Make Money Online

Chapter 4 : Reloads and My First Gubbing

28th February 2016 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

I feel that this month I really picked up the momentum with matched betting and am pretty confident in what I’m doing now. I’ve really moved on from just the sign up offers, to looking at taking on any of the offers related to football, primarily at the weekends.

I’ve been doing a lot of in-play betting this month making the most out of the William Hill and Paddy Power offers: “Place £20 on qualifying match and get £10 in-play on another match”. To be honest I’m starting to think whether it is worthwhile pursuing these smaller bets or not. For example out of the £10 free bet I’m probably only managing to extract 60 – 70% back into my account and the whole In-Play betting experience can be quite stressful.

I’ve had a few occasions when I’ve been trying to add the in-play bets on my Iphone 4S, which was a bit of a nightmare to be honest. The best time to put your bets on is at half time, because the odds don’t fluctuate so much, but if you miss this window it gets a little bit more tricky.

The other thing that you need to consider is that because the games are spread out over the course of the day / weekend now, you will need to structure your weekend around these games, which is not really what I want to be doing for a few quid here and there. However, at the moment, I am still learning my trade, so it is all good knowledge to pull in.

Bet365 Risk Free Bet

This month also completed the Bet365 risk free bet offer twice, we gave me a massive £35 for each match, which was well worth the small amount of time involved.

The offer was basically, place up to £50 pre match and up to £50 in-play and if your in-play bet loses then they will refund this bet to you. You simply need to calculate this as a risk free bet, and lay this off at one of the exchanges, then sit back and count the cash.

Risk Free Bets

I ventured a little bit further forward in my matched betting career this month, when Paddy Power gave a price boost on both Watford and Everton winning in the cup.

Thanks to the matched betting blog, I followed the advice of laying this off at Smarkets booking exchange: http://matchedbettingblog.com/football/paddy-power-price-boost-watford-everton/#.VtCRIvmLTZ4

Basically this was a risk-free bet, where if the event happened ie Watford and Everton both won, then I would earn £27, but if they didn’t win then I break even. This was a pretty good deal, took 5 minutes to add the bets on, and ended up netting me £27.60… GOLA!

There are a lot of these types of offers out there that I haven’t really started looking at yet, but will try and progress on these next month.

Horse Racing

I made my first venture into horse racing as well this month, which I’ve wanted to avoid initially as I believe it can be a little more complex than a standard football match back and lay scenario.

However, there were 2 particularly good offers, for the upcoming Cheltenham festival.

Coral were offering to match your bets of up to £20 per bet that you put on, as long you place a bet each weekend for the 4 weekends leading up to the festival and Betway are offering a similar offer for up to £50, so I added a couple of bets this weekend.

GUBBED

All was going so well until yesterday I got this lovely email from Coral:

Now, I’m not really sure how this had happened as I hadn’t placed too many bets with them and my history didn’t seem abnormal:

stake	odds	date	game
5	2.2	24/10/15	Ajaccio GFCO v Nice
20	7.6	28/10/15	Liverpool vs Bournemouth
20	3	30/01/16	Ang v Serena
10	5	31/01/16	3 – 1 Djok
20	3	20/02/16	Ars v Hull draw
20	3.25	20/02/16	14:05 Haydock One track mind
10	3.9	20/02/16	Bourn v Eve

However, they had been on a bit of a gubbing spree and lots of members in the Matched Betting Facebook groups experienced similar things.

My theory is slightly different, however, as I had been a bit stupid. My plan for this site was that as I go through the offers with different bookmakers I would also add affiliate links to these offers so other readers could sign up as well, and I’d earn a small commission.

I tried applying for affiliate accounts with 5 of the main bookmakers, however, as part of the application process they check out your website and see that I am promoting Matched Betting, which they’re probably not to keen on, so 3 of them refused my application. One of those was Coral, so my suspicions are that they put two and two together and linked my personal account with the application for the affiliate account. Oh well, lesson learned!!!

More Sign Up Offers

So, this month I added 3 more accounts to my name and signed up to Matchbook (Betting exchange), Net Bet and Betsafe

Last Month’s Goal

Sign up to 3 more offers – COMPLETE
Continue In-Play betting – COMPLETE

Next Month’s Goal

I really want to start looking at Accumulator’s as this seems like another solid way to keep generating income, without having to place in-play bets, however, this would require moving up to the next level of matched betting expertise and I don’t think that I’m quite ready for that yet. I’ll research it a bit more if I have time, but think I will keep this month’s goals quite simple to:

Overall Earnings to Date

I have finally managed to get a grip on what I have earned so far and am pleased to announce the grand total of :

£732.00

My Website Dream : Chapter 4 : Content Creation and Optimisation

28th February 2016 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

Niche Content Creation

This last month has been all about content creation and organisation for both my niche site and www.mylifestyledream.com

My target was to write 3 articles for my chosen niche site, but luckily enough I’ve had quite a quiet time at work this month and I’ve tried to use every spare hour I could get for writing. This meant that I managed to create 5 pillar content articles for my niche site, totalling more than 12,000 words of pretty decent content.

I think that with another 5 pillar articles and 5 smaller articles I should have enough content on the site to be able to launch it. On top of this I have also collated a list of all the businesses in London that are qualified to provide the service in the niche that I am focusing on. I’ve captured their addresses, services provided and am writing a paragraph of SEO focused introductory text for each of these businesses. My plan is that I will then create one big listings page that targets the keyword ‘[myniche] service in London’.

Failed Survey

One of the keywords that I want to go after as well is ‘[myniche] service prices’ or ‘how much does an [myniche] cost’ so I decided that I’d put a survey together and reach out to a number of businesses in the UK who offer this service and find out what their price list is.

I set up a Survey Monkey survey and wrote an email to 20 different businesses, pretending that I was a student doing a study on regional diversity and was interested in finding out how prices in the industry differ across the country.

Out of the 20 businesses I surveyed, guess how many responded? Yes, that’s right, a big fat 0. Looking back even though the email was nicely worded and the survey would only take 5 minutes to complete, it did look a little complicated and there was no real reason why they would participate as they weren’t getting anything out of it. I think I’m going to put this on hold now, until the site takes off and then do a proper survey offering the businesses a page to promote their business on my site in return for their participation. I’ll then create a nice infographic out of the results, which would be a useful piece of information as no one really has this information readily available on the internet.

Alexa Submission

Another thing that I did this month is submitted my site to Alexa as this sounds like another useful place to list your site to enhance your search rankings.

A couple of quick tips to help boost your Alexa rank are to install the Alexa toolbar in your browser, and the Alexa widget to your site. The word on the street is that this will boost your Alexa rank, although I am still showing as having no data! I think it just takes a month or so until you get listed though.

Optimisation

I thought it was about time this month to take stock of where I’ve got to with building www.mylifestyledream.com. I wanted to check how the site was performing and see if there were any issues with how I was creating the content and the structure of the site and also check my SEO rankings.

As I was looking into this I came across 2 really useful tools:

Onpage.org

This is a really handy tool that checks your site for 3 key areas:

SEO Aspects
Technical Aspects
Content Aspects

Onpage.org allows you to generate a report where it will check against a multitude of criteria in these categories and list out any errors for you. It takes a while to generate the report, and you are limited to creation of 1 report a month, however, this gives you some really great pointers into potential issues on your site.

Moz

Moz in general is a pretty amazing must have tool for anyone interested in SEO. They have a free toolbar that you can install on your site that looks a bit like this:

This helps you tell at a glance useful SEO metrics such as the domain authority or page authority of pages in the search results so you can see how easily you could rank for that keyword. You can find out the full feature set here : https://moz.com/tools/seo-toolbar

On top of this if you can afford it then I’d recommend getting a Moz Pro account, which has some really useful features such as doing an indepth SEO analysis of each page on your site. Based on the tips that it gave me, I went back and re-worked all of my pages so there were no issues showing with Moz.

Fiverr Gigs

Welcome to the world of fiverr.com. If you haven’t heard of this before then this is basically a marketplace where people offer all different kinds of services for a maximum of $5. You can source everything from logos to software subscriptions so there are a number of things that can come in useful if you are just setting up a website.

Because I am researching niches at the moment I used it to get a 1 month subscription to SEMrush and it worked perfectly. To be honest, it is a little bit dodgy so I wouldn’t use it in the long term, and you are sharing your account with other users, so if you want to keep your niche close to your chest, this may not be the best bet.

There are a lot of gigs on Fiverr offering traffic and backlinks as well but you should definitely stay clear of them as this will do more damage than good to your site.

Podcasts

Amongst all of the content that I’ve been creating I’ve also been making the most of every second I can get to listen to Podcasts from some of the key influencers in the internet marketing / niche website markets.

The best of the bunch are listed below:

Smart Passive Income

This podcast from guru Pat Flynn gives you all kinds of hints, tips and motivation to get your online business up and running. His goal has been to set up businesses with a bit of hard work to start with that free up time in the longer term and generate passive income for you. Great listening, but takes a while to get used to Pat’s fast, squeaky voice!!!

Ask Pat

This is another podcast from Pat Flynn but comprises of shorter 10 minute podcasts, where he responods to a listener’s questions. A wide range of topics discussed but he provides useful, digestable information

Authority Hacker

My personal favourite site and podcast at the moment. The duo of Gael and Mark give you no nonsense tips about creating your authority website based on their real experiences running Health Ambition and Authority Hacker. They ran an agency together but the podcasts are usually full of actionable information about SEO, content marketing and anything you need to know about running a site.

Niche Pursuits

Spencer Hawe and Co-host Perrin Carrel focus on creating niche websites, and are now branching out into the Amazon FBA programme. These guys are behind the Niche Site 3 project, where they are mentoring 3 differetn listeners as they help them to set up and develop their websites. Essential listening.

WP Elevation

This blog is more focused on how you can use the power of WordPress to elevate your blog and improve your business and features interviews with a range of eminent online entrepreneurs and internet marketers.

Pro Blogger

Darren Rowse is the goto man for blogging on the internet and has many years of experience. His podcasts tend to offer writing tips and anything blog related. Worthwhile listening, although the nuggets of information are a little hidden amongst the waffle, and he does sound a little bit preacher-like. Still, he’s been there and done it, so you should listen!

Last Month’s Goal

Write 3 articles for the niche site – COMPLETE
Create a list of the niche services in London – COMPLETE

Next Month’s Goal

Complete the London listings page for my niche site
Write 5 more articles for niche site
Stretch goal – look at the Thrive Content Builder

Tools and Sites Used

How to Find a Niche Market in Less than a Day

4th February 2016 By martinos74 4 Comments

Choosing a niche for your online business can seem complicated, however, this guide will show you how to find a niche market right for you.

In this guide I’m going to give you the tips and the tools that you need to select your niche in less than a day!

Quick NavigationStage 1 – Creating a Shortlist of Niches Stage 2 – Find a Niche Product Using Amazon Search Step 3 – Find the Best Keywords for Your Niche Using Keyword Modifiers Step 4 – Sample Your Keywords for Keyword Competitiveness STEP 5 – Analyse the Competition Step 6 – How to Choose a Niche Market?Summary Tools Used

Stage 1 – Creating a Shortlist of Niches

Task Time : 1 Hour

If you’re looking to make money online, then finding potential online business ideas and understanding how to find a good niche are critical to your success. There are so many potential niches out there for you to choose from and getting started is going to be your biggest barrier.

My main advice to you is start with something that you’re interested in. After all you’re going to spend a lot of time researching, writing and being part of that niche community so it’s best that you are in some way interested in the subject.

Some of the most profitable niches are going to be hobby or passion niche’s where people are emotionally attached with the product so are a lot more willing to spend money, and therefore advertisers will be a lot more willing to pay for space on your site!

I had a number of ideas for niches that I was thinking of entering but wanted to broaden my reach a bit before entering into keyword research so I started with our good old friend Wikipedia. They have a really useful list of hobbies page, which lists pretty much every hobby you can think of.

My process was to simply run through this list and make a shortlist of niches that I was interested in. This took me about an hour to do but was a really useful brainstorming exercise as well as it generated a lot of potential online business ideas.

Once you’ve created a list of potential niches that you’d like to set up a business in you want to see what kind of keywords are available for that niche so you can interrogate them and see if there really is a business there.

In general we can split the keywords into 2 distinct groups:

Product Keywords – These will be useful for your website monetization strategy
Information Keywords – These will be useful to drive traffic to your website

Both sets of keywords are equally as important as they can bring revenue and traffic to your site.

Stage 2 – Find a Niche Product Using Amazon Search

Task Time : 10 Minutes per niche

If you’re going to make any money online you need to know how to find a niche product or a service to either sell or recommend. Without products in your niche, your bank account is going to remain very empty.

For each of the niches on you shortlist, spend 5 minutes brainstorming some products that are related to that niche. For example, if you’re really into walking then your first list of product keywords would be something like

Hiking boots
Hiking poles
Backpacks
Fleeces

Once you’ve got a small set of keywords together then I’d simply jump on over to Amazon.com and type these keywords into the search bar:

How to find a niche product using Amazon auto suggest

What you’ll find is that the auto-suggest kicks in and shows you a load of other related product keywords that you might not have thought about before.

In the case above we can now add the following keywords to our list:

Hiking socks
Hiking armband
Hiking trousers
Hiking gaiters

I also recommend clicking around the categories as well and you’ll probably find another few related products that you could add to your list.

Step 3 – Find the Best Keywords for Your Niche Using Keyword Modifiers

Task Time : 10 Minutes Per Niche

The next trick that we are going to use is a combination of keyword ‘modifiers’ and a free tool atUbersuggest.org to help you find profitable niche keywords.

Keyword modifiers are simply additional words that you put either before or after your keyword to help you find keywords in your niche with a stronger buying intent.

Examples of these are

Best eg ‘Best hiking boots’ or ‘best hiking boots for’
Reviews eg ‘hiking boot reviews’
Top eg ‘Top hiking boots’
where to buy eg ‘where to buy hiking boots’
versus eg ‘hiking boots vs sports shoes’
brand names eg ‘North Face hiking boots’

You can find a full list of these types of modifiers here

You should then take some of these sample keywords that you think will work and plug them in to the free ubersuggest tool. Ubersuggest basically uses Google’s autocomplete function and goes through every letter of the alphabet trying to find related search terms.

Ubersuggest Search Box

This won’t work in all cases but if you put open ended strings into the search box, then you’ll get better results back eg ‘best hiking boots for’ or ‘where to buy hiking boots for’ will bring you back much better results than ‘North Face hiking boots’:

Ubersuggest provides a list of related keywords

All you need to do next is to click on the ‘Select All keywords’ button and copy the keywords that you’ve created into a master list of keywords for that niche. I usually keep these in a spreadsheet, which has a tab for each of my niches like this one: How-to-Choose-a-Niche-Workbook

Ubersuggest Keyword Suggestions

Step 4 – Sample Your Keywords for Keyword Competitiveness

Task Time : 20 Minutes Per Niche

When you’ve gone through this process a few times in Ubersuggest, copy all of your keywords and add them into Long Tail Pro. Add one of your main keywords like ‘best hiking boots’ as your seed keyword and add all the other entries into the ‘Add My Own Keywords’ section then just click the ‘Generate Keywords’ button and sit back and relax for a bit:

how to choose a keyword for website

You’ll then be returned with a huge number of results from Long Tail Pro but to help you filter this list I would recommend the setting the following filters in Long Tail Pro

Suggested bid : £0.50
Local Searches : 10
Advertiser Competition : Set to Medium/High
Number of words : 4

Once you’ve done this then you’ll have a much smaller list that you can go through and check out the Keyword Competitiveness scores. Usually I’ll try this across a range of keywords, starting with the higher value and higher traffic keywords but sampling all the way down to keywords that have low CPCs and low traffic.

In the process that I went through I tried to sample about 50 keywords for each niche, which really gives you a good idea of how competitive the niche is. If there are hardly any keywords with a KC of under 30, then it’s going to be really hard for you to enter that niche, so probably best to move on to the next one in your list.

Here’s a real example of hiking boots that I looked at:

what are the best keywords for my website

For each of your niches when you find a good keyword then add this to your favourites, which will help you when you come back to review them later on.

STEP 5 – Analyse the Competition

Task Time : 10 Minutes Per Niche

The next thing to do is to analyse some of the keywords in that niche, to see if you are going to be able to push your way onto that elusive first page of Google. You want to start by looking for keywords that have a high traffic, high competition and low KC score.

Click on the result and ideally you want to see a minimum of 2 sites that have a Domain Authority of less than 30, with a KC of less than 30. This gives you a good indication that if you write a good article and with a little bit of SEO loving you could probably get your site to rank in those top 10 results as well.

In the case of hiking boots I can see a keyword (best hiking boots UK) that gets 140 visits a month and has a KC of just 22 so lets click on that:

finding a niche in the market

Unfortunately there’s only 1 site with a DA of less than 30, which has a pretty low KC of 24, so lets start by checking that site out. We can see straight away that it’s a niche site as it has a product comparison table, some reviews and a load of affiliate links : http://bestwalkingboots.org/

Best Walking Boots Reviews and Ratings of Hiking and Walking Footwear

Now the next little trick uses a tool cool SEMrush, which really just helps you to spy on the competition, look at how much traffic they are getting and then eventually steal their keywords! After all, all’s fair in love and keywords!!!

You can get 10 free searches a day with SEMrush, so head over to semrush.com and plug the url of the site you’re looking at into the search bar:

SEMrush : Organic Search Positions

Straight away you can see that SEMrsuh provides you with an estimate of the traffic the site is receiving, in this case 136 visitors a day, and then even better than this it shows you a complete list of the keywords that this site is ranking for and how much of their traffic volume this makes up. Simply click on the ‘export’ button and these keywords can be yours as well!!!

How to get keywords from a website”

The other useful feature that you’ll see is the competitors graph, which gives you a list of related sites, and also plots them on a graph split between number of keywords and traffic. SEMrush has loads of great features and shows you how to find search volume for a keyword, how to find out keywords of a website and can really show you how to identify a niche market.

All of these things together give you a really useful insight into the competition and can help you understand whether this is a niche worth going into. When I went through this process it helped me to eliminate a number of niches, purely by the fact that the main competitors were getting so little traffic that it wouldn’t be worth my while entering that niche.

COPYCAT SITES

Another good tip is to try and find sites that are similar to how you imagine your site will become. If there are sites like this in the top ten then it’s a pretty good sign, so spend some time and analyse their sites as well.

Look at their traffic figures and check out their competition and keywords and this should give you a really good indication if you should go for this niche or not.

For each of your niches make a note of the number of sites that you found like this and jot down their traffic volume.

Step 6 – How to Choose a Niche Market?

Task Time : 10 Minutes Per Niche

Once you’ve gone through the above process for a number of different niches, you’ll quickly get a feel for whether there is any business value in the niche, whether it is easy to enter, and most of all whether it’s something you’re going to want to dedicate a lot of your time to in the next months.

My final check list for each niche that I looked at would be something like this:

Does the niche interest or excite me enough that I could commit a lot of my time to?
Are there a good range of products that I could create or promote in this niche?
Is there enough scope in the niche for me to write a decent amount of content about? (100 articles or more)
Out of my keyword sampling exercise, were there a decent number of keywords with KC scores of less than 30?
Did I manage to find a lot of copycat sites for keywords that had a KC of less than 30?
Was there a good volume of traffic in the market for my copycat sites?
How could I make my site stand out from others in this niche?
Is there potential to expand my niche into further markets/niches?
Would I be proud of talking about this niche to my friends/family?

Summary

Stage 1 – Create a shortlist of niches : 1 hour
Stage 2 – Finding Product Keywords using Amazon Search : 10 Minutes per niche
Step 3 – Use Keyword modifiers to expand your keyword list : 10 Minutes Per Niche
Step 4 – Sample your Keywords for Keyword Competitiveness: 20 Minutes Per Niche
Step 5 – Analyse the Competition: 10 Minutes Per Niche
Step 6 – Choosing a Final Niche : 10 Minutes Per Niche

Tools Used

My Website Dream : Chapter 3 : Keyword Research and Choosing my Niche

24th January 2016 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

Through listening to the podcasts on Niche Pursuits and doing a lot of background reading, I’ve decided that I need to diversify my website monetization strategy. I had originally planned that I would focus my efforts on building out this website www.mylifestyledream.com and look at how I could monetize this site, however, I’ve switched my focus somewhat.

Through the initial keyword research that I’ve done it’s obvious that the ‘How to make money online’ niche is one of the most competitive niches out there and will take me a long time to rank for an ultimate build up an audience. Whilst I still want to pursue that avenue, I also want to try something that can bring back dividends in the shorter term, so I’ve decided that I also want to set up a niche site.

From what I’ve read so far, creating a niche site that brings back £500 to £1000 a month in recurring passive income, is not a dream, but actually a distinct possibility. There are loads of people out there doing this and making money from niche sites already, and most of them seem to be employing pretty similar methodologies and techniques. In the short term, I’m going to look at these approaches and start to apply them in practice as I build out my own niche site.

Detailed Keyword Research / Choosing a Niche

I know I’ve banged on about it before but doing extensive keyword research before you start building a site is absolutely essential. There’s no point in spending hours and hours writing content that no-one reads, so this month my focus has been 100% on keyword research, evaluating market size and eventually, choosing a niche that I want to go into.

One of my money spinning plans has been to set up a niche website and monetize it with either Adsense or Amazon affiliate links. I’ve had a few ideas bouncing around in my head for months now, so I wanted to road test these ideas and find out whether there really was any business opportunity in developing a niche in those areas.

To come up with my shortlist of niches I simply went to Wikipedia and looked through their list of hobbies to find potential niches that I might be interested in.

Then for each niche, I looked on Amazon for potential products and also used Ubersuggest to give me a list of keywords related to that niche.

I then plugged these keywords into Long Tail Pro and did a short sample of keywords to get an idea of keyword competitiveness in that niche. Some of these niches were clearly overly competitive with lots of keywords with keyword competiveness scores of over 30, so this helped me to start whittling down the list to about 5 niches.

For each of these 5 niches I then used SEMrush to gauge how much traffic was in those markets. This was quite a simple process of looking at the top ten results for some of the keywords in the niche, and choosing sites, which were similar to what I would like to build ie Doppelgangers. I could then take their URLs and put into SEMrush, which gives you an indication of the traffic size:

SEMrsuh monthly traffic stats — Screenshot showing SEMrush monthly traffic stats

The other good thing about SEMrush, is that you can view the keywords that the specific site is ranking for and put these on your list of keywords you want to rank for:

This clearly showed that a couple of niches I was thinking of entering had very little traffic, so I removed them from my list.

In the end my choice was between 2 niches:

Niche 1 – This would be entering a sub-niche for a product that has taken off in the last few years, and I think will have great potential in the future. The sub-niche doesn’t have great traffic at the moment, however, is fairly easy to enter, and I think will grow in the future. I can also see potential that you could then expand into the main niche with time and become an authority site, even though that is quite a competitive niche.

Niche 2 – Is entering into a niche where you would promote a service that other people are supplying. There are loads of really low competitive keywords in this niche, and most of the sites are obviously built by people who don’t know a lot about SEO. I’m not sure how much it helps either, but the Cost Per Click for these keywords is really high:

Long Tail Pro Screenshot screenshot showing keyword competitiveness in my niche

The only problem I can find with this niche is that it will be hard to write a lot of decent quality articles.

In the end, I have decided to go with Niche 2, just because the Keyword Competitiveness is so low and the major site in this niche is getting 40k visits per month!!!

Content Research

After choosing my niche I was really keen to crack on with content creation so this month I’ve started to do a lot more research into the niche to generate content ideas.

I’ve basically been reviewing other sites in the niche to ‘borrow’ content ideas, and this has proven to be a really useful exercise. From this exercise I have decided that I can expand my site into 3 main areas:

Helping visitors to find the niche service in their area
Helping businesses to find training for the niche service
Helping visitors find a related niche product

I really think there is potential to become an authority in this niche as well, and I’ve started creating a list of different content ideas to put on the site. I found the guys at Digital Marketer wrote this really great article

How I Nearly Bought a Website

Talking of distractions, well this month I nearly took a massive shortcut around the whole niche site building process and almost bought myself a ready made website, complete with WordPress plugins and 40 keywords focused articles.

The opportunity arose when I was reading an article on Matthew Allen’s blog about the Google Thin Content Penalty. This is basically a new algorithm that Google introduced recently to penalise websites, which are perceived to add no value and are built for the sole purpose of generating Affiliate revenue ie Niche Sites. If you don’t have a lot of content on your site and you have a lot of affiliate links, then you’ve probably been penalised and received something like this from Google:

So, Matthew Allen had 2 of his sites hit with this penalty and had since then de-indexed the sites, put them on a new URL and was selling them through Human Proof Designs for $799. He claimed that these sites were making a few hundred pounds every month and with a bit of careful nurture could make even more money.

To me this sounded like a great opportunity, not just because they were tried and tested websites that had already made money, but because this would afford me a great opportunity to learn how he had set these specific niche sites up in WordPress. More than anything I was looking at this as a really good learning tool so I clicked on the ‘Buy Now’ button for the site about Organic Shampoo, and initially it looked like I was successful.

However, I was completely gutted to find out a few hours later that there had been an issue with the checkout flow, and that the site had already been sold. Matthew was extremely apologetic and offered me first refusal on the Fertility Kit site instead, but to be honest, that niche just wasn’t going to float my boat.

Looking back, it’s probably not such a bad thing as I want to go through this whole set up process myself, so I guess it’s back to the drawing board and time to focus on writing them articles!!!

NEXT MONTH’S GOALS

Write 3 articles for the niche site
Create a list of the niche services in London

LAST MONTH’S TASKS

Choose a niche for my website – COMPLETE
Publish 5 more articles – INCOMPLETE
Create a backlinking strategy – INCOMPLETE

TOOLS AND SITES USED

Chapter 3 : In-Play Betting

24th January 2016 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

I’ve been doing a few offers a week this month and gradually building up my matched betting knowledge. I’ve been using the matchedbetting.guru site and the Matched Betting for Free Facebook Group, which has been particularly helpful.

Last weekend I decided to dedicate the whole weekend to Matched Betting and I ended up making a massive profit of £25!!! Doesn’t sound like a lot, and to be honest it completely stressed me out all weekend, but I think that is because I’m still learning some of the rules and techniques.

In fact, I think this weekend I think it’s fair to say that I graduated to phase 2 of the matched betting academy:

Stage 1 – Signing up to the bonus offers
Stage 2 – Placing in-play bets and making the most of weekly offers
Stage 3 – Laying off bets in an accumulator
Stage 4 – Expanding out into other sports
Stage 5 – Moving into trading / arbitrage

Placing In-Play Bets

I think the most stressful part of the weekend was getting used to the In-Play bets. For example Paddy Power gave an offer where if you bet £20 on a qualifying game, they will give you two £5 bets to use In-Play, ie when the game has started.

The main issue with In-Play bets is that you can’t use an odds comparison like Odds Monkey, so you have to check the odds between different bookmakers manually. That doesn’t sound too bad, but the problem is that the odds are constantly changing, so by the time you put your odds into a matched betting calculator to find the amount to lay your bet, the odds will have changed. I found this to be extremely stressful, and also meant I made a few mistakes.

TOP TIP: If you’re going to use In-Play bets then you should place your bets at half time when the odds are more stable.

Rollovers

The other thing that is worth learning is the concept of ‘rollovers’. These are the bane of the lives for matched betters as they can really spoil the amount you can extract from a free bet.

An example of this is with Bet Victor. They recently made an offer of Bet £20 and get a £10 free bet, however, you can only withdraw the free bet once you had bet 4 x the bonus amount ie you need to bet an additional £40. This means that on some offers it’s just not worth doing because the rollover just eats into the total you’ll get back from the free bet.

What odds should I place my Free Bet at?

A lot of people’s accounts were getting ‘gubbed’ or closed down this month, which happens when you bet in a suspicious way. Basically if they suspect that you are a matched better, then they will close you account immediately and sometimes even keep your balance.

For some offers I was placing my free bet of odds of over 10, so that I could extract as much as possible from the free bet. Looking back this was a little silly as it is likely to raise suspicion and after taking some advice from the Matched Betting for Free group, I found out that you should try to keep the odds to between 5 and 7, and not risk going any higher.

Matched Betting Balance Sheet

This month I’ve really struggled with understanding my finances and figuring out exactly how much money I won or lost with Matched Betting. I tried using the Ultimatcher Spreadsheet, but for some reason the numbers just weren’t stacking up so I’ve decided to go back to my own spreadsheet, where I can manually check how much I’ve won / lost on each match. In the long term I’ll probably need to switch to something else, but I think for now this will have to suffice!

LAST MONTH’S TASKS

Complete Bet365 Offer – COMPLETE
Place an Inplay bet offer – COMPLETE
Get an accurate balance sheet – COMPLETE

NEXT MONTH’S GOALS

Sign up to 3 more offers
Continue In-Play betting

TOOLS AND SITES USED

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