Big Ideas Day

So I've just finished Day Three of the challenge info (well I did so last night but ran out of time to blog). Day 3 was all about getting the ideas you'd come up with in Day 2, gathering just 7 of them (I basically closed my eyes and "threw a dart" at the screen) and having a look at how they fair in the "real world" of search engine results and the like.

The seven ideas I came up with range from pretty obscure to pretty commercial, and I like that because it will help to give me a good overview of how different markets turn out different results. At least, that's what I hope will come of it.

So following Ed's instruction, I put each of my ideas into the free Wordtracker tool to get an idea of the amount of searches that my niche is getting on a daily basis, and to also get a list of close-match results that I might be able to get further ideas for down the track. Well, as I suspected, my ideas returned search results ranging from around 12 a day, to somewhere in the vicinity of 13,000. The high level ideas that had that many searches also produced the highest number of alternative searches relating to the original search (are you still following...?), so perhaps I can go back to that list later and find a sub-niche to my niche that works. On Day One Ed talked about a sub niche he entered which was "Trout Fishing with a Spinner in a Stream", well you can expand that niche to be "Trout Fishing in a Stream" or "Trout Fishing with a Spinner", and again to simply "Trout Fishing", and then again to the umbrella heading of "Fishing". Now it doesn't take an Internet Marketing genius to know that Fishing as a niche would be pretty big and have some hardcore competition, but as you delve into sub-niches you obviously find that the competition drops off with each sub-niche tier you delve into. So eventhough I have one idea which is getting 13,000 searches a day according to the free wordtracker tool, there will no doubt be other sub-niches, and sub-niches of sub-niches, that will narrow down the field of competition until I am dealing with something far more manageable and potentially successful. But we'll just have to wait and see about that.

The next step was to go to Google and drop those main search terms (my 7 ideas) into the search engine and see what comes up at the top of the list. The idea here is to find out if there are actually other people trying to sell stuff relating to those ideas to real people. In a lot of cases you might find that you only get review sites and Adsense sites, which may not be so good. They can be useful, however, as they will generally only bother putting up a review of something if money is to be made from it...but the real meat is in seeing products in those results. That lets you know that people are making money from this niche. In this regard competition is good, just as long as it's not too much competition. The plan will be to out market our competition with Ed and Dan's state-of-the-art IM techniques...stuff these others wouldn't have even heard of (assuming they too aren't participating in the 30DC, of course).

And that was pretty much it. I put my ideas through and found that one of them didn't really come up with anything, so I might change that...or I might wait and see what comes next and perhaps look at a sub-niche of that one and see what is on offer.

Now in the 30DC scheme of things, Day 4 & 5 were catch-up/rest days, but there be no rest for those wicked neophytes who didn't have their internet connection on for the first week. Apparently the second week of the challenge was down to business so I dare say I'll have my work cut out for me in catching up...so why am I continuing to dribble on in this blog? It's on to Day 6 with a bullet!