To Google Or Not To Goo...well, actually

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.

The best laid plans...

Well it had been my intention to plough through 3 days worth of 30 day challenge material each day in order to catch up after being offline for a week, but that hasn't exactly gone to plan so far - having only completed day one yesterday and here it is noon on my day two and I've only just completed watching and listening and writing stuff down. But here goes my summary for Day Two of the Thirty Day Challenge.

Today's lessons were all about the getting of ideas, and also what markets to avoid. It makes sense that a neophyte like myself would not attempt to try his hand at marketing products and services for highly competitive niches - a very small fish in a very big ocean. No, what is important is to learn how to make that $10 in the month, and once I've gone through the process once it will get easier and easier with each attempt, and perhaps then I can venture out of my little pond for deeper waters. So Ed wants me to come up with 7 ideas by the end of this day to take into day 3, and I must say that it's actually going to be hard to pick out only 7 ideas from the small mountain of niches I've already accumulated with a minimum of fuss. Ed's suggestions for looking for ideas include eBay Pulse, Technorati, Google Groups, Google Hot Trends and even Yahoo Answers. I will be having a look through those, but I spotted on the 30 Day challenge forums a thread where people such as me have listed sites they have used to scour for ideas - and there really is a sea of places out there to search for ideas, and once you start looking you really do begin racking up quite a list with not much effort. Now, whether the ideas I come up with are any good is another story, and one I'll obviously be finding out more about on upcoming training days, but the ideas are there and that's what's important.

As Ed put things (making very good sense to a newbie like me), the sites he suggests can be broken down thus:

eBay Pulse - Where you can find out what people are buying
Technorati - Where you can find out what people are writing about
Google Groups - Where you can find out what people are passionate about/interested in
Google Hot Trends - Where you can find out what people are searching for
Yahoo Answers - Where you can find out what people need help with

All are great avenues therefore, for developing products and/or services.

So far, however, I've only checked out the Random Niche Generator as well as various other blogs to get a list of around 60 niche ideas. I'm off now to search through Ed's suggestions, as well as eHow.com, MyGoals.com, NicheBrowser.com and TrendHunter.com, just for back up purposes. I intend to be doing this internet marketing gig for a long long time so too many ideas are surely never enough...