Day Six of the challenge is completed for me, I've watched the videos and done the tasks set out for us by the Maestro of Internet Marketing, Ed Dale.
Today's tasks were to first head on over to Google and try out our category ideas in the search engine, along with the word "affiliate", to see what was being offered in the way of affiliate programs for our particular niches. My ideas came out pretty well, with all but one having affiliate schemes attached to them. Ed says it doesn't actually matter if they don't have affiliate programs attached, as the idea of this 30 Day challenge is not necessarily to join an affiliate program. He will later be showing us an affiliate site to beat all affiliate sites, so I'm hoping he doesn't mean ClickBank, because while it is a pretty good affiliate site, I have found that a lot of the products there are absolute crap, so I'd hardly say it's the "beat-all" site for affiliate products...but I have faith in the words of Ed so I'm looking forward to sussing out this site when it comes up in the challenge. He also suggested that we take notes of some of the results we got for affiliate programs through Google, and drop them in Notepad which I have done.
Next was a hop, skip and a jump over to Google Trends, to see in graph form how our ideas were looking in the search department. One of my ideas didn't make the grade, having so little results that there was no graph for it, so I dumped it and grabbed another from the well, put it through the Day Two wringer and got it up to speed with the rest of my ideas. Google Trends is a great place to check how your search terms fair over the whole year, so you're able to see whether you have picked something seasonal, or whether it peaks at any points throughout the year for any particular reason. There are also news articles listed that are given A,B,C, etc labels, and these are also shown on the graph, so you can see if the spike in searches for your idea is based on it being simply because there happened to be a news article put out in relation to it. You are also able to view which regions/city/language the search term was most popular in.
Mine came out with some pretty general results. Only one of them had a spike at a particular time each year, with most just a steady cruise of spikes and troughs throughout the year. It was interesting to note that none of my searches had the US as the top region, despite the US being our target market. I don't know if this is a bad thing, Ed didn't place any importance on the region section. Still, I'm feeling less confident about my ideas today. I'm starting to feel they are either far too commercial, and therefore too competitive (despite what I wrote for Day 3, I'm thinking "why bother?"), or they are just too obscure...But the good thing is that as we whittle them down with the market research tools that we are being taught, I'll be learning the process so that if I do have to scrap the lot then I can simply start again and be able to do the market research on the new terms in a fraction of the time it's taken for these, as I'll already know the process and have taken notes...mainly this blog :)
So that's it, on to Day 7...only 3 days until I'm officially caught up - then I'll have some other Internet Marketing news to report on once I have more free time.
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