We’ve personally taken this course and found that it is literally filled with wall-to-wall information from experts who have been in the business for years. You may not find their names up in lights, but then again they don’t tend to claim that you will become a millionaire overnight. And that’s a good thing, because as we’ve said time and time again, online businesses are still businesses that require hard work.

Although the name of the workshop includes the word ‘niche’, the pleasant reality is that you’ll find that there’s a wealth of information regarding subjects such as list building, marketing, technical subjects such as HTML, creating websites, creating videos, etc. that go beyond niches and can be applied to money making online and even offline.

For what amounts to less than $500 ($397 if you register by the end of May) you get three full days of instruction from 25 different next instructors. You could spend easily five times that amount to attend any popular conference, for example, Affiliate Summit. While we highly recommend eventually attending such conferences and loved our last experience at ASW, if you’re relatively new to affiliate marketing or even online marketing, then this is probably going to be much more valuable to you at this point in your journey.

We highly recommend you take this type of course given by people who can give you up-to-date information and allow you to ask questions and interact with them. Books and online courses are great, but there is simply a ton more value that you get from interacting with like-minded people in real space.

NAMS6 runs from August 19-22, 2011.

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.

I recently reviewed one such book, with an eye-catching yet appropriate name: “Friends with Benefits:A Social Media Marketing Handbook” by Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo. This is a pretty thorough book that covers subjects like whether you should start a blog, how to reach out to the rest of the social world, bet practices, and importantly how to measure success.

You can read the full review at Blogcritics.

First a word about the Head First series. It is a new approach to technical books (at least so far) that O’Reilly is championing. Head First aim to help you learn the material by keeping your brain interested and focused on the material with the use of visual, eye-catching and unexpected graphical aids [see example below], a conversational style that includes an appeal to your emotions, and activities to get both sides of your brain engaged.

I have obviously not done full justice to the reasoning and encourage you to check out the full explanation. In my non-scientific observations, I did find that I spent more time reading and thinking about the material without my mind wandering, and this despite my already deep knowledge of the subject.

But let’s talk about the subject matter itself – WordPress. This book is aimed at anyone with at least a basic knowledge of HTML & CSS, and running a website, and covers the self-hosted version of WordPress, not the one that’s hosted by WordPress at WordPress.com.

Head First WordPress starts naturally enough with installing WP and writing your first post. It quickly gets into how to modify your theme so your blog doesn’t look the boring default, treating WP as a CMS (content management system) and making it play nice for the search engines, not to mention the practically infinite power that are plugins.

I was relieved to see a full chapter on security, and while I did not completely agree with author Jeff Siarto’s recommendations, they are very good recommendations. Computer security is hardly black and white, but more of an opinion and experiential driven art. If you are concerned about security, and you should be, do your research and/or consult an expert.

The penultimate chapter deals with performance and ways to ‘speed up’ WordPress, a welcome and important topic. If your blog starts pulling in a decent audience, you’ll either need to implement some of these measures or get bigger more expensive hosting. Again, here is an example of there being many more times the number of potential solutions than are laid out here. For example, the WP Super Cache plugin is recommended, but the W3 Total Cache plugin is also highly another viable option.

The last 10 pages are devoted to 10 topics that could not be covered in greater depth without making the book twice as long. This was a nice addition that helps to point out how big the WordPress universe is, and that you should not use any single book as your bible, no matter how large it is.

If you are contemplating the jump to WordPress, or have just dipped your toes into the water, Head First WordPress is a solid book that will give you a nice foundation. Also, if the rest of the Head First books are anything like this one, then I’m going to be looking at those first the next time I’m in the market to learn something.

(Disclaimer: Untethered Dreams received a complimentary review copy of this product.)

First off, this is an inexpensive book ($5) that clocks in around 50 pages. It is after all a “mini manual”. I should have known based on the size that this was not going to be an advanced set of tips, but rather geared to newbie website owners. However, let me not disparage this book – it is a pretty comprehensive set of guidelines on what to do when you set up a website for the 1st time.

It covers things like reciprocal links, web rings, promotion, meta elements, directories and getting noticed by the search engines as well as setting up Google Analytics. I would have liked to see more info on SEO, at least some basics. There are lots of disagreements on this subject, but reciprocal links don’t carry a great deal of weight with the likes of Google, and I would have liked to see a notation at least.

There was a terrible definition for Javascript that I trust they will improve in another edition:

“Note: Javascript is a type of mini-program that runs inside a browser. Virtually every Web browser in existence supports it.”

Lastly, this mini-manual would have benefited greatly from a “To Do” checklist, a.k.a. a summarized version of its steps, because who wants to poor through 50 pages the next time they need to set up a new site?

Overall, I quite liked the book, and at $5 is completely worth it. Of course, you will eventually want to get a more advanced book. We quite liked Kristopher Jones’ Search Engine Optimization book.

(Disclaimer: Untethered Dreams received a complimentary review copy of this product.)

While my padna may have a different take, I currently only have a lukewarm feeling with our first 20 hours. We’ve assigned four tasks including finding sites to locate gadget writers for Gizmos for Geeks, transcribe some audio recordings from our Livescribe sessions at CES, create a spreadsheet of the top 10 web mail providers and determine their antivirus/antispam/antiphishing capabilities and information on cloud-based web hosting companies including if they really are cloud-based web hosters and pricing.

The first task yielded some time spent to come back with sites like guru.com where you put out a bid and wait for writers to respond. I had hoped for something more creative, but the first part of the task was completed according to what we had stated. We then assigned the second part of the task which includes contacting writers that respond. The verdict is still out on that but I think the work deserves a ‘C’ so far.

The second task of transcription of audio sessions actually surpassed my expectations. While I haven’t read through the entire transcriptions yet, our VA did a fairly good job of transcription which definitely provides some value to my padna and I and Get Friday deserves a solid ‘B’.

The third tasks receives a grade of a ‘C’. While I had hoped the information about antivirus and antispam would be included in the spreadsheet provided, the links to get the information were provided. If my calculations are correct, this spreadsheet took 340 minutes or about $57. I probably could have gathered the same information and inserted it into a spreadsheet in about 30 minutes, so the ROI in near even on this one.

Finally, the VA failed miserably on looking for cloud-based web hosting companies and will pick up again on that task next month.

Overall, I was actually surprised by the information gathered for $200, but the verdict is still out. The most difficult aspect of working with a VA is spelling out the tasking very explicitly. My padna has handled this aspect of the relationship so far and I feel he has done an excellent job of spelling out our requirements. I am not sure what happened with the final request, but stay tuned for our second month.

I decided to take the design and creation of themes for these sites as an exercise in outsourcing.

Basically, there are a few ways to find outsourcing staff. First, you could run a google search and pick a couple outsourcing companies and “interview” them. The next approach is to rely on feedback from friends and partners that required your same services. Finally, you can go with a site like Rent A Coder, Elance or Guru that help match professionals looking for work and employers.

The first assignment was to create the themes for Gizmos for Babies and Gizmos for Kids. I elected to use the second approach which was to use feedback from friends and partners that required the same services. As it turned out, Real Tech News had just redesigned and had their new theme developed for them so I used their developer.

Here’s where I learned my first and second lesson. I provided the developer a couple of sites that I would like the GfB and GfK to emulate as well as a basic color scheme. I then let the developer go off and do the work as I’m not and never had been a micro-manager in the “real world”. A week went by with no update so I pinged the developer. I usually had to ping the developer two times before I could elicit a response. This went on for weeks with excuse after excuse after he had promised the stars in one to two weeks. After the fifth week we parted ways. Frustrated with the amount of time I wasted, I ended up designing and developing the themes which are adaptations of other themes available on the Internet.

I mentioned there were two lessons learned… well, the first lesson is to be as specific as possible when outsourcing. The second lesson is to maintain communication on a daily basis through email and through regular reports from the outsourced staff. I believe this second lesson can be relaxed once you’ve gotten to know your outsourced staff, but I haven’t been able to achieve that yet!

The second attempt at outsourcing was recently with the Gizmos for Cooks site. This time I opted to use the third option for outsourcing. Since I was experimenting I took notes and tried each of the three services: Rent A Coder, Elance and Guru. I posted the exact same description which detailed plugins to be used, version of the blogging software, where columns need to be, what the logo should look like, where the ads (with sizes) would be places, etc…. You get the idea. I spent over an hour crafting the description to use on the sites.

Next I created a new project or bid. During this process I discovered that Guru had really strict rules on how to post a project and that I could not request mockups. Also, the project budget is restricted to ranges ($250-$500 for instance). Since I wanted to spend $200-$300 for a theme this was disappointing. Elance had a similar restriction and I could only set a budget of $500 or less. Finally, Rent a Coder had several bonuses the other sites did not have including forcing a bidder to put up an Expert Guarantee that would be lost if they could not finish the work. Also, you could set the exact days you wanted the bidding to remain open as well as setting the budget to any dollar amount.

After another hour plus I had finally submitted the project for bid. I received the following bids:

Guru:
3 bids
$470 from New Zealand
$500 from NY, USA
$480 from CA, USA

Elance:
3 bids
$900 from Romania
$250 from US
$400 from NM, US

Rentacoder:
3 bids
No bid – Azerbaijan
No bid – India
$300 – Peru

I decided to go with the $300 bid on Rent a Coder from Peru. While the US bid at $250 was tempting, my cat could design better themes than what was in his portfolio. The developer from Peru had nice but mostly unoriginal themes, but with my description I figured the theme would turn out nicely. Before accepting his bid I contacted the developer to verify that he understood the project and that he could complete it on time. The bidding process took another couple of hours bringing my outsourcing experiment up to five hours of work… that’s about how long it takes me to create a theme!

Unfortunately I learned another lesson from the Peruvian… don’t believe any excuses and do not give an outsourced employee a second chance if he/she has not proven themselves yet. Basically his promise of providing the theme within four days (which was less than I had asked for) did not come true. He refused to answer his communication and missed new deadline after new deadline. Having to follow the rules of Rent a Coder or forfeit my escrowed money, I had to keep him longer than I normally would. After a brief mediation that I easily won I reclaimed my money after working on outsourcing one theme for 10 hours. Frustrated with the amount of time I wasted, I ended up designing and developing the theme which is an adaptation of another theme available on the Internet (sound familiar?).

Perhaps my next experiment will be an outsourced company that I discover through a Google search but for now, outsourcing has been a waste of my time! Build it and automate it seems to be the way to go, but automating the creation of theme building is an impossible task.