Art Of Money

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After 3 years of trying to earn money online, I can tell you I wished many times for someone that would teach me what was really going on, the fundamentals of online business, without a pile of hype, without a slick sales pitch and no $67 e-books please.

Have you even wished there was something like a community college style Internet Business 101?

Well, guess what, there is…and despite the fact that I consider myself a pretty savvy Internet business guy, I enrolled.

Here’s the class excerpt:

How to locate interesting / potentially profitable markets

How to investigate those markets for profit potential

How to choose products for those markets that are proven and provide the highest profit margin.

How to conduct deep market analysis to uncover:

• Content strategy
• Selling strategy
• Consumer psychology - which will give you an important edge in the marketplace.

Keyword research based on market analysis

Web site blueprinting based on market/keyword research

LSI (latent semantic indexing) Content structure

Search Engine Optimization (how to achieve top listings)

• Getting indexed properly
• Theme giving site / content construction (siloing)
• On and off site ranking factors
• Proper link building
• Proper internal linking

Growth scheduling - ensuring the smooth and profitable growth of your business

Much of what I’ve been writing about related to market research lately has been a direct result of this course. The course has been developed by 2 people who are professional market researchers, so it makes sense that this would be the emphasis.

How It’s Structured

Basically what happens is that you walk through the entire process of performing market research to setting up, building and monetizing a website as a project while you take the course.

The goal of the class is for you to come out of it with a profitable niche (us Canadians can’t figure out why Yanks say ‘nitch’ but that’s besides the point) website and a complete and profitable online business system.

University 20/20 Support

One of my key benchmarks for any product I purchase or system I’m involved in, is how good is the support. So far I can say that Charles, who created the course is ever present on the member’s only forums answering strategy questions as the members move through the lessons.

Who Should Take It?

• People who are new to Internet business and want a great foundation in how to make money online minus the hype, constant sales pitches and hidden agendas of most forms of instruction on the topic.
• Anyone wise enough to realize that something has been missing in all their previous attempts to make money online, and that something is solid fundamental business intelligence as it relates to the online world.

What Else You Need to Know

While you can go through the course and do all the lessons with out signing up for their advanced research tool, University 20/20 is really a stepping stone to a keyword and market research uber tool called Theme Zoom.

I have known about Theme Zoom for a year or so now and even though I never signed up for the tool (it costs $200 - $1000 a month) I have stayed on their mailing list because they sent out the wildest in depth Internet business information I have ever encountered.

I suspect that University 20/20 came about because there were people who wanted to use Theme Zoom that needed to be brought up to speed, since the things they teach are so mind blowing that many of their perspective clients, having been previously indoctrinated in traditional SEO and web business techniques, required extensive re-training so that they could grasp the complexity and power of Theme Zoom.

[insider tip: if you join Theme Zoom as an affiliate or even sign up for their newsletter you’ll get access to valuable information that will give you a taste of just how advanced their techniques are. You can also check out the Theme Zoom User’s Guide for in depth learning about SEO, website silos, vertical market analysis drilldowns, etc.]

The Value to Students

While what I have covered so far in University 20/20 is based on nailing down the profit potential of a niche before beginning work on a website, the real value to a the student is the advanced search engine optimization (SEO) techniques that they have developed based on latent semantic indexing (LSI) and siloing.

Traditional wisdom, when it comes to optimizing for search engines (and what I’ve always done) is to optimize a page for a keyword. So that when someone types “make money online” into a search engine, your page, optimized for that term shows up in the search results.

The University 20/20 SEO Revelation

…with people typing in longer and longer search queries into search engines, as many as 50% of all searches are unique.

What this means is that targeting individual keyphrases is the least efficient way to gather traffic from a search engine. What University 20/20 teaches is that it is much better, through proper SEO techniques, to convince Google that your site is the best resource for the massive number of long tail search terms that will never show up in a traditional keyword tool.

Even more profound is their claim that by building what they call a “wide synonymic net” that a site can target and claim very competitive and valuable keywords due to Google’s preference of this type of site architecture and information structure.

My Final Thoughts

Not sure what the price will go up to, but we’ve been informed that it will increase on May 15th, 2007. I wanted to get a little further into the course before writing my review, but I didn’t want you to miss the chance to get it at this price.

The current cost is $20 a month, with the estimated time of completion being 4 months, although if you’re motivated you can probably finish in less. Also, we’ve been told that if you sign up before the May 15th price increase, you rate will be locked in at the current price.

I take it as a sign that the idea of making money online is maturing to see courses like this coming on to the market. The thought “where was something like this 3 years ago, ‘cuz it would have saved me so much trouble” goes through my head quite a bit as a progress in the course.

Why some people will make more money online is because they will get training from real professionals who can pass on the wisdom and knowledge. There is so much “common knowledge” on the web that is really not much more than rumor or a hunch; perpetuated on forums by people who have never made more than lunch money.

It actually feels like a real school (you have to pass a quiz on each section to advance to the next lesson, so you can’t just skip ahead to get to the so-called good stuff until you grasp the fundementals.)

You can visit the Building Profitable Websites course home page, where if you click on the image that looks like the one at the top of this story, you’ll see a short video that will give you a good idea of what the school offers and how the content is delivered.