Chris Meistre

There are only 263 days left until the hordes of soccer 2010 fans rock up on our shores and airfields. It is estimated that at least 500,000 people will descend on South Africa to watch the soccer matches held at 10 venues in 9 different cities.

What does hosting the soccer 2010 world cup mean for South Africa?

By hosting the 2010 soccer world cup South Africa will have a huge impact on their economy. The event will generate a direct expenditure of about R12,7 billion and will contribute R21,3 billion GDP. It’s estimated that about 159 000 annual jobs will be created and an additional R7,2 billion will be paid to our government in taxes.

There is also the increase in tourism and foreign investment that we need to take into consideration. It will foster confidence in our country as the profile of the country will be raised.

How can you profit from the 2010 world cup?

If you own a house, townhouse, guesthouse or flatlet you can rent it out to people visiting your city. To see what you can charge for rent, check out this soccer 2010 income calculator. At Soccer 2010 Accommodation they can list your property and have a qualified letting agent handle all the paperwork and legal contracts.

How do you go about obtaining tickets for the soccer 2010 world cup?

If you are from South Africa, you can visit any FNB (First National Bank) branch and purchase your tickets there.  Alternatively you can go to the FIFA website and register for it online.  Prices vary depending on which matches you apply for. There are 3 million tickets available when they started selling them.

If you want to drive traffic to your website you need to write articles for it.   It sounds a lot harder than it really is.  I used 1 article that I published to 1 site and it generated led 600 new visitors to Karma Sutra Positions.  That is 1 article submitted to 1 article site.  And because my domain name is still very young in the eyes of Google, my article also ranks higher in the search results than my actual website does.   But that’s okay because I still get the traffic.

I also used to think writing articles are difficult, but after seeing the results I got from just 1 article I decided I need to make writing articles a lot easier for myself.

Choosing your topic

This can be a very difficult thing to do.  The first thing you need to do though is do the keyword research legwork.  Doing this will give you the advantage of being able to incorporate your keywords naturally into your article, instead of trying to make them fit once the article has been written.  Read my article about keyword research.  Decide on 1 main keyword phrase and then 2 or 3 secondary keyword phrases that enough people are searching for, but that doesn’t yet have that much competition in terms of other websites having that keyword phrase.  It helps choosing something that is of interest to you, because there is nothing more difficult writing about a topic that doesn’t interest you!

Check out http://www.searchenginespy.co.za/ that shows you a list of what people are searching for each day.

Writing the article

Now go and look for some content on your topic.  Wikipedia, Ezinearticles and Goarticles are just some of the places that will help you find the content.  Find 1 or 2 very good articles and copy and paste their text into a word processing file.

Read the article once, and then a second time.  What I normally then do is start typing my article above the pasted text.  This allows me to have everything on the one screen while I type my article.  Write the article by trying to remember what you’ve just read and putting it in your own words.  Glance down to the original article only when you get stuck.  The idea here is to write a totally unique article and not just something that you are rephrasing.  While you’re writing, remember to incorporate your keyword phrases into the article as well.  If you’re going to directly quote the original article, be sure to include a link to it or mention it.

I aim to have about 300-500 words per article.  My main keyword I want to use at least 5 times and then use the secondary keywords if they can be used.

Reread your article at least 3 times to make sure there are no grammar and spelling errors.

That whole process shouldn’t take you more than an hour to do.  It gets easier the more you do it.  While you’re at it, why not write another one as well?

One last thing you want to add is a short footer for the article.  This is just a short link to your website making use of your main keyword as the link.  For instance: Learn more about the Karma Sutra Positions.  This will be the link that drives traffic to your website.

Words of caution

• Keep the article that you are writing sounding natural.  You don’t want to saturate it with keyword phrases that causes the article to have grammar errors.
• For articles you submit to article directories, don’t include any links in them.  This is what your footer is going to be for.  PLEASE NOTE this is just my personal opinion and using links in your article may or may not increase clicks  to your website.

Making it work for you

For the articles to start working for you, you need to start submitting them to article directories.  There are thousands of them and a simply Google search will yield the results.  My recommendation is to use an automated article submitter called Article Marketer.  This allows you to save some time by using their service to publish your article to article directories and other publishers.  It’s not necessary to do this, and you can do it manually, but I just prefer using this method.  It can take anything from 2-10 minutes to submit an article manually, so if you can save an hour by using Article Marketer, you can rather use that time to write another article.

How long will you wait to see results?

It can take up to 3-4 weeks before your articles get approved so just be patient.  I found that once the article is approved it instantaneously starts generating traffic for me.

Other examples

I also have an article about Blackjack Counting that I submitted.  It was approved about 8 hours ago and it has only led to 3 new visitors to my website on Blackjack Counting.   This goes to show you that the amount of traffic that your article will generate depends on your keyword and if you did your keyword research correctly.

Some tools you can use

How to write article

Article Marketer

When Peter Carruthers from Business Warriors was in PE, I met up with him and spent the afternoon just talking about a lot of things.

It obviously led to conversations about websites and I told him about the one website I have up and running, http://www.karmasutrapositions.net/.  I know the spelling is wrong by the way, you’d be surprised how many people search for the incorrect spelling versions of keywords.

Anyways, I told him what my ultimate goal was with this and we got talking about it.  As always, he had a totally different way of thinking about this.  It was great because that evening I got back home and started with some research based on an idea he had given me.

A few hours later http://www.romantictips.org/ was up and running.  It’s a very simple website, but effective.  I rank 7th on Google for the broad keyword phrase romantic tips.

The website system itself is very simple as well.  You subscribe and then weekly you are given some romantic tips (this is aimed at guys) that will make your partner a lot happier.

To date I have 126 people subscribed to the ecourse, and I get about 90-110 visitors to the site a day.

When I spoke to Peter, he mentioned to me to rather take my Karma Sutra Positions idea and aim it at romance instead of sex.  So I had to put my sex idea on hold for a bit

How am I making money?

Whenever I can associate an affiliate link (for which I’ll get paid) with a tip, I do it.  The best example is in the first of the emails that you’ll receive, as well as 6 weeks later.  If you want to see it you will need to subscribe    I might not make millions with this website. I do however have a mailing list of people that are interested in romantic products and I can advertise related products to them whenever I want.  Apart from that the list is also growing daily.

There is a fine line between trying to over sell and just trying to sell a product.  I’ve decided to not incorporate product advertisements in all my emails that go out, but rather look for quality products that will really attract their attention.  Otherwise people will start unsubscribing if they’re bombarded with product links daily.

How much effort?

What’s great about this is that I am adding the tips as I go along, because I didn’t want to come up with 52 tips, write them all and have this all be a flop.  So I make sure I have enough tips for the first guy that registered to get an email per week.  So with very little effort this website can grow as big as I want it.

Why is this working?

It boils down to having found a need that is out there and filling the void.  Sure there are millions of other websites offering romantic tips, but as Peter said we as men need to get reminded to do stuff all the time.  For those that went to the Netfontein seminars, you’ll know exactly about this.

So why am I telling you all this?

I’d like some feedback on this idea and the website.  And because I want everyone to know that it’s easy to do this stuff.  You don’t need to be a SEO expert.  My keyword research helped me out to get search engine traffic, but even if you can’t do that you can be on the first page of Google and pay a few cents for every potential subscriber it sends your way.

Here are some maths:

1,000 visitors resulted in 50 subscribers, that is a success rate of 5% (which is on par with that I’m getting).  Let’s say you paid Google 10c for each of those visitors.  So it cost you R100 to get 50 subscribers.  Let’s say 2% (that is 1 person) of those 50 subscribers buys something from you.  You make $39 (R290 on that sale).  So you’ve made R190 profit.

But remember, because this is an ecourse you not only sell to them once, but you have different products in there each week.  Those 50 subscribers then become potential sales for the next 52 weeks.  1 person might buy 10 products, another 2 and another 4.  16x R290 = R4640.00, and it still just cost you that initial R100 to get the 50 subscribers.

And don’t forget, daily your ecourse subscription base is growing…

Is that worth it putting in the effort?

Hell yea I think it’s worth it.  It took a few hours to setup the website and besides perhaps for the auto responder software I used, anyone can do that!

What if it doesn’t work?

On the other side of the coin, let’s say it doesn’t work out.  You’ve spent your R100 to get the 1,000 visitors to your website, but not one of them subscribed to your ecourse.  It either means you are not attracting the right people or that your idea might not work.

You can decide to reword your Adwords adverts perhaps and even rewrite your website.  Or you can just can it and move to the next idea.  It cost you R100 and about 4-5 hours to setup the website and write the first 2 weeks of the ecourse.

Find your market first before you worry about the product

That is what the Netfontein seminars and the Thirty Day Challenge was all about, testing a market before you go ahead and spend too much effort on it.

Where to get your ideas?

I think finding the idea to run with is the most difficult part, but at the Netfontein seminars Peter showed a very cool thing.  A mindmap of yourself.  Start with you in the middle and then have children that mentions all the things you are.  For instance: husband, business owner, nature lover, dog owner, etc.  Then branch out from each of those with your experiences.  Husband -> getting married, proposing, honeymoon, Business Owner -> banks, closing businesses, opening new business.  And so on.  And then if you can branch out from those experiences as well, do it.  You soon realise that you have a LOT to offer in terms of advice on the internet.

I found this cool Facebook application that allows you to enter your blog’s RSS feed into it, and then it periodically creates notes on your Facebook profile for each of the entries in your RSS feed.  The name of this application is Blog RSS Feed Reader.

This allows you to write in your blog, and then once your RSS feed updates your Facebook profile automatically also gets a note with the post in as well as a link to your website.

Another cool feature is that you can have multiple RSS feeds in there.  It’s cool for me because I have multiple blogs that I want to publish.

This year I’m taking part in the Thirty Day Challenge again.  The most valuable thing I’ve been able to learn is about saving time doing keyword research.  Normally I would’ve used things like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and then a number of others.  But with Market Samurai, it cuts that time to about 5%.  This tool combines all the tools I used previously, but it puts it into a nice package that saves you a lot of time.

I was able to research niche keywords and find 18 micro niches that I can use to make money online.  To first put everything to test I chose two of them and got websites up and running for them.  2 day s later they were being indexed by Google, and 2 days after that I check up to see if any people had reached the sites.

Was I surprised!  I knew keyword research can make all the difference to a website, but I forgot how well it can really work.

In the first 2 days I had 680 visits to my one website, all coming to me from search engines.  The other one had gotten about 40.

I checked the stats again this morning and it’s averaging at about 329 visits per day for the one website and 124 visits per day for the other one.  This is good for a 1 page website.

So before you get your website up and running, spend a few hours to work out what keywords you are going to target, because it can mean the difference between having a bad or an awesome website!  You want to target keywords that enough people are searching for, but with not too much competition in terms of other websites people reach with those keywords.