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.

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.

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!