Lucky Number 7

Day seven of the thirty day challenge was a brutal one ladies and gentlemen, as 3 of my ideas had to be dropped after putting them to the days test. I've chosen for now not to replace them, and just continue to roll with the 4 I have left (until they possibly get shot down by more market research, of course). Ed's podcasts suggested that we start concentrating on 1 or 2 that really stand out to us at this time, but to still work the MR mojo on all 7. He also brought up a good Internet Marketing analogy using, in particular, the Idol music series (American Idol, Australian Idol, etc). Now, this seems to be the first place that my opinions differ greatly from Ed's, ad I absolutely despise reality TV shows - I think they are, for one, not reality at all, but merely voyeur TV. The only "real" part is that they don't use actors in the rolls, but the content is manipulated to the want of the producers so that even the most wholesome sweetheart can appear to be a total conniving bitch if the producers of the show deem it so. Ed says that it's a wonderful insight into the human psyche and how people think and work and I would agree, if the content was not manipulated for entertainment purposes. However, his analogy of Idol was really good, and eventhough it won't get me watching the show, it did make me see it in a different light. Basically, Ed made the point that in the old days the record company rep would go out to clubs and pubs, listening to bands in the hope of hearing that allusive sound that will sell - the next big thing. The problem with that is that it is like starting off with the product first and then trying to find the market...really bad in IM terms, huh? Well, bad in any terms...really stumbling around blindly in the dark, hoping to grab onto something worthwhile. What the Idol series does is it firstly attracts tens of thousands of people in each city to come along to them (the makers) to try and be successful. It's like sitting at home and having all these products delivered to your doorstep. The next part of the process is the filtering, which is similar to the noticing and judging faze of the 30 day challenge, whittling down what works and what doesn't. Being on TV they have the traffic situation covered and they have already started to make money via the text voting system...which is essentially the marketplace having a look and a listen to these "products" and deciding which ones are the best. The 12 or so episodes that it takes to whittle down the competition to the final 1 is like the build up to a product launch, with the final winner guaranteed a number one hit because it was the marketplace that chose him. It is genius from a marketing point of view, of course. As entertainment I still find the lawn in my garden more compelling...but I'll leave my anti-"reality" shows rant there.

Next we got the video from Ed's mate and fellow Immediate Edger, Rob Somerville, who quickly took us through a technique for finding out what competition your ideas will be up against through Google. Rob reckons that an acceptable Umbrella Phrase (your ideas keywords) should have no more then 25,000 - 30,000 competing pages in Google. Actually, if that was the case all my keyword phrases would be trashed right now, but the final 4 were close enough to that criteria for me to hold on to them. Firstly, we were to put our original idea (e.g Speed Reading) into Wordtracker and see the search results, as we had done a few days back. Then we put our niche keywords into Google, making sure to put quotes ("") at each end, which is called a Phrase Match, and Google will only show sites that display the term Speed Reading as two words side-by-side. If you left the quotes off, it would show every site that had Speed or Reading on the page, not necessarily together but anywhere on the page. We were to do that with all our 7 categories. Well, since most of my categories were one word keywords there was obviously a high volume of competition, usually in the millions. So what I did is look down the Wordtracker results for what is called "long tail phrases", and I'm sure the boys will go into this more as we go along. They will no doubt explain it better than I could so I'll leave the explanation of a long tail phrase until they have gone through it. Anyway, I went down the list looking for a term of 2 to 3 keywords that incorporated my original category, making sure that there were at least around 100 searches a day recorded in Wordtracker for it. Then I went back to Google and tried the Phrase Match again, getting much better results on most of my categories. As I said, 3 had to be put down, as they either had too few searches in Wordtracker without a decent long tail phrase, or they simply had too much competition no matter what long tail i used that had at least 100 searches a day. I hope that makes sense...

So it's on to Day 8 now, and from what I hear this may be make-or-break time for my last 4 categories. I'm actually a little more confident in them now that I have turned them into long tail phrases, but only time will tell if they are able to stand up to the 30 Day Challenge Market Research criteria.