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.
Showing posts with label niche ideas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label niche ideas. Show all posts
Monday, October 1, 2007
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Chipping Away
So it's actually day 15 of the challenge today but I'm still chipping away at the Day 13 material, the content writing. I'm still finding it a bit of an obstacle, and I'm sure this is where a lot of people trip up and are never heard from again. I'm determined not to be one of those people. So eventhough I've only written 4 articles on my first keyword, and none on my second, I will push through and get this done - even if it means catching up over this weekend. The reason I've done 4 of one is because I took a sneak peak at the Day 14 material and in it Ed says we should write another 3 articles on our niche keywords. Seeing as I already had this fourth "angle" on my niche as a back-up, I thought I might as well give it a go. The niche I'm currently working on happens to be the one I knew nothing about before I started, and I'm surprised to find that I'm actually getting interested in it - so much so that I may look into obtaining it once I have some money rolling in. God knows I'll know all the ins and outs and problems associated with it by the time I'm done.
The second niche I haven't started on yet but will probably get going with that today. I hope to be able to write at least two pieces today, maybe three if I'm lucky. That will really narrow the catch-up gap. I'm still planning to check out the Day 15 video today, because I feel that if I get more insight into what we are going to be doing with this stuff, then I might have a better way of going about writing about it. Just a personal thing for me, others might be able to just write and write with no problems. I do prefer to know what it is I'm writing for, but I have to admit I've done better than I thought I would so far. I know 4 short pieces of content doesn't sound like much, but having to read all about a brand new topic that I had no knowledge of does take up time. It still has it's moments, as the niche is quite a technical one, and parts of it are hard to digest for the layman, but on the whole I'm getting better.
So back to it...
The second niche I haven't started on yet but will probably get going with that today. I hope to be able to write at least two pieces today, maybe three if I'm lucky. That will really narrow the catch-up gap. I'm still planning to check out the Day 15 video today, because I feel that if I get more insight into what we are going to be doing with this stuff, then I might have a better way of going about writing about it. Just a personal thing for me, others might be able to just write and write with no problems. I do prefer to know what it is I'm writing for, but I have to admit I've done better than I thought I would so far. I know 4 short pieces of content doesn't sound like much, but having to read all about a brand new topic that I had no knowledge of does take up time. It still has it's moments, as the niche is quite a technical one, and parts of it are hard to digest for the layman, but on the whole I'm getting better.
So back to it...
Monday, August 13, 2007
The Learning Phase
Day 10 of the challenge was about the gathering of information, and beginning to learn about our particular niches. I realise now why Ed had only wanted us to bring 2 niches into this exercise, as the work load begins to increase significantly from here on.
Ed started the day with his usual podcast, and then made a strange little video about doing one last little bit of market research. As he said it was something that was sort of hard to teach, but as experienced Internet Marketers, himself and Dan knew this technique more by looking than actually documenting the process. Anyway, he told us to have a look in Google and search for our niche keywords. We were then to look to the results to see if there were any, or many Web 2.0 results. By Web 2.0 he means results that include Squidoo lenses, Hub pages, Ezine articles, Tumblr blogs, etc...places where people are already using Web 2.0 sites to write about and possibly market niches such as ours. Now the reason I say this was a strange video was because once he had told us about this, saying that if our niche failed after we had done all the previous market research then this would probably be the reason, he told us to ignore what he had told us. I'm assuming he did this because the idea might confuse a lot of newbies (and I would have included myself in that group had I not been part of the Immediate Edge program - now of course, I know all about Squidoo and Hub and Ezine). Adding this into the mix could quite well add a level of complexity to the mix for a lot of people that they would simply crash and burn through frustration at not being able to understand the process at this point, and may very well chuck it all in. Ed made the video as to give full disclosure, so that if someone did do all the research but didn't get any traffic, then he could at least say that he had explained the reason why it had probably happened. I assume he believes that for this challenge it's certainly not an important enough part of the market research faze to be worrying, but at the same time it needed to be mentioned. I have the feeling it may have been more confusing to have made the video and then said to ignore it, but I understand why he had to do it, and I bet if there are experienced members in a team then they could probably go into more detail for the lesser experienced people.
Speaking of teams, I'm not sure if I have one anymore...at the start of the challenge we were all told that teams were the best way, and I got that and so asked to join a team. We got a handful of people together, I think 5 was the magic number, and I sent off an email to the guy who started the team saying I was interested. A few days later he sent out a group email with everyone's details, asking them to confirm that they still wanted on the team, and I sent off my confirmation. Since then I've had received maybe one email from each of them, only in response to me asking if the team was still a team. One of our team members started a Facebook group for our team, and only 4 out of 5 of us have joined it...the guy who started the team is the one who hasn't joined, but in his defense he says that he has been sick and needs to catch up. Mind you, the Facebook group has not had much activity since it was started, and the guy who started it, who is meant to be a member of my team hasn't even added me to his friends list despite me requesting to be his friend several days ago. I really thought there would be a bit more communication between team mates. I noticed in the stages of pre-season that other teams were doing teleconferencing on Skype, and coming up with fun team names, but getting correspondence out of my team has been a little like pulling teeth - nobody seems to want to communicate so I've pretty much resigned myself to doing this on my own. I know what people might say, well if YOU want to communicate then communicate...well, I HAVE been trying, and not getting much in response and I'm not the sort of guy who bangs his head on a brick wall for very long. Ok, that's my rant over...
The rest of Day 10 was about the gathering of information on our niches. For those who have chosen a niche they know little or nothing about, now is the time to learn. That goes for me, as the two niches I have chosen are both areas I know nothing about really. I just hope that as I learn about them I'm able to get interested. At the moment, though, it's just about getting snap shots of information and saving them in Google Notebook, a cool little tool for this exact purpose. Another fantastic technique that Ed has shown us is the way to be notified when new information on our niches comes our way. This process entails going to Google and doing a search for your niche under the Google News site. Now, in Ed's example his niche is "Free Speed Reading", but as it's a sub niche the news results are minimal, so he stuck with the umbrella phrase of "Speed Reading". Once he got his results he merely clicked on the RSS feed icon in the address bar of the browser, which took him to his Bloglines account and he saved the feed. This means now that anytime the word "Speed Reading" appears in a news article, Ed will get it delivered to his Bloglines account. Pretty bloody clever if you ask me. Then he did the same with the Blogs search section of Google and voila! He now has every blog that mentions "Speed Reading". Google, being the mother of all search engines, would pick up most blogs and news articles, and therefore Ed would receive a plethora of content which can be used down the track in the preparation of a product or sales page. Then it's just a matter of reading through these blogs and news articles, and seeing what makes you go WOW, or HMMM, and copying that into Google Notebook, storing it for future use. Hell, you may even learn a little about your niche along the way! Hats off to you, Ed, that's some cool IM shit right there!
So that's where I'm at right now. I'm concentrating on my two main niches, gathering information about what they are and cool things that others might find interesting about them. I haven't forgotten my third niche, and if I have time I will have a look for info regarding that, but it happens to be a niche that I already have quite an interest in, and know a bit about, so it's not imperative that I get stuff down during the thirty day challenge.
So, I'd better stop dribbling and get on with the learning phase
Ed started the day with his usual podcast, and then made a strange little video about doing one last little bit of market research. As he said it was something that was sort of hard to teach, but as experienced Internet Marketers, himself and Dan knew this technique more by looking than actually documenting the process. Anyway, he told us to have a look in Google and search for our niche keywords. We were then to look to the results to see if there were any, or many Web 2.0 results. By Web 2.0 he means results that include Squidoo lenses, Hub pages, Ezine articles, Tumblr blogs, etc...places where people are already using Web 2.0 sites to write about and possibly market niches such as ours. Now the reason I say this was a strange video was because once he had told us about this, saying that if our niche failed after we had done all the previous market research then this would probably be the reason, he told us to ignore what he had told us. I'm assuming he did this because the idea might confuse a lot of newbies (and I would have included myself in that group had I not been part of the Immediate Edge program - now of course, I know all about Squidoo and Hub and Ezine). Adding this into the mix could quite well add a level of complexity to the mix for a lot of people that they would simply crash and burn through frustration at not being able to understand the process at this point, and may very well chuck it all in. Ed made the video as to give full disclosure, so that if someone did do all the research but didn't get any traffic, then he could at least say that he had explained the reason why it had probably happened. I assume he believes that for this challenge it's certainly not an important enough part of the market research faze to be worrying, but at the same time it needed to be mentioned. I have the feeling it may have been more confusing to have made the video and then said to ignore it, but I understand why he had to do it, and I bet if there are experienced members in a team then they could probably go into more detail for the lesser experienced people.
Speaking of teams, I'm not sure if I have one anymore...at the start of the challenge we were all told that teams were the best way, and I got that and so asked to join a team. We got a handful of people together, I think 5 was the magic number, and I sent off an email to the guy who started the team saying I was interested. A few days later he sent out a group email with everyone's details, asking them to confirm that they still wanted on the team, and I sent off my confirmation. Since then I've had received maybe one email from each of them, only in response to me asking if the team was still a team. One of our team members started a Facebook group for our team, and only 4 out of 5 of us have joined it...the guy who started the team is the one who hasn't joined, but in his defense he says that he has been sick and needs to catch up. Mind you, the Facebook group has not had much activity since it was started, and the guy who started it, who is meant to be a member of my team hasn't even added me to his friends list despite me requesting to be his friend several days ago. I really thought there would be a bit more communication between team mates. I noticed in the stages of pre-season that other teams were doing teleconferencing on Skype, and coming up with fun team names, but getting correspondence out of my team has been a little like pulling teeth - nobody seems to want to communicate so I've pretty much resigned myself to doing this on my own. I know what people might say, well if YOU want to communicate then communicate...well, I HAVE been trying, and not getting much in response and I'm not the sort of guy who bangs his head on a brick wall for very long. Ok, that's my rant over...
The rest of Day 10 was about the gathering of information on our niches. For those who have chosen a niche they know little or nothing about, now is the time to learn. That goes for me, as the two niches I have chosen are both areas I know nothing about really. I just hope that as I learn about them I'm able to get interested. At the moment, though, it's just about getting snap shots of information and saving them in Google Notebook, a cool little tool for this exact purpose. Another fantastic technique that Ed has shown us is the way to be notified when new information on our niches comes our way. This process entails going to Google and doing a search for your niche under the Google News site. Now, in Ed's example his niche is "Free Speed Reading", but as it's a sub niche the news results are minimal, so he stuck with the umbrella phrase of "Speed Reading". Once he got his results he merely clicked on the RSS feed icon in the address bar of the browser, which took him to his Bloglines account and he saved the feed. This means now that anytime the word "Speed Reading" appears in a news article, Ed will get it delivered to his Bloglines account. Pretty bloody clever if you ask me. Then he did the same with the Blogs search section of Google and voila! He now has every blog that mentions "Speed Reading". Google, being the mother of all search engines, would pick up most blogs and news articles, and therefore Ed would receive a plethora of content which can be used down the track in the preparation of a product or sales page. Then it's just a matter of reading through these blogs and news articles, and seeing what makes you go WOW, or HMMM, and copying that into Google Notebook, storing it for future use. Hell, you may even learn a little about your niche along the way! Hats off to you, Ed, that's some cool IM shit right there!
So that's where I'm at right now. I'm concentrating on my two main niches, gathering information about what they are and cool things that others might find interesting about them. I haven't forgotten my third niche, and if I have time I will have a look for info regarding that, but it happens to be a niche that I already have quite an interest in, and know a bit about, so it's not imperative that I get stuff down during the thirty day challenge.
So, I'd better stop dribbling and get on with the learning phase
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!
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!
Saturday, August 11, 2007
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.
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.
Friday, August 10, 2007
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.
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.
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!
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!
Thursday, August 9, 2007
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...
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...
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