A Day in the Life: Using MSN
Some of our students have been curious about an average day in the life of Stephen Pierce, so here it is:
After I do all of my morning rituals, I open up Internet Explorer and then http://www.msn.com appears as my pre-set homepage on one of my computers. The thing is, if you go to MSN, you get a wealth of information, so much more than just the daily headline news. MSN gives you really simple things that are important, such as Top Searches, and similar categories.
There's a section on the home page called Popular Searches. It tells you what the top five search movers are, and then it has Suggested Searches. It lets you know what the current special offers are, and here’s why I like the special offers section. If it’s available and for sale on the MSN Web site, then people are making money from it; either it's MSN or somebody else who was buying that particular space. So when you see things titled, “How To Get a Degree” or “Great Deals on Autos,” and things like that, I pursue or at least evaluate those things.
I remember one article on msn.com that was about the popularity of renting video games online. Similarly, Netflix allows you to rent movies online, they mail them to you and you mail them back. So they were talking about much more popular it has become to rent video games online than to go into the Blockbuster or Hollywood Video in the neighborhood to rent their video games, but to rent the video games online.
Hmmmmm. That’s interesting!
So, I looked at that and thought, "That's interesting." So I clicked on the link, and the company sponsoring it was one of the big companies in the video rental business and actually had an affiliate program. So, I bookmarked that affiliate program in this special folder I had set up, and then I did some keyword research on it. The keyword research turned up some decent searches, not just for people looking for video games but looking for very specific processes with video games, as far as rentals and other topics.
I actually started creating some Web pages on that. Now those pages generate passive revenue with people going to the site that we found and signed up for their affiliate program, and all we did was create a landing page – a Web site - using words that we identified as keywords. It's not a main market of ours, but it just ends up putting an additional small profit stream into the business, and that just comes from going to MSN.com.
What you should do is go to http://www.msn.com and look under Shop and look at what's cool and popular, compare different deals, and check out the kind of products that are being advertised and marketed on that Web site. Look at the Feature Deals. Look at the Spotlight section. Look at what's going on under the Entertainment sections and others. But especially take a good look at what the top five search movers are and see how any of those specific things may apply to your business.