The easiest way to start making money on line for most people is via affiliate marketing. But, if you really want to make significant money you  need to give serious thought to creating your own information product.

In this second video in my Information Product Creation Series I explain some of the reasons why.

[tags]affiliate marketing,information product creation, product creation, information product, info product, info product creation, ethical bribes, opt in forms, email marketing [/tags]

Technorati Tags: Affiliate marketing, email marketing, ethical bribes, info product, info product creation, information product, Information Product Creation, opt in forms, Product Creation

I am starting a new series today on Information Product Creation. I intend to do the bulk of this via short videos recorded with my Flip Camera.  The first is below.

[tags]information product creation, product creation, information product, info product, info product creation, ethical bribes, opt in forms, email marketing[/tags]

Technorati Tags: email marketing, ethical bribes, info product, info product creation, information product, Information Product Creation, opt in forms, Product Creation

Do you need help getting your online marketing off the ground?

If you do, I would like to help, but first things first, I need to get a better handle on where you are currently in terms of your existing computer skills and also in terms of your existing marketing plan.

If you haven’t mastered some of the basics, I may want to send you to a program Marlon Sanders has put together called, “How to Make Your Computer Do What You Want It To — The Ultimate Beginners Guide.”

It is designed to help computer beginners or relative novices get the basics down fast. It’s a paid program but well worth the investment if you are not “up to speed” in basic computer skills like

How To Download exe’s, pictures, programs, PDF’s and MP3 files:

How to use Email, attached files, and understand email terms:

How to use Windows Explorer:

How to cut, copy and paste, drag and drop, open multiple windows and use your program files:

How to use FTP Programs to put up your own web site:

How to take the mystery and frustration out of using Windows: Your Windows Desktop — Windows System Tray — The Taskbar –

How to correctly save files.

And more…

The above are prerequisites for anyone who wants to maximize the potential of their computer. Many programs will assume you know all of these things.  If you don’t you will not be able to take advantage of the training I or anyone else has to offer you.

Now don’t feel bad if you are less than certain in any of these area’s. You would be surprised at how many people are in the same boat.  But it is time that you do something about it.  This is the first baby step.

The next basic level is the second baby step. You will need to learn about web hosting, cpanel and setting up auto responders.  I will discuss these and some possible resources in my next posting here.

In the meanwhile, if you are less than 100% on any of the above topics be sure to invest some time and effort in learning them.  Marlon’s program, “How to Make Your Computer Do What You Want It To — The Ultimate Beginners Guide.” will give you the essential solid foundation you need.

In the meanwhile, I welcome emails to enetwal@gmail.com on any other questions you may have of a beginner or advanced nature.

[tags]online marketing, computer basics, how to use computer, internet marketing basics, newbie computer course[/tags]

Technorati Tags: computer basics, how to use computer, internet marketing basics, newbie computer course, online marketing

I just created a new report to give away on my newest blog on Public Speaking.  It’s called An Anatomy of a Speech.

In it I provide some solid tips on how to go about writing a speech or business presentation.  To help promote it I also created a new Flip camera video which  is below.

I’ve recently become quite aware of the need to keep these videos short. This one is well under two minutes. I like my little Flip camera, even though it doesn’t like my “Es’s”

Some day I will upgrade, but for now it’s adequate. (at least I hope it is.)

Go to Top Public Speaking Tips to get your copy.

Technorati Tags: Public Speaking, Speech

As many of you will know, I have been taking Doug Champigny’s PowerStart 2010 course the past few weeks. It’s a four week course and we are in week three.

This week we are working on podcasts and video as well as continuing to pursue article marketing in support of the new blogs we have each created as part of the course.  Last week we focused on getting a product created using both Master Resale Rights and Private Label Rights.  The first week was real heavy duty with a lot of article writing as well as blog set up and much more.

I have just finished the podcast section of this weeks work and am about to move on to the video section, but thought I would do one more quick Flip Camera video today to sing the praises of this course, and what it has done for me so far.

Unfortunately, my little Flip Camera is catching all my explosive S’s and you will hear them when you watch.  But please don’t let that get in your way.

Doug is going to be offering the course again starting the first week in March. It may be right for you, it might not be. That’s why I created the video below.

Listen and if it is for you, sign up at

http://askearlabout.com/PowerStart2010.php

By the way be sure to visit my new blog,  its at

www.TopPublicSpeakingTips.com

[tags]powerstart2010, internet marketing, internet marketing training, Doug Champigny[/tags]

Technorati Tags: Doug Champigny, Internet Marketing, internet marketing training, powerstart2010

The Following Article is from Marlin Sanders and is used with permission. In the article he promotes his recent release the Writer’s Secret. I recommend this to you, if your meet the criteria Marlin explains in the article below.

—-

If you were to look at the inbox on my email account, you’d see a zillion billion emails from marketers telling you all the things you need to buy to succeed online.

Whew!

You can’t buy all of ‘em, read all of ‘em or do all of ‘em.

What a pickle you have yourself in now!  What do you do?

I just keep teaching and preaching the road less taken.  Here’s how to avoid dead ends and stay on the straight and narrow path to online success by focusing on the ONE thing you must do.

Know what model you’re following

There are different models for making coin online.

1.  The affiliate model

You promote affiliate programs by getting organic search engine ranking or buying pay-per-click or other types of ads.

If you DO use affiliate marketing, make SURE you’re building your own list BEFORE you promote affiliate products. Your list is absolutely key.

– Article marketing is an organic seo (search engine
optimization) play. This is what MOST people do who are on the affiliate model.

Article marketing DOES work. But it’s much better if you drive your clicks to what we call an email capture or name squeeze page. That way you can get people on your email list and follow up.

Just understand that if you’re doing article marketing, it’s a play to get traffic from the search engines and also the article directories you submit to.

The downside of the affiliate model is you’re doing the hard work of getting new customer and putting them into someone else’s funnel. The hardest thing you will EVER do is get a new customer.

So as an affiliate, you typically do the HARD part and often make only a 1-time commission for this while the OTHER person, the merchant, sells product after product to that new customer and pays you nada.

Now, I have an affiliate program. But we pay on many back-end or follow up sales and not just the initial sale.

But would you rather be at the top or the bottom of the food chain? I advocate being at the top where others are YOUR affiliates.

Understand that a lot of people who advocate the affiliate model use that approach as a trojan horse to recruit affiliates for THEIR products.

Nothing wrong with the affiliate model to start with. But become a producer and promoter as soon as you can.

– Buying ads

Anything that focuses on pay-per-click (ppc) or other methods of buy advertising is usually an affiliate model.

2. The Web 2.0

For the most part, all the talk you hear about web 2.0 translates into getting higher rankings in Google or the search engines. So it’s an organic seo play.

Web 2.0 sounds like it’s some new beast. For the most part, it’s a way to get inbound links to your web sites with higher authority and trust. There’s also the possibility of getting traffic from the web 2.0 sites themselves.

You’re still either promoting your own products or someone elses as an affiliate. And if it’s the latter, you’re doing the hard part of getting new customers and putting them into someone else’s funnel who will THEN suck out the lifetime value (that is, a whole bunch of other sales in a compressed time frame) and pay you zilch on those sales.

I try to play fair by paying backend commissions to my affiliates.

3. The CPA model

CPA (cost per action) is an affiliate model where you typically get paid per action like lead generated vs. per sale.

You’re STILL promoting someone else’s product vs. your own.

The challenge with the CPA model is you typically aren’t building a list that has clear cut needs you can sell to over and over.

What you ARE doing is putting people into someone else’s recurring billing system. MOST CPA offers are built on recurring billing. With Visa’s new crackdown, that will likely change.

There’s nothing wrong with this model. But I prefer an evergreen model where I build customer equity. In other words, I build a list of loyal customers with common needs and desires who buy from me over and over again.

4. The organic seo model

This concept dominates a lot of the affiliate models and a lot of online marketing talk.

I actually enjoy learning about this model and have a filipina working on it (I hired her using the gameplan at outsourceplan.com).

Anyway, the downside of this model is it’s SLOW to get those rankings and requires skill and know how. And the big thing is, you’re subject to Google slaps, whims and algo changes.

Google can change HOW it ranks sites and overnight your income can be zapped. OF course, there ARE other search engines and you can lower your risk by spending part of your time focusing on those also.

I think seo has a place if you outsource it properly. But I think it’s risky to build your whole business on it.

One of the problems in learning how to do organic seo is there are so many theories about what works and doesn’t.

The main game here is to get inbound links to your website. But Google changes their mind about what types of links are acceptable and what aren’t.

So you have to always stay on top of the game. And there is a ton of conflicting information. I’ve invested a lot of time and money just boiling the topic down to some evergreen things you can do that aren’t likely to get zapped by Google.

The other problem with this model is that the amount of competition for keywords KEEPS increasing! More and more people keep looking for low competition keywords.

So the competition for low competition keywords keeps increasing and you have to work harder to maintain rankings for those “easy” keywords.

This is OK. It’s all a game. And with proper effort and outsourcing it’s doable. I wouldn’t base my entire business on it because of the risks involved.

The MAIN thing to know here is when you see people tout all these huge numbers from an organic seo model, you can BET there’s a whole lot of something going on in the background. And probably quite a bit more than they let on about.

5. The PPC model

My friends Joel Peterson and Kirt Christensen totally rock at this.

PPC is good if you can watch your numbers very closely.
You’re spending money so you have to really stay on top of it.

The risks are similar to organic seo. Google likes to change the rules as soon as most people figure out WHAT those rules are!

Which isn’t all bad. It weeds out the competition.

You should know that a LOT of the gigantic numbers printed in sales letters for products about ppc are from selling things that are very broad market like ringtones.

If the product being promoted isn’t revealed in the ad, this should be a clue.

You’ll ALSO find out that a lot of the big success stories involve products that are either recurring billing or very large ticket like $3,000. If you can get people on a webinar and sell something for $3,000, by all means DO IT!

I’ve never concentrated on verbal selling enough to do that. I don’t like doing it. It’s not my cup of tea. Just understand that anytime you see really large numbers tossed around, what is actually DONE to make those numbers usually isn’t revealed.

Which is my beef with some of the products sold on the topic.  If you don’t show me HOW to do what YOU do but CLAIM you do, then you didn’t play fair.

Is the method fully disclosed? From what I see, a lot of the ppc stuff never reveals HOW the numbers in the sales letter were actually generated.

PPC is a pretty complex Game.  Still, if you focus on it, you can do well.

I don’t like having my future depend on the whims of Google.  Yuk!
I also don’t like watching numbers that closely.

But if you’re willing to spend 25 g’s in a month to bring in 100 g’s, you CAN do it via ppc.

If you DO PPC, you’ll probably need automation tools like the one Joel Peterson showed on the webinar I did with him the other day.

Very cool tool.  I also like buying banner ads as Joel does because there’s a lot less risk of a Google slap than with search.

I’m EXPLORING doing ppc with this software.  I need to see if I can get a process worked up that my oursourcer can use.  I don’t do this kind of thing myself but don’t mind outsourcing it.

6.  The Writer’s Secret model

The Writer’s Secret is about producing and promoting your OWN products.

And it’s about getting traffic via your OWN affiliate program, which is hands down the best source of traffic in many niches.

Here are a few advantages of the model:

a.  Full disclosure

There isn’t some deep dark secret you have to join a high-end coaching program to discover.

b.  It’s simple, logical and practical

I’m NOT saying anyone can do it.  I AM saying it’s pretty darned logical and practical.  And it’s reasonable to think someone who works at it can do it.

c.  It’s evergreen

Nothing about it that’s going to “stop working” or “get slapped” tomorrow.

========================
How To Choose Your Model
========================

1.  Know what you ARE and are NOT good at

If you’re good at spreadsheets and detailed work, ppc is a great choice  for you.

If you’re good at routine, sustained effort over an extended period of time and you’re analytical, organic seo may be your cup of tea.

If you’re good at writing, creating or talking on video or screen capture video, the Writer’s Secret approach may be for you.

2.  Choose a method with full disclosure

Do NOT start using a method where all the secrets aren’t revealed (or available at a cost you can afford) and where you have to spend $250, $500 or $1,000 a month for coaching to get the REAL scoop.

A lot of systems sound good. But the info product on it is really a glorified teaser for the coaching program.  So the method isn’t actionable to you.

You MUST have an actionable, doable method that does NOT have these deep dark secrets you don’t know that are required for success.

3.  Ask yourself if your model matches your abilities

Right now, the idea of video sales pitches is making the rounds.
It’s a great method.

Really works.

BUT — if you can’t talk, don’t like to talk, aren’t verbal or articulate, then save your money.

If you like to write, follow a writer’s path.

If you like to talk, then do video products and teleseminars, webinars or video sales letters to sell your products.

4.  See through the fad pitches

When your inbox gets POUNDED with people endorsing a new product or method, it has LITTLE to do with how great the product or method is and a LOT to do with how skilled the person was in doing reciprocal mailings, networking and pulling off a major launch.

It has VERY little to do with the actual value of the product FOR YOU.

Keep your head screwed on.

5.  Once you know your model, focus on your model.

Cut out the noise.

You can’t know everything nor do everything.

=======================================================
Marlon Sanders helps people with hopes and dreams figure out how to turn those into reality by selling stuff on the Internet.  http://www.thewritersecret.com

//////////////////////

REPRINT RIGHTS: You have permission to use the above article without omission and including the resource box.
You have the right to insert your reseller URL for any products I mention

Technorati Tags: Affiliate marketing, internet Business Model, Marlon Sanders, The Affiliate model, Writer's Secret

I have started a new blog on Public Speaking called Top Public Speaking Tips

Here is a video I did earlier today about it.

Technorati Tags: Powerstart 2010, public speaking tips, Publis speaking, Stage Fright, top public speaking tips

What’s 18 months worth? It depends on where you are. Watch the video and see what I am getting at.

Internet Marketing Intensive

Hurry Special Pricing Ends Midnight CST Feb 1.

The Giveaway is Back.  While I feared it may have died last year in a flood of same old events vanilla events it appears to be alive and kicking due in large part to Rodger Hyatt and friends.

He has put together two very successful events in the past few months and has just announced a third which is now open for Joint Venture partners called EZ-IM Giveaway.

The secret to Rodger’s approach is that he has discovered ways to make it worthwhile for people to promote the events.  And he has built a huge following of large and small marketers to participate in the process.  If you are building a list and have a product you can contribute, you too should join as a JV partner.

In his last effort with Gary Simpson and Stephanie Mulac, called the Self Improvement Giveaway I had 130 people download my gift and join my list.

Now these days, I sometimes get that many and more from some of the ad swaps I do, but if you don’t already have a list in the thousands or tens of thousands, a hundred plus people is pretty good.  Had I upgraded, (and I wish I had) I could have offered three gifts and I probably would have easily double that number.

Now I going to repeat the old saying here. Bear with me. The money is in the list.  There I said it.  It’s actually in the relationship you build with your list, but the saying is a truism.  One I heard but didn’t fully understand and more unfortunately did not take action on as soon as I should have.

Once I did, through giveaways and then ad swaps my income has dramatically improved.  If you are relatively new to internet marketing and haven’t focused on list building yet. Start.

And a good way is via Giveaways. What ever your niche, create a short report you can giveaway. Create a Short Squeeze page, and get your product listed in the EZ-IM Giveaway.  It opens on February 5th at 10:00AM EST.  Join today and get your product ready if you don’t already have one.

So why are these events successful? Well in large part because they have been designed to encourage people with lists to actually promote them.  The upgrade money flows to the people who recruit the JV’s, which encourages participation. This increases the variety of products offered so there is even more reason for members to go to the event and shop for gifts they can actually use.

I don’t know what Rodger and his partners, The Mutrie Boys, Charles and Philip, have in mind for this event, but I am expecting some mid event promotions to encourage promotion by the JV’s. This is good for everybody.

In the past on most giveaways the bulk of the action occurred on the first few days and then next to nothing there after.  In the SI event I was getting sign-ups all through the event, and a big burst toward the end. It was gratifying.

I don’t normally write about Giveaways on this blog.  I have another where I regularly post current and upcoming events. http://AskEarlAbout.com/GiveAways

I do so today, because these guys have made a difference that can be of real value to you.  This event will get a lot of traffic, and if you have an attractive report that highlights your niche, I can promise you will get a nice list of prospects.   If you don’t have a report yet, use this event as the reason to create it.  You have a few days to do so.  Get it done.  You can use it over and over again.  Sign up today and get busy.

EZ-IM Giveaway

Technorati Tags: Charles Mutrie, EZ-IM Giveaway, Giveaways, List Building, Mutrie, Philip Mutrie, Rodger Hyatt

When it comes to Internet Marketing, there is a lot of material out there that is little more than rehashed ebooks that go on about the same tiresome things.  I was half expecting Instant Fast Traffic to be the same, because admittedly I’ve become jaded to these products that are churned out on a regular basis. I even had the intention to check it out, and then get a refund before the 60 days guarantee expired. Surprisingly however, I found that Instant Fast Traffic was a diamond in the rough, because the strategies covered within all its three modules were intriguing, to say the least.

Instant Fast Traffic

The brains behind Instant Fast Traffic are Joel Chue and Alvin Huang, guys I haven’t even heard much about, but if Instant Fast Traffic is anything to go by, these guys are the ones to watch. Instant Fast Traffic is a 3 Module guide on traffic generation strategies, and each module is guaranteed to give you a free pass to a massive source of traffic from practically anywhere on the Internet. You’ll find strategies covering link building to article directory submissions, and even social networking. Let’s take a closer look at what these 3 modules cover.

The first module, called Search Domination Traffic, talks about strategies any marketer can use to get their websites optimized for search engines through link building. From email signatures to classifieds to web rings, these elements are often overlooked, but surprisingly effective in getting your links out there for droves of traffic to click through. I personally have never thought of using Wikipedia as a source of free traffic, so it came as a surprise when I discovered that I could indeed funnel traffic from Wikipedia to my website.

The second module, aptly named Content Traffic Invasion, covers content strategies and viral strategies. In essence, it teaches you how to optimize your sites and links using keywords, how article directory submissions can give you those much needed backlinks, and how forum marketing can be a highly effective tool in your traffic generation efforts. It also covers strategies that can make your links viral, from using quizzes to giving away free content, and even using Resell Rights Products to generate massive traffic to your sites.  Now I use and preach a number of these, but these guy cover stuff I never thought of.

The last module, Underground Traffic Funnels, discusses ways social networking sites can be used to promote your links, and how one can make their links even more viral through these sites. From social bookmarking to using MySpace and Facebook, Joel and Alvin leaves no stone unturned as they discuss practically every aspect there is to know about getting your links out there through social networking, joint ventures, and even offline strategies that you can leverage.

Newbies don’t worry about getting lost in all that information. There are process maps that detail exactly what needs to be done in a easy-to-understand guide for each of the modules, so I don’t see where anyone can’t succeed using the strategies discussed in Instant Fast Traffic. All in all, this is one resource I would recommend if you’re in need of a quick traffic boost.

Instant Fast Traffic

Technorati Tags: Alvin Huang, Instant Fast Traffic, Joel Chue, traffic

I am impressed with Marlon Sanders.  Now let me be honest, he scared me away with his frentic style the first few times I encountered him. He talks a mile a minute and looks a tad bit crazed, but there is definite method to his madness.

Here’s a short video I created that emphasizes a key point or feature of his current offer for his Marketing Dashboard.

Now Check out his offer:

Marketing Dashboard

]]> http://microbusinessspecialist.com/blog/microbusinesstips/not-1-not-2-not-3-but-4-times/feed/ 7 http://microbusinessspecialist.com/blog/market-research/whos-afraid-of-competition/ http://microbusinessspecialist.com/blog/market-research/whos-afraid-of-competition/#comments Tue, 12 Jan 2010 07:34:31 +0000 enetwal http://microbusinessspecialist.com/blog/?p=637

We have run into a number of competitors during our niche market research process.   Hopefully made some notes about them along the way.

While the initial inclination is to be discouraged by the competitors, the truth is that for the most part, they are a good sign. One you should be grateful for, because their presence in the market indicates that people are willing to spend money in your niche. Thus when you get your product(s) out there you should have a good shot at making money.

If there are a lot of competitors, that means a lot of people are making money.

What you want to do is subscribe to their mailing lists, and analyze their follow-up emails.  You want to go to their web sites and make a copy of their sales pages and analyze them as well.

Make note of the commissions they pay, the % of payout etc.  Figure out how long they have been around. Do they frequently update their web pages? Do they offer bonuses. What types of free offers do they use? And what type of up-sells do they present?  What are their price points?

You want to make a study of the major competitors and then you want to explore what they don’t offer.  What could they do better?

You want to do a SWOT analysis. Swot stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

For each of your top competitors, identify what their strength is, Where are they weak, how can you turn it into an advantage for you, and what will be most difficult to overcome.

Odds are you won’t become the dominant force in your niche overnight. But you can find a toe hold and build from there.  Find an angle of attack keeping in mind everything you have learned during your market research. And then don’t over analyze.

While it’s vitally important to research your niche don’t get stuck in the process.  Get it done, and create a plan and take action.

You have picked a niche, you have researched it and determined that it is vital. You have identified the types of problems people in the niche are looking for solutions on, and have a good idea of who those people are.

Now it’s time to create a product or find one of more products you can represent as an affiliate.

Technorati Tags: competition, Market Research, niche market research, niche marketing, SWOT, SWOT Analysis

The final free tool we are going to discuss on this series on niche marketing is Quantcast.com.  The more you know about your niche’s demographics the better and this is where we are going to find the best information quickly and easily.

Go to www.Quantcast.com and once there register for free.

Then pick one of the top web sites you have found in your niche.  Quantcast will provide you with information on their site and their demographics.  You may want to check out three or four or more sites to see how the results are the same of different. If they are different you will want to reason out why.

By examining the demographics of people going to the top competitors in you niche you should be able to pick up some solid insights into the audience you will want to target with your site or product.

Quantcast is a tool that you can use to find the demographics of your audience. This tool allows you to gather traffic statistics and demographics data for any existing sites on the Internet.

For this demonstration, we will continue to discuss the Sleep Apnea niche we have covered in past posts.  One of the top sites in the forums was www.apneasupport.org

When we search on it we discover one of the limitations of Quantcast.  Small and moderate sized sites are not as well documented as are major authority sites. That said in this case they do return data which we will review. We just need to keep in mind that it may not be as accurate as we would prefer, but it’s much better than nothing.

Like Google Trends it provides a graph showing their estimate of the traffic to the site.

The Quantcast statistics suggest average traffic of about 14.8K per month.

The above 6 month chart shows a drop off in traffic in the months of November and December of 2009.  In this case the data is from just the US.

On larger sites, you can get world wide distribution as well.

Below the traffic chart is the nitty gritty and why we want to use Quantcast, the Demographics.

With this data we see that the searchers for information on the topic are somewhat more likely to be women, typically 35 or older with the largest group 50+.   Most are Caucasian with no children at home.  They tend to have had a college education with more than an average amount having graduate education, but their incomes tend to be slightly below than average which may indicate a significant portion of retired people.

With this background information, you now have a better idea of who your prospect may be.  To do this right you should as I mentioned check on several other related sights to see what variations in the data you can find.

This will allow you to brainstorm ideas to make your site more user friendly, which in turn should help the success of your venture.  It may also give you ideas on the type of additional products you could offer your prospect.

This finishes my tour of free research tools you can use to identify and develop profitable niche markets.  In my next post in this series we will discuss competition.

Technorati Tags: free research tools, niche marketing, niche research, Quantcast

Pi is a printers term for when a job case full of individual letters used for setting up a page to be printed is spilled and all the a, e, i, o, u’s together with all the consonants both lower case and capital are mixed together. A frightful mess.

Internet marketing can be like that as well.  There are a lot of ways to do internet marketing and a lot of individual pieces.   Because internet marketing is not a single thing, but rather a system of multiple pieces put together in an ordered sequence.

What makes it most confusing for people is that there are a lot of different models you could follow.  And many of the different models use some of the same parts, but none require that you use everything.

This causes confusion for people when they are trying to learn the business. They are often tempted to buy a product for a part that they don’t really need, or maybe will need, but not until they have mastered another part of the puzzle they may not even be aware of yet.

My family likes puzzles and we got three new ones for Christmas, all of which were 500 piece puzzles from the same maker and very similar in the way the pieces were cut.

Unfortunately, while everyone was busy visiting my grand daughter dumped the contents of all three puzzles on the floor creating puzzle piece pi.  If putting one of the puzzles together was challenging, imagine how challenging it was to do three at once.

We tried to create borders to frame the puzzle, but pieces from puzzle A seemed to fit with pieces from Puzzle B and C. It was a real nightmare.

Eventually over a week, the dinning room table, the kitchen table and a dresser top, we were able to get it done, but it took much longer than it should have.

My guess is that same thing is happening with your internet marketing education. You are spending time leaning stuff you don’t need right now, trying to get it pieced together with a different strategy you think will work for you in the long run.

Why do I think that, because that’s what happened to me. I bought a ton of stuff, and found myself going in a half dozen different directions. It wasn’t until I accidentally ran into Doug Champigny at the right time. He was putting together a mentoring group he called Team Champigny. That was a little over 15 months ago.

It’s made all the difference in the world to me.  Before I was spending more than I was making online. I lost a small fortune trying to make pay per click work for me.  My only understanding of one time offers, was that I hated them because I kept buying them. I had no idea how to connect the dots.

I’ve broken through many barriers since then, learned to create my own products, learned how to promote other peoples products, built a list and much more.

Now I’m not where I want to be yet, this is an ongoing journey and always will be for me, and for you if you are going to be truly successful. After all success is in the journey.  But if you are going to step up and start that journey, you really and truly need to have a solid coherent game plan.

Next month, my mentor and friend Doug Champigny is starting a new professional internet coaching sequence, a 4 week high intensity power-start.

Now Doug is definitely a high intensity fellow, so be aware that you will need to be prepared to take action. But if you are, if you really want to break through and make this internet thing a source of wealth for you and your family, then you owe it to yourself to grab this opportunity.  If on the other hand, you are looking for someone to molly coddle you forward, and hand you wealth on a silver platter, save your money.

When Doug say high intensity he means it. And if you are up to the challenge, you will succeed a lot faster and go a lot further if only because you will be putting together one puzzle, and better yet a puzzle that has all the pieces you need, if you know what I mean.

Doug has made a real difference in my life and he will yours as well.

Get your decade off on a solid footing with Professional Internet Marketing Coaching

PS: The next post in my niche marketing – market research series will be posted on Sunday.

Technorati Tags: coaching, Doug Champigny

Clickbank is the largest affiliate network for information products. As such it is an ideal arena to research your competition and spy on existing products for virtually any specific niches that you want to pursue.

If there isn’t already at least one or more products in you niche, it may well mean that your niche is not economically viable.

If you are still searching for the right niche, you can browse through the category section to find some markets, which could potentially interest you.

With the Clickbank tool, you can identify the existing products in the market and see how many players are in the market. You can also check out their offers and see what price points they are hitting. You can evaluate their sales pages, and buy their products to determine whether or not there are any holes in the market they are missing.

Once you signed up for and logged into Clickbank you want to go the the Marketplace tab.

In the market place, you can do your research by going through the categories listing. There are a total of 9 broad categories. Next step is to then select the sub-categories and click Go.

Clickbank will then generate search results of the products under your selected category listing.

Other ways to use the Clickbank tool is to make use of the keywords search bar or sort your search by product type, popularity and languages as well.

For this demonstration, we ran through the search term, ‘Muscle gaining’.

You can see from this search, there are a high number of products that is under the niche, ‘Muscle gaining’.  You may want to play around with a variety of keywords to get a full selection of products in your niche.

At the bottom of each result, there are some useful statistics, which provide a quick insight into what the merchant is offering. So in this case, for ‘No Nonsense Muscle Building’, the product vendor pays their affiliate an average of $62.30 per sale with a possible future payout of an additional $40.97 and offers a percentage sale payout of 57%. For the ‘grav’ column, this product is at 109.08.

This gravity simply indicates the number of affiliates that has made a sale over the past 8 weeks. The higher the gravity number, the more affiliates have successfully marketed this product, which also implies that this niche is profitable!

So from here, you can gather some great information to see what are the existing products that these merchants have. You may even click on ‘view pitch page’ to spy on the merchant’s sales page to see exactly what they’re doing! If they are profiting already, there is no need to re invent the wheel.

Learn from your competitors.  This will save you a lot of time and research.

Technorati Tags: clickbank, free market research tools, Market Research

I will return to my ongoing series on market research and niche marketing on Thursday, but I wanted to share a worthwhile opportunity I just grabbed for myself.

Since I am in the midst of creating an 8 module project right now, I will pass on how you can grab this cheap, rather than resell you the package now.But I expect I will be working them into a product of my own by the end of the month.

Doug Champigny has just finished uploading a new PLR bundle, and to help us start the new year he’s priced it really low for 1 day only:

http://askearlabout.com/PLRInterviews.php

This PLR bundle consists of three powerful interviews, one with Rosalind Gardner, one with Ken McArthur and one with Josh Peak.
Now you may not be familiar with these names, so let me tell you that they are each top notch affiliate marketers.

If you are doing affiliate marketing or plan on doing affiliate marketing, selling other people’s products, you will find these interviews extremely valuable.

If you have been setting goals to start the year, these interviews will give you a clear idea of where the finish line is. As any sea captain will tell you, it’s a good idea to have a clear notion of which port you are heading to, before you chart your course.These interviews will help you clarify your goals like nothing else I know of.

So, if you want to save over $17, head over now and grab your copy.

http://askearlabout.com/PLRInterviews.php

Remember, there are 3 separate products you’re getting in one bundle,  Don’t miss out: And while just listening to them is well worth the price, you are getting more than that. You will be getting the transcripts for the calls, so you can read along. And most importantly you will be getting private label rights which means you will be able to resell these and recoup your money over
and over again.

P.S. These interviews are worth more than Doug is charging just for the information they provide. Add in the ability to create 3 more products for your marketing funnel and this is a must have.

Technorati Tags: Doug Champigny, Interviews, PLR

Forums are a great place to find out what exactly your audience are thinking and talking about. This is the place where a community hangs out, discusses and share their problems and experiences.

So with forums, you can leverage on the community to find out what are their desires, lacking and needs. With these real market insights, you can brainstorm the kind of possible solutions you can provide for them.

How you use this tool is to start by going to the Google search engine and typing in the niche you have in mind and add in the keyword ‘forum’ after it.

In this demonstration, the example we’ll be using is, ‘Insomnia Forum’, where insomnia is our niche.

Under this ‘Insomnia Forum’ search results, it will display several pages of forums.

Click on one or more of the search results and research deeper into one that is most active, that means there are a lot of recent posts and replies within the forum.

When exploring the forums, it’s probably best to spend some time getting an overview of the top half dozen or more forums and then focus on those that are most active.

Initially, you want to familiarize yourself with the types of conversations going on with special emphasis on the types of questions most frequently asked.  Take note of these and start building a list of hot topics.

While you are doing this, pay attention to those people who are most active responding to other people’s questions.  These are influence leaders.  In the long run, you will want to get these people on your side. They may be possible joint venture partners and or advocates for your product.

As you gain a greater understanding of your niche, you will want to participate in the forum, and start answering other people’s questions yourself.  Many forums frown on commercial activity, so do so carefully.

Establish yourself as a reliable source of useful information by actively commenting for a considerable period of time.

Remember that forums are like icebergs.  Many people will lurk on forums and never post themselves or only infrequently.  A consistent presence will establish you as an expert in short order, and will arm you with the critical insights to target your products to people’s most pressing needs.

Technorati Tags: customer intelligence, forums, free market research tools, Market Research

Niches and keywords related to niches can vary significantly over time.  Had Google been in existence 100 years ago, you would likely have found a lot more listing for Buggy whips than you would today.  People change, markets change and thus its a good idea to pay attention to trends within the market place.

That turns out to be easy when you you use Google Trends.

You may have noticed a little magnifying glass next to keywords displayed on the Google Keyword tool we looked at in out last post. Had you clicked on that you would be taken to a page in Google Trends for that particular keyword.  Also in the keyword tool is a chart showing the relative strength of searches by months for the prior 12 months.

This is valuable information that you should take note of.

If you want to really get into trend analysis though, the place to go is Google Trends itself. Again the easiest way to get there is to use Google Search and Search for “Google Trends.”  Or you can remember the URL as http://www.google.com/trends

Once there you will see a Google Logo, a search box, some example searches, and two lists. One lists hot topics, and the second lists Hot Searches.

These hot topics and searches will change rapidly, but are a good indication of what is currently hot online. If you are blogging, this can be a great way of keeping up with where the most activity is online.  One strategy is to develop a blog posting on multiple hot topics on a daily basis and bookmarking them.  If you keep it up over time, you can drive a lot of current events type traffic to your blog. This you can in turn monetize with adwords or other promotions.

In general though, as part of our niche market research project we are more interested in longer term trends.

Say we are interested in the diet market. We could type the phrase “lose weight” into the Google Trends search box and get the following results.

There is quite a bit of information here. Perhaps the most important is that the overall trend appears to be increasing over the five years of data reported on the chart. While it may be difficult to see above, there also appears to be a dip just before the Christmas holidays, followed by a spike with the new year.

On the right are various news articles whose publication is noted on the chart with letters marking their date of publication. This can have a significant impact on some searches although it appears to be minimal in this particular case.

Finally on the bottom you can discover which regions of the world are most interested in the keyword phrase.  In this case, the US followed by Australia, Singapore and Ireland. To the bottom right, these trends are even further broken down by cities.  The results vary from time to time, but for some reason there appears to be heightened interest from a number of Texas cities at the moment.  It appears not everyone is interested in being the biggest in everything in Texas.

Lets look at another search term. This time we will explore “Golf Slice.”

When we do, we see a distinct seasonal pattern. Searches for “golf slice” are significantly higher in the summer than in the winter. Not too hard to understand.  Of note the peak number of searches appears to be decreasing, but the breadth of the base appears to be widening over time. This suggests that more people are looking for information on their golf slice throughout the year, than may have been the case before, but the niche is still strongly seasonal.

One more example to make a final point a bit more emphatically. This time we will search for the keyword phrase, “how to make money online.”

Here we see a very dramatically rising trend. This must certainly be a top candidate as a niche to explore. But lets look to the bottom of the chart again and look at the regions doing the search.  Topping the list is Nigeria, followed by the Philippines, Malaysia, India, and South Africa.

Nothing wrong with that, but it could be a problem if you are primarily interested in selling a product to the North American market.  Also note at the bottom right is a listing of the languages spoken by the searchers. The top language is Tagalog which is the Philippino national language followed by English.

Hopefully, you can see the value of understanding the trends in the marketplace, and the role that this free tool can play in helping you in both the niche selection process and also how you might plan for seasonal variations within your market.

The Google Key Word Tool is perhaps the most valuable of the free tools we are going to be discussing. In the past and in many dated online eBooks you will find references to the Overture Keyword Tool which is defunct, one of Yahoo’s biggest mistakes in my opinion. Today the world uses Google Free Keyword tool to explore and select keywords for a wide variety of purposes.

To access the tool,  open your existing Google Adwords account or if you don’t have one go to Google and search for “Google Keyword Tool.”

Google has recently changed to layout of their site.  The Keyword Tool is not immediately evident. You need to click on the “Opportunities” tab. When you do, any existing campaigns you are running will appear at the top of the left column.  You may need to scroll down to see the second box in the left column which is titled, “Tools.”

Once there, just click on the Keyword Tool and you will be taken to the tool we will discuss today.

The tool permits two related but completely different functions.  You can search for keywords on a particular web site, or you can do research on keywords related to a specific keyword phrase.  We are going to focus on the later, but will discuss the former first.

In our last post we discussed how to drill down in the Google Directory to find a niche.  In the final stages of that process we came to the end of the line, where we ran into articles related to our niche.  I advised that we examine those sites to learn about out new niche, and to see if there were advertisers or not to determine if it were commercially viable.

Once we identified the most interesting sites already in the niche, we can take their url’s and plug them into the keyword tool.

In our search we drilled down ultimately to Sleep Apnea, and the top page ranked entry under it was the following: http://www.sleepapnea.org/

When we put this URL into the Google Keyword Tool we can see the keywords that led people to this site. This is valuable information, and can provide us with insights into the niche.  Specifically it will help us identify the keyword phrases we will want to consider focusing our niche marketing on.

When Google Returns the results, it ranks them in accordance to Google’s sense of the most relevant Keyword Phrases.  In this case, sleep apnea, sleep apnea treatment, sleep apnea machine, sleep apnea masks, cpap mask, cpap masks. etc.

Now I don’t know much about sleep apnea, but I now know that something called CPAP is up there in relevance. Depending on whatever niche you are exploring you may find similar surprises, that you will want to explore.

And while sleep apnea appeared as if it might be a small niche, we are beginning to see the possibility of even smaller niche in the form of masks and machines and possibly other treatment methodologies.  These may be options that could be monetized.

Now is we go back and put in the phrase “Sleep Apnea” in the word or phrase box, we get a similar but different list.

It’s headed by the phrase, sleep apnea treatment, sleep apnea diagnosis, obstructive sleep apnea, severe sleep apnea, sleep apnea symptoms, etc.

Once again these are initially ranked by what Google sees as the most relevant term we entered into the box.  If we want, we can click on the headers above any of the columns and get the results ranked in ascending or descending order by that column.

Its lead by the term Insomnia, followed by apnea, sleep apnea, apnea sleep, snoring, narcolepsy, sleep aid and so on.  These are the terms that are related to sleep apnea that get the most traffic. We found a new term, narcolepsy that merits some examination and as we scroll down the list there are a few more interesting terms that we may not have thought of when we first started to explore sleep apnea.

This access to related terms is valuable. By taking them and using them in the keyword tool as new phrases we may find even more terms that we might otherwise miss altogether.

We won’t do that now, but you should with your niche studies.

We will discuss two additional items though.

The first is the competition graph.

If the bar graph is completely full, it is both good and bad news. The good is that the niche is actively being pursued by advertisers, which indicates a good chance that money can be made in this niche.  The bad is that it is already a contested market so it will not be easy to break into the top without a major effort.

You may decide that you want to make that effort.  If you are looking to use the internet to sell your existing product line, you may have no choice. However if you are looking for a new market to enter, you do have a choice and should use the following technique to identify a market that is both lucrative and that you have a chance to dominate.

I learned this approach originally through the Niche Profit Classroom. You can see a small banner ad of there’s in the upper right of the blog page. I found their entire program to be well worth the modest membership fee and can comfortably recommend them to you.

They outlined something they call the money market matrix.  Since I learned it from them, I have heard similar approaches advocated by others as well.  I will give you my short hand approach now.

Rather than focusing on the high end of the search results we are going to go down the list and focus on keywords that have 300 or more hits a month up to those that get about 2000 to 2500.  This range is somewhat arbitrary and you can certainly go beyond it in either direction.

Your goal is not to find the most popular search term, it’s to find a frequently used search term that is relevant to your niche and/or product for which their are relatively few competitors.  By relatively few my shorthand answer is 50,000 or less.

The term “Sleep Apnea” returned 800 results so we have to scroll down to the bottom of the second page of 100 results to get in range.

The top item on the screen capture above is the term, “sleep apnea help.”

The Google Keyword Tool tells us that it is getting an average of 1600 hits a month. That’s slightly over 50 a day.  So while not huge, it’s likely a steady source of traffic interested in the topic.  Next we are going to a new tab on our browser.  There we will do a search using the regular Google search tool for “Sleep Apnea Help”  being sure to include the quote marks. That way we will get the total number of results that use that precise term.  It turns out that in this case the result is 8220 which is well under my threshold of 50,000 competing sites.

While I am there, I notice that there are a lot of ads, which tells me this is a solid keyword phrase I could hope to build upon. Note there are three ads on top of the organic search results and a full side panel as well.

The Google Keyword tool is an extremely valuable tool, with a number of additional features.  I’ve tried to show you some of the basics as well as a strategy to put the information you can derive from the tool to work for you.

In my next post, we will explore Google Trends.

Technorati Tags: Google Adword tool, Google Rank Tool, Google Word Tool

There are a number of free internet marketing research tools and resources that will greatly enhance your ability to identify and exploit profitable niche markets.

These include:

1. Google Directory
2. Google Keyword tool
3. Google Trends
4. Forums
5. Clickbank
6. Quantcast

In the next several blog posts we will examine each of these in turn as we pursue our web marketing strategy of identifying profitable niche markets where we can become a dominant force.

The first market research strategy we will examine is the use of the Google Directory to begin the process of drilling down from a major category into some potential niches.

To start we will open our browser and go to http://Google.com/dirhp

When we do we will see a page that looks like this.

Arts, Business, Computers, Games, Health etc. are major categories that you can use to begin the sorting process.  For this example, we will select Health and click on it.

When we get the next screen we start refining our search. Notice at this level the categories also have a number along side them, giving an indication of how many articles are in each category.

By selecting Conditions and Diseases we are brought down one more level, where again we find many additional sub categories.

Here we will pick Sleep Disorders for this example. And are taken to on final screen, where we can pick a particular niche to explore. In this case we will select Sleep Apnea and begin our process of determine whether or not this is a good niche to consider for our purposes.

Here we can explore existing sites that are related to sleep apnea. They are initially ranked by Google Page Rank. By searching these sites we can check to see if there are advertisers on these sites which will indicate whether or not this is a viable market for us to enter. We can also research the topic to identify any gaps we might be able to fill, and possibly identify even smaller niches we might wish to enter.

This is a very simple tool to use, and yet a powerful way to begin your niche marketing research. In our next post we will explore the Google Keyword Tool.

Technorati Tags: internet marketing research methods, Market Research, marketing strategies, marketing strategy, research methodology, strategic marketing, web marketing