One of the first things that I did before I even launched StandOutBlogger was to create a unique design and get it coded to wordpress. Since then I have had about 3 different themes as I made my way back to a unique theme.

But Are Unique Themes Important For Success?

Definitely Not!

If you have spent any time visiting blogs you would have experienced your fair share of successful bloggers. Now I would dare to guess that a lot of them where not using a unique theme. Instead they have been using:

• A Premium Blog Theme (Straight Out Of The Box)
• A Premium Blog Theme (But Highly Customised)
• A Free Blog Theme

Now there is definately no right or wrong answer when it comes to whether your blog should have a unique, premium or free theme. It really just comes back to preference and budget.

So let’s take a look at the pro’s and con’s of each (plus a few of my fav’s of each!)

Free WordPress Themes

There are many free WordPress themes available these days. Infact, there are quite a few that could be considered premium (except they do not cost!).

PROS: For Free Themes

• They Don’t Cost Anything!
  This is the main reason that people turn to free themes.Blogging is seen as a low entry cost opportunity and so spending $30-$3000 on a blog theme is not usually high on new bloggers priorities.
• They Are Still High Quality (Some Are!)
  
  1. SkinPress.com
  2. 100 Amazing WordPress Themes Of 2009 – Smashing Magazine

There are 1,000 of free WordPress theme, however it takes a fair bit to cipher through the rubbish. However, that being said, there are still a lot of high quality free themes and here are a couple of my favourite links for finding them:

CONS: For Free Themes

• More People Have The Same Theme As You
  Since the designs are free, there are going to be quite a lot of blogs using each of the themes (especially the better ones). However if you don’t see many blogs in your niche using the ones you like – you shouldn’t worry.
• Footer Links
  The way that free blog themes are free, is because the designers either have a link to their website at the bottom, or they sell multiple links to the highest bidder. This means you could have a couple of totally unrelated links in the footer of your blog.

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I don’t know about you, but having been blogging for over 3 years now, I have always been looking for that ‘top affiliate product‘ that just sells like hot cakes every time I promote it.

After reading  a post over on BuildThatList about the best affiliate products, I was reminded of the most important key when it comes finding that top affiliate product.

The products you use are the best affiliate products to sell!

I think that Tom has made a fantastic point that I recently had the pleasure of experiencing.

My Top Affiliate Product

I am not the type to go around sharing my online earnings, but I have set myself a goal to go full-time online by the end of the year with a minimum income of $3,000 a month.

While I am still quite a long way off this figure I have been taking the necessary steps to make sure that I find myself on top of the goal by the end of the year, and the first of those steps was to find my top affiliate product.

Now I know it is going to take a lot more than just one successful affiliate product for me to consistently make $3,000 a month, but I found my start when I downloaded a trial of a keyword research product called Market Samurai.

After purchasing the product, I seriously could not think of why every single affiliate marketer and blogger was not using this software – I believe it is that good!

The Problem was when I started looking for their affiliate program.

At the time they didn’t have an affiliate program and all I could do was email them my details asking them to let me know when they decide to set one up.

I got a reply saying that they were working on adding about 7-8 new affiliates a month, but there was a long waiting list  – so I was left in limbo until sometime near the end of January.

I was estatic.

Here I had a product that I love. That I seriously recommended to everyone who asked anyway and they offered to give me about half of every sale that I sent over to them. Sounded like a pretty good deal to me.

In the month of February, I sent an email to my mailing list and made a couple of blog posts, one about a Market Samurai Discount, one about a review of the software using a case study for my new large dog kennels niche site.

During the 28 days of the month I made 12 sales (which is almost one every 2 days)  and this month is on target to do even better.

Why Is Market Samurai My Top Affiliate Product?

If we go back to the way to find your top affiliate product,

The products you use are the best affiliate products to sell!

The reason I believe I made the sales that I did was a result of my review posts, where I showed my readers how I personally use the software to find the keywords for my websites.

So Where To Now?

Obviously I am going to continue to find ways to introduce bloggers and internet marketers to Market Samurai but now my focus is to finding my next top affiliate product.

Sure 10 x $50 commissions a month is nice, but that is not even 20% towards my monthly goal for the end of year. So now I am looking for my next top affiliate product – because we can either continue to improve our sales of one product, or introduce a new pipeline (I am trying to do both!)

So what is your top affiliate product, and why is it working for you?

I’ve been focusing quite a bit lately on two topics on this blog – Market Samurai and ‘cheap article writers‘.

The reason I have been doing this is because these two tools are really all that you need to create a fantastic, profitable niche blog. On the one hand if you buy Market Samurai you have probably the most advanced keyword research tool (Market Samurai review) that will not only allow you to analyze topics to find highly targeted, money making niches ( my indoor dog kennels site is already starting to get Google traffic and Adsense dollars!)

But What If You Find A Profitable Niche You Have No Knowledge In?

This is exactly what happened to me. I found a fantastic niche that I saw had a handful of keywords with niche search traffic, and not to difficult competition (I knew with a little work I could get front page of Google) – but the problem was that they keywords had to do with dogs….and I don’t really like dogs. To be quite honest, they kinda scare me. So the fact that the niche was to do with extra large dogs – I had even less interest.

But It Was A Profitable Niche!

So I bought a great keyword domain and started writing my first article – but was failing miserably. I don’t know about you, but I cannot write about what I am not passionate about. So I needed to find someone who was. But since I was only testing the niche at the time – I needed cheap article writers!

But Where Do You Find Cheap Article Writers?

I was willing to pay up to $5 an article because I knew that was about the price that they were going for if I went to the DigitalPoint marketplace, but if you have ready my SEO article writers post, you would know that I took a completely different route.

The best way to get the cheapest article writers is to get the writers bidding against each other for your business and that is exactly what I did.

If you have never heard of oDesk, you need to head over there and sign up to their freelancing website.

What Is oDesk And How Can I Help Me Get Cheap Article Writers?

oDesk is an online services marketplace that has freelancers performing over $6 million of work a month.

It is totally free to join and as soon as you have registered you will have access to 1,000′s of writers, designers, programmers and many other services that will help you focus your efforts on other parts of your online business.

All you have to do is post a job, if you are looking for cheap article writers then you will obviously post a job in the article section – you set the maximum price and then just wait for the writers to start bidding for your work.

You will get a range of expensive and cheap article writers, quality writers and not so professional writers. The good thing about oDesk is that before you have to decide which SEO article writer you will give your job to, you can view their resume and application, check out their previous work rating and contact them for a further interview.

What’s This About $1.60 Articles?

As I said earlier, I was more than happy to pay up to $5 an article but after seeing a couple of people posting writing jobs on  oDesk for about $2 an article I decided to put that as my maximum price ($20 for 10 articles or $2 each), but as the applicants came in I started to see people offering less to try and gain my job.

You have to be careful when you are selecting candidates that English is their first language. But you can set this as a requirement in the job description.

)ne lady’s application caught my attention, because she was American (so English was her first language), she had and loved dogs, her sample articles were fantastic (extremely personal writing style) and her bid on the job was just $1.60 per article!

I made the decision to approve her application, sent through the keywords that I wanted articles written for and as they say, the rest is history.

Here Is A Sample Of The $1.60 Articles

• Dog Kennels And Runs
• Dog Kennel Fence
• Indoor Dog Kennels
• Outside Dog Kennels

I don’t know about you, but that is much better than I could write, and for $1.60 each I can’t wait for my next niche project to use oDesk again!

So, I guess the whole point of this article was to show you that creating a niche website doesn’t have to take a lot of time or money. For me it took some keyword research using Market Samurai, and hiring cheap article writers to create my content for me. Now all I have left to do is perfect my monetization strategies and do a bit of link building!

If you are looking to purchase a copy of Market Samurai, then make sure you grab our Market Samurai Discount which saves you 35% off the RRP
(Saving your $52)!

From the amount of traffic that I am receiving to my posts on the Market Samurai SEO and keyword analysis software it seems like a lot of you are not looking to buy Market Samurai (testing out the whole Squidoo thing), but you really want to learn more about what it does.

Wouldn’t it be great to see a Market Samurai tutorial for each of the features so you not only know before you purchase, what is involved. But if you already own Market Samurai then don’t you want to be making sure that you are getting the most value out of the software?

Well, sure I could go and make a handful of them myself, but if you are like me, then you would prefer the people who made the software to be showing you all the best tips and tricks to makes sure you are using it to its potential!

Market Samurai Tutorials From The Market Samurai Team!

If you want to their list of tutorials you can do so now, but I thought that it would be nice to pick out a few of the Market Samurai tutorials that I think do a great job to show you the basics to get you started. read this entry »