How To Be Successful With
Covert Social Press
Ideas For Building & Monetizing Sites
Welcome to the second part of the Covert Social Press tutorial.
The purpose of this short PDF is to give you some ideas on what kind of Covert
Social Press sites to build, how to do it and how to monetize them.
If you are looking for help with the theme, please go back to the other PDF
tutorial, it covers all the technical bits. Then come back to this one when you are
ready.
Remember That You Have Full
Multi-Site License To The Theme!
The multi-‐site license means that you can install the theme on as many of your
own blogs as you like. You can pursue and test as many different ideas as you
like – but we definitely recommend that you start by…
Going Long-Tail & Sticking With A Niche First!
A site like Digg (and other big social bookmarking sites) have multiple niches, in
fact they have pretty much everything.
It might be your goal to build a Digg style social bookmarking site – and it is
possible to do that with the Covert Social Press theme.
However, if you think about it, you are not going to knock Digg off their throne
any time soon.
You will find it much easier to achieve success if you limit your Social Press site
to a single niche.
That way you can become the go-‐to place to find news and information for
people who are interested in that particular niche. And they might like your site
better than the big networks, because it’s not cluttered with stuff they are not
interested in. A side benefit is that you will find it much easier to monetize you
traffic when you know exactly what your visitors are interested in.
Here’s an example for a particular niche – but you could apply this principle to
any niche you want.
You could build a Covert Social Press sites about “Movie Reviews” (that would be
your main niche and keyword.
Then you could use your categories to narrow it down to for example; Action,
Comedy, Thriller, Romance, Animated etc.
Then you start curating and bookmarking movie reviews from different sources
– putting them in the right category and tagging them with the right keywords
(such as the movie title, actor/director names etc.).
On top of bookmarking other people’s reviews, you can write some of your own
too and post them on your site.
For monetizing this niche there are likely a lot of CPA offers with cinema tickets,
and you could definitely sell DVDs and movie related stuff from Amazon – and I
know there are some movie streaming offers on Clickbank too… And there is of
course always Adsense and other PPC programs you can use.
You build your site to be the go to place to find movie reviews – and when you
have a following they will start bookmarking their own (and other people’s)
movie reviews on your site.
Of course this “movie review niche” is only an example… But I hope you get the
idea that it will be much easier for you to achieve success if you stick to niches,
rather than trying to compete with a mega site like Digg.
And since you have multi-‐site license you can build sites for as many niches you
like, test out different ones and go with the ones that work.
At First You Want To Curate Content Yourself
The Covert Social Press theme lets other people join your site as a member, so
they can bookmark/curate content and build your site for you.
While this is awesome and could be very powerful down the road… Lets be
realistic here – You are not going to have thousands of people bookmarking stuff
to your Covert Social Press site on day 1.
This is something that will happen after you have built the initial foundation, it
will be slow at first and then the snowball effect will kick in.
But in order to get your site off to a good start you need to curate and bookmark
content yourself to populate your site.
Thankfully this is very easy to do and doesn’t take much time at all… and here
are the easy steps you need to follow:
1. Log in to your Covert Social Press site as the admin
2. Click on “Submit a Link” in the your site’s header
3. Drag the “Submit It” bookmarking applet button to your browsers toolbar
4. Find content you want to bookmark
5. When you are on a site/post you want to bookmark click the “Submit It”
button on your browsers toolbar
6. Fill in the information like “tags” select and image and save the post
That’s all there is to it… you can populate a Covert Social Press site with tons of
content in mere hours – or you can take it slow and bookmark a few posts every
day, that is all up to you.
How To Find Content For Your Site
There are several great ways to find content for your Covert Social Press sites
and here are a few of my favorite ones…
Google Alerts
Lets you set up an on going content search and have Google deliver the results
straight to your inbox.
Here’s how it works…
1. Go to
www.google.com/alerts
2. Enter a keyword or search phrase (be specific so you don’t get irrelevant
content, here for example I’ve use quotes in “Movie Reviews”
3. Select if you want everything (or only blog posts for example)
4. Select how often you want the results (I recommend once a day)
5. Select how many results you want (best results is usually ok, unless it’s a
very obscure keyword)
6. Select where you want the results delivered to (I use my email)
After I have set that up, Google will now email me once a day with their best new
results for “Movie Review”.
I can simply open that email every day and quickly bookmark all the links in it to
my Covert Social Press site. This is a super easy way to get relevant content and
it will only take you 10 min a day to do this.
Google Blog Search
Is a part of Google’s search engine that only delivers results from blogs. This is
handy because bookmarking posts on other blogs will often earn you backlink.
You simply go to
www.google.com/blogsearch
and enter in your keyword or
search phrase, just as you would do for a normal Google search.
You now have a list of relevant blogs and blog posts about your keyword. You
simply click on the links and go bookmark the ones you want.
Google News
This is very similar to the blog search – but instead of searching for blogs it
searches news articles from around the world.
This is handy because the sites ranked in Google News are usually reputable
newspapers and other news sources. That means it’s a great place to find quality,
professionally researched and written content – in other words content that is
just begging to be curated and put on your Covert Social Press site.
To get started go to
www.news.google.com
and type in your keyword and search
phrase – and you will get something like this:
And you can now click on the news stories you like and go bookmark them on
your Covert Social Press site.
Other Content Sources
Those are my 3 favorite ways to get content – but there are of course countless
others out there.
You may have some favorite blogs in your niche. Yahoo and it’s sub categories is
a great place to find content too. You could even trawl Digg and other social
bookmarking sites and check out what has been bookmarked there.
And finally Facebook is one of my favorites too – my wall gets filled with
interesting stuff I would never have found outside of Facebook. And with their
new Graph Search it has become much easier to use Facebook as a search engine
to find good content to curate.
Using Covert Social Press As Your Own Link Hub
If you have other blogs and sites you might want to consider setting up a Covert
Social Press site just as link hub for all your other stuff.
This way you bookmark all your posts on other blogs and gain at least one
backlink for everything you publish.
You can of course combine this with other strategies if your own blogs fit the
niches you are building Covert Social Press sites in.
Mixing In Your Content
Don’t forget that Covert Social Press is more than just a social bookmarking
theme.
You can write you own posts and pages on your Social Press sites and it can be a
good idea to do that and there is several ways to mix and match your content.
• You can have a Covert Social Press sites that are mostly curating other
people’s content -‐ but then pad it out with your own unique content to
earn extra brownie points with Google.
• You can have a Covert Social Press site that is primarily comprised of your
own unique content. But then once in awhile bookmark other stuff to
make sure there is always something fresh on your site
• And of course you can do any combination of content curation and unique
content.
How To Get People To Add Content To Your Site
As we discussed above, this is not something that is going to happen over night.
But as you site grows – gains ranking, traffic and followers – people will start
submitting content to your site.
But there are of course some shortcuts to make the process even faster…
Basically when people bookmark content on your Covert Social Press site they
get a free back link. Everyone is interested in free back links, as it will help their
SEO efforts (and free is always good) … you get free automated content in return
and you visitors get fresh relevant content… So it’s a true win-‐win-‐win
Anyway here are a few ideas you can use to make this happen:
• Promote your site on webmaster forums like the Warrior Forum or
Digital Point. If you are in a specific niche i.e. dating, there are likely also
webmaster forums that focus solely on your niche… You can post an offer
to go bookmark on your site for free backlinks. Or even better participate
on the forum and have a signature link that says something like:
“Bookmark Your Sites Here For Unlimited Free Backlinks!” and link that
to your Covert Social Press site.
• If you are in the internet marketing niche and have a list you can email
them and tell them they can go bookmark their stuff on your site. They
will love you for giving them free backlinks and that will help you build a
relationship with your list and brand you as the expert… and you get free
automated content.
• You could even use this as a bonus for your own products or affiliate
products (or on your squeeze pages). If they buy or subscribe, you will
give them unlimited free backlinks. The just give them the link to your
Covert Social Press site and tell them to go submit their links.
How To Monetize Your Covert Social Press Sites
There are several ways to monetize your sites.
First of all you have the two optional sidebars, one for the front page and one for
single posts. You can add any kind of ads you want to your sidebars for example
Adsense, Amazon ads, Clickbank products, CPA offers or perhaps your own optin
form.
Covert Social Press also comes with a widget ready footer – you can put ads in
there as well.
Under theme options you can set a pop-‐under ad link. When people click on
anything on your site (max once a day though) the unobtrusive pop-‐under ad
will open in the background waiting for them. The pop under ads are best used
for squeeze pages or simple CPA offers with zip/email submit.
You can use other plugins like for example
www.CovertMessenger.com
and
www.CovertActionBar.com
and many others to help monetize your sites.
Don’t forget that Covert Social Press is more than just a bookmarking site -‐ you
can post your own content and of course put any links or ads in that content.
If you grow your site and it really takes off, you could even consider selling
access to bookmarking content on your site.
Flipping Sites For Profit
Don’t forget that you not only have multi-‐site license – you also have a full license
to flip your sites for profit.
That means you can build as many sites as you like and flip them for profit. Loads
of people are looking for “done for you” websites and
www.Flippa.com
is just
one of the many sites you can sell on.
You could even build some Covert Social Press sites and use them as bonuses for
people who buy your products or buy products through your affiliate links.
Start Building
I hope you found these ideas helpful… and now it’s time for you to start building
some Covert Social Press sites.
These were just ideas (but good ones if I’m allowed to say so myself)… but you of
course have free hands to build exactly what you want, you may have ideas that
are even better than mine.
And with the multi-‐site license there is no risk. If something doesn’t work as well
as you hoped, you can always build something else, until you find the winning
combination.
The real key to success is of course to…
Take Massive Action!
Thanks again for ordering the Covert Social Press theme and good luck with your
sites.
Soren Jordansen, John Merrick & Cindy Battye
Soren Jordansen, John Merrick & Cindy Battye
IM Wealth Builders Ltd.