An Interview with Nate Rivers on How to Build Extremely Profitable Membership Sites

OIL 006: AN INTERVIEW WITH NATE RIVERS – NICHE SITE WIZKID

Trent: Hey everybody! Welcome to the Online Income Lab podcast. Here we are with episode no. 6. And speaking of avoiding anything to do a real job or avoiding a real job rather we have the San Diego blackout last night. That was pretty exciting. Absolutely no internet, no cellphone, no power whatsoever. Very good for forcing you to go out and go meet your neighbors. So anyone in this neighborhood. I hadn’t actually expect to be able to do this show today.

So on the show with me, fortunately we’ve got the power back, and on the show with me is a fellow by the name of Nate Rivers who I’ll introduce in just a second. I came across Nate a number of months ago and somehow found his blog, street blogger, I’m not even really sure how I found it. I joined his mailing list. Nate sent an email out 4-5 days ago. Caught my attention, clicked the link through to the warrior forum where he had a warrior special offer that he was explaining something called the niche video tycoon. So I bought that and I thought I was gonna check out what this guy is doing because it sounds very interesting. So Nate and I had a short conversation after my purchasing that coz I told him I was so fascinated with what I found in his course and I really wanna get him to talk about it.

And so it’s a new activity that I’m gonna start in addition to my adsense sites hopefully some of my listeners here will want to do the same things. With all that said, Nate, very happy to have you on the show. Welcome to the Online Income Lab podcast.

Nate Rivers: Thanks Trent, it’s good to be here.

T: So I’m assuming you didn’t have any power either last night.

N: No

T: That’s good.

N: I was just sitting here like normal.

T: So Nate, let me ask. Many of my guests probably are not familiar with you yet. If you could start by saying a little bit about your background. How did you get started it online? And what were you doing before you got online?

N: Well, before I started online I was doing whatever anyone else was doing. You know working at some crappy job and hating every minute of it. I went to college. Got a degree in accounting and god I just hated having a job. It drove me crazy, the idea of making somebody else rich. That was the main thing. I wasn’t even having so much having a go at jobs everyday. It drove me insane to, no matter how hard I work or how good my work was I got paid a fixed amount. Somewhere along the line I got the idea of making money on the internet and I don’t remember what I came across online and how I got that idea.

But if anyone’s heard of this site building software called SBI or site build it, kind of a primitive, all-in-one package that’s supposed to teach you how to do online marketing. And that’s the first thing I came across and this was like 3 or 4 years ago. So I built a site with that and spent a lot of time on it for basically 2 years and it never went anywhere. And so my first 2 years I tried to build an online business was a complete failure.

T: I don’t think that’s terribly uncommon. 2 years? Maybe longer than most I’m really not sure but I’ll tell you what. If it is a test of it with the fact that you decided to stick with it, if you continue at something and don’t give up that’s make a success of yourself. So the failure in the first 2 years, I’m guessing you didn’t do any keyword research, you weren’t sure what traffic was. What made you pick this particular site and now that you know the whole researching aspect how bad did you screw it up?

N: That was the main thing. Not something that people usually don’t really focus on coz they wanna start building sites as fast as they can or whatever but yeah, I didn’t get the idea of I guess competition in the search engine or whatever. And the site was about body building of all things. And I wasn’t even going after like long tail keywords like I was trying to rank, seriously trying to rank for the terms like body building or how to get ribs. It’s ridiculous. And so I’ve built all these pages after like 6 months or a year it’s not even showing, they’re not even on the map in the search engines anywhere. And I was thinking “man, this sucks”. I have put in all this work and nothing happens.

And so choosing your niche and how to like find niches that you’ll be able to rank for and keywords I would say that’s the most important step to getting started on the right foot because well you could spend 2 years working on something and if you’ve chosen the wrong niche it’s not gonna go anywhere.

T: I couldn’t agree more as you and I were talking about very briefly before we went on the air. That’s one of the reasons why I’m re-launching my training webinar series and you can just go to the Online Income Lab blog, there’ll be a button on the right hand side bar where you can sign up for. Because keyword research is 90% and I say that in every episode of the podcasts and I think in every post that I make I hammer the point on keyword research, keyword research. And it takes a long time to figure out all the little itty, bitty specifics that go into the importance of that.

So interesting that you’ve started off like the rest of us, following, actually on my webinar I point out a couple of my mulligan sites one of mountain biking and one of car driving video games and yeah it wasn’t quite bad as your body builder story but it was a whole lot better. So what happened after what you call an internet flop to the wildest, successful guy that you are now? So let’s go back to the body building disappointment. What happened next? Why didn’t you just quit?

N: Well, I did quit for a few months. Yeah at some point like the SBI program’s $30 a month for their site hosting and everything. And after 2 years I just added it up in my head and said ok I’ve spent like almost a thousand dollars by just working on this thing with no returns whatsoever. I finally just went into my account, cancelled my account completely. I took the site offline and I just for a few months just given up on the internet idea completely.

And then I couldn’t really get the idea out of my head. And I’m just, you know I go online everyday and just mess around like everyone. This stinks. How come I can’t figure out how to make money somehow in here. The internet is huge. There’s gotta be something that I can figure out. And so I started looking around again. And this is basically another failure. I’ll give you a short version.

But I came across the idea of pay per click. And you know, anyone selling of course on pay per click, they want you to think that you can just set up a campaign direct link to an affiliate offer and it’s as easy as starting a campaign. Well, they sold me on that idea. I still haven’t learned that much I guess because I’ve waited. And I spent like a whole day setting up my pay per click account, loading money in there, setting up my first campaign. And I remember finishing like 2 or 3 in the morning and just, this is funny but I went to bed sneaking and I said this is gonna be so sweet when I wake up in the morning. I’d make like 500 bucks. And I woke up, I’d spent like $200 and not made a single sale and I just could not believe it. I was like how I thought that this was gonna work for sure.

And so anyways, a few months after that that made me give up again for a few months. A few months after that, this part I’m really hazy on. I don’t remember where I came across the idea of niche sites but I did somewhere and then I brought a course on building this small niche sites. And so I started doing that and I didn’t have any huge success fast but I started getting just small sales pretty quickly and it has blown my mind coz I spent 2 years on that body building site and never even, you know I think the whole time I think I made $5 per adsense or something. The whole 2 years. When within just the first 2 months of setting up these niche sites I started getting sales from the different sites. And it just kind of, I don’t know, I did get a lot of training I guess in the first 2 years just kind of learning how it all works. So it wasn’t a complete waste. And just in the process of building these niche sites, I just kind of, I finally just got how it works I guess.

And then the next level was, you know after the 6 months of building these sites I kind of look back and the more successful ones I just thought “wooh, I should just create my own product for this instead of sending all my traffic over to as an affiliate to another vendor.” So that’s what I did. I just created my first product, it was an e-book for one of my niche sites. It was doing pretty well and that just really changed things from there. I got into creating e-books for most of my niche sites and then I thought well I’d rather sell these things for higher prices so I started creating video courses instead of an e-book. So now, that’s just been for the last year and a half. That’s my main thing. That’s what the WSO was about is. Putting together simple video courses to sell in these niche sites instead of the e-book because video and audio content is just much higher perceived value than just an e-book.

T: Absolutely. So for the readers that are curious, for the listeners rather that are curious are you willing to share how well are you doing online? How many sites you’ve got?

N: Well, yeah, I mean I’m gonna add this up in my head. I have over a dozen of this little sites. Well, I have a lot more than that that are, I still do just affiliate sites you know. So kind of my main method is I set up affiliate sites first and a lot of work. And then the ones that perform well then I go back and create my own product for it because creating your own product is kind of a lot of work and you know obviously if you can see how it goes with the affiliate offers first it’s better to find your best performing sites, what niches are performing best and then go back and create your own course.

So that’s what I do. So my main course site, sorry, my own site that I have my own courses for, I have over a dozen of those and everyone of those makes between like 500 and 1300 a month.

T: That is fantastic.

N: And it’s pretty awesome. I gotta tell you it’s pretty sweet because I don’t really do anything to work on those. Those are 95% auto pilot.

T: No gc’s, no organic traffic.

N: No, geez, I don’t pay for traffic.

T: Interesting. So I have a copy of your course here in front of me. Now I’ll just ask you a few questions. So when you are, sorry let’s go back. You said that you do a lot of affiliate sites first. Let’s talk a little bit about that. So what’s a lot? How many of those things are you launching in a given month would you say?

N: Well, to be honest with you, the last few months like I was telling you on the call the other day, it’s kinda been in this last six months that things have really gelled and my online income has just exploded. So the last few months it’s been summer I kind of been like basking in the… whatever you call that…

T: The glow of the internet lifestyle.

N: Yeah, and I haven’t done a ton of work. But back when I was just, I mean I had a goal to set up 50 sites like 6 months ago and so I would get usually 4 or 5 of those niche site set up every month. And someone who’s just willing to work their ass of could do a lot more than that really. And I point out I was only writing articles for this which is stupid like there are article writers out there that can write articles better than I can. And you pay them 10-15-20 dollars per article. And it’s done in 3 days instead of taking a week to write 10 articles or so. But people that are just starting and maybe don’t have the budget writing your own articles is not really that big a deal. In fact if you have to get started then do it obviously.

T: So let’s talk about the specifics about an article. How many words? How long do you make it?

N: 500. Everytime 500.

T: What keyword density are you using?

N: 2% I mean when I was writing myself I did not take the time to like calculate that. I just made sure that it was in an H1 tag or an H2 tag on the page and on the last paragraph. That’s only like things I like make sure I did every time. Because having the keyword in your URL, your title, your meta tag, your description and your first paragraph is by far the most important thing as far as on page SEO.

T: Yap. Same process I follow. Have you been able to discern, excuse me, since the panda update 500 words have you tried any, the sites that you’re creating with 500 words they’re still ranking like before panda?

N: Yeah definitely. And this is something that, might sound crazy but I go for very, very low competition keywords and that’s kind of the, my whole process just to give you an example. In one of my sites, one of my better performing sites it made 1300, it has like 7 raw pages on it. The main keyword phrase that the site is optimizing is for gets searched only for 140 exact match searches a month if you look in Google tool. So most people that know what they’re talking about so to speak or gurus would tell you that it’s totally not worth the time to go after. But you have your own priorities so, you know, and it’s a video course that you can sell for more than just 15 bucks like an e-book. You don’t need that many sales to hit 5,6,700,000 dollars a month.

T: In that way, ladies and gentlemen, is what really calls my interest when I read Nate’s course. Why I had him on the show. Coz if you’ve been at this any amount of time and myself and many other teachers who are talking about adsense or affiliate stuff or all I’m saying is you should have a few thousand searches for that primary keyword and of course it’s more difficult to get a site rank when there’s 3,000 searches because there’s that many people pursuing that word. But you start going down in a 140 searches a month. Nobody, nobody is paying attention to that keyword. Nate, how long does it take you to set it out on the first page? A month?

N: No, less than that usually 2 or 3 weeks. A lot of times the youtube video will hit the first page like in a week or a few days. And I guess I might as well explain that I know I didn’t mention that before. Each article I write, I go in and make a powerpoint video that I put on youtube that’s optimized for the same keyword as the article. And then I take the youtube video and embed it on the article page on my own site. Because then the youtube video 9x out of 10x is gonna rank in the top 10 so is your article. And then the youtube video being embedded on your article on your site will quadruple your average time on site. And that’s another huge indicator that Google looks at to decide which site is most relevant to these viewers. They see how long do people stay in your site, you know. So having a youtube video embedded on the site will just really send up your average time on site.

T: So let’s just dive to that youtube video for just a little bit deeper for a second. So you get a 500 word article, how are you gonna turn that into a youtube video? Do you basically make a short powerpoint presentation that kinda encapsulates what the article is about?

N: Oh yeah that’s it.

T: And then do a voice over or do you just read slide by slide like slide 1 blah, blah, blah… slide 2 blah, blah, blah?

N: I don’t read slide by slide. I just kinda talk about the contents of the article. I mean, I cover what’s exactly in the article but I just like to talk… the thing you’ll hear me say over and over again in my training whatever it is, you owe it to your video whether it’s a paid product, a video course that members pay for, youtube videos, you just wanna talk like you would be talking to your bestfriend. Just very casual, you know, a casual tone. When you try to like read slides word for word it becomes just uninteresting instantly.

T: Yeah it’s boring. How long do you make these videos?

N: 2 or 3 minutes. And if it, you know, sometimes I’ll just end up talking longer about whatever it is, 6 or 7.

T: So far what we have is we pick a keyword with 140 searches. You built the 7 page site. You got a total of 7 500 word articles. You’ve created sounds like 7 youtube videos that are between 2 and 3 minutes each. One of those youtube videos is embedded on the page for the keyword that it’s targeting. Am I understanding this correctly?

N: That’s correct.

T: Ok. Now do you have to do any link building at all? Or are you on first page just on what I described?

N: Well, I don’t really know because I do link building, yes. But I made this some automated process that takes me like 5 extra minutes after every article I post. So when I setup to build all these niche sites really fast. I sign up for Unique Article Wizard and you know one submission will give you about 2 to 300 backlinks to the given article and you can put 2 links in every resource box. So one of the links in the resource box I use for the same article on my site and then the 2nd link on the resource box I link to my youtube video for my same keyword phrase. So that process 9x out of 10 will give me top 10 ranking for both the video and the article on my own site.

T: Wow. Talk about going after the low hanging fruit. And I think absolutely that’s one of the brilliant parts of your strategy. You just think about how many keywords that are out there that are under 500 searches that you could go after.

N: Yeah that’s ridiculous.

T: You’ve opened up an entirely new market that isn’t really on anyone else’s radar coz I’ve spent a lot of time in the forums, a lot of time talking with other niche marketers and nobody, nobody has ever made their primary keywords under 200 a month. You’ve figured out how to make money. And the reason why for the listeners and the audience that may be grasping this yet, if you’re running an adsense site or you’re doing affiliate site of any kind the reason that you need 3, 4, 5, 6,000 searches is in the case of an adsense site you might only be making 50 cents to 52 cents to a dollar per click. So you need a lot of clicks. Or if you’re doing an affiliate site you know depending upon the sale price of the product that you’re selling you’re probably only getting 4 to maybe 8% depending on the product of whatever that product is. So you simply, you just need a higher volume of clicks to make a decent income.

But in the case, Nate, what you’re doing because you’ve created your own product and you’re selling it for $47 you don’t have to give any portion of the $47 to anybody else and so 1 or 2 sales a month and that’s as much money as most people make from an affiliate site and they’re happy if they’ll make a hundred dollars a month.

My aunt quoted many times as saying “hey, I’ll build an adsense site if it’ll make me 50 bucks a month”. So out of a 140 searches and you’re ranked no. 1 we’ll assume so you’re gonna get the vast majority of those people to your site that makes 1300 a month. Now what’s the amount of traffic that goes to the site each day? Do you know what that is off the top of your head?

N: Yeah, yeah. On average it’s like 37 visitors a day.

T: Yeah 37 visitors a day. So you figured out that’s like a thousand. You must be getting some long tail as well coz that exceeds a 140 searches. But the point is

N: Yeah. Only 1 page you know 1 keyword phrase gets a 140 then you add 10 pages that are all around there you know. So yeah, it adds up but still not, it’s much less than a guru would tell you to go after. But yeah those 10 pages help out obviously.

T: Ok so you hit on a very important topic there and I don’t want to skip past this. This is the related keywords. And actually hold on before we get in to the related keywords I just wanna quickly talk about – so when you’re ordering your articles I think you and I both talked that we order from the content authority. And I know on the content authority when you’re ordering article no. 1 there’s a little check box and you can order a rewrite of that article or 2 rewrites or 3 rewrites and the major benefit of doing that is you don’t have to spend all the time using a spinning program like The Best Spinner and going and inserting all the spintax which can be a little bit labourish. Lots and lots of copies when you’re done but you don’t do it that way.

N: No way. I figure out the fastest way to do things possible I guess mine is creating my own products. I don’t outsource my product creation. I do them all by myself. And I guess the point will come where I will do outsourcing but everything else, the stuff that I absolutely hate doing like writing articles, building backlinks obviously, manually building backlinks, there’s nothing worse than that.

T: Yeah.

N: Or spinning an article. Like I tried some spinning software once and I just can’t stand doing that. So I just really like Unique Article Wizard’s format. I order a set of 3 articles, 1 original, 2 rewrites. Plug it into the Unique Article Wizard and I’m done. A few days later it’ll have 300 backlinks.

T: So for each, I wanna wrap my mind all the time to do this, so you’ve created a post and you pasted it in the content that you got from the content authority so that’s really quick. I have my VA’s for example going to embed images in those articles, tag the images, do you do any of that or do you add the content?

N: I do actually. I will put an image in and give it an alt-tag that’s the same keyword phrase and the youtube videos as well.

T: Ok so you got that in there. You got a couple of minutes and then all you do is you take and rewrite no. 1 and rewrite no. 2 plus do you use the, coz you use the Unique Article Wizard, you need 3 versions of an article right?

N: Yeah I don’t use the original one.

T: You don’t even spin it.

N: Yeah the original one won’t be posted anywhere exactly like it is on your own site coz it’s gonna get spun in between the other 2.

T: That’s true. See I’ve spent so long my VA is using Unique Article Wizard for months I haven’t laid a finger on it myself personally I’ve gotten a bit foggy on it I don’t know how it works. So you put in the 3 versions in Unique Article Wizard will swap the paragraph. Will it swap it in paragraph level or sentence level? I don’t remember.

N: Paragraph.

T: Paragraph. Ok so you just hit the go. So really for each one of those post that you’re doing this extra layer of work with Unique Article Wizard we’re talking minutes, not much time at all.

N: 10-15 minutes at the most.

T: Yeah ok. So I wanna go back now to where we were a minute ago with these related keywords. So how, you’ve mentioned your primary keyword searches 140 a month but now we’ve got 7 or 8 or 9 or 6. How many articles do you wanna do? How do you pick your related keywords? What are the criteria? What are the tools?

N: I use Market Samurai for all my keyword research. That’s the only thing I use because it runs from the Google keyword tool and just makes it much much faster and easier to see everything at once. And so what I do if I get a general idea of something that I might want to create a site about I search for a certain phrase that has to do with it in Market Samurai. Then your big indicator is the, inside Market Samurai there’s a column called SEOTC, Search Engine Title Competition. That’s telling you how many other pages out there in the internet are actually optimized for that keyword phrase. So that’s really all you need to look at. All I wanna know is monthly searches, monthly exact searches. Don’t use broad or phrase. Monthly exact searches and then I just go through and look at the search engine title competition and if it’s less around 5,000 or less and it is as far as like from human perspective it logically relates to my main keyword then I’ll use it.

T: So let me summarize that back make sure that I understand this right. You got primary keyword, we’ll call it dog training for lack of a better word. You punch that into Market Samurai, it’s gonna produce for you when you hit the analyze button I believe if I remember this correctly coz I don’t use Market Samurai anymore, it’ll produce a list of related keywords. You are then sorting that list by the SEOTC column looking for words that have fewer than 5,000 and then just using common sense to say does this relate to dog training that I would write another article to put on my site.

N: Yeah. That’s funny you say dog training because anyone that talks about you know like finding niches they use that example. It’s just the gold standard example in internet marketing. And so when I put this WSO together just to prove that you can even find keywords within the biggest most saturated niches that will still make this formula work. I searched dog training to start off with just to see what I could find. And what I found was like how to housebreak an older dog and that phrase itself is very niched.

T: Very much so.

N: How to train an older dog. But that phrase gets exact searches and it only have like 600, not 6,000 but only 600 SEOTC. And that’s a ridiculous keyword like you know that’s 8x as many searches as my main keyword for other sites that I already make like a thousand a month you know. And then I do a separate search for that keyword, how to house train an older dog, and I was able to find like 15 other keywords that directly were about how to train an older dog. Something to do with older dog, training an older dog. Most of them had less than a thousand than SEOTC.

If you can find keywords with less than a thousand SEOTC it’ll virtually guarantee you, it’ll be very easy to get in the top 10 for those keywords. That’s a super low amount on a competition, your competing pages. And even within the dog training niche they will find I mean 20 keywords. You could make 20 pages of full site of how to train or how to break an older dog. And there are even any e-books out there like on click bank or anything that I could find. But it’s obviously if you add those up collectively that exact niche is getting searched for several thousand times a month. There’s no product out there about it.

T: I just want to, I’ve fired up my browser out here coz I want to type that in. I wanna check something. And there’s one how to train an adopted dog by the way that Google instant just punched in for me. Ok so one of the tests of commerciality that I always look at when I’m building an adsense site if keywords fail this test coz I want to look at how many ads is played on when you go to Google, you type in how to train an older dog and hit the search button, if you don’t see any pay per click ads at the top or over at the right generally speaking that would be a keyword that I would have avoided.

Now in your situation have you run, is this one of the tests? Coz the word we’re talking about is a hypothetical one that you know we’ve got this phrase how to train an older dog which is easy to rank for and is related to dog training. But when you, for the sites that you’ve built that’s been commercially successful, is part of your research has it been, how do you tell people that you’re spending money on that niche. I have my tests that I do and by the way I cover all of this in detail in my webinars so if you want to find out the real detail just sign up to one of the webinars in Online Income Lab. But Nate what are the tests that you use to test for commerciality?

N: Yeah I have a very, very simple test that so far has a 100% success rating. To create an info product all I do is I go to Amazon.com and if I can find a published book, even one, about the general idea then I’ll go forward with it. That’s it. Now there’s a big distinction because one of the popular technics, overnight niches right now is upload a bunch of PLR crap into Amazon’s kindle store so don’t look at results that come up for the kindle in Amazon if you do this. The big difference is once you do a search you can click on pay per box only so that would give you actually if a publisher has decided that this book is gonna sell enough to make it worth it for us then that’s my test.

T: Ok. So I’m already on Amazon. I did that how to train an older dog. We’ve got

N: There’s a book called How to Train a Dog of any Age.

T: So there are 6 results: How to Housebreak your Dog in 7 Days, How to Teach a New Dog Old Tricks, How to Teach your Old Dog New Tricks. Lasels has nothing to do with dogs. The Power of Positive Dog Training and Everything you Need to Know about Housetraining Puppies and Adult Dogs. Those are the only 6 that I see. Which one did you say was supposed to be there?

N: There was a book that I just saw when I was doing this the other day called something like how to train a dog of any age.

T: And what was the search phrase that you typed in to Amazon?

N: Probably it might have been how, maybe not training, it may be housetrain like as in potty train, I don’t know, something like that. But there was a paperback on there and that’s what I, that’s like my key test. That’s it.

T: Interesting. Anyway, the point I’ve got so when you type in your search there’s 6 paperbacks. They’re all sort of kinda close but they’re not exactly about how to train an older dog. Is that a pass or a fail?

N: That’s a pass for sure. I’m just looking for like related. If there’s the book published that’s like related.

T: So you punch it into Amazon, a couple of paperback results come up. Common sense says that’s pretty closely related to my topic so from a commerciality stand point for you that’s a go.

N: Yeah and like you said a few minutes ago, ok so once I pay for articles at the most $200 to set up one time, even if that only gets like 1 or 2 sales a month, within a year tbat’s produced, even if it’s only 500 in a year I mean that’s a passive income producing asset of 500 a year that once you do it once it’s over and you don’t touch it again. So I mean I’m willing to do that.

T: Absolutely.

N: But most of them do better than that but I’m just saying like worst case scenario.

T: So let’s go back to this building affiliate sites first then picking the winners from the affiliate sites to actually build a product for. So how do you typically, let’s just stick with this how to train an older dog thing here for just a minute. So you’re gonna build an affiliate site around that topic and you’re just gonna promote some Amazon products on it? What is it that occurs that makes you think “hey this site is worth making my own product for”? Is it just traffic or is it traffic and conversions? What are you looking for?

N: Yeah I don’t really have a set indicator for that. I just kind of, yeah, I mean it’s definitely traffic and I’ll look at average time on site or the views that the videos that I’ve made for the articles. How much they’re getting. And then I guess if it’s $400 in a month in affiliate sales, a combination of adsense, Amazon stuffs, click bank products then I will create a product for it.

T: $400 in commission to you or $400 in sales?

N: I mean commissions to me.

T: Ok.

N: Not 400 in sales because in Amazon you’d hit 400 pretty easy. It’d only make like whatever 6% of 400 is. Yeah commissions to me.

T: Ok again I wanna make sure that I’m really grasping this concept. You’re gonna pick a keyword, a primary keyword that has 200 searches or less somewhere in that neighborhood.

N: Well it can have more.

T: Sure sure.

N: If the SEOTC is 5,000 or below then I mean I’ve had a few that I found like 3 or 4,000.

T: Sure. So you pick primary keyword and 6 or 7 related keywords all that have an SEOTC of less than 5,000. You go ok I’m gonna build the site and then you’ve checked on Amazon and found out that there’s a published book so you’re gonna put adsense and you put Amazon and do you look for click bank product and just throw them all in one there?

N: Well I guess it’s like backwards from that maybe. So for me to come up with ideas for niches I go to click bank or Amazon and I just start digging through the categories. And then if I see something that seems like that in itself is kind of like a niche idea already then I’ll just do a search in Market Samurai. So that I have a starting point of there’s already product to sell for this list.

T: Yeah. The concept I’ve heard the term parade. You wanna find a customer parade and then stand in front of it. So what does that mean? A lot of folks especially when they’re new and if they jump in here if when I’m explaining start to diverge from what happens in your mind. A customer parade is a proven, there’s competition. There’s actually one to see lots of competing products. Because if there’s no competing products there’s nobody spending money on that niche.

And so if they’re not spending any money then you’re not gonna make any money. So you find a niche where there is plenty of competing products and then you’re gonna find some way to get some portion of that traffic to your site. Now we’ve just covered that portion and repeat that yet again. So in the case of click bank you could go on and find some high gravity products and I would say stay out of the make money online niche because your competition is off the charts. Find some other stuff, start doing some research around that. See if you can find number of keywords that fall under the SEOTC of 5,000. Then build a site, promote that particular click bank products and if you see I’ll maybe throw some adsense on and maybe Amazon affiliate on some of the other pages but if you see that you’re starting to make a couple of hundred dollars per month for you that’s when you say “hey now I’m gonna reserve time, effort and resources to go and build a product to put on the site. Did I digest that correctly?

N: Yeah yeah definitely. Like my method I don’t look for, like I said the Amazon test the published paperback that is, you know to a small degree just make them sure that there’s a demand. But I definitely don’t go after things that are super popular if there’s like only a few paperback books chances are there’s not even like a click bank e-bok out there about it. So you can make that and then in most niches like outside of the IM niche nobody knows those video courses as like a paid product. Nobody that does so creating this is like you know I guess technically you could go into an area where there’s tons of e-books but you really a video course and instantly be perceived better than all the other e-books than all these e-books.

T: And now you’ve segway into the next topic that I wanna cover and the course itself. So at this point now you wanna have content that’s not widely available so we’re not talking youtube videos anymore. So what do you do? How do you make the site? What does the video teach? How do you host the video? Can you give us some details there?

N: This is the part that blows people’s mind and most people just have this thing in their head that I can’t make a product I’m not an expert in anything. That’s just, it’s not even real concept. It’s not real. I basically do what I call become an expert in a week. These books that I mentioned I buy them, I read them then I just search any forms. Basically just do 2 or 3 days where I spend a few hours and then I become an expert. And really the definition of an expert at least for our purposes here is that you know more about the subject than the people looking for information. That’s it. You don’t need a PhD in whatever it is. You just become an expert in a week. I don’t copy to make my video courses. I don’t copy the book that I bought. I just learn everything I can about it then just kind of put my own twist. Well maybe not even a twist. Just create these video courses where I just talk about it and you know teach it to people.

T: You do what all the other authors do. They read everyone else’s book and they take the best ideas from everyone’s book. Make the content their own and write their own book.

N: Yeah it’s totally true. That is how it works.

T: So let’s talk about the video, are you on camera facing the video?

N: No

T: Are you just powerpoints?

N: Yeah strictly powerpoints. I used to think well you can say that this is a video course but someone might pay for the product, get in there and just think what the hell these aren’t real videos. These are just powerpoints. And then my first few products I didn’t get any. All I got was positive feedback from people, from customers saying thanks this course is super helpful and everything. And then at some point it just kind of dawn on me that every college course in America where kids are paying thousands of dollars per semester to attend these classes, what are they getting taught on?

T: Powerpoint?

N: Powerpoint. So that fixed that limiting away from my mind. This is what I mean to what people are used to being taught. It’s the medium people are taught to learning from anyways. Powerpoint.

T: Absolutely.

N: And these videos are like ridiculously easy to make.

T: So the average, in a given course, how many videos would you produce?

N: Like 15 to 20.

T: And how long do you make these videos each?

N: I try to make each one around 10 minutes and some just end up being quite a bit longer than that. And the reason that like I wanna say in the sales page whatever is like this is the only video course anywhere about this subject. When you sign up for the member’s area you’re gonna have access to over 2 hours of video training or over 3 hours of video training. That just sounds like a thousand times better than an e-book. You know, 3 hours of video training.

T: I agree. Ok very, very interesting. So we are targeting keywords that the people are not targeting. We’re using a commerciality test that other people aren’t using. We’re delivering content in a way that other people are not delivering that content but yet you’re sticking in niches where you already know that people are buying stuff. You’re using an affiliate site in the beginning to test your assumptions and when it passes the test then you make the investment, develop a product. The net result of which is a site that produces passive income for you of 600 to 1300 a month as has been your personal experience over the roughly dozen sites that you have.

Absolutely a brilliant business model my friend. Absolutely brilliant. So at this point in time and I don’t even know how far I think we’re probably 40 minutes or so into our conversation, I’m sure that some of my listeners are thinking “hey wow! That sounds really cool. I’d like to do that”. Because I’ll be honest with you this is a strategy that I’ve never ran across before. You’re the only guy that I’ve ever met, ever read about just doing it this way and you’re killing it. You’re making over $10,000 a month so very clearly this works.

N: Yeah you could say that.

T: Some people are gonna be wanting to sign up. They’re gonna say how do I get the play by play on step 1, 2, 3, 4. How do I do that? So do you have a product or are you offering a product?

N: Yeah I mean I have the WSO that’s just like a 50 page pdf and as soon as I put that out there I had several experience people in the warrior forum contact me and they’re like ok you could, you shouldn’t be selling this for like $7. You need to create like a full course that you sell and show people how to do this on video. And then I had a lot of people probably like 30 or 40 private messages from people that are at WSO asking me basically the same thing, do you have a video course that shows this process. And I didn’t at that point. That was like 2 weeks ago or whatever. So the last few days I’ve just been putting videos together, putting course together and hopefully is gonna be available by next Monday or Tuesday. So to answer your question, yes I’m putting together just a training course that’s screen flow video or screen cast video of exactly how I do every step of this.So by the time you publish this podcast it’d be available.

T: Ok and I will put a link. If you’re listening to this in your car or on ITunes or anywhere out of the Online Income Lab you’ll need to go to onlineincomelab.com/session006. Again that’s onlineincomelab.com/session006 and that is the page where I will put the link to Nate’s course underneath or just in the post that contains this particular podcast. There will also be a link there for Unique Article Wizard. There will be a link there for Market Samurai. I’ll put a link to the Content Authority. Market Samurai I know they have a trial I think that you can get I don’t know how long the trial is. Unique Article Wizard there isn’t a trial. It’s a $67 a month product. I use it. I absolutely swear by it as obviously does Nate. So all of that information will be there.

What else Nate? Am I missing anything? Anything else you wanna add? I know there’s more stuff that we talked about before hand but I don’t expect you to give away all of your best secrets for absolutely free. I think you’ve been super generous with the techniques here so far. But is there anything else you wanna add before we bring this show or this episode to a close?

N: I guess I just want to say you know whatever, if you’re still trying to figure out just how to build an online business is that’s how you have to think of it. Quickly take the phrase make money online out of your vocabulary. You need to figure out like a business model that you can turn into a system that works that you can do over and over and over again. If you’re just constantly looking for new opportunity or new ways you just have to find one model, become good at it and just do it over and over again.

T: The expression we call is rinse and repeat. For those who followed me for a while you’ve heard we talked about shiny objects before and how important it is especially a new marketer to avoid shiny objects. So shiny object is some other newest bang idea and for some of you this might be a shiny object. You might already be going down the road with the adsense sites which you know I love and you might think “oh I don’t want to do any more adsense sites. I wanna do Nate’s technique”. And I would say to you be very, very careful about pursuing new shiny objects before you’ve figured out what it is that you’re doing. We talked earlier, Nate talked earlier about using affiliate sites first. Well you could then build the adsense sites and then your most successful adsense sites you could simply take those and create a product and see if that product is able to end up increasing the monetization of the earnings from the site.

So don’t necessarily abandon what you’re doing now but maybe try and see if there’s a way for you to fit this in with it because it’s really important to stick with one thing. And I couldn’t agree more Nate, having one thing that you’re really good at and just doing it over and over and over again is what allows people to have a much higher level of success than those who are continuously chasing the next new big shiny object.

N: Yeah definitely.

T: So listen thank you very much for being on the show. It has been absolutely a thrill to have you on. I’d love this conversation. I’ve learned a ton. You can rest assure that I am going to be launching some of my own video products in addition to Niche Site Mastery.

For those that have not heard of Niche Site Mastery that’s my private membership site. And in it I teach from step 1 all the way to step zed or z. See there’s the Canadian in me that’s become. A to Z on how I make small sites that makes adsense income and you can get signed up for a trial or whatever at nichesitemastery.com. If you wanna get more podcasts like this one or see just more of my training content, thoughts and rumblings. If you’re listening to this on my website already onlineincomelab.com I look forward to interacting with any and all of you.

Nate, again thank you very much for being on the show.

N: Yeah thanks for having me.

T: No problem. It has always been an absolute pleasure and I’m sure that we’ll get you on again at some point in the future.