Bot That Makes Money

[Ramya Bradbury]

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80% or more of all the money in the speaking industry is in the business category. You might want to talk about how to lose weight, or how the angels speak to you, but the real hard cash happens for business topics.. That means these categories:

What have you got to say in any of those categories that is fresh, interesting, exciting? Do some Google searches and see what other speakers in your broad category are speaking about. Check out books on Amazon. Are any of those books almost exactly what your proposed speech is about? Spend some time thinking about how you can take your content from a different angle, customize it to a specific industry, and make it appeal to more people.

Sometimes, people think their life or business story is worthy of a speech. That's not usually true unless your company is world-famous or unique in its niche. Steve Jobs got much higher speaking fees than Bob, your local dry cleaner, ever will. That's true even though Bob may be the best dry cleaner for 50 miles. But if Bob is earning 10x more than all the dry cleaners for 50 miles, he could certainly build a very lucrative speaking and consulting business in the dry cleaning industry.

Once you're pretty sure you've got something reasonably unique to say, open up a blank PowerPoint and put just ONE point on each slide. Since no one will see this first draft but you, go ahead and load each point up with stories, sub-points, proofs. You'll use this as your working outline on the speech. (Never use more than 15 words MAX on a .PPT you'll be showing a real audience! Fewer is even better!)

Start to "feel" your content. The great thing about PowerPoint is you can sort the slides as you realize Point 3 really needs to be Point 7. Work it like Play-Doh until you find it smoothing out and taking shape. (This could take days or months!)

And thank goodness countless other strangers all around the world are working late at night in labs, trying and trying again to find drugs that will cure sicknesses that I, or those I care about, will probably have in the future. What motivates many of them, besides their belief in their work, is that a drug company is paying them. What motivates the drug company is the large revenue it can earn by developing drugs that cure diseases and save lives. We live in a wonderful time, a time when we can realistically dream of curing diseases that we so far have had to accept. I sure as hell do want people making money finding cures for my sicknesses.

With its eminent scholars and world-renowned library and archives, the Hoover Institution seeks to improve the human condition by advancing ideas that promote economic opportunity and prosperity while securing and safeguarding peace for America and all mankind.

What are some common tell-tale indicators that the time has come to sell a stock?

What could catalyze the decline and/or end of high frequency trading?

Is it true that a salesperson makes the worst CEO?

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A while ago I heard about the idea of a "micro-niche site", and a few months back I finally decided to build one. Not for any particular reason - out of procrastination more than anything. But it turned out to be a pretty fun project.

As you know I'm always interested in new ways to build a life on the road, and along with blogging, freelancing, travel jobs, and the many other random ways to make money, this seemed like another interesting thing to try.

For those of you ready for a new pet project, below is my complete guide on how to build a micro niche site that makes money from scratch. I'm going to share the whole process with you, how I built it, and how much money it's made.

A micro niche site is just a more narrowed down version of that. For example, you might build a site about school snacks for kid's with allergies (or vegetarians or diabetes). Not the best example but hopefully you get the idea. The goal of the site is to give information to people about a very specific topic. Because your site is so niche, it makes it easier for people to find you.

The best thing is how low-risk it is. You can do it from your bedroom, you don't need to take a course or go to a special school, and it should cost you around $50 to get started. To start a mini-business that could make you a passive income from anywhere? That's pretty cool.

My micro niche site took maybe 30 hours to get it a money-making stage (I wasn't really counting). I didn't take any courses or read any books on how to build a micro niche site, I just read a few blog posts and tried it.

Now it only takes me an hour a month to maintain and has already made a tiny bit of money - nothing I'll be able to retire on, but it has paid back my investment in the first two months and is now just making me a cool $30-$50 per month on auto-pilot. If I want to scale it up I can, and if I want to just let it run, I can. So that's pretty cool.

If this is your first site, I highly recommend choosing the Starter plan. You'll get hosting for one site, a free domain, one-click WordPress install, unlimited traffic and a free SSL certificate. That's more than you'll need!

For example, a niche site on golf clubs could be "golfclubreviews.com" or it could be something more like "thehappygolfer.com". It's really up to you, I have seen both types of domains work perfectly fine, so I wouldn't say one is more effective than the other. Just choose something that feels right to you!

You can also keep the "Pre-Install" WordPress button checked so WordPress is already installed on your website for you. This is super convenient and it means you can skip the following section and simply get started on building your site.

If you want a fast, secure, nicely designed website, I would highly recommend using WordPress. Best of all, it's 100% free. The other great thing about WordPress is it's super simple to use. No nerdy stuff, no weird programming or coding. Just install and go.

A theme is like a pre-made design for your website. Instead of paying a web designer thousands of dollars to design a pretty website for you, you can just install a WordPress theme with one click and your site will look great. This is perfect for dummies like you and me ?

Why? You're probably going to spend days shopping through different themes, and it will just be a distraction from the more important tasks. There are millions of free themes you can use in the meantime.

Once you've written some articles and you have a better idea of how you want the site to look, you can look at investing in a theme. Changing a theme is as simple as one click, so no need to worry about this so early. Focus on building your site content and traffic.

Of course if you want to buy a theme right away, that's totally fine too. You will want to get a theme eventually anyway. Once you've written some articles and have an idea of how you want your site to look, it's time to start theme shopping.

A while ago I had a big rash on my leg. I grew up with bad eczema so I figured it was just a flare up - the stress of blogger life maybe, no big deal. But then it started getting really red and itching like crazy, so I went to the doc. He looked at my skin and told me the bad news: Scabies.

If you don't know what scabies are, it's a skin parasite that burrows under the top layer of the skin. It's not a killer parasite like malaria or giardia, but holy crap are they annoying. I've no idea where I got it - probably from jiu jitsu, but anyway.

I spend the next two weeks reading absolutely everything I can about scabies on the web - the history, all the different treatments, all the horror stories, some people saying they've had it for 5 years and want to kill themselves.

Now I'm thinking shit! I'm going to die from scabies! (nobody has ever died from scabies). So now I've gone really crazy, and I'm reading all the latest scabies studies, taking notes, reading up about all these weird plants and oils that are used in rural Indian villages and by the Aborigines and by the Ancient Romans. Then I go and try all the treatments, and spend a few days smothering different concotions all over my body.

I start writing up an email to my doctor about all the research I did, and I figure this information should really be public. Especially since many of my Google searches weren't really fruitful, they just came back with people crying "Waa I'm dying" and things like that. Since not everyone has the time to be reading through pages of scabies studies like I did, I figured I could summarise it all and give people answers to treat scabies properly. Surely a site like that could be really valuable to people!

This might not be the best example of choosing a micro-niche, because it sounds like you need to go through some weird experience like that which is not the case at all. I actually had about 7 or 8 micro niche ideas, but I just chose scabies because it was (a) on my mind at the time, and (b) felt like the easiest the subject to write about.

Example: Let's say you want to get into archery. Go and buy a bow, gloves, arrows, find an archery club, start learning to shoot. After you've done all that, you now have five blog posts you're perfectly placed to write:

How to buy your first bow

Which arrows to buy as an archery beginner?

Do you need gloves as an archery beginner?

What to look for when deciding on your first archery club

Five things I learned at my first archery lesson

So in my example, we want to find out how many people are searching for stuff about scabies on the webs. If only 500 people per month are searching for scabies information, probably not a great niche idea since nobody is interested it. However if it's getting many thousands or millions of searches per month, we could be in luck.

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