The real problem isn’t really making the website or even creating an ad campaign; it’s *finding* a niche that has potential and hasn’t already been fully exploited.

A brand-new service devoted to helping you find these niches, as well as analyze their potential is launching in just 4 days. Although it has a sensational name chosen for marketing reasons, Auto Niche Income is quite legitimate. I’ve beta tested it, and it really does deliver on the promise. Now, let’s be clear on what the ‘promise’ is. They’re not guaranteeing you’ll make millions or even tens of dollars! They provide the niche ideas and the analysis, something that takes a lot of work just by itself. They’re doing that work for you, but the rest of the hard work is up to you. So if you think this is some buy it and it’ll make you money, then don’t even visit the site, yet alone think about purchasing this!

I’ve probably not done a very good job of describing what they do, so luckily they have a handful of pretty good videos on their site that describe and demo what they offer.

I would be remiss if I didn’t show you one of their banners, so here it is, but do yourself a favor and at least check out their videos.

This one is all about traffic generation, and you can read my awesome post called Zen and the Art of Web Traffic. It’s not so much about the mechanics, but rather starts at a higher level, which is where we should all start when approaching a task or project or goal.

I would really appreciate it if you check it out and leave a comment and/or retweet.

And now for the generous sponsors:

The Traffic Generation Blogging Contest is organized by:

ComLuv.com, IBlogZone.com, MyBlogGuest.com, and FamousBloggers.net

Special Thanks to the contest Sponsors!

Main sponsors

- Longest.com ~ Website name
- WordPressThemes.com ~ WordPress Themes
- BlogDash.com ~ Get the guide to blogger outreach e-book free
- CueRank.net ~ Keyword rank checker
- SMSCoin.net ~ making/make money
- BlogInteract.com ~ Blog Interact’s Webinar Services!
- Waatp.com ~ Real time people search!

Ideal sponsors

- JoeLane.com ~ Richland Wa Homes
- WPHostingDiscount.com ~ WordPress Webhosting
- BasicBlogTips.com ~ Best Chrome Extensions for New Twitter
- TheMonogrammedMartini.com ~ Monogrammed Bags

Basic sponsors

- Kikolani.com ~ Increase your chance of winning blogging contests with Blog Post Promotion!
- DanLew.com ~ Dan Lew, the Internet Marketer!
- AIDYsPoetry.net ~ AIDY’s poetry and writing Blogpoetry and writing!
- VerticalMeasures.com ~ Vertical Measures, Internet Marketing Service!
- MonsterAuto.ca ~ Monster Cars!
- CreditCardsCanada.ca ~ Monster Shoppers Optimum MasterCard!
- SEO-Writer.com ~ Blog writer for hire!
- FreeiPhones4me.com ~ Get a free iPhone!
- SporkMarketing.com ~ Spork Marketing!
- Invesp.com ~ Conversion Rate Optimization!
- NursingUniforms.net ~ Medical and Nursing Scrub Tops!
- CN.Go-Globe.com ~ Guangzhou Website Development!
- BestTravelWebsites.com ~ Travel Directory!
- ArrangeYourVacation.com ~ Vacation Rentals!
- 1001WallClocks.com ~ Wall clocks shop!
- BaltimoreDUILawyers.org ~ Baltimore dui lawyer directory and informational site!
- School-Fundraisers.com ~ School Fundraisers!
- AndroidGeekTips.com ~ Best Android Deals!
- Adrenalin.com.au ~ Gifts for men!

Other blogs in an effort to improve their own incoming guest posts run contests to encourage that. One such community is Blog Engage, and their current Guest Blogging contest runs through the end of March 2011.

Although there are cash prizes for winning, my main purpose for entering is to put my writing skills up against other bloggers in the big bad Internet and see how I compare.

As a requirement for entering, we must blog about the contest on our own blogs and list the generous sponsors (which if you think about it, is a pretty ingenious way to automate its promotion!):

Virtual Assistant

Guangzhou Web Design

Conversion Optimization

Lab Coat

So I put one together. It’s color-coded based on pass type (Gold, Platinum, Diamond) and whether it’s a session geared for folks at a beginner, intermediate or advanced level.

You can download the calendar (in PDF format) here.

PS> Sign up for our mailing list (top-right corner of this page) to stay on top of all these goodies that we create!

Well we’re baffled as to how we had no takers on this past contest. Sent out a whole bunch of tweets to prospective winners, but not a single reply. Weird. Do folks like to enter contests with no hope of winning?! We’d like to think that there are some optimists out there, so here we go again!

This time, the entry period will run until Hallow’s Eve, Oct 31st 2010 @ 6PM Pacific Time. At that point, TWTaway.com will randomly pick a winner. Please remember, you have to be a US resident to win.

Enter to win here.

See all of the other details in the original post.

We’re giving away yet more stuff! This time, it’s a copy of O’Reilly’s latest in their Head First series – Head First WordPress.

Great book – see our review. This is better suited for those now getting started with WordPress,  so if you’re an experienced WPer, please give the other folks a chance. We and they will certainly appreciate it!

All you’ve gotta do is follow us on Twitter (@gizmosforgeeks) and then retweet the contest. We’re using the cool TweetsWin service, visit the contest page for more info. We’ll draw a winner on Sun 26 Sep 2010 at 6PM Pacific.

PS> You’ll want to stay tuned to our Twitter, Facebook and/or RSS feeds because we’ll be giving away more stuff in the future. Just take a look at some of the stuff that has been up for grabs in the past!

Here are our general contest & giveaway rules.

PPS> If you can’t wait, you can snag it from Amazon for about $23.

How much? We haven’t added up the numbers exactly, but we were both each under the $100 mark. It turns out that we were both a bit hesitant to throw money recklessly at media buys/PPC without testing the waters slowly at first. And two weeks just isn’t long enough to get real data. Another factor we had not planned on is that some platforms take quite a while to approve your ads.

So what else did we learn?

1. The 2 week window may have been too small for relative newbies to the PPC game who have done better at the slow-building game of SEO and traffic generation.

2. PPC is an incredible challenge for newcomers, particularly with the variance in rules that the different platforms have. It takes more than a few days of repeated testing to figure out what works and what’s allowed.

3. Two weeks can be a surprisingly short period of time! This is especially true when you’re trying to squeeze in something new into your life on top of the other things that you can’t toss out.

4. On a positive note, setting yourself goals such as this makes you move. A lot faster than you may have thought possible. Look up BHAG for some more inspiration.

5. If any PPC gurus are reading, we’ll give you our idea for what we think is a clear cut opportunity (for free even!):

Produce content or a product that illustrates and explains what works on the major PPC platforms and what’s allowed. For example, a recently submitted ad to Facebook, adCenter and PoF all pointing to the same landing page got widely different results. Facebook rejected it, PoF accepted it, and adCenter didn’t generating any impressions.

A big old book/site of examples that work/don’t work would be incredibly useful. Facebook didn’t even give me a reason. Google doesn’t either. That’s pretty frustrating.

How do we feel about our little contest? Worth it or a waste of time? Sure, we lost money, but we learned valuable lessons that will be with us when we perform similar experiments in the future. Yep, the cliched lines about the road to success being littered with failures and mistakes are true. So get out there and fail!

So I got my site up and posted about it on a few forums, submitted it to Google Webmaster Tools, did some basic SEO and then I launched a few different PPC campaigns to push traffic to my offer. I’m not going to say what it is or link to it from here, because I don’t want to pollute the data just yet. If you find it, that’s ok.

PPC can be a tricky game nowadays, because Google can snap their fingers and kill your account even if they just assume you’re trying something unethical. And other platforms don’t drive enough traffic and/or are really slow at reviewing and approving your ads. For example, despite over 400 keywords in Microsoft’s adCenter, I’m yet to get even an impression. I may be doing something wrong, so I’m about to shoot them an e-mail.

I’m generally frustrated by online advertising as a low-spend small fish for 3 main reasons:

1. Ad platforms don’t really care about the folks spending $10/day. Can’t say that I blame them. From a bottom-line point of view, it makes sense to pay attention to your bigger spenders.
2. Although they have laundry lists of guidance for both your ads and landing pages/products, it still boils down to the objectivity (or lack thereof) of a human. I’d much rather a computer did the approval based on very ‘digital’ parameters, and then you could know the answer to #3, which is…
3. You never know why the *@&$ your ad was disapproved. It’s a pass/fail test. If you fail, then you can go back and continue shooting in the dark.

Well here’s hoping that some of these platforms read and address some of these concerns. I’m looking at you, Google, Facebook, & Microsoft. I also put up an ad on PoF (free dating website, Plenty of Fish) and so far I like that they’re pretty realistic about ads and what people advertise. It’s tough trying to be the ‘good guy’ broker.

I’m almost wish I had millions to spend on TV instead. At least I could talk to an exec and find out what was wrong with my ads.

Well back to the drawing board. After all, if I’m going to make any sales in the next few days, then advertising has to be on my list, because SEO takes a lot more time.

Wow, time does fly by when you’re <insert verb here>. Yup, so you really need to be on a plan/schedule. Boy am I glad I did. So am I on schedule? More or less. Ok, honestly, less. The big honking lesson is that I definitely underestimated how long tasks would/will take.

Anyone who ever says just a few clicks will get you to ‘done’ is exaggerating. Not lying, because in all likelihood they’ve done it a hundred times and know what it takes to perform a few clicks confidently knowing that they’ve done it correctly.

So what did I do in the past few days (Tue-Thur)? Well, I stood up a site, a WordPress blog actually, wrestled with my domain registrar a bit (but they, NameCheap, are great and totally helped me out), wrote a sales letter, created a mailing list (using Aweber), put together a bunch of bonuses to give away to my mail list, and wrote a wicked cool little htaccess file that I’m very proud of (I’ll leak that one later )!

Whew! Actually, I’m pretty happy to have written all of that down, because it demonstrates that I’ve been working hard and accomplishing tasks. Sure, not as quickly as I would have wished, but it’s still progress.

And there is a bright side – there’s a fair amount of this material that I can replicate faster the next time I put together a similar program/site. I just need to document ASAP.

Day 5, here I come!