Finding niche markets to dominate in Google.
October 8, 2009
After writing my post showing how I got 46 page one rankings in Google in 7 days, I was flooded with requests asking me to release my tool for researching niche keywords to build sites around.
Well, I decided to do something a lot better than that. I've built a web-based system that literally discovers and analyzes niche markets while you sleep! It's incredibly easy to use, and super, super powerful. It uses the exact method that I used to achieve all of those page-one rankings, but it finds the niches much faster than I was able to do so on my own.
Find out how it works by watching the preview video on the home page:
Click here to watch the preview video.
To answer a few questions I'm sure will come up:
- When will Niche Horde be available?
Soon. I can't give an exact date, but as soon as the beta testing is over (and I expect it to be over within a week), I'll make the system available to everyone.
- How much will the service cost?
I'm considering an annual cost of between $27 and $67 a year. I'm not completely decided yet. What I do know is that it will not be expensive. After all, each user helps grow and improve the system by having the Niche Horde client software installed on their own computer.
- What are the system requirements for the software I need to install on my computer?
The software requires a Windows computer (98/ME/XP/Vista) that has the .NET Framework 2.0 installed (most already do). I'm sorry, but it won't run on a Mac.
- How big is the database of keywords?
With only a few dozen beta testing users, the database achieved 32,000+ keywords in its first 16 hours of operation. That should give you some idea of how quickly the database will reach into the millions of keywords, with thousands of available niche markets.
- How does the database grow?
Niche Horde is continually fed new keywords to analyze and expand by finding related keywords. It's fed new keywords by users, and by other outside sources that continually grow the database. So the database actively grows and expands without any work on the part of its users.
- How is the competition (SOC) determined?
The number of competing sites is determined by querying Google for the number of results that
1) have the keywords in the title and2) have the keywords in links coming into the page. (I've modified the system to only count pages with links matching the keywords as competitors). Those are your only real competition. Sites that only have the keywords in the title or in the body of the page, but have no links into those pages containing the keywords, aren't real competition.
ADDED: Regarding Strength Of Competition (SOC)
I've gotten a lot of feedback from people who don't seem to understand the SOC numbers. Some folks seem to be assuming that if you search Google for, say, "pumpkin seed butter" (with the quotes) and it comes back with 7,780 results that the SOC is 7,780.
Wrong!
That figure is only the number of pages Google has that contains the phrase "pumpkin seed butter" somewhere on the page. That's NOT your competition. Your competition is only the pages of those 7,780 pages that have links coming into them whose anchor text is the keywords "pumpkin seed butter".
To find out how many pages THAT is, search Google for:
allinanchor:"pumpkin seed butter"
Then go to the "Advanced Settings" and set Google to show 100 results per page. Then go to the LAST page of results and look at the "Results X of Y" figures at the top of the page. THAT'S your competition. In the case of my example, "pumpkin seed butter", it's only about 295 pages of the 7,780.
Pages that do not have any links coming into them are not really competing to rank for the phrase. Only pages with links coming into them are the ones you need to concern yourself with. That's what NicheHorde.com's SOC number indicates.
Please post any additional questions or requests you have in a comment below.
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Move over Twitter…
July 16, 2009
It all started with Twitter. I love the idea of microblogging. It's a beautiful thing. Twitter makes it easy to post your thoughts and ideas about just about anything in 140 characters or less. Other folks can follow along and read what you have to say.
That's why I love Twitter, but that's also why I don't like it.
You see, it's a great idea, but unfortunately it often ends up that I'm following all of these folks who are posting about what they had for breakfast, or tweet that they're giving their dog a bath, or other ridiculous stuff that I have absolutely no interest in.
Then there are the spammers. Oh my goodness! 100 tweets in a row advertising trash I'm not interested in.
Even when folks aren't spamming, Twitter seriously lacks focus. From one tweet to the next, the sheer volume of subjects is dizzying — and it's rarely related.
That's why I created TipDrop.com. TipDrop is what I call a "social-knowledge" site. Simply put, it's a very focused form of microblogging site.
At TipDrop, a user creates a "tip sheet" focused on a particular subject. The user who created the tip sheet, and other TipDrop users, can post tips to the tip sheet. The users can also vote for or against the tips on the tip sheet. Since 140 characters really isn't enough for a good tip, your tips can be up to 255 characters long.
It's like Twitter meets Wikipedia meets Digg.
For example, let's say I created tip sheet on How to get people to link to your web page (which I have–that link points to it). You can go to that tip sheet to read all of the tips that I and other users have added to get ideas about how to build links to your site. If you like a tip, you vote it up — if you don't like it, you vote it down.
You see the power here? Instead of random bits of noise and nonsense, TipDrop creates tightly focused pages of practical knowledge. It's social-knowledge.
To make it even better, TipDrop is driven by what I'm calling a "credibility engine." Everything in the system is given a "credibility" score: users, tip sheets and tips. The more users vote for a tip, the higher the credibility of the tip, the tip sheet and the tip-writing user. The more users that vote against the tip, the lower the credibility of those three things.
The best (read: most credible) tips appear on top of the tip sheet. Once a tip falls below a credibility score of 1, it disappears off the list.
The more credibility a user gains, the higher up the list his tips appear when he first writes them. Of course, those tips are then subject to users voting them up or down. Also, the higher a user's credibility, the more power his votes up or down command.
What this does is encourage high-quality tips from users who are trying to establish themselves as experts in their field. Each tip is linked back to its author's own account page, where a timeline of the user's tips appear, as well as a list of the user's tip sheets.
The credibility engine also helps prevent spam and junk from coming into the system. Spammers' tips will quickly get voted down, reducing the credibility of not only the tips, but the spammer's account. That way, when they try to submit more spam, their spammy tips will have virtually no credibility, appear at the bottom of the tip sheet, and after just a vote or two disappear entirely.
Of course, the creator of a tip sheet has the ability to delete tips they feel are inappropriate. So the tip sheet owner maintains control that way as well.
Unlike Twitter, TipDrop also encourages you to have links on your account page. You can have up to 10 links appear on the right sidebar of your account pages. And since all of the tip sheets you create appear with your account profile and links on them, you are rewarded for making your tip sheets popular by having other people visit your links.
On top of that, the site is monetized with AdSense ads. In your user settings you can put your AdSense Publisher ID and have 75% of all ad impressions and clicks from your account pages and tip sheets credited to your own AdSense account. I believe that users should receive a monetary incentive to create great content, and that's just another way I make that happen for TipDrop.com users.
TipDrop is a great way to get your email list to build link-bait lists of information on just about anything. Think about it: create a tip sheet on the best ways to lose 10 lbs, have other users add their own tips, and monetize it from the AdSense ads plus links down the sidebar to weight-loss products you promote! Build your credibility up with enough great tips and you'll soon be an established authority in your niche.
The site is now in beta, and I encourage you to go take 30 seconds to sign up for a free account (that's really all it takes — it's super-fast and easy). Perhaps start by adding your own tips to my tip sheet on how to get people to link to your web page?
Check the Site Links down the right sidebar of the home page for links to the TipDrop blog and forum as well. I'm very interested in hearing your suggestions and thoughts on how to make the system better.
Click here to go to TipDrop.com now.
And be sure to post your thoughts and questions in a comment below.
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Like what you see? Then subscribe to Marketing Insiders and reap big benefits! By subscribing to my free Marketing Insiders email list, you will regularly receive special member-only insider information, discounts and freebies. You will also be notified when new articles are posted here at the blog. It's absolutely free to subscribe, and you can leave the list at any time. For subscribing today, I will give you a valuable free gift as well! |
Selling physical products online (part 2 of 2)
June 25, 2009
Two days ago I posted the first part of this two-part series on how to sell physical products online. The first post dealt with finding an in-demand product, pricing it correctly and getting traffic using second-tier pay-per-click sites.
This second post deals with getting traffic from search engines (primarily Google) instead of pay-per-click sites. As I mentioned in the first part, Ted now gets almost all of his traffic from Google instead of pay-per-click (PPC) sites. That's because it's far cheaper to generate traffic from search engines than it is to pay for traffic using PPC. Getting started using PPC is great if you have the budget for it and your conversion rate is good enough to turn a profit, but the more traffic you can get from search engines the higher your profit margins will be.
Here's what I did to start generating razor-targeted traffic from the search engines for Ted's porch swing business:
Do The Keyword Research
Before doing anything else, you should always research your target keywords. You need to find out what the best terms would be to rank for. To accomplish this I use Google's AdWords Keyword Tool to find out what people are looking for and how much traffic I can generate.
I also check out the competition to see how hard I'm going to have to work to get the site ranked for the keywords I think will be best. This basically involves seeing how well linked the competition is, which tells me about how many links I'm going to need to rank well.
Setup A Feeder Blog
Rather than try to rank Ted's porch swings site directly, I chose to setup a Wordpress blog on a new domain, rank that site and use it to pass traffic over to Ted's site. There are a few reasons for this:
- Ted's not a search engine guy, so his site wasn't really built for getting ranked well in the search engines.
As I said in the first part of this series, Ted was doing great without getting any traffic from the search engines. He's not a search engine guy, and he was doing fine without the search engines, so his site isn't well optimized for search engines. It is, however, very well optimized to get people to buy!
- Having a site that recommends another site is a great way to increase conversion rates.
Good affiliate marketers have been using recommendations to increase conversion rates for years. If you write an article that praises a site and product you don't personally own, that recommendation provides a level of legitimacy that product owners can't generate themselves. It's like a testimonial, and increases conversion rates significantly.
I chose Wordpress for my feeder site because blogs are fantastically easy to rank due to the fact that each time a post is made it "pings" a variety of sites that automatically index your blog's content. That means you immediately get a bunch of free links back to your blog, which gets each new page indexed fast and improves your overall link popularity (and thus your ability to rank well in the search engines).
Use The Right Wordpress Plugins
I like to use the All-In-One SEO Pack for Wordpress, because it lets me give the blog a more search-engine-friendly title and meta description, as well as allows me to disable the indexing of categories and archives. I don't like the categories or archives getting indexed because I don't want Google to rank anything but the permalinked blog post pages. I don't want folks landing on the category pages and having to click again to get to the full article — I want them sent straight to the articles.
I also use the WP-Sticky plugin for Wordpress, which allows you to select a post that will always be on the home page of the blog. That way I can optimize the home page content for my chosen keywords.
Fill The Blog With On-Theme Content
Once the blog was up I seeded it with a bunch of EzineArticles.com articles related to porch swings. That way the site is chock-full of content that is very specifically related to my target keywords. I wrote a post targeting my chosen keywords and then made it the "sticky" post that is always shown on the home page. That post strongly recommends my brother's porch swings and links to the site in the end.
In addition to the recommendation and the link, I also put up an attention-grabbing banner ad for my brother's site. As of today this combination is generating a better than 50% click-through rate. So one out of two people who visit the feeder site are continuing on to Ted's site. That's like getting a 50% click-through rate for AdSense ads. How cool is that?
The result is a lot more sales for Ted. Ted's conversion rate is about 5% (yes, 5% on physical products ranging in price from $60 - $260 dollars), so his site is obviously setup to get visitors to buy. Combine that great site setup with the razor-targeted traffic from the search engines and you get a super-successful real-world business selling physical products.
Get Links to the Blog
The final step was to start getting links to the blog. I always get links from a variety of sources (3 sources in particular). All the link sources are absolutely necessary to the successful ranking of the blog. I can't emphasize that enough. The search engines want to see a variety of links from a variety of sources.
The result is that the blog ranks #2 for its primary keywords in Google, #5 in Yahoo and #2 in Bing (formerly MSN Live).
Since achieving those rankings I've also begun to work on ranking the site for an even tougher set of keywords that gets about fourteen times as much traffic (according to Google's keyword tool). As of today, the site ranks #10 in Google and Bing for those keywords (I've got a bit more work to do before it makes it into Yahoo for those terms). I expect it to be in the top 5 in a few weeks.
Exact Instructions Coming Monday
What I've given you here is an overview of how I set things up. But there are some very detailed things I do to assess keyword competition (and the value of a set of keywords for conversion purposes), as well as the linking methods that I use which are not stated here.
However, this Monday (June 29th) you'll have an opportunity to get all of the details of how I go about researching keywords and ranking sites in the search engines (including my sources for getting the all-important links), as well as the exact methods my brother uses to find in-demand products, price them right and get cheap traffic from second-tier pay-per-click engines to start generating profits immediately. Look for an email from me about that on Monday.
Until then, please post your thoughts and questions in a comment below.
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Like what you see? Then subscribe to Marketing Insiders and reap big benefits! By subscribing to my free Marketing Insiders email list, you will regularly receive special member-only insider information, discounts and freebies. You will also be notified when new articles are posted here at the blog. It's absolutely free to subscribe, and you can leave the list at any time. For subscribing today, I will give you a valuable free gift as well! |
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Jonathan Leger has been earning his living online full-time since the fall of 2004. He regularly posts advice about search engine optimization (his current passion), AdSense and Internet Marketing. 
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