A question that I am often asked is ‘how do I find keywords to use when building my blogs?’ The answer is not easy as there are many different keyword research techniques that can be followed.
As a start to an ongoing series of audio internet marketing tips I am featuring a short presentation on a method of researching keywords to use within your niches. I hope that you find this helpful.

I know some here are involved in, or want to become involved in doing work for hire - contracting and consulting. On a discussion board I posted about the topic of calculating the right money to charge for a job. here is that post, I hope you find it useful.

Re: How to determine hours for budgeting social networking

I was responding to a poster who was suggesting that consultants should charge based upon the number of hours in the week and then dividing by the hours worked. This is a simple method but flawed, the slightly edited post follows:

The danger of this approach is that one is starting out by undercharging!
Once one is undercharging it can be very hard to get the ‘right’ price for the job because one’s clients come to know how much output you get for so much dollar input.

One way to tackle this is to look at the job tasks and these are NOT just doing the work.
First concept to address is that of ‘billable hours’ these are the hours of work for which you charge the client and they are the only hours which will pay for you to live.

Consultants who get a utilisation rate (another concept - related to billable hours - the proportion of a week’s time that is used in billable hours) of over 80% are doing really good.
As a one man band you should allocate about 40% of your time to marketing and business building. Your utilisation rate is thus a max of 60% and you can manage in a ‘normal’ working week of 40 hours about 24 billable hours.

So, being really simplistic, if your income need is $5000 per month then you must charge $52 per hour. 5000/96 = 52
I have excluded vacations, sickness and inefficiency slack from this example, but they are easy to add into a real life calculation.

When starting out you will not be as effective as a more experienced hand and thus you will give a lower output per hour. If a ‘market rate’ for your work is $50/hour then you need to discount your rate by the factor that you estimate you are inefficient. So, of you are only 80% efficient then your hourly rate should be $40 per hour and you will be competitive with hands working at full efficiency and charging $50 per hour.
The task will cost the same whether you are hired or your more efficient competitor gets the job.
Now, as you get better you increase your internal hourly rate but the time taken goes down; net result is the same money for less work without having to change the prices that you charge your clients!

When you have the ‘internal’ hourly rate for the job you can start to give quotes based not upon time but upon objectives. So, if a client wants 500 links building and you know it’ll take you 20 hours then you can quote a price for the task and avoid hourly rates. This is more simple for the client and is less risky for them because they can measure a tangible - output as against an intangible - time taken.

This is why quoting for an objective achieved is seen as more professional by experienced buyers because it shows that you know your cost factors and efficiency and account for them yourself rather than leaving the prospect guessing.

Normally I don’t give much thought to WordPress themes, I pick one for the purpose, install it and use it.
Recently though I got involved with themes in a little more detail as I commissioned a customised theme that will shortly turn up for the WordPress Blogs we build.
I had to get the hang of what went where so that I could get changes made and to add some functionality that will be quite cool.
Anyway, this made me think a little.
What goes into a theme?
How does a theme work?
How does one make a theme?

These questions led me to a post by Richard D. LeCour at Richards Ramblings where he shows how to make a WordPress theme in just minutes. If you want to understand what makes your blog tick,or even to make your own basic theme then this post is well worth reading and bookmarking. He provides the code and an explanation. For building basic niche blogs this might form a worthwhile base from which to work.

Andrew.

I just read a post ’somewhere on the webs’ about a make money from blogging course being offered by Mark Joyner of Simpleology. He has launched a Simpleology blogging course and he has a neat and interesting twist.

I am sure the course costs money - I don’t know how much. There seems to be no link to a sales page.
But, if I blog about the course and include the text that follows my wn words then I get a free copy of the course package.
I am always keen to learn and as I’d like to help readers here to learn this seems an easy deal and I’d encourage any readers to follow my example. Nothing to lose and, after all, if the course is rubbish you can always delete the post, right?

Actually there was a secondary reason for going along with this idea. The stunt is a very cool illustration of the power of viral marketing. Mark Joyner puts out a product that is of interest to a niche group. He wants to reach as many members as possible of that group at as little cost sa possible. So, he gives away the product on the proviso that the ‘clients’ promote the product without even having seen it.
Of course, once in the Simpleology product funnel Mark Joyner can take his time in getting all his new ‘clients’ further down the funnel where we will be spending real money.
The old saying ‘using a sprat to catch a mackerel’ applies here, with a vengeance.

So, here is the text that I need to post and I look forward to seeing the course in the near future!

PS. It looks as though Google has indexed about 25,000 copies of Mark’s text. It’ll be interesting to see if I can get any kind of decent ranking for the search term Simpleology Blogging.

OK, since when did Web 2.0 come to mean a set of design cliches.

Anyway since we are in the middle of that meme I might as well chuck another stick on the fire.

I found a list of over 100 tools for doing web 2.0 stylee graphics tricks. There are also things like domain name generators, email address obfuscators, loadsa fun for the Web 2.0 (and ordinary folks!)

http://www.ajaxflakes.com/web-20/top-100-online-generators-web-20/

For the curious but indolent, here is a partial list of the goodies available:

Graphics & Image generators
Color generators
CSS generators
Domain Name generators
Email generators
Favicons generators
Flash generators
Form generators
METATAG generators
Password generators
PopUp generators
Robots.txt generators
RSS generators
SiteMap generators
Text generators
ASCII generators
PDF generators
Tooltip generators
XML Forms generators
HTACCESS generators
Fun & Humor

I have, a few days ago set up a new training course delivered by email. The course is designed to give an introduction to the huge field that is Internet Marketing. We are starting off by covering emails, automation and brand/reputation building.

It is my hope that by signing up and following along with the newsletters that subscribers will get an idea of the scope of what they need to know and that this will help them to better focus on their information needs.

We will be adding more training over the coming weeks to expand on the material in this introductory series. I’d be really happy to hear suggestions from subscribers as to what kinds of training they would like to see.

The signup form is underneath the animated image in the sidebar.

Thanks for taking a look!

Andrew.