The Challenge Begins Again

So today is the first day of my new challenge. I've spent the last 31 posts going into the process of the Thirty Day Challenge with the help of Ed and Dan. I started two niches and put them through the 30DC process and ended up making only one sale. I've all but given up on one of the niches and am still working on the other one with the home of building upon it over time.

But today it's all about the new niche and starting to put it through the 30DC process. This is likely to happen a bit faster than the previous niches, as I am much more familiar with the process in general - and I only have one niche to work on. I'll be keeping this niche to myself, at least until I actually make a sale (touch wood). So in the interest of simplicity when it comes to explaining what I'm doing, I'll simply be referring to my niche as "stamp collecting". I know, it's not very inventive, and doesn't have much to do with a real niche, but it works for the purposes I'll be describing later on.

As I mentioned, I will be going through a large portion of the challenge process in a faster time than the first time around. In fact, in one day alone I've already reached Day 10 of the challenge. To know what I've already done to that point feel free to read over my original 30DC blog posts. The information I have discovered for my new niche are as follows:

Initial Searches
"Stamp Collecting" has 2873 searches per day in the free Wordtracker tool
The drop off from "Stamp Collecting" to "Rare Stamp Collecting" is 2873 - 719.

Competition Analysis
Through the Thirty Day Challenge Toolbar, the first site to come up for the broad match of "Stamp Collecting" was ranked at #8 in Google. That equates to good optimization prospects for my site(s). There were only 3 sponsored links that showed up in Google through the 30DC toolbar also. Also, plenty of sites charge for "Stamp Collecting" materials, so definitely potential for sales.

Through the Google search bar, it was the #6 site to be the first to use "Stamp Collecting" as a broad match - and that was actually a subpage of another site. Only 2 sponsored links showed up and again, plenty of sites that charge for "Stamp Collecting". Clearly a mature market and great potential.

Affiliate Prospects
There are a number of affiliate options for various "Stamp Collecting" sites. Sponsored links also have general affiliate websites but none that are "Stamp" specific. Actually, I already went into Clickbank and found a product with great stats that I'll be using. I know that's going a little against the teachings of Ed but I thought it wouldn't hurt to have a look once the other stats started to shape up. Mind you, the above section is more about seeing if people are offering affiliate schemes, which equates to a niche that people pay money for, rather than seeing if there is an affiliate product for me to promote.

Google Trends
No news articles. Search trend has steadily grown since the beginning of 2004. It peaked in August 2007 and has declined slightly since but not significantly. Doesn't seem to have any major trends other than the search volume rising slightly during the US summer period. Understandable. Having just missed the US summer that will mean I won't get the traffic of a couple of months ago but it's not enough of a decline to keep me away from the niche. Search volume is still quite high throughout the year. By next summer I could have developed a great site and catch the extra traffic with it (fingers crossed).


Checking Umbrella Phrase
Apart from "Stamp Collecting" I had thought of targeting other phrases relating to my main keywords. After checking out other phrases under my keywords of "Stamp Collecting" I found that there weren't enough searches to warrant the extra work. In GTrends, "Stamp Collecting" has 1724 searches a day against a competition volume of 193,000 websites. The Thirty Day Challenge process taught us to stick to searches over 100 a day and competition of less than 30,000 pages. It is my understanding that the criteria was only for use at the beginning, and that as we became more confident with our handling of the lessons we could tackle larger niches. Well that's what I'm doing and if you look at the above stats I've got a pretty good chance if I do the work.

As I mentioned, the original criteria was 100 searches per day against no more than 30,000 sites. Here I have 193,000 competing sites which is a little over 6 times the amount I'm supposed to have. In comparison, my niche is getting 1724 searches per day which is 17 times the amount necessary. With those two put together my ration is actually much better than if I was sticking with just 100 searches a day and 30,000 competing pages. Obviously I will have my work cut out for me, but I'll also be tapping into a much larger traffic stream so the chance for success is greater.

Web 2.0 Properties
So I'm up to Day 10 of the challenge process, just like that. Day 10 is to have a look through Google after doing an exact phrase match search for my niche, and to check for results in the "Web 2.0" categories. This means sites such as Squidoo and StumbleUpon returning results in my niche. What that can mean is that someone is already optimizing their stuff for the keywords I have chosen. That could mean extra hard competition, but it doesn't necessarily mean that I should steer clear of it. If I found I wasn't getting as large amount of traffic as I expected then it could be attributed to this part of the process. Still, according to the market research I've done I should still be able to get a fair whack of the traffic if I work hard enough. After doing the exact match phrase for my keyword in Google I found that the first Web 2.0 property to appear was an Ezine article, at #17, and not for my exact phrase match anyway ("Rare Stamp Collecting" instead of just "Stamp Collecting"). So all indicators look good.

Bloglines
So now is the time for setting up my Bloglines account to receive "Stamp Collecting" news and blogs. From here I'll start gathering information to place in my blogs, Squidoo lenses, etc.

That also means the hard grind of writing frequently about a new niche phrase, which I've had trouble with in the past. Still, after getting through the previous two niches I worked on relatively well I think I'll be okay. It's good that "Stamp Collecting" also happens to be a subject that interests me.

To Proceed Or Not Proceed

Day 24 of the challenge was a bit of a rehash with a side order of extra stuff. Ed started by talking about traffic, and said that now was the time to look at our niches and if they weren't getting the sort of traffic necessary for a successful start-up then we should probably cut them loose. The amount of traffic necessary isn't necessarily based on the stats we got from Gtrends, either, as that was really only showing what you could be looking at once you are in the #1 or #2 position for your keyword phrase on Google. Most of us, of course, are not at that point. We are, afterall, after 200 visitors to our blog each and every day, with a hope that a certain percentage of those clicking through to our product/sales page. I thought this was a little strange, since not all the SEO tactics had been discussed, so alot of people (myself included) were not ranking as high as we could be, as we probably would be, once all the tactics were put into place. Still, I did have to concede that even with the extra tactics to come over the last 6 days, my WiFi blog was possibly up for getting the chop. The only thing was, of course, that I hadn't given it the link love that it needed, as I wanted to concentrate on the best Wii games blog first. I'm actually contemplating making a post on the 30DC forum, asking for a team of around 5 or 6 people to become a "link love" team, and just work on helping each other out when necessary. I guess it can't hurt and who knows, I might get some interest.

It was interesting to note that if Gtrends is saying you should be getting 200 visits for a #1 or #2 rank in Google, that it will drop to about 60 visits for #3, and around 30-40 for #4, etc. Most people have their Google search results set to default, which is 10 results per page, and most people do not click onto the 2nd page of results. They will refine their search before they do that if what they want can't be found on page 1. So it's important to get to a ranking of at least 10 to really see results.SEO

Ed then went on to talk about clusters. A cluster is where you create content on a bunch of different platform and have it all pointing to your product. These platforms all work on your main keyword phrase, and you should be looking at 4 or 5 in each cluster. Clusters can include, by are not exclusive to, Blogger blog, wordpress blog, Squidoo lens, Hubpage, Ezine article. They should all have at least one link each that points to your product, as well as possibly having links to each other along the way, just to increase your authority/backlinks. Backlinks will be a topic that is discussed at a later date.

As you build up a cluster for your keyword phrase (sausage making tips), you can then create another cluster that centers around another keyword phrase in that same niche (sausage making recipes) and another (sausage making supplies) until you have several clusters, all in the same niche, all pointing to the same products, but using different keywords to capture different search traffic, increasing your chances of getting that illusive 200 visits per day.

Rehash, Repeat, Reinforce

As you can tell by the title Day nine of the challenge was mostly about going back over the lessons of yesterday. It seems that people were having a bit of trouble with the lesson and Google Trends itself, and so Ed made a car cast (podcast in a car) as well as a couple of videos reexplaining what Rob had taken us through yesterday. I think that due to my time with the Immediate Edge program, and having seen part of this technique used, I didn't have a problem understanding where Rob was coming from - but it's always good to have what I thought was going on confirmed, by Ed no less. The one other thing Ed mentioned, which I'd also heard about through The Immediate Edge, was that we need to think in terms of the magic number of 200 - that being only 1 in 200 people who visit your "money page" will actually part with their hard-earned money. This doesn't sound all that encouraging, I know...but if you're getting 100 searches a day for your key phrase, and you're at the top (or near the top) of Google, then it could really only be a matter of a couple of days before you get a sale, thereby completing the challenge. And if you think that each niche has several keyword phrases that can bring in traffic, then you might be able to accumulate more than 200 searches in a day with all your keyword phrases pointing to the same money page, thereby making at least one sale a day...and it can only get better the more time you spend on it. The crucial part of all this is to make sure your phrases are getting traffic, by going through the market research steps as laid out by Ed and the team. As Rob Somerville put it, it takes you just as long to create a site for a term that is getting searches, as it does for one that isn't, so why waste that time on a term that isn't when some simple market research can confirm it for you? I can only probably see a dip in motivation if, once on my own, I'm unable to find another niche that brings in a healthy amount of traffic - but I have an ever increasing number of niche ideas to work with, and I realise that a lot of it at the start is going to be trial and error. Sure, I may have done the market research, I may see there is plenty of traffic for my keyword phrase, and so I create a site to sell a product...but if my site then stinks I won't make a sale no matter how many people are dropping in for a look-see...so down the track, when sites are being built and tested, we'll be able to see what works and what doesn't - and I'm sure that will be one of the many things left to go through by Ed and the gang, to make the process even easier. But I'm getting way ahead of myself.

Ed did say that at this point we should be thinking about only taking 2 of our niches on to the next phase, to put more focus on them. I'm not sure what the next phase is, but seeing as I've already whittled it down to 3 niches through the market researching, I might as well take all 3 through for now and I can always get rid of one if the work in the next phase is too much for 3 niches.

Bring on Day 10!

And Then There Were Three

Day 8 of the challenge has come and gone and I am now down to just 3 niches, which is okay since I didn't care for most of the others anyway...Of the 3 that are left, one is a subject I am really interested in already, one is something I know absolutely nothing about, and one is something I know a bit about but very little. Both the last two are subjects that I am interested in knowing more about, which certainly would help when it come to gathering information down the track. I know Ed and Dan find the thrill on Internet Marketing in learning about new niches they had previously known nothing about, and I certainly hope that down the track I can find that sort of enthusiasm for anything due to the marketing prospects...but at the moment I know myself well enough to know that I find it hard to get enthusiastic about a subject that doesn't interest me...so I'm glad that the subjects that do remain after all the market research testing are ones that do hold my interest.

So, anyway, I should probably explain how it came to be that my niches have been narrowed by one since yesterday. Ed's lessons for today revolved around getting some sort of confirmation that the number of searches per day that were coming up for my niches in Wordtracker was accurate, or not. It's all well and good for Wordtracker to tell you that you're getting 200 searches a day for your keywords, but apparently there have been a lot of cases where people have used that information to produce a sales site, only to find that they go no traffic whatsoever. As we know, Wordtracker is only an educated "guesstamite" of the searches for a day, and uses a couple of sites to gather this information. Unfortunately, one of these sites is not Google, as that would pretty much clear everything up (as it's Google rankings that we are going after here). Google are pretty tight lipped about the actual number of searches a particular keyword phrase can get in a day so it's was up to Ed and his "lab" - Rob Sommerville, to try and find a way of being able to double check the Wordtracker results. They feel they have managed to do this through Google Trends.

Google Trends is a place where you can see in graph form, just how your search terms have been going. Unfortunately, there are no actual numbers on the graph to tell you how many searches the graph is showing at any particular point, but thankfully the big brains of Ed, Rob and Dan managed to figure out a way that you can get a rough indication. By using a search term with a known about of searches per day as a baseline, we are then able to enter our search term alongside that one for comparison. So using one of Dan's keyword phrases, that of "Male Yeast Infection", where he knew that he was getting 500 page hits per day due to his statistic counter, we are able to see if our keywords get enough traffic to warrant going further with them.

Now, this is by no means an exact science. As I mentioned the graph shows search results, while Dan is only able to gather stats for people who have clicked through to his site. He is in the #2 position in Google for that term so it's safe to say that a majority of the searchers who do click on a link will be clicking on his, but obviously not all of them will. The idea behind this is not about getting exact results anyway, it's simply a test to confirm that there is enough traffic on your keyword phrase to go ahead with the next phase. If Wordtracker was displaying 1000 results a day but Google Trends didn't have anything show up then you would know that, for that keyword, Wordtracker wasn't accurate. Then, to add to the confusion, we find out that Google doesn't usually display results on their graph for search terms that get lass than about 250 searches a day. That seems to throw a spanner in the works as, according to Wordtracker, most of my terms are only getting around 100-150 searches a day. Never fear, says Ed, for below the graph is another section that includes searches by region, by city and by language. It just so happens that "Male Yeast Infection" is only searched for through the English language, so therefore we know that the blue bar that represents the English number of searches is the full amount for Dan's click through stats...that being 500-550 a day. So if the blue bar is 500 searches, and our red bar comparison is only half the length, then we know that there are roughly 250 searches a day. As I mentioned before, this is far from being an exact science. It is merely a tool to double check the worth of your key word phrases.

Now, as so many people at the 30 Day Challenge were using "Male Yeast Infection" as their baseline, it meant that a spike occurred in the Google Trends search results. This then meant that the English blue bar was no longer reading 500 searches, but as Ed points out, if you still regard the bar as representing 500 searches, then you can't go wrong, as if the bar is actually representing more searches then your red bar by comparison is getting more than it would if the bar was only representing 500. Still with me? No, I thought not...

Suffice to say that as long as there is a little bit of red appearing, say 3mm at least, then all should be okay. Luckily for me, two of my phrases actually showed up on the graph as well, one of them being way higher than the baseline, while still only having around 30,000 page matches in Google...so I'm particularly chuffed about that. But, it did mean that one of my niches had to get the arse, so to speak, as it just didn't cut the mustard in comparison to the blue English bar, and when I tried to widen the niche by removing a keyword I found that there were far too many competing pages in Google for it...so it got the chop.

Thanks to Ed, Rob and Dan I'm feeling quietly confident about my last three niches as I move into Day 9 of the challenge.

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.