before. You may even have existing hosting but I encourage you to watch this video any way around it.

So Part 1 was getting the domain name. Part 2 is getting hosting. Those are the two essential components for owning a website online.

So in case you don’t know what hosting is, just really simply put: it’s your server. You’ve probably heard the term ‘server’ as well. It’s where your files are stored to deliver up to the people that visit your website. So when someone… again, an oversimplified explanation… but when someone types in RueTattoo.com, their browser pulls the files from my server and displays that to them. That’s what makes that my web page. Again, oversimplification – but that’s basically how it works.

So hosting is where your files are stored. It’s essential for having a website online. And there are a ton of different options. I’ve hosted with well over a dozen different companies over the years. I’ve hosted with every single one of the absolute best brands that’s out there and I’ve had varying experiences with each of them.

You know some of them I’ve had experiences that were bad enough to make me never register or never host my websites there again. I’ve also had some frustrating encounters – maybe live chat was a little bit too long – but based on the pricing and what I was paying for… you know… I couldn’t be too upset. I was upset at the time, but long term, it’s just the nature of shared hosting.

So in this video, we’re going to talk about my recommended host and that is Bluehost. And I mentioned this towards the beginning of the training – you know, one of the introductory videos – please use my link if you’re signing up for hosting. That is like the one point that Free Internet Marketing Project receives commissions and monetization consistently. So I would just ask that you please use my link. The link is StoppingScams.com/Bluehost. If for some reason that link isn’t working when you try to shoot me an email and I’ll give you the direct full code of the link. But that should work. StoppingScams.com/Bluehost.

And in my experience, you could Google… you could say, “Okay, should I host at Bluehost?” and you’re going to find a lot of people that are really upset. Because at the end of the day, that’s going to be true for HostGator, that’s going to be true for Bluehost, that’s going to be true for 1&1 Hosting, that’s going to be true for every low-cost shared host.

I have personally hosted with HostGator for years before I moved over to Bluehost. Just full disclosure: I just found the services and the support (the performance overall) to be much better with Bluehost than it was with any of the other kind of low cost shared hosting companies – which is why I recommend them. I personally think based on my experiences that they’re the best place for someone to start off hosting.

And just for full disclosure too, Bluehost pays anywhere from $65 for everyone that signs up. If I do a certain amount of volume, they pay me $125 per person. There are hosting companies that pay much better than that – much, much better than that. There are hosting companies that would pay me up to $200+ if I referred you to them but they’re going to be more expensive, they’re going to be lower quality.

And again, my priority is to put you in the best place, not to make as much money as possible. So I just put all that out on the table. I really hope you support the Free Internet Marketing Project by purchasing hosting through Bluehost using this link.

So the other thing to note is any shared host (whether it’s Bluehost or HostGator or anyone)… you keep hearing me use the term ‘shared host’ which… shared hosting means that you are sharing server space with a lot of other websites. You don’t have your own server. That would be a dedicated server where you are the only website on that server. And in between, there’s something called VPS which stands for ‘virtual private server’ – not to be confused with the VPN. That’s a very different thing that has nothing to do with hosting, typically speaking. But a VPS is a kind of an in-between. It’s a virtual dedicated server basically.

So there are other people on the server but you are allocated a specific amount of technical specifications like RAM and processor speed and memory. So right… this is again eyes glazing over, people are just falling asleep, and just like hitting keys on their keyboard trying to figure out how to make this stop. I understand that’s way more technical than most of you want to know, but I also want to throw it out there for the people that are curious at least at a high level.

So when I say ‘shared hosting’, it’s kind of the most basic level, the lowest cost hosting. You should hope to outgrow any shared host in time because when you get to a certain level of traffic and a certain amount of money per month, it’s just going to make sense for you to move on to at least a VPS (a virtual private server). It’s probably months, if not years down the road. Don’t worry about it right now. They’re more expensive and that’s why I don’t recommended them right off the bat. But you should hope to outgrow any shared host whether it’s Bluehost or HostGator or GoDaddy (if you hosted with them) but I find Bluehost and any shared host to be the absolute best value for when you’re getting started. And like I said, I find Bluehost to be the most dependable of those options.

The other thing is to make sure whatever host you’re going with, most of them will have a really low-priced tier that they advertise. They’re like, “It’s only $2.99 a year for hosting!” And then you look at it and you’re like, “Oh, that’s only for one domain name.” Again, as an internet marketer, you are probably going to run multiple websites in time so just spring for the unlimited domains right from the beginning.

I will also say full disclosure: I don’t say that because I get paid a bigger commission. I get paid the same commission whether you sign up for the one domain account or the unlimited domains account. I just say that from experience.

Technically, you could upgrade when you got to that point but I think it’s just easier to sign up for unlimited domains from the beginning because whether it’s you registering another domain two weeks from now and stating a different site, whether it’s abandoning the niche you’re working in and wanting to host another site two months from now, or whether you’re just expanding into multiple sites down the road… I think my main hosting account has something like fifteen domains on it (they’re all different sites that I run or have run in the past)… so long story short, make sure to buy the unlimited domains option.

Okay so we’re going to hop in and look at this. Again, just like domain registration… I haven’t finished checking out like I said I would but I actually will after this video because we’ll need it for the next video.

I want to come in here and I’m going to… you know… go to StoppingScams.com/Bluehost… and of course, it auto filled my Bluehost review of the URL… so that would take me to Bluehost through my affiliate link. Again, thank you so much if you go through the effort of doing that. You don’t have to. You’re going to pay the same amount either way and one way I get supported and another way I don’t. So I appreciate it if you do that. But you can see here they say, “Oh, starting at $3.95 a month.” That’s going to be the single domain option.

So the only thing I want to point out is really call your attention to the different hosting tiers I talked about.

So with the Basic hosting tier, you’re going to get one website, you’re going to get one domain that you can host. With the Plus tier, you’re going to get unlimited websites. And yeah, there’s all these extra stuff, too. You technically get an included domain.

Personally, again, I would still register it in NameCheap. I’m not even commissioned on those NameCheap purchases. I just say that because they’re going to give you that included domain for the first year, and then the next year, it’s going to build at $25 and every year thereafter – and you’re going to lose in the long run.

But if you want to take advantage of that free domain, the totally go for it. Just know that your costs are going to be higher in the coming years. So you know, you could go up to the next year. I don’t see any reason to. I don’t know why I’m… I don’t see the difference here. Okay, one spam experts, one domain privacy. I see. So even domain privacy wouldn’t be included here which their cost for domain privacy would pay for the first year with NameCheap anyways.

So the only thing I really want to show here is make sure you select the option with unlimited websites. So I would say RueTattoo.com. You would put in whatever domain name you registered and then you would come in and you would just fill up and just checkout anything else. You can uncheck Site Backup Pro (it’s just an upsell), uncheck Site Lock Security. These may change over time and don’t be too terrified of this price because that’s going to change here in a second, too. But they’re just checking those as upsells by default. Again, just like anything else, just like hosting, keep an eye out for those upsells and uncheck them.

And if you’re strapped for cash… again, I mentioned earlier on you’re going to need somewhere between $150 to $200 to get your business started up. The main chunk of that is hosting. So if you pay for more – you know, if you do 36 months; if you do 24 months – you’re going to get a bigger discount. But I am totally conscious of your pains as someone… a lot of you are trying to get a business started for as little money as possible so I just bumped this down to the lowest price for… or excuse me, the lowest term… which is the overall lowest total which is 12 months.

And you just want to make sure to uncheck any upsells because they very clearly add to your total down here. So just uncheck those and then you would input your information.

What it’s going to look like from here… again, I’m not going to checkout onscreen largely because I already own several Bluehost hosting accounts and I’ll use one of those to walk you through what we need to do later. But what’s going to happen is you’re going to get an immediate confirmation after you checkout and in your inbox you’ll see that. And once your hosting is set up for that account, you’ll receive another email that contains all kinds of information. You want to print that out, you want to star it, you want to keep track of that email because it contains some really important information that you may need down the road as long as you’re hosted with Bluehost. So potentially, you may need that email eight years from now if you stayed with Bluehost for a really long time.

So anyways, you would checkout for hosting. And at this point, by the end of this video before you move on the next one, you should have your domain name, you should have secured hosting with Bluehost or already have hosting somewhere else. And in the next video, we’re going to talk about how to link your domain registrar – wherever you registered your domain – to your hosting account at Bluehost.

And of course, if you bought your domain at Bluehost through this process – you know you’re going to pay a little bit extra over time, whatever – you can skip the next video. But anyone that registered a domain at GoDaddy or NameCheap or anywhere else and has hosting somewhere else, you’re going to need to watch the next video because I’m going to show you how to update those name servers. And it’s much quicker and more painless than it sounds. I promise.

If you have any questions, as always, please feel free to post them to the Facebook group – free for registered members.

For anyone that does end up buying through my affiliate link for Bluehost, go ahead and shoot me an email, forward me your receipt, and I have a nifty little bonus – kind of a really detailed reference guide for all of the kind of common problems and encounters and things that people need help with frequently when they’re setting up hosting and stuff like that. So forward me your receipt if you bought through my affiliate link and I will make sure to follow up with you and send you that bonus.

Otherwise… deep breath… we will get into the technical stuff now and I will show you how to update your name servers, connect your domain to your hosting, alright? I’ll see you in the next video.

4.3 The Best Place to Register Your Domain Names (AF)

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Please use my NameCheap affiliate link when registering a domain name if you’d like to help support FIMP. These commissions aren’t very big, but every bit helps!

In this video I discuss:

  • The best place to register your domain names based on convenience, short-term cost, and long-term cost
  • An overview of the process of buying a domain name

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

4.3 Transcript Below

Okay!

I just want to follow up on this video or on last lesson really quickly, and because I did, I took a little while. I probably would have taken more time if I weren’t in the middle of recording training and I didn’t want to keep going. But at the end of the day – again – I can rank for anything with really high-quality content if I decide to pursue this niche so I just decided… you know… I’m finally going to choose one of these.

So I’ve tried all kinds of things. I tried ByeByeTattoo. I looked at Lean Domain Search and NameMesh and all the tools we just looked at. And then eventually, I had some ideas I kind of liked like TattooRegrets.com – but that was taken. Of course, you know… things like ThinkBeforeYouInk and BeforeYouInk – ideas I was attached to before – those weren’t available. And so ultimately, I found a handful of… I think all of these would have been good options.

TheDisappearingTattoo.com I thought would have been good or DisappearingTattoo.com – I didn’t check if that one was available but I just felt like ‘disappearing’… something you get used to in this industry is people in your target audience on the whole are probably not as smart as you generally give people credit for… and I was kind of concerned that people would get lost in typing TheDisappearingTattoo and so I just didn’t do that one.

TattooRemovalWeb.com was on that kind of includes the exact match keyword. It’s not as brandable as I’d like it to be, but I found that one just straight through Lean Domain Search. I liked that one. That one would have been very good actually. Nothing wrong with that. Also, TattooRemovalJournal.com was really good because if I do build out this site eventually, it will be about my personal experiences with images from my tattoo removal process and everything like that.

But ultimately, what I decided on when I was looking at TattooRegrets, I went over to Google and I said, “Okay, what are synonyms for ‘regret’?” and one of the words was ‘rue’ like, “You will rue the day.” R-U-E.

And I understand… yes, there is potential for misspelling there. You know again, it doesn’t check all of the boxes; but it’s short, it contains a root keyword, and I really like kind of the double and triple meaning. Like of course, ‘rue’ is also the French for ‘street’… so you know technically, this is TattooStreet.com… So I like the fact that it kind of has a good rhythm to it: RueTattoo… and then of course, the fact that it means ‘regret tattoo’.

So ultimately, I think that’s the one I’m going to run with. So I’ll register that some other time off camera but I want to give you a quick kind of rundown of the steps I just went through and kind of the lens I evaluated these things through before I came to my conclusion. With that being said, let’s jump into Lesson 4.3 and we’re going to talk about the best place to register your domain names.

As I mentioned, it’s a lot more complex than most people think. It’s not as simple as “Oh go register here.” It can be like I could just phone it in and be like go register your domains at NameCheap or register your domains through your hosting company. But for me, that’s a disservice to you because there’s more to it than that.

So the three options I’m going to talk about here are registering your domain through your hosting company, registering a domain through GoDaddy (which is probably the most well-known brand for domain registration), and then also NameCheap (which some of you may have heard of; other people may not have). So I’m going to talk about these three major options.

There are a ton… there are dozens, if not hundreds of domain registrars out there (I’m not going to compare them all) but in my experience, these are the three that I’ve used over the years and I think these are the three most common in the internet marketing community.

So there are advantages to each of them. The main difference is cost. One thing that I want to emphasize is – you may or may not know this – if you register a domain name and you don’t pay for domain privacy, you open all of your registration information to the public. All of that information is public. So someone can search RueTattoo.com if I’ve registered it and I haven’t paid for domain privacy. They can find my address, they can find my phone number, they can find my email, and they can find my full name.

Personally, that’s not something I’m too comfortable with. I don’t think it’s something most people would be comfortable with. So always purchase domain privacy. And that’s included in all of the pricing we’re going to discuss here and it’s one of the things that really shifts the conversation from one registrar to another and makes one much more advantageous than the others in my opinion.

So if you want the absolute easiest option, the best thing to do would be register your domain with your hosting company. The reason I say that is because there’s a technical step in between that I’m going to teach very clearly and it’s going to be very easy to follow which is called ‘updating your name servers’. If you register your domain with a registrar that is not your hosting company, you have to connect the two. I’ve got a lesson for it coming up. Don’t worry about it. Don’t panic. It sounds really technical and scary. It’s actually a really simple thing. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing or why it’s happening technically, it’s a very easy thing to do. And so, you’ll just have to follow the clicks that I make on screen and it won’t be an issue.

But if you register your domain with your hosting company, you eliminate that step because your hosting company is now your domain registrar. They know your name servers are theirs so you don’t have to connect the two. They’re both in the same place. But the disadvantage is that’s going to cost a little bit more. That’s going to cost about an extra $10 or $12 a year. The cheapest option but it is the most convenient without a doubt. The easiest $10 a year I know.

For some people watching the video, it may be like, “Oh it’s just $10 a year.” For a lot of people too, it may be like, “Man, $10 a year!” For some people, that’s actually quite a significant amount of money when we’re talking about startup costs.

And the thing I really want to call your attention to is as an internet marketer, you will probably own a lot of domains in time if you stick with this. I don’t even know how many domains I have. I know there are a lot of internet marketers… I’m not this extreme… but a lot of them own hundreds.

And so if you’re talking about a $10 difference times 10, that’s $100 a year. If you’re talking about a $10 difference times 100, that’s $1000 a year. Just for no real value add because you wanted to cut out a technical step.

So personally, I don’t recommend this option especially because in the training in the next lesson, I’m going to talk to you about how to tie the… not next lesson but this is 4.3… so 4.5 is about how to connect your domain name and your hosting company. Super easy. So I don’t recommend this option personally. You just don’t have anything to be afraid of.

The next option to discuss would be GoDaddy. I think a lot of people default to GoDaddy because they have some really good upfront pricing and they run some incredible promotions and so a lot of people tend to end up at GoDaddy because they could find a domain for $1 for the first year or $3 for the first year of a .com domain plus privacy.

And the problem with GoDaddy is they’re going to make their money back somewhere, right? They can’t just afford to take a loss always. So what’s going to happen is you’re going to get that really special promotional pricing for the first year; and then the next year – if you’re talking about a .com domain plus renewal fees – it’s going to be somewhere around $25 and it’s been going up over the years so depending… it could get up to $28, $30 per year. And for me, it’s just not a big enough value add.

You get the best deal in the short term so this year your domain may cost you a $1.08 after fees – I think it’s like $1.17 – or it may cost you like $3 including domain privacy. But every year after that, it’s going to be rebuilt at $25. And again, for one domain, not that big of a deal. For 10 domains, a little bit bigger. For 100 domains (if you end up having a pretty large domain portfolio because you just kind of find a domain you like and you’re, “Yeah, I’m going to register that.” It’s fun – a lot of people end up doing that) GoDaddy nor hosting company are going to be the best option because they’re going to be expensive… the most expensive… I shouldn’t say the most expensive but more expensive than NameCheap.

If you want the cheapest option long-term, as in the longest… you know, outside of talking about kind of bulk wholesale suppliers that you have to like pay an upfront fee with and stuff like that… the best mainstream, easy, approachable option is NameCheap.

So the first year, your domain privacy is included for free. And then this is where their big difference is: they only charge $3 for it for every year thereafter; whereas, GoDaddy charges like $10+ and the hosting company typically charges somewhere between $10 and $12 just for privacy alone.

And on top of that, NameCheap’s baseline pricing is also cheaper; whereas, GoDaddy charges about $15 for a dot-com domain per year at the full non-promotional price. The hosting company charges around the same. Some of them go up to $16, $18 or north of that. NameCheap typically starts somewhere around $10 or $11 especially if you have a coupon code for the first year.

So yeah, that’s that. My personal choice – in case you can’t tell – is NameCheap. I think I actually said it so I kind of ruined the punch line there.

So I want to take a quick look at how to do this. The process varies slightly from registrar to registrar but it largely remains the same. The steps are going to look very, very similar. It’s basically going to be find a coupon code using Google, and put the domain you want to register, purchase it, and then you wait sometimes an hour or two until the domain registration is fully-processed.

What I will say is don’t buy hosting through your domain registrar (obviously with the exception of people that are choosing the first path where you register your domain through your hosting company). It’s just not usually as good of hosting and it’s also more expensive typically and the support isn’t as good a lot of the time. We’re going to talk about hosting in the next video and my recommendations there. But for now, my recommendation – very strong one – is do not buy hosting through that just because you’re buying a domain with that registrar. There’s just not any reason to do that when there are much better hosting companies out there that are around the same price or cheaper and specialize in hosting rather than specializing in being a domain registrar.

So a quick walk through of how to get domains as cheaply as possible through GoDaddy and NameCheap. (So again, I’m getting way to too close to the camera, kind of cut off the top of my head.) So let’s look through here. So let’s get over into NameCheap. As you can see, I’ve already searched. I’m going back to the home page and start from the beginning though.

And actually, the first step would be find a discount code. So I’m just going to go ‘NameCheap discount codes’. NameCheap typically has their own page like you can see right here it’s on the NameCheap.com domain. So I can click here and I can see ‘Discounted Registration and Transfer’. DOGDAY8 is their current discount code. It’s not huge… but, you know… it’s worth a quick search. It’s worth a quick Google search.

The same thing, you could search something like this or ‘GoDaddy discount’ alone would probably pop it up and you’ll see here GoDaddy discount $0.99 domain names and more.

So I could type in RueTattoo.com, search for it, and you can see I would get $0.99 first year pricing on this. But again, if I add this to cart and I went through checkout, I think I have to sign in and go through checkout which I don’t.

So you can see privacy protection here is going to be an extra $8 per year and it’s going to renew at $10 per year. So, you know now… I’m going to pay $9 today but next year I’m going to pay $25 plus taxes and fees; whereas with NameCheap, I’m going to pay… what is it? What’s our current discount? $9.66 plus $0.18 and privacy is free for the first year, and then next year, it’s going to renew at $14 instead of $25 – which is why I register all my domains with NameCheap.

So next lesson, we’re going to talk about securing hosting. I want to… let’s see here really quickly… there’s linking… okay. So yeah, linking your domain name and hosting is what I’m actually going to walk you through step-by-step because it’s kind of intense. It can be kind of intense if you’ve never done it before. It’s really simple overall but there’s not much more to talk about.

I could checkout on camera and – I’m sure to the joy of many people – put my credit card information online. But I’m not going to do it. There’s just no reason to. I’m not going to register a domain live.

It’s just really, really simple basically. So we’ll go back to the domain search. I’ll put RueTattoo.com. I can search and then – if it’s going to search – I can come down here and I can say I want to add this to cart, I want to view cart, and then I would have to sign in to checkout, of course. I went too quickly and it didn’t get added to the cart.

So again, there’s just not much sense to me going through this. Basically in checkout, ta-dah, promo code, I apply DOGDAY8. Okay, I need to log in before it’s going to apply the promo code accurately. So again, I’ll do that off camera. I don’t want to share my username and log in to my account and share all domains on camera. I’m sorry, no offense. But you can see WhoisGuard available for free.

GoDaddy is actually a little bit more complex of a process. The thing you need to watch out for with GoDaddy is they’re going to try to hit you with upsell after upsell after upsell after upsell. Their checkout process is a horrible user experience. NameCheap is going to try and hit you… so they’re not going to try and hit you with some upsells… they’re going to offer you like hosting too, but it’s much more subtle and less in-your-face and annoying than GoDaddy.

The important thing to note… you know… like I said, I’m not going to do it on camera… but the important thing to note as you go through this process, it’s just like buying anything else online. You just need to watch the upsells to make sure you don’t accidentally purchase hosting or you don’t accidentally purchase an upsell that you had no interest in or no use for.

So with GoDaddy, your promotional pricing should stay pretty much unaffected on your final page of checkout with the exception of a few cents for fees. And the same thing for NameCheap. Just make sure you pay attention to the price on the final page of checkout before you confirm to make sure you haven’t accidentally added any upsells. That’s the only thing I can think to advise you on that’s noteworthy in the checkout process.

Other than that, I’m going ahead and buy this domain off-camera and I will see you in the next video where we’re going to talk about securing hosting and what that means and what the best options are for that.

So if you have any questions, as always, feel free to post them in the Facebook group – free for registered members. And other than that, I will see you in the next video.

4.2 The Anatomy of a Perfect Domain Name (AF)

Thanks for stopping by and checking us out! If you like what you see, make sure to create a free account so that you can:

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  • Get support from me and other members whenever you get stuck using our members-only Facebook group
  • Secure your spot in a followup accountability course designed to assure you’re making progress

Or simply log in if you already have one.

=====

[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2509″ ifallowed=”hide”]Unlock more training for growing your online income — with the business tools you’ll need in the process.
PLUS, get:

  • Time-tested methods to get traffic fast with NO risk of getting Google-slapped.
  • The most profitable ways to make money—and exactly how and when to monetize.
  • Access to Ian’s expertise so that you can ask him questions every time you need to.

Unlock it all by getting the tools your business needs to grow.

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2342″ ifallowed=”hide”]Twice the results. Half the time. Would you be interested?
Be on the top 5% of online business owners who know how to maximize their online profits. Get new, actionable, and advanced training every month. Focused on more profits. 2X Faster.

WARNING: Goo-roo’s ain’t gonna like this

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

Helpful links from this video:

In this video I discuss:

  • How long it takes to find a good domain name
  • Exact match domains (EMDs) vs. non-EMDs
  • What makes a good domain?
  • Helpful free tools for picking a domain name

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

4.2 Transcript Below

Okay! Now that we’ve got all of that out of the way, let’s talk about your domain name. I think a lot of people will get tied up on this (again, just like everything else we’ve covered) and it can actually be broken down into a really simple set kind of rules so that’s what we’re going to talk about in this section and how to find a domain name, et cetera.

So the anatomy of a perfect domain name.

This process is more time-consuming than most people think. I think a lot of people jump into this and they can’t find a domain name within 30 minutes or an hour and they think it’s peculiar; they think it’s a bad sign and they’re alarmed by it. That’s perfectly normal. It’s perfectly normal for the process of finding a really good domain name to take one to four hours or more. You may end up doing it for six or eight hours over the course of two or three days. That’s perfectly normal.

So don’t feel like this is something you might just like hop on and be done in 10 minutes. I guess it’s possible, but there are some check boxes that we’re going to talk about in this video that you really want to make sure you check for a domain name and it takes time – especially in somewhat saturated niches – to find a really good domain name. But we’re going to look at some tools that helps with that, too. A lot. That help a lot.

So an important thing to note because I get this question sometimes: you cannot change a domain name later. You could build a different website on a different domain or you could transfer your website, have a… it’s kind of a technical thing so unless you’re technically inclined, you probably have a developer transfer your website from one domain to another. But it’s really not something you want to do. There’s a very particular way to do it correctly and it’s a difficult and technically challenging thing. So if at all possible, you want to get it right the first time.

So another thing worth noting – just like picking a niche – is not to fall into that ‘analysis paralysis’. It can be easy to fall into that, because you know again, we’re talking about a lot of different kind of things you really want to see in the ideal domain name. But at the end of the day, you’re not going to find one absolutely perfect; you’re going to do the best you can and hopefully you get something really, really good. You should get something really, really good if you follow the training and use the free tools that I’m going to point you to in this training.

So hey, I think it’s important… I can see a lot of people going, “Hey Ian, ‘to find good’ – what does that mean?” So let’s talk about some really clear and tangible guidelines for what makes a domain good, okay?

Old-school training is what’s referred to as an EMD which stands for ‘exact match domain’. If you search Google… like if you search the term ‘Google exact match domain’… like four words ‘Google exact match domain’ on Google, you will find articles where Google de-emphasized the importance of an exact match domain.

I want to pause here really quickly because if you’re more technically-inclined and very advanced – which I know the majority of the people watching these videos won’t be and that’s perfectly fine – someone might say, “Oh…” well someone I saw even recently in training said exact match domains are really good. And they can be. There’s a technical advantage that would be way, way, way too overwhelming to explain at this point because it has to do with off-page search engine optimization and search engine algorithms and what’s referred to as ‘anchor text’ which is the links or the text that is used in a link. Like if you see someone put ‘Click Here’ and that’s what they used to link to a site, the anchor text is ‘Click Here’.

So technically speaking, exact match domains are likely to get more links that contain their search phrase that they’re trying to rank for because it’s the name of their domain. And that can also insulate you, give you a little bit more cushion to not be penalized by Google. And right now I bet 90% of people watching this video are going… like your eyes are just glazing over… and that’s why I say don’t even worry about that because when Google de-emphasized the importance of an exact match domain, it definitely helped level the playing field some. And at the end of the day, if you create value, it doesn’t matter what keywords are or are not in your domain name. It doesn’t matter what your domain name is. It’s going to get ranked with or without the keyword in the domain name. So that’s the important thing to remember.

But the old-school training in internet marketing… if you see anything even from a couple of years ago… maybe even as early as a year ago and especially five years ago plus… you know, three to five years back… everyone was saying, “Okay, you want to find your main keyword that you want to target and you want to buy the exact domain that matches that.” And that’s why you see a lot of things like MensSupplements.com or MyMensSupplementsHelp.com, like these really crappy domain names because they were just trying to get their keyword into the domain name and you don’t have to worry about that stuff as much anymore.

So if that’s what you’ve been taught in the past, I give you total permission to just kind of chuck that in the trash and move on because there’s better more up-to-date training and that’s what you’re going to learn here.

As I mentioned, new-school present day, there’s a lot more flexibility for branding based on the more level playing field due to exact match domains being de-emphasized by Google. So let’s talk about the anatomy of a perfect domain or as perfect of a domain as you can possibly get.

Absolutely hands-down, .com if you can get it. .net and .org technically are also okay – they rank just as well. My problem with .net and .org are if I go to a website once and I pay attention to the brand name and I catch the brand name… say for example, StoppingScams.com… if I want to go back to that site I’m like, “Oh yeah, I saw this thing on Stopping Scams the other day…” and I’m going to put in Stoppingscams.com first. So if I had the domain StoppingScams.net or StoppingScams.org, that visitor would have trouble finding me. Maybe they can find me in Google if they search, but the top of mind as far as domains go is always – world-wide – .com. Flat out. And that’s why personally, I never register domain names that are not .com – at least, domain names that I’m trying to rank and make money with.

There’s some more advance training that I’d like to get into teaching at some point. I’ve dabbled with things like PBNs and private blog networks to make sure I’m up to date in the community so I’ve experimented with some things… you know, some properties I do not touch with PBNs because I don’t want to get them penalized… but other things I think it’s important to keep yourself up to date with all the skills in internet marketing.

So in that case, I have purchased .orgs and .nets but those aren’t to rank and make money with. Those are to use… you know, to leverage and to build ranking for other sites, which again, is so far beyond the level we’re at right now that is PBNs. To do them correctly are so technically demanding they require so much knowledge. So don’t even worry about that right now. If you’ve heard PBNs and you’re like, “I want to get into that!” If you’re still learning to build a website and you’ve never had a profitable internet business and you don’t even know the basics of on-page/off-page SEO, I would not venture into PBNs right off the bat because there’s so much foundational knowledge you need to build between here and there.

And I hope to teach PBNs at some point as well, but for now, just again taking us back to the present moment… .com if you can get it and just know .org and .net are okay if you’re okay with them. But also, I want to share my personal standard: I keep searching until I find a .com always. If I’m trying to make money with a site, if I’m trying to build a brand through a website, I am going to find a .com even if it’s not the most desirable brands because that .com was taken and I have to come up with another brand, I will sacrifice that for a .com rather than going .net or .org. So keep that in mind.

A really important note here is I just very specifically mentioned .com, .net, .org intentionally. Do not use other domains. Do not use other what are referred to as TLDs (top-level domains) even… .com, .net, .org are the ones you should use.

Particularly, do not use like .co, .nz, or .com.uk, .co.uk – anything like that. Regionally-specific is going to severely inhibit your ability to rank worldwide and one of the beauties of an internet business is that you can rank and talk to people all around the world and make money from people all around the world as website traffic. And if you choose a regionally-specific domain, you limit that ability.

So again, if you’re going to venture out of .com, only venture into .net and .org. Don’t consider anything else, okay?

And you may be going, “Oh, but I’ve seen .infos rank!” It’s true, they rank just like… again, as a general rule of thumb, you can find contradictions to some of the things I’m saying but I’m absolutely giving you the best practices and I strongly recommend staying within those.

So the second component of a perfect – again, as close as you can get to perfect domain – is for it to be memorable, brandable (those typically go hand-in-hand) and easy to spell.

A lot of the times, you’ll see these days someone like drop a letter and sometimes you sacrifice one for the other. For example, Tumblr is a huge website and they’re not spelled correctly. It’s T-U-M-B-L-R. So they dropped the E. And it became a huge website. So that’s totally possible; but at the same time, is that level of success likely for everyone that launches a website? Definitely not. So you have to factor those things in.

So the more memorable and brandable it is and the easier to spell it is, the better. And also, the shorter, the better. I wouldn’t say there’s any hard rule… you know, I run the website PinTurningTexan.com, I have a VirtualRealityGinger.com – are both niche sites that I’ve profited from in the past and those are both pretty long domains all things considered. I’ve even had longer ones in the past way back in the day. So I would say priority over shorter. If you can find something that’s more brandable and memorable and it’s easy to spell but it’s a little bit longer, I say personally, go for it.

But you want to keep it as short as possible. You don’t want it to get out of hand. Just use your best judgment. There are no hard and fast rules like “Don’t exceed 15 characters”. It just doesn’t work that way. Just use your best judgment, be smart about it, and just know the shorter you can keep it, the better. I really would not try to make it more than two or three words if at all possible.

And the other thing to note is if you can include a root key word in your domain or brand, go for it. Do it. So an example of a root keyword would be… it’s a spin-off of an exact match domain so if your niche was ‘men’s supplements’, you may try to get ‘supplements’ and you may not need to get all of ‘men’s supplements’ in your domain name but you may try to get ‘men’s’ or ‘supplements’… you know, kind of root chunks of your keyword that are going to apply across a lot of the keywords and a lot of the articles you write over time. That’s awesome.

And if this just kinds of confuses you, you can just throw it out the window because these are kind of – again – in order of importance so .com is the most important. Memorable, brandable, and easy to spell is the next most important. The shorter the better is the next most important. And then if you can’t get a root keyword in it then fine. Like Stopping Scams ranks for a ton of keywords that have nothing to do with scams and they don’t have the word ‘scam’ in them. So you can absolutely rank for keywords either way – for search terms either way – so I wouldn’t emphasize this too much but if you find it kind of convenient, you can kind of stick it in there and sneak it in there. Perfect. Like that’s awesome.

It may help you with a little bit more of ranking power, but at the end of the day, it’s not going to do your business in just because you didn’t get a root keyword in there.

So I want to mention and then I want to show you really quickly a handful of really helpful tools. My absolute favorite is LeanDomainSearch.com. I’ll show you what that looks like. There are also a couple of potentially helpful tools that I’ll take a look at from time to time if I’m not finding what I need from Lean Domain Search. NameMesh is really good and so is Nameboy.com.

Typically, what I’m doing with these tools… occasionally I’ll find something that’s really good. I’m like I’m going to register that domain name. End of story. And it works out really well that way but it doesn’t always play out that way. I would say more often, what happens is looking at all of these ideas make me think, “Oh! I wonder about this. I like this one. It’s similar to that but not quite. But I like it. I think it’s really brandable.”

So you can use any domain registrar to check other ideas that rattle loose. A domain registrar is like GoDaddy.com, Namecheap.com – Google even has a service where you can register domains. And so you don’t have to obviously… you don’t have to buy everything you search.

And I’ve heard people have this ‘conspiracy theory’ that the moment you search on GoDaddy, a timer starts running and it’s only going to be available for so long. That’s not true at all. I’ve searched stuff on GoDaddy like years… like a year or months before I’ve registered it and then I finally get around registering and it’s still available.

So don’t feel like just because you’re putting it into a system, now some magical timer starts and someone can see and they’re going to register it before you. It doesn’t work that way, okay?

So as you go through these tools, you can pull up any other registrar. We’ll talk about which one is best to use in a coming lesson, but for now, you can use any of them – GoDaddy, NameCheap, anybody – to check those extra ideas that rattle loose. Because for me personally, those are typically the best ideas. Even though I’m using these tools to kind of stir up ideas, the best ones aren’t listed on these tools themselves.

An important thing to keep in mind, again, to aid with avoiding analysis paralysis is that there is no 100% perfect domain. There are going to be sacrifices one way or another: you may not get a root keyword in there; it may be kind of long. It may even… for some of you… if you’re okay making that sacrifice not be a .com. Again, that’s not something that I do but plenty of people do it with great success. So just keep that in mind. Like you want to get the stars aligned as closely as you can but you may not line them all up perfectly and it’s okay. That’s okay. It’s good. You need to be okay with that if that’s what happens.

So we’re going to talk about registration options in the next video and specifically talk about where you should register your domains because it’s not as straightforward as ‘Register Your Domains Here’. There are different advantages and disadvantages to each one (I’m going to talk about three different paths specifically) and that’s going to be in the next video. There’s more to it than a lot of people think. But for now, we’re going to hop into a couple of these tools and take a look at them and what they look like in person… right? Live.

So let’s hop over here and let’s take a look at this. So I’m going to go to Lean Domain Search… also like change my… (Oop! There’s the top of my green screen! Spoiler alert! Okay. So I’ll just sit further back from my computer so I’m not just like here the whole time because probably like that was a way too close. Sorry about that.)

So Lean Domain Search is my personal favorite. I really like it and I’ll show you why.

So let’s say for example… I think I’m still trying to decide between tattoo removal and dachshund discectomy – which of those niches I’m going to build out. I probably won’t build out fully; most of this is just for training purposes. But those are both niches I’ve thought about pursuing in the past and I think I might pursue. We’ll see. But at the end of the day, let’s just run with one.

So let’s just say, ‘tattoo’. You can also include ‘multiple’ here. I think you can include ‘removal’ as well. And you have all of these different ways to sort. This is why I love Lean Domain Search. You know, you can sort by Popularity; you can sort by Length (so if you sort by length now you’re going to see all of the shorter ones first); you can sort by Alphabetical; and you can also sort by Starts with Search Term or Ends with Search Term.

So I searched this specifically as a tattoo removal niche site. I can’t remember if Lean Domain Search does both… Yeah, so they do. They definitely do. So you can see they just kind of merge them together but you still have them adding prefixes and adding suffixes to kind of give you a mix and you can just like… this list just runs and runs and runs and I just see here and I go through some of these and I go, “Okay which one?” Like, “Okay.”

The domain that came to mind… One day I was thinking about… I was like, “I’m going to register that if it’s available – even if I don’t build the site out yet, I’m going to register that,” was ThinkBeforeYouInk.com. Just really brandable in my opinion. I think it would’ve been fun to build. It’s not available. And BeforeYouInk even was not available so it’s like okay, I’m going to have to find something else.

So you can see… like you go through and there are just all these great suggestions. A lot of them. Like I just saw one it was TattooRemovalResearch. And all these ones that are lit up green? These are all available. And I believe they are all available as .coms. So pretty handy, right?

And I could also just like put in plain ‘dachshund’ and so… you know, all kinds of… I wouldn’t make anything as a domain name DachshundDiscectomy whatever. Because again, that would not be easy for most people to spell. And even if they’re like, “Oh yeah, I can spell that.” Most people can spell it. Like how memorable is it, right? I’d rather be brandable than be an exact match domain in today’s search climate.

Interesting… DachshundMagazine.com is available… I find that kind of funny. So you just get all of these great suggestions and these are all available. And yeah, they’re all .coms. DachshundMagazine.com… that’s crazy that’s available. It probably won’t be after people watch it up in this video.

So I want to pull you over into another one. Let’s get in here to NameMesh. Go to page.

Alright. So again, this one I don’t find quite as helpful but it does have its uses. You can put in one word; you can put in two words. I also typed in ‘removal’.

Okay, so now… you know, if you have all different kinds of categories like none of these are going to be… again, a lot of these aren’t going to be .com, .net, .org… so we just wouldn’t consider any of these.

And same thing with these. Like they’re just playing around with the words I input and using top-level domains or domain endings to play into that keyword – and I just wouldn’t look at them.

In fun, you see they’ve kind of cut out characters. Again for me, personally, nobody’s going to remember this crap. Tttrmvl.com. Like yeah, oh I’m sure.

And even I think what’s most likely to happen with a domain like this is someone misreads it, they think it says TattooRemoval.com and the next time they try to come back to your site, they end up going to one of your competitors. So I wouldn’t even look at those.

And you see an SEO category. So you can play around with this one, too. It can be helpful to stir up ideas. I have found it helpful in the past but not always – I’ll just emphasize ‘not always’. But by far, Lean Domain Search is my favorite of these two.

So let’s get back in here… the keynote… and we’ll go to Nameboy.com. So Nameboy, you can actually enter them in different spaces and you can see that this kind of allow hyphens. I think I may have skipped that over in my training. I thought I mentioned it somewhere. I did not.

So another side note is I personally would recommend not using hyphens in your domain name. Maybe using one, but even that… like again, for me it’s a hard rule. Personally, I’m only going to use .coms. I am not going to put hyphens in my domain name. A lot of the times they’re just associated with lower quality websites. So I won’t click ‘Allow hyphens’ here and I’ll hit ‘go nameboy go’. And kind of like Lean Domain Search, it’s going to pop up a bunch of different combinations. This is an interesting mix between Lean Domain Search and NameMesh. Kind of some middle ground.

I think they even have a tool on Nameboy… No. There are tools out there too, where you can put in your own custom prefixes and your own custom suffixes and kind of just throw in the root keyword you want to work around and they’ll make suggestions. But I can’t remember which one that is. You can just also – in addition to these – Google free domain research tools or domain suggestion tools and you’ll find all kinds of other stuff.

I’ve just found personally over time… especially Lean Domain Search has been a go-to for me especially for stirring up ideas. And like I said, there have been times I’ve just been like, “Oh! DachshundMagazine… I’m buying that!”

So that’s the end of this lesson, we’re going to tie it up here. In the next lesson – like I said – we’re going to talk about the kind of differences between the major registrar options, what the pros and cons are, and basically it all comes down to cost and what your tolerance is there. And so I’ll talk to you about the cheapest option, the most convenient option, et cetera.

So that’s in the next lesson. I’m going to play around here for a little bit and find a domain that I can kind of use as an example as we continue throughout this section and I will see you all in the next video.

4.1 Winter Is Coming — Preparing for Website Setup and Design (AF)

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WARNING: Goo-roo’s ain’t gonna like this

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In this video I discuss:

  • This is where the difficulty really begins for most people, but why that shouldn’t matter
  • A reminder of why all of this will ultimately be worth it
  • The mentality you need to weather this industry and succeed

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4.1 Transcript Below

Hey there! Long time, no see!

Once again, another day, another section. It’s time to get in and we’re talking about website building now. So we’re getting into some pretty serious stuff. This is kind of the very tangible and noticeable starting point for your business – like its birthday.

As soon as you get a website up, it all becomes very real. It can be a very challenging thing, but as always, I’m going to make very clear what you should expect. I’m going to do my best to help you temper a mentality that is going to set you up for success very well as you encounter some of these challenges. And most importantly, I’m going to put together some training. I’ve already put together some training that we’re going to go through together that I think sets you up for success better than anything else on the internet talking about this stuff.

So with all of that being said, I named this first lesson in this section “Winter Is Coming” which of course anybody from Game of Thrones will get… anybody that’s an actor in Game of Thrones will get that… anybody that’s a fan of Game of Thrones will get that. For the rest of you, it just basically means prepare for battle like things are about to get hard potentially and I’m about to equip you with everything you need to go into that battle. So don’t freak out. We’re going to start off by talking a little bit about what to expect and we’ll go from here. And we’ll get into actual like screen sharing and step-by-step – all that stuff – is going to kick off in this section.

So the important thing to know and keep in mind… The best mindset to have as you’re going into building a website – particularly if it’s your first time but even if you’ve never built a profitable full-time or part-time niche site – it’s really important to have the mentality of “I know this is going to be challenging. I know I’m going to encounter stuff that makes me angry, that frustrates me, but at the end of the day, it’s 100% necessary.”

Something for whatever reason is floating around in small pockets of people pursuing an internet business, they ask, “Can I make money without a website? Can I make money online without a website?” And the answer is, frankly, hell no! There may be ways where you can piece together inconsistent income, posting like to Craigslist and stuff like that, but even those businesses most of the time – the vast majority of the time – are highly dependent on having a website at its core.

So the best way I can think to explain it to people is trying to run an internet business without a website is like trying to run a brick and mortar store selling things out of the trunk of your car. Like you’re just set up so much better for success if you learn to build a website if it’s not 100% required – which I’m kind of in the mentality that it is but I know that there are exceptions and someone may come along and, “Oh! There’s this one guy that in a case study he didn’t have a website.” Like fine. And whatever. YouTube channels, all that stuff – everything works better, everything is simplified, everything is more in your control and you are more likely to succeed across the board if you’re operating a business online with a website.

So if that’s at all like a question floating around in your mind, the answer’s no. From me, the answer is no.

As I mentioned, there are going to be a lot of challenges ahead but this kind of big amorphous blob that may be so intimidating is what stands between you and your dream business, right? This is an essential step and this is some of the hardest stuff that we’re covering here. Everything from here out will probably not be remotely as technically challenging from here to when you’re making money. This is the technical stuff. This is the stuff that people are afraid of. But again, I’m going to walk you through it step-by-step, tell you exactly what to expect, and I’m going to walk you through everything on screen.

So there’s really nothing to be afraid of here. Just know that this obstacle that some of you may be very intimidated by is the most technical thing that’s standing between you and a successful internet marketing business of your dreams that you can travel with, that produces more income than you may be able to produce in the workforce, and et cetera. So it’s important to keep that in mind.

Also, this is what stands between you and a better future. A better future not only for yourself. But I know a lot of people are very motivated because they want to provide a better future for their families. This is you know… you just got to like rip it off like a Band-Aid. You know it’s going to sting but you got to go through it.

And the good news is you only have to learn a lot of this once. Also, a very important thing to realize as you go into this, there will be things that you encounter and you’re going to have to study them on your own. You’re just going to have to Google them and figure it out. But the good news is you only have to figure it out once because from then on, you’re going to know how to overcome that. And over time, you do that more and more and you see the amount of time you’re researching things go down and your productivity obviously goes way up.

So sometimes, you’ll be making slow progress; but just realize you make the slowest progress the first time you do it. And from then on – especially if you’re teaching yourself these skills as you go – it’s going to be easier and easier and easier until it’s almost second nature.

Another thing that I’ve mentioned in a previous video is it’s very important to have the mentality and realize even what feels like wasted time is not wasted. If you feel like you spent two or three or four hours just trying to troubleshoot this one problem and you finally get it and you think, “Oh God, I wasted three hours… I wasted four hours doing that.” It’s not a waste because you just tucked away something else in your arsenal that prepares you better for the same problem – the same challenge – down the road and it’s very, very important to remember that.

So the best way I can set you up for success here is to really emphasize that you need to have an independent mentality to succeed in this industry and this is the point where you are going to have to exercise that and practice that the most.

At the end of the day, there are millions of website owners online and a lot of them are using the same tools and going through a lot of the same challenges as you are. Not everybody that owns a website is a pro. I mean, I’ve been doing this now for over 10 years and I still don’t know how to edit code very well. I can still – very possibly – break my website when I edit code. So you’re looking at a guy that is not technical at all. I hire developers for that stuff or I just figure out a way to work around it and I’ve found a lot of ways to work around it over the years.

It’s just so important… you know, I was having a conversation with my wife recently – actually, just yesterday as I’m recording this video – because again, she’s starting her own internet business and she has a tendency as she’s getting started to interrupt over and over again throughout the day and say, “Oh how do I do this? How do I do this? Okay I did this what do I do next? Okay, after I do these things, what do I do next?”

It came down to a point where we had to have a conversation because it was interrupting my workflow. I’m trying to put together this just like massive amount of training, and then on top of that, I’m running my other businesses and managing team members. And I just couldn’t afford to deal with those interruptions over and over again so we had a conversation yesterday.

And I had said at one point like you’ve just got to figure it out like everyone else that runs an internet business, that tries to start and internet business. You’ve just got to figure it out. It’s what stands between you and success. And at the same time I can tell her a lot of what to do, but again, it comes back to the analogy: I want her to learn to fish. I don’t want to hand her the fish. Because then, she’s dependent on me for her whole business and that’s not sustainable for my business or for hers.

So we had to talk about it and she said, “I apologize. It wasn’t my default thinking basically to go out and research it before I asked about it. And now that it is, I know to do that.” And I have no problem if she researches at first and she can’t find the answers, she comes to me. That’s what I’m here for, right? She’s my wife. I frickin’ better be there for her when it comes to situations like that.

But I say that because it’s a very real thing and it made me realize other people are going to face this exact same challenge. And I had never even thought because I’ve had to be in research-first-ask-questions-later mode for years now. I had never even thought that someone’s thinking could default to “Oh I’m going to ask someone.” Because again, there are millions of people out there that have encountered… probably hundreds if not thousands of them… have encountered a lot of the issues that you’re going to encounter and a lot of the challenges and they’ve posted about it online and people that are more experienced have come and asked them.

So you just have to use the resources at your fingertips. Try and Google it first, use multiple search terms if it doesn’t turn up immediately – just do the best you can. And if you find yourself researching and researching for an hour and an hour and a half you still can’t find the answer, then post to the Facebook group. Again, as always, it’s free for registered members here and that’s what the community is there for.

So I really want to emphasize: you need to step into a very serious mindset of “I am on my own”. And I don’t say that in a bad way because you have to hit that point of independence to succeed in this industry flat out. Nobody succeeds in this industry just expecting to have their hand held every step of the way. It just doesn’t happen. You have to have a self-seeking, independent mentality to build a profitable internet business. Period.

So I’ll stop harping on this on this but it’s so, so, so important and I want to speak to this next point.

If you ask somewhat of a basic question in the community – you know, the Facebook page – or you email me, either me or another community member in the Facebook page says, “Hey, go Google that,” or “Hey, search the Facebook group,” don’t be offended by that because these things are out there for you to find. It’s your job to get in the mentality of seeking them out. Now for more advanced stuff, that’s totally called for to ask for help. But again, that’s what the community is there for.

But just keep this in mind: if you ask a fairly basic question, someone says, “Hey, just Google that,” or “Hey, search the Facebook group for that,” (and myself included) please don’t be offended by that. If we answer the same questions over and over and over again, nobody would ever get anything else done.

So it’s just essential that you hit this point. You know, I’ve said that a billion times now so I’m going to stop saying it but I can’t overemphasize it. I really can’t. It doesn’t set you up for success any other way than if you establish a very independent self-seeking, I’m-going-to-help-myself mentality.

So like I said, this is the most common place… as we enter into building a website… this is the most common place that people fall into that “hand-holding” trap. Like, “Oh, I just need someone to hold my hand!” No, you don’t. None of us had someone to hold our hand for all this stuff and we found a way to success and it is up to you to do the same.

There’s a lot of information out there, so again, the community is here to help as much as we can. But when it comes to really basic stuff, basically you just have to – if you encounter a problem – Google first. Google first, try to find an answer yourself, and then move on and ask the community if you can’t find an answer.

I’ve said this over and over again so I’m not going to say it again: just establish an independent mindset. You will find… and I don’t mean this in an offensive way… you will find that the quickest way to my bad side is to email me – especially repeatedly – with really basic questions that you could just Google.

Because again, I have a very strong passion about helping people. Please don’t mistake what I’m saying now to mean anything contrary to that. But I’m building a business, right? I’m running businesses, I’m running teams. For someone to send me an email to say, “Hey, how do I change this thing on my name servers?” (if that doesn’t make sense to you, we’ll talk about it later in this section) when it’s a really simple thing to Google, that just shows like it’s a matter of respect. Like I’m in the trenches with you, I’m trying to build a business, my time is very valuable. Like I don’t mind helping for really kind of specific difficult things. And again, that’s what the Facebook community’s for here at Free Internet Marketing Project. That’s why I check into the Facebook community and chime in and answer questions.

But at the end of the day, it’s not only the quickest way to my bad side, I think it’s the quickest way to a lot of experienced internet marketers’ bad side. It’s just a pet peeve, because again, none of us had that. So I think for anyone to fall into that mentality of like “I need to have my hand held” comes off to… even if it’s not the intention of the person on the giving end of those questions… to the person on the receiving end a lot of the time it comes off across as a sense of entitlement and a disrespect for that person’s time.

So anyways, I say all of that… again, winter is coming… I’ve harped on that enough… I say all of that to say fasten your seatbelt because it’s probably going to be a bumpy ride as we go through and we do a lot of the technical stuff for building a website. But this is it. Again, this is kind of the birth place of your business. This is where everything starts to get really tangible and exciting.

And yes, there are going to be some challenges but they are all totally surmountable and you can do this, okay? You just have to have the right mentality, you have to keep pressing forward no matter what, you have to learn from your mistakes, and eventually before you know it, if you keep the effort going, you’re going to have a profitable internet business.

So we’re going to dig in and start talking about how to find a domain name, we’re going to talk about where to get hosting, what makes a good domain name, how to connect your domain name to your hosting account, how to set up your website, install WordPress, what to look for in a WordPress theme – all that crap is covered in this section.

So it’s going to be a big one but it’s also going to be super helpful and it’s going to turn a big corner. Whereas up to this point we’ve talked about a lot of theory, we’ve gone through a lot of slideshows, this is when you’re going to start doing work and you’re going to have a really tangible output by the end of this section. So I’m excited for it. I hope you’re excited for it.

As always, if you have questions, feel free to post them in the Facebook group, alright? I guess research first and then post them in the Facebook group if you still can’t find the answer. And I will see you there and I will also see you in Lesson 4.2.

3.7 Making Sense of the Tornado Inside Your Head, and When to Move On (AF)

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In this video I discuss:

  • A quick recap of the concepts learned in lessons 3.1 – 3.6
  • When to give up on a niche and what to remember when doing so
  • How long to linger on niche selection before just making a decision and moving forward

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

3.7 Transcript Below

Okay, here we are!

It’s been kind of a long journey to get here, I know. But hopefully, you can look back at when you started watching the first video in this section whenever that was – whether it was earlier today or it was a week ago – and you can look at what you know now.

And even if you’re still a little bit confused and you’re still a little bit overwhelmed, you know so much more than you knew when you started and you’re set up so much better for success. Even though you may not feel it right now, you are set up better for success than 90% at least, if not 99% of people that go into this industry and start trying to pick a niche.

So take pride in that because now you’re set up for success so much better for such a crucial part of the process than the vast majority of people in this industry.

So yeah. That’s worth a pat on the back I’d say. But I want to make one final video for this section. I may add to this section over time, but for now, one final video of making sense of the tornado inside of your head. We’ve talked about a lot of topics and I would just want to revisit some of them and kind of make that last pass to kind of pack it down and make sure it’s all really concrete.

So that’s what this video is so we’ll do this as quickly as possible, alright?

So to revisit a lot of what we’ve gone through and making sense of it all and organizing it all is I know that this all very hard and overwhelming, but this part – niche discovery – takes some time. And it’s important enough that you want to take some time on it because it will determine to a large degree whether you succeed or fail in the long run.

And the other thing I want to make sure to revisit is: remember, even the worst case scenario is not that bad. You picked a bad niche. I can’t tell you how many bad niches I picked. You just have to get to a point where you just need to jump in. You’re still learning a ton and moving towards success even if you pick a niche that’s not the niche that you ultimately end up making your living in. You’re going to learn so much from just picking something and starting to work on it.

And it’s also distinctly possible even if right now you’re like, “Ah, I don’t know if this a really good niche.” You just don’t want to get to the point that you paralyze yourself. So it can actually be really beneficial even if you’re only 30% confident that that’s a good niche. You may jump into it and find out as you work on it over the coming months that it was an awesome niche.

I don’t think anybody that’s new to this – and even a lot of us that are experienced – go into a niche 100% confident that we’re going to knock it out of the park. We have some pretty good indicators, we have a lot of confidence going in, but we don’t know for sure. Nobody knows for sure.

But if you stick with it over time, you will see success especially if you line up all of these factors and you follow the rest of the training as we move on from here.

The important thing to remember is plenty of people have succeeded in this industry before you without remotely this much guidance and highly-detailed instruction. A lot of people just kind of picked something and rolled with the punches until they make it work. And that could absolutely be you even if you don’t feel totally confident in your choice that you’re looking at some ideas and you’re going, “Man, this is my best one but I’m still not sure.” You may just need to jump in and give it a shot, okay?

So let’s recap some of the most important concepts from this section – the core concepts of picking a niche.

The best niche for you is one where you can provide value. The more value you can provide in that niche in the long run… again, there are some exceptions which we’ve discussed and we’ll revisit here… but the more value you can provide, the more likely you are to succeed and profit pretty tremendously within that niche.

You don’t want to pick an industry as your niche, but you don’t want to go so narrow that you paint yourself into a corner where you can’t regularly write really high-quality content. Where your kind of content well – your idea well of articles that you would write about – runs dry. So you don’t want to go too broad; you don’t want to go too narrow.

You want to make sure that the audiences that you are writing articles for as much as possible make purchases to solve their problems and solve their pain points and answer their questions. So that’s dealing with a buying audience.

You also want to keep in mind that competition is your friend. You don’t want to be scared of competition. It’s not something to be afraid of.

And a good rule of thumb is to choose a niche with digital products that have higher percentage commissions where they’re paying you 50% or 75%+ or a niche that has $50 or more physical products where the commissions still are going to be low on that tier… it would be better if you get into the $100+ or several hundred dollar plus. Because remember, the higher your commissions, the fewer conversions you need. The fewer conversions you need, the less traffic you need. The less traffic you need, the more likely you are to succeed.

So again, generally speaking, there are exceptions to each one of those tiers I just explained. But generally speaking, those are good rules of thumb.

And another one again that isn’t listed here is you can get paid to give away free trials. You can get paid to generate leads for people’s businesses. You can get paid by creating your own products, your own eBooks, your own video courses. There are all different kinds of ways to monetize but if you line up the things above this last bullet point, you will be able to find a way to monetize, you just may have to get a little bit creative.

So I want to talk about “When is it time to give up on a niche?” I think it is an important kind of thing to wrap up this section with. Frankly, you’ll probably find this more believable now than you did if I had said this towards the very beginning: you’ll very likely know when you get there. Especially now that you know a lot of the symptoms to look out for, it’s distinctly possible that some of you are working right now and you’ve been working on a site for a couple of months and you’ve gone through this training now and you go, “Man, this is not a viable niche.” You just know when you’re going through it and you compare it to all of the training that we’ve talked about in this section, you’ll know if you get there.

Typically, you’re going to feel totally boxed in or totally burned out. Those are going to be the two most justifiable reasons for jumping out of a niche.

Sometimes, you know… I talked about the thing that you have the most expertise in may be something that you’ve worked on; you’ve worked in an industry for 30 years; you can offer a lot of value. And I think the best lens to look at that through when you put in all that work is, “I’m going to help a ton of people.” And if you help a ton of people, there are going to be a lot of monetization opportunities.

But some people just don’t find that as enough. Sometimes, you just burn out. Sometimes, you have been forced to live and breathe that niche as a living for decades or for years and you can’t work in it anymore. And that’s okay. That is a viable reason to give up on a niche.

The same thing is true – and even more true I’d say – if you find your ‘content well’ (so to speak) runs dry. You just run out of things to talk about and you would feel totally boxed in and out of ideas. Those are both very, very viable reasons to give up on a niche and I think you’ll know if you end up there.

The most important thing to remember if you end up there or if you’re there right now is to not beat yourself up. Most of us didn’t get this right the first time and I’m speaking for myself personally. I know I didn’t get it right the second time or the third time either.

So as long as you keep trying, you are going to ultimately be successful. So the quote “fail early, fail fast, fail often” comes to mind. The more you fail, the more you learn. It’s just a matter of you want to do it as quickly as possible and you want to be as early in the process as possible before you realize that it’s a failure because then you’ve wasted as little time as possible; and you know, “Okay, I can move on and I’m better now. I’m improved and I’m more likely to succeed the next time I have a go at this.”

At the end of the day… you know… most of our successes are made up of all of the failures we’ve had along the way because we refine, we get better, we improve… until ultimately we can run five- and six-figure a month businesses.

Progress is the goal, not perfection. Another way to say this is “Done is better than perfect.” One of my absolute favorite quotes.

Because a lot of the time, you can get a really high-quality article out that may be 80% of what you’re capable of producing quality-wise but it’s still some of the best quality that’s out there. And you can get it 80% there or 90% there and 50% of the time as getting to 100%, right? Because that last 10% to get it to perfect… (And trust me, I’ve struggled with this a lot. That’s why this resonates with me so much. I’ve struggled with this a lot as somewhat of a perfectionist myself) but you will be amazed at what that last 10% to 20% eats up as far as time and resources versus just putting it out at 80% or 90% which is more than enough quality to put your competitors to shame and establish yourself in the industry or in the niche that you’re working in.

And at the end of the day, you may not have the perfect niche, right? You may spend months trying from now until you would find a perfect niche – if you ever did find one that lines up perfectly with all of these criteria. Whereas, you could just launch into something right now and it could be highly profitable in… you know… the next 10 or 12 months. Whereas if you just kind of get paralyzed here, you could end up here for 10 or 12 months and never get anything done. Whereas if you just jumped in and got started and used the rest of the training in Free Internet Marketing Project, you would be profitable in that time.

So the rule of thumb that I’m going to give you is: after you’ve covered all of this training, I would not linger here for more than 24 to 48 hours. This is probably the single most common sticking point for people that are trying to get started in this industry. It’s very easy to get paralyzed here. It’s very easy to get stuck here. I would not linger here for more than 24 to 48 hours. I would go through everything you’ve learned and then I would just make a decision. I would make a choice and I would stick with it. And if you find yourself stuck and needing to start over again, remember, it’s not the end of the world.

Momentum is one the most crucial things to becoming a successful internet marketer and owning a profitable internet business. I know it’s a cliché kind of analogy but think of yourself as a shark and if you stop moving, you risk dying. I can’t remember if that’s an old wives tale or not; but any way around it, it’s a great analogy for this particular industry because the longer you end up stuck, the longer it’s going to take you to succeed. And the longer it takes you to succeed, the more likely you are to wash out and never succeed at all.

So remember: momentum. Even if you’re not doing everything perfectly, you’re learning, you’re becoming better, you’re taking strides towards success even though… for example, I had a conversation with my wife earlier today. I’ve mentioned that she’s starting her own internet business.

She said, “I researched this thing for an hour and a half and it was just wasted time.” Because ultimately, we decided to hire a developer for it anyways because it requires editing hard code. She’s got kind of a complex niche; don’t think that that’s something that you’re going to encounter. That’s a very uncommon thing to encounter.

But she said that it was all wasted and I said, “No, it wasn’t all wasted because you learned so much along the way. In that hour and a half, you learned. You became better. You established a lens that you can filter all future problems like this through. It was not a waste of time.”

It’s very easy to get caught up in that mindset but as long as you are making progress – even if you are making mistakes, you are making progress, you are taking strides towards success. Whether or not you realize it. It’s very, very, very important to remember that, okay?

So either take the best option from the list that you started with or go back through this process with all of these different factors in mind and come up with things. You’ll probably come up with much better ideas now. And yeah, there may be fewer of them now that you have all of these different filters to pass it through, but the niches that you come up with – the ideas that you come up with – will be much better.

And at the end of the day, you can just Google… you know… niche ideas. There are tons of people that are talking about different niche ideas and they throw a lot of them out there and you could use everything you’ve learned in this section to come up with a really workable niche based on what you read and kind of get some ideas kicked up through those. So like I said, if you don’t have any ideas, I would go back through, come up with some ideas, and make a decision within the next 24 to 48 hours.

If you have ideas and you’re just kind of like, “Which one of these is the best?” Just make a decision based on your best judgment at this point within the next one to two days and press forward with the training. Do not get stuck here, okay? Like quicksand, niche selection can be. Don’t get sucked into the black hole that can be niche selection. Make a choice; commit to it; and at the end of the day, keep reminding yourself the worst case scenario is not that bad.

If you find yourself stuck in kind of a dead niche; you’re at a dead end; you’re burned out – something along those lines – still, the progress you made over those months or those weeks or even just those days is going to be tremendously helpful to set you up for success going forward.

Alright, that’s all I have to say about niche selection at this point. Again, I think I’ve gone more in depth than any other training that’s out there – especially that’s out there for free but even compared to what’s available in those paid products.

So I hope you found it helpful. Again, it’s such an essential skill to master if you want to be good – if you really want to be a professional – and have a lot of long-term success with multiple streams of income in this industry. And with all of these things in mind combined with some experience as you go through it and you kind of work in the trenches and you build these sites, you’re going to find yourself tremendously empowered by the in-depth knowledge you have for niche selection now.

So again, think back to when you first started this section and how little you knew or even if you knew a fair amount compared to what you know now; you are just setting yourself up so well for success and I really want you to pay attention to that. I want to call your attention to that because that in and of itself is a huge feat and a ton of progress. You just cut months, if not years out of the cycle that most people go through in internet marketing by having all of this knowledge. No exaggeration.

So that’s my gift to you along with everything else in Free Internet Marketing Project. I hope it helps you change your life. It’s definitely going to set you up better for success.

Once again, if you have any questions that are lingering and you just kind of want to skip all and work through, post them in the Facebook group – that is free for registered members. And as always, it’s free to be a registered member. You just need to sign up so that it gets you access to the Facebook group. Post it there and let’s all work together as a community and kind of make sure you’re perfectly on track.

And I will see you in the Facebook group and I will see you in Section 4 where we’re really going to start to get into some of these strategies and methods and frankly start building your business because all we needed was a niche and now it’s time to press forward and I’ll show you how to turn this into a profitable business in the coming weeks and months, alright?

So, I’ll see you guys around and I’ll see you in Section 4. Talk to you then!

3.6 Good Niche, Bad Niche — A Breakdown of Multiple Example Niches (AF)

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WARNING: Goo-roo’s ain’t gonna like this

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In this video I discuss:

  • Multiple examples of good niches vs. bad niches
  • Examples and detailed explanations of niches that are too broad
  • Examples and detailed explanations of niches that are too narrow
  • Examples of good niches, and detailed explanations as to why they’re good options
  • A recap of what makes good niches vs. bad niches based on the examples shared

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

3.6 Transcript Below

Alright, let’s play us some Good Niche, Bad Niche.

At the end of the day, I’m probably a little bit too excited about this lesson but it’s something I’ve never seen anyone teach and I’ve never seen anyone go through. And at the end of the day, when we’re talking about really complex concepts that are very difficult to discuss and teach in the abstract, the best way to do it is to give some concrete examples and rock through them together.

So if you feel like you’ve got niche selection down really well so far, you know what, just go ahead and skip this video. If everything has made sense to you, you can go straight into Video 3.7.

But I think the vast majority of people that are going through this training, I think it’s more normal and more expected for you to be kind of lost and swimming in a lot of confusion and being a little bit overwhelmed. I would expect that at this point, frankly. Remember it’s perfectly natural, it’s a normal reaction to learning a whole bunch of new stuff. But I think this is going to be very helpful if you find yourself in that situation. I think that is a very normal situation to find yourself in given everything we’ve been learning and discussing.

So if you feel like you’ve got niche selection down, go ahead and wrap up, watch Video 3.7 and move into Section 4. But if you feel like it would be helpful to walk through some examples step-by-step, that’s what we’re doing here. And I just named it Good Niche, Bad Niche because it was fun.

So in this particular video, if you find me casting my eyes off camera to the right, it’s because I’ve got an extra monitor over here. Before starting the lesson, I typed up a lot of notes for each one of these niches so forgive me if I’m not making as much eye contact as I usually do. This is the first lesson where I really wanted to make sure that I didn’t miss certain things as we discuss these niches.

So the first niche is: women’s clothing. Is that a good niche or is that a bad niche based on everything we’ve learned so far? Give you a second? Alright, you’ve had long enough.

That unfortunately is a bad niche and there are several reasons why. But the main thing it ties back to is I think in Section 3.2 – at Lesson 3.2 – we talked about what’s too broad and what’s too narrow. And this is absolutely too broad of a niche. Even something more along the lines of women’s dresses which is another step down, makes it a little bit more narrow – even that wouldn’t be a very good niche.

And the reason that both of these would be kind of invalid niche ideas – besides being a little bit broad for women’s clothing – is because the vast majority of products you could sell under each one of those kinds of umbrellas would be less than $50 and a low-percentage commission. You’re not going to find a whole bunch of high-percentage commission digital products in the women’s clothing and women’s dresses niches.

So at the end of the day, the way you could kind of craft this into a more workable idea, better examples of good niches potentially in this industry would be (let’s see) women’s clothing about exercise or women’s clothing (Just let me take a step back. Jumped in and said something that didn’t make any sense). Women’s clothing for exercise or a blog about affordable fashion tips. You know, something that talked about affordable fashion, talked about how to shop at thrift stores, how to shop online to find really good clothing and really good deals – basically how to be a deal-hunter for clothing in women’s niche.

And you may say, “Well Ian, that’s going to be even less than $50 per commission or less than $50 per product.” But at the end of the day, if you create a bunch of content about how to shop affordably, how to find the best deals, how to piece together really kind of nice outfits for as cheaply as possible, you can have a section on your website that’s women’s outfits that are less than $100 or less than $150 or less than $200 that are total outfits… that they bought the hat, they bought the shirt, they bought the pants, they bought the shoes… and you could commission on each one of those and your total commission profit may be something like $10 or $15. So still kind of on the low end but definitely workable.

And the same thing for women’s exercise (or excuse me) clothing for exercise. Like for example, my wife just recently had to figure out like how to evaluate running shoes. She’s been running a lot, she wants to make sure to protect her joints and make sure she’s not going to be aching when she’s older because she didn’t buy good running shoes.

So she was doing all the research on that and there’s so much information that you can cover and write about. I mean, you could have an entire section on the website for women’s exercise clothing and accessories that’s just all about running shoes and what makes a good running shoe, why a good running shoe is so important, and you could just kind of carve yourself out as an authority when it comes to running shoes and shoes for training.

And then that’s before you get into all different kinds of apparel in the women’s exercise niche and that could be… a lot of those are very expensive products… and they could, again, very easily exceed the $50 threshold I’ve mentioned. And again, it’s going to be on the lower end of the commissions but it’s workable. It’s totally workable.

So these niches are much easier to carve your spot out due to having kind of a more targeted smaller audience and their behavior once they get to your site is going to be more straightforward and predictable. And at the end of the day, the more your audience as a whole has predictable tendencies, the easier it is to monetize.

If you’re pulling from all these different things and all these different… even though they’re technically all in the same niche… if you’re pulling a bunch of different audiences and trying to funnel them through the same funnel but they all have very different behaviors that aren’t easy to predict, it could make it very difficult to monetize something as well as possible.

So we’ll talk about that when we get into conversion optimization and we get into keyword selection extensively. But for now, just know basically that end of the day, women’s clothing is not a good niche and those are the reasons why: it’s too broad, the commissions wouldn’t be high enough, and it’s just going to be something that’s really, really hard to specialize in and carve yourself out as a credible authority within that niche.

We talked about this one heads on so you should know the example to men’s fitness or you should know the answer to the men’s fitness example, right? Good niche or bad niche?

That’s a bad niche. That’s another bad niche. Again, just like women’s clothing, it’s too broad. This is an entire industry. It’s not a niche.

Better ideas than men’s fitness are running a website about how to build muscle or how to gain weight. There are a lot of guys… I found myself in that category for a long time. As I got older, my metabolism slowed down and it is much easier for me to gain weight unfortunately now but at the same time fortunately because it makes it easier to build muscle.

So that could be a much better niche than men’s fitness as a whole. Workout supplements for men – we talked about that pretty extensively throughout this section – best home workouts for men, home fitness equipment would be another one, home gym equipment would be another much better niche than men’s fitness as a whole. Remember that’s an industry. It’s not a niche.

So hopefully that clarifies that and kind of shows you, “Hey, how do I go from something that is way too broad and turn it into something that’s workable,” while also not boxing yourself into something that’s too narrow.

Alright, this one’s very specific which is probably a sign of which way it swings. Dachshund – which if you’re not familiar with dachshunds, that’s a wiener dog also known as a sausage dog. You know, the kind of long I find very cute dogs. I’d say that because we own three of them because I just want to demonstrate to the world what a man I was. So dachshund discectomies. A discectomy is where they remove a disc in the spine. It’s a surgical procedure. Again, this is specific enough that you should have a probably good idea of good niche, bad niche. So this I would say is a very good niche.

And I know about this one personally. One of our dachshunds, she blew a disc in her back and over the course of several days… it was actually very, very sad… this was about a year and a half ago… it was very, very sad. She slowly… fortunately, we had her under vet attention by this point and could call the vet and say, “When do we take her in for surgery? When do we take her in for surgery?” But she slowly lost function in her back legs. Her back legs slowly – over the course of about three days – started to go paralyzed because the fluid from her disc was putting so much pressure on her spinal cord that she was becoming unable to use her legs.

And if that had stayed that way for a long period of time, they needed to get in and relieve that pressure surgically because otherwise she could’ve become permanently paralyzed, and even worse, something called “spinal death” can take place where that portion of the spinal cord dies and essentially the dog just needs to be put down.

So for the dog lovers out there, I’m sure you are feeling this one. We did, too. We felt it in a lot of ways. It was very, very difficult emotionally because personally our dogs are members of our family. But it was also difficult financially because it cost about $5,500 once it was all send on – maybe even closer to $6,000 – to have that whole procedure done and it was just a nightmare. And the recovery was so difficult.

So again, this one hits close to home. This is a perfect example of something that you encounter in life and you’re like, “Man, that would be a really good niche.”

And the reason… there are a lot of reasons that this is a really good niche… you’re dealing with a very passionate audience that’s facing a very difficult problem. Remember in one of the lessons we talked about, those being kind of factors for a really good niche potentially.

There’s so much to write about in this industry. If you had an experience at first-hand you may not think so… You may think, “Oh, I can write like three articles about dachshund discectomies.” But that’s not true at all. You could write about intervertebral disc disease which is a disease that all dachshunds have and I don’t think most dachshund owners know about until they kind of stare this face to face and encounter it.

I know that the audience is fairly large because the one vet clinic that we went to in the suburb of Austin that we live in they said they see typically at least one of these a day. So if you think about that times every vet hospital across the United States alone – let alone the world – you get some pretty high numbers, right? That has to be a pretty sizable audience.

So writing articles about intervertebral disc disease, what it is, details of the operation and the costs of the operation, how to finance the operation to make it affordable, the recovery aspects – there’s so much that goes into it.

We have to for the rest of… this dog’s name is Marcy and she’s my daddy’s girl. She’s the one that follows me around everywhere. We have three, like I said. She is the one that follows me around everywhere. She’s in the room with me right now and she is… most of the time I’m recording and the other ones are… I’m gushing now.

But Marcie for the rest of her life cannot jump. We have to limit how much she jumps because there’s a high risk for that. Which means we have to have stairs all over the house: we have stairs that lead up to our couch, we have stairs that lead up to the recliners in my office, we have a ramp that leads up to the bed – so there are all different kinds of things to write about.

So just to give an example, there’s all kinds of content you could write about so many different subtopics within the topics I’ve mentioned and ultimately this could be somewhat of a challenge to monetize. But at the end of the day, there would be several options if you got enough traction and started getting the traffic.

You could write about pet insurance, right? Like I would be a prime candidate for… it may be too late for Marcy… it may be really difficult to get pet insurance for her. But for her two sisters that are also dachshunds… because a lot of households that own one dachshund own another or another two. Which is ridiculous, I know. Whatever. It’s a mad house. But it wouldn’t be a hard sell to say, “Hey, you should really consider pet insurance for your other dachshunds so you never go through this again.” And you could get commissioned on that pet insurance.

One of the problems we encountered was my wife crafted this… we had to have a sling for a while because after the surgery, her back legs gained function over time so we had to do physical therapy and we had to carry her back legs around in this little sling that had these handles. It was almost like a plastic grocery bag and we had to support her back legs while she used her front paws. And it was just so ridiculous looking back.

But my wife, she wanted one that was more comfortable and one that didn’t look as sterile as the one that the vet clinic gave us and she couldn’t find anything online. So she ended up sewing our dog a custom sling that was more comfortable and was cuter because it was from a fabric that my wife chose.

And again, when you’re dealing with a very passionate audience that’s emotionally distraught, that is a prime purchase opportunity. So you could ultimately either start off sewing those yourself or just… if you got enough traffic and you saw the potential there, you got a large enough audience, you could launch a Kickstarter to manufacture these designer comfortable slings for people who had dogs that needed the sling when they got home from the operation.

And there’s also the opportunity for like an eBook – like a $7 or $9 or $15 eBook that just walks people through the path to recovery, what to expect and just kind of holds your hand through all of the difficult things on that journey.

So I talked enough about dachshund discectomies, but of course, I wanted to kind of walk you through the anatomy of why this is a good niche.

Okay, moving on.

Oh, and by the way, if you’re like, “How do I do physical products?” That’s something that I’m going to teach down the road… I fully intend to teach down the road. It’s one of the frequently overlooked monetization opportunities because it can be really difficult and intimidating. But at the end of the day, if you’re getting a bunch of traffic and that’s your only way to monetize it really well… you can figure it out… yeah, you probably are because it could take your site from being worth $1000 a month to being worth $10,000 or $15,000 a month if you did it correctly.

So again, is it difficult to crack? Yes. Is it a lot to learn? Yes. Is it worth an extra $9,000 to $14,000 a month? Hell, yes!

So we’ll talk about that much later in the training because we’re getting pretty advanced to that point. There’s a lot we need to cover between now and then. But just know it’s doable and it’s an option.

Next niche: drone reviews. Is this a good niche or is this a bad niche?

For those of you that don’t know, drones are those kind of miniature helicopters that carry cameras and you can use them to survey, you can use them to shoot real estate footage, and a lot of people just use them for hobbies and use them for fun.

So drone reviews, is that a good niche or is that a bad niche? (I’ve played the Jeopardy music) So that is a good niche… with some challenges. This bumps up against those challenges that we talked about when we talked about technology: can you afford to buy all of the different drones that you’re going to be talking about? Probably not.

But at the end of the day, this is a great niche with high cost purchases. It’s just going to be so much challenging to add value. So if you can afford to buy all of the drones for review, you need to come up with a unique angle to break into this saturated niche where you wouldn’t need first-hand experience or video footage to provide that value to your audience.

So we talked about this earlier, you know, kind of a buying guide for drones that could be broken up into multiple sections: what you’re looking for, what you need to look out for, what components are best, what the different metrics and specs mean when you’re comparing drones side-by-side. If you’re buying drones as a gift, you could create a drone gift guide to guide people to the absolute best drones based on whoever they were buying for – whether it be a friend or a spouse or a child – you know, “These are the best options.”

So there are definitely opportunities that don’t require you to buy all of the drones that you would be studying and looking at. There are definitely opportunities to add value there, you just have to research the industry, research the competition, look at what everyone’s doing, and find your in.

So that is a good niche with some challenges. At the end of the day, a lot of those are going to be high dollar purchases – sometimes ranging up into several hundred dollars each. And your commission on those – even if your commission percentage were only 3% or 5% – could still be $20, $30, $40 for each one that you sell. So good niche with some challenges.

Alright, here’s an interesting one because it’s tricky. So best phone cases. What do you think? You think that’s a good niche or a bad niche?

That is a bad niche, unfortunately. That one’s a little bit tricky, right? Because in one of the videos, I said “the best pretty much anything” is going to be good to write about. This is an exception because of a more important rule – which is a couple of more important rules.

One: because it’s a low dollar product that has a low percentage commission – typically speaking. I know there are high dollar phone cases that sometimes range up to a hundred dollars, but they are few and far between. So that’s one reason it’s not the best niche to enter and it’s a bad niche.

But another reason is that it’s too narrow. There’s not a whole lot of content you can create for phone cases. There are not a whole lot of technical specs that need broken down in articles. And on top of that, you’re going to find yourself wanting to gauge your eyes out if you have to write article after article after article about these individual phone cases – all their different features and find a unique way to talk about this one and talk in a unique way or find a unique way to talk about this one. It’s just not going to be worth it in the long run. So even if you could find enough to write about, the commissions just aren’t going to be there.

So how could you improve this? How could you turn this into a more workable niche?

Well obviously, we need to broaden out. We need to take it from something too narrow and kind of broaden out. So you could create a more holistic website on phone protection and phone replacement and phone repairs. Those could be individual niche sites or those could really be a one niche site. And you kind of tackle each one, one by one. Remember, divide and conquer.

So you could write about the most protective phone cases for impact, the most protective phone cases for water… and then, you’re cutting out a lot of those phone cases that cost like $10 or $20 and have way too low of commissions… and now, you’re carving out a niche where most phone cases are going to be $30, $50, up to $100+ because you’re looking at very specific pains and very difficult to solve pains.

And again, people… if they’re looking for the most waterproof case… if they’re looking for the phone case that is most resistant to impact… they’re probably looking to make a purchase very soon. So if you’re the person that gives them the information and links them to the best purchase, they’re probably going to use your link and you’re going to get commissioned on it.

So another thing you could do on a more holistic site, you could talk about different phone insurance options, whether you buy from your carrier or you buy from a third party… and if you refer them to a third party, there’s probably a pretty handsome commission involved there.

You could talk about the best options for screen repair, you could talk about all different kinds of options there – that could be several articles. You could talk about what to do if you drop your phone in water, how to be prepared just in case you ever dropped your phone in water… and on top of all kinds of other benefits, that is the type of content that could go viral. People might share it if you do a really good job with it. How to be prepared for the day you drop your phone in water because it’s going to happen to most of us at some point. So that’s the kind of thing that a lot of people could share, a lot of people could really engage in.

And at the end of the day, this particular niche, if you broaden it out to something more holistic like I mentioned (what did I say?) phone protection and replacement options… if you broaden it out to something along those lines, you’re going to have a lot of different options for monetization. And another way to monetize as I mentioned in one of the last examples, you could ultimately use this as a pushing off point, as a foundation for launching your own phone lines (excuse me, that’s confusing)… you own line of phone cases. So you could do that through Kickstarter or you could just manufacture based on the gaps you see and you know like there’s a lot of opportunity here.

So you could launch your own crowdfundings campaign. That’s something else I want to cover with this training. But again, that’s much more advance than down the road. We’ve got a lot more to cover between now and then. You should just know that it’s an option that most people don’t traditionally just talk about when they talk about how to monetize in this industry.

Next niche. Good niche, bad niche? And I think we only have a couple more. I think this is the last one or second to the last one. So tattoo removal. Another fairly specific niche. Do you think that is a good niche or a bad niche? That is a good niche in my opinion.

So there is a lot of content to write about. You probably wouldn’t know it if you haven’t gone through tattoo removal yourself. Believe it or not – I know a lot of people find it very hard to believe – but I have a tattoo. I have a very large tattoo and I am like 11 treatments in… 12 treatments in. It’s a very painful process. But I found as I’ve gone through it myself that there is a lot to write about especially for a really large tattoo.

So there’s so much to write about different lasers, different aspects of recovery, everything from pain management down to which creams you should use – because essentially what’s happening when you’re getting a tattoo removed is you’re experiencing a lot of burning to your skin. Your skin reacts as though it was burned because that’s a side effect of the lasers. And so, you have to take care of it very specifically.

And then after you do that, you have these adhesive… from three days, I’m having a fully-dressed wound that may have been blistered and may have been bloody – all different kinds of things. It’s not a pretty process. Now you’ve got to figure out how to get out all that freakin’ adhesive from the tape over the course of three days off of your body.

I’ve had to figure all of these things out and I can tell someone how to do all of these things. So this actually could be a very good niche. Lots to write about. Like I said, a lot to write about.

And it’s a good way to go into a niche that doesn’t really have a whole lot of competition and it would be really, really easy to add a lot of value. The other thing is that it’s a high barrier to entry. My personal tattoo removal sessions – and these aren’t even as expensive as it gets – are about $300 a pop. So a lot of people aren’t going to have it done but a lot of people are going to be considering having it done.

And I think it’s the combination when I talk about high barrier to entry, how many people are going to have it done that also get into internet business and consider pursuing that as a niche. That’s where you really carve down the odds of how many people are going to be in that niche. It’s just not going to be super high competition niche.

It’s a very motivated niche if you want to have a tattoo removed. It could be somewhat personal – which taps into something we talked about in one of the previous lessons – but it’s also a very difficult problem that a lot of people that want to have a tattoo removed face. And so again, that makes for a very motivated buying audience.

So ultimately, the most difficult challenge with this niche is not going to be how to add value, it’s not going to be how to overcome the competition, it’s not going to be not having enough to write about. The challenge for this particular niche is going to be how to monetize.

But again, if you’re dealing with a buying audience, you will always have options for monetization. It’s easy to fall into the trap of saying any niche can be monetized. Technically speaking, that’s true. But realistically… you know, you can monetize a recipe site, you just need so much traffic to make a full-time living from. It’s really difficult. So I’m trying to help you avoid that, of course.

But if you did get the traffic, there would be a lot of different options. Just the ones that came to me off the top of my head would be an eBook – again – somewhere between $10 and $20 maybe a little bit less than $10 where you address all of those problems up front.

Again, it was a long journey to find out everything I needed to find out for tattoo removal and I go to a really good clinic that gave me a lot of information up front. But that still didn’t help me fully with pain recovery options. That still didn’t help me with how to get the freakin’ adhesive off of my body after I’ve had a fully-dressed wound for three days because there’s just so much medical tape involved that there’s all these leftover adhesive and it’s really, really difficult. I had to look that up. So putting all of that information in one place and selling it as an eBook could be an excellent way to monetize.

And ultimately, I think if you’ve got enough traffic that you got enough traction in the niche, the best way to monetize this would be to sell leads to tattoo removal clinics – which is, again, kind of a difficult thing to think about but it’s also something that’s very doable. You would have to call and email clinics around the United States and potentially around the world, but if you could find one in every major city and then you could have a programmer write a script on your website based on someone’s location (This is not a difficult thing to do. It wouldn’t cost a whole lot of money to have done) that changes which clinic they’re referred to. And then you had a phone number that tracked you know, “Okay, I sent them this lead,” which is how lead tracking is done. Again, something that I’d like to talk more about in future training. But there’s actually a lot of information about this. There’s a whole sect of internet marketing – a whole industry or subculture in internet marketing – that is how to sell leads and there’s a lot of really good information there.

So again, at the end of the day, if it’s the difference between your site making $1,000 and your site making $15,000 a month, are you going to figure out how to crack it? Heck yeah because a lot of those leads could be worth $5, $10, $20 each. Because the clinic I go to make several thousand dollars or several hundred dollars at least off of every patient. I just so happened to have a very large tattoo where they’re probably going to profit somewhere between $1500, $2000, maybe more dollars by the time my tattoo is completely removed. Probably closer to $3000 I would assume.

So that’s a really high value lead. So that’s probably the best… that’s probably like the ultimate vision. It’s going to take a long time to get there. There’s a lot of traffic involved and then there’s a lot of technical skill and implementation involved. But again, at the end of the day, it’s very possible you’re dealing with a buying audience… a very motivated audience… it’s possible to make a lot of money off of that audience in the long run. You just have to get creative. There are always options. You just have to get creative. So again that comes back to working in a buying niche.

So we’ve gone through enough examples, I think. I think that gives you enough kind of angles to think about and kind of make all of these concrete so that you can evaluate your own niches really accurately.

The key takeaways, though. I always want to kind of boil it down to the simplest form so that it’s as easy to walk away with and deal with those feelings of being overwhelmed.

A buying audience isn’t enough as we discussed, right? We’ve kind of covered that over this training. Initially, you heard buying audience. “Okay,” you may have thought. “If I do this, I’ve got it right.” And there are a lot of exceptions to that. You still need to be careful not go too narrow or too broad and you still need large enough commissions for it to make sense. Because again, are you likely to get hundreds of thousands or millions of visitors a month? Not remotely as likely as you are to get 1000 visitors a day or 2000 or even 500 visitors a day. So those are the economics we talked about in a previous lesson. We want to keep those skewed in our favor and working for us rather than working against us. So a buying audience is not enough.

You want to make sure that you can write a lot of content surrounding the topic if you can afford to buy all of the products for reviews. So again, don’t fall into that trap where it’s just, “Oh, I’m going to write drone reviews,” and then you find out, “Oh crap, I can’t add value in this niche because I can’t get my hands on the products.” Then you need to find a different way to write content surrounding that industry and surrounding that niche and those purchase decisions and write about those and produce really high quality content and add value there instead.

If you line up all of the above on this slide with a buying audience, there will be a way to monetize. So if you narrow it down to a niche that isn’t too large or too narrow and you can figure out how to add value in that niche and it’s a buying audience that makes purchases – that is likely to make a purchase to solve their pain point or answer their question – there will be a way to monetize that.

And I talked about some really unique ones in this video from selling leads to tattoo removal clinics around the United States to manufacturing your own phone cases. It’s going to be possible. You don’t need to concern yourself with exactly how you’re going to do it right now. There’s so much in between here and there that’s important. But no, if these factors line up, there is going to be a way to make a very good amount of money from that niche site. You just may have to get a little bit creative and you may have to create it yourself.

So that’s it for Good Niche, Bad Niche. Hopefully, it helped more than it hurt. Again, made a lot of these complex concepts that we’ve discussed much more concrete and easier to understand. And hopefully, it equipped you with kind of a Swiss Army knife tool set to evaluate your own niche ideas by.

But as always, if you have questions… if you’re still going, “Man, I don’t know if this is a good niche,” post it in the Facebook group. Let’s take a look at it. Let’s kind of dissect it and talk about it as a community.

I know that can be intimidating because you might feel like someone’s going to compete with you. But at the same time, if it sets you up for success or helps you completely roll out a niche and saves you months in the process, is that a good risk to reward ratio? I would absolutely say so.

And the odds are, people aren’t going to steal your niche. Unfortunately, most of us are just tied up. You know people have treated me in the past like, “I can’t tell this guy my niche.” I don’t have time to steal anyone’s niche, guys. I’m involved in enough niches myself and enough different projects and making money – finding different ways to monetize my existing sites – there’s just no chance that I’m going to steal anybody’s niche. There are enough of them out there that nobody needs to go stealing other people’s niches.

And just while we’re on the topic, if you see someone ballsy enough and putting enough trust in the community to share their niche to workshop it, don’t steal their niche. Don’t be that person. Come up with your own niche. There are plenty of them out there. It can be inspiring, it can be helpful, it can be cool to think about like, “Oh hey, that’s a good niche! That’s a good example! I need to come up with something like that for myself.” But don’t steal other people’s niches – it’s just a dick thing to do.

So, if you want to workshop… if you’re not sure… if you’ve gone through all these and you’re going, “Man, I still don’t know if it’s a good enough niche,” we’re going to go through one more video where we wrap up and really get down, revisit a lot of these concepts and nail them down – really make them solid.

But if you want to post it to the Facebook group, of course, it’s free for registered users here. So, registered members, feel free to post to the Facebook group and we’ll all work on it together, alright?

So that’s that. Until next time, I’ll see you on the next video. And if not, I will see you in the Facebook group between now and then. Alright? So I’ll see you guys there.

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