Looking for a niche or a product to sell?

Well, some merchants share clues about the type of niche markets that work best for affiliates.

Here, for example is a partial email that I just received from CSN Stores:

CSN Stores is merchant on the ShareaSale Network and comprises over 250 specialized online stores that offer a wide variety of home goods including tools, office furniture, bedding, lighting, outdoor furniture, luggage, baby furniture & more.

… I (Eileen the Affiliate Manager) recently compiled a list of CSN’s most popular brands in 2010. I’d like to share just our top 5 with you. Since these brands were such best sellers last year they might have high conversion rates again this year so feel free to feature them if you wish! ‘Top 5′ is defined by net number of orders for the entire year of 2010.

CSN’s Top 5 Brands of 2010:

1. Wildon Home
2. KidKraft
3. Winsome (pantryware and lifestyle furniture)
4. Home Styles (furniture)
5. Midwest Pets

CSN’s Top 5 Brands of 2010 through Affiliate Sales Only:

1. Kidkraft
2. Wildon Home
3. DaVinci
4. JoJo Designs
5. Melissa and Doug

That should tell you that not only is furniture a good market, but specifically that relating to kids and pets.

Check your merchants’ emails frequently for good clues such as these.

And if they don’t share their data with you – ask!!

Are you a newbie thinking about starting the next great ‘make-a-million-online-overnight-at-home-while-you-sleep.com’ blog to rake in big bucks from the Internet marketing business opportunities niche?

Think again!!

PLEASE think again.

I’ve had numerous discussions with my colleagues throughout the many years I’ve been involved in the Internet marketing space — and we’ve all talked about ditching the niche entirely.

Seriously, the IM niche is NOT a fun place to be unless you have a LOTS of experience and unlimited grit. Even then it’s not really fun.

The only reason I and my friends remain in this market is NOT about love or money. We stay because we feel that there have to be at least a few of us who represent value, honesty and integrity in the space.

In a nutshell, we hate to see the many ways in which hopeful netpreneurs / online entrepeneurs get ripped off and totally disillusioned.

Here are just a few.

1. The products sold are mostly crap. In too many cases, products purported to be the ‘latest and greatest way’ to get a site to the top of Google’s listings, or build a list of ten million subscribers or make $17,398 (all overnight) is a rehash of a product that was first introduced in 2002, didn’t work at that time and has been relaunched every year since.

   Another con job is when info marketers take someone else’s work (such as my Super Affiliate Handbook), outsource it for a rewrite and then try pass it off as their own product.

   Experienced Internet marketing niche researchers pick up on and report these thieves quickly.

   However, unless you’ve been in the IM niche for a long time, you won’t recognize either the players or their bad (or stolen) products.

   That leads to the next problem…

2. Selling crap will ruin your reputation. Many IM marketers in the last decade have gone down in a ball of fire after buyers publicly complained about the shoddiness of their products or total lack of customer support.

   Affiliate marketers who enthusiastically promote those products without doing proper reviews lost respect with their audiences and suffered a similar fate.

3. List mining. Too many newbies who learn enough about the Internet Marketing niche to successfully build a huge list of subscribers – completely dessimate their lists on the possibility of winning an XBOX or iPad during a big IM launch.

   Trading your list for an iPad will never replace what you will lose in terms of future sales… for a couple of reasons.

   Most marketers in the IM niche don’t pay for the leads you send them.

   Many others don’t pay on upsells.

   Their primary interest is NOT in how many sales you generate.

   Oh sure, you make commissions on the initial sale, they make money and that seems to be a good thing.

   In reality, however, it’s ALL about the qualified leads that you send that they capitalize on for years to come and are lost to you forever.

   They continue to sell directly to them over and over again — and you’ll never make another dime on the leads you took time to capture and cultivate.

These factors have become SO much more prevalent since the U.S. economic downturn began and the scam artists jumped on the opportunity to take advantage of those who’d lost their homes and/or jobs and were now looking for online business opportunities to shore up their incomes or avoid bankruptcy.

The situation has now gotten so bad that it almost makes me sick.

I learned my lessons in this industry the hard way — trusting my valued subscribers to those who turned out to be (or into) into scam artists. I finally refused to promote all but one or two — but you can avoid those issues right from the start.

Either stay out of the internet marketing “make money online” niche completely — or, spend gobs of time doing your homework to make sure that the business opportunities and products that you promote in the internet marketing niche are HIGHLY valuable to your subscribers.

The key point to remember is that you need to place your hightest value on the trust you build with your readers – don’t squander it.

Don’t get me wrong.

There’s plenty of money to be made online in SO many different niche markets — but opting for the Internet marketing niche is a big mistake for 99% of newbies for the reasons discussed above.

It’s not often that I read a book a second time, or watch a movie twice in 2 years – let alone twice in a week – but I did just that this week with Julie & Julia.

OK, granted, I watched it on the flight down to the Affiliate Convention in Los Angeles on Wednesday.

Then, without asking if I’d seen it (I see all new releases on airplanes) Ed rented it yesterday — but the kicker was that I was actually keen to watch it again.

If you are unfamiliar with the plot line, here is the description from Netflix.

Amy Adams stars in this truth-inspired tale as Julie Powell, a disenchanted government secretary who decides to enliven her uneventful life by cooking all 524 recipes outlined in Julia Child’s culinary classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Based on Powell’s book Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, director Nora Ephron’s heartwarming dramedy also stars Meryl Streep as legendary chef Child.

The Amazon review of Julie & Julia is much more descriptive about the movie, but it barely touches on the aspect that I found so profound about this movie.

Julie Powell wants to be a writer.

So, she starts a blog called the Julie/Julia Project on August 25th, 2003 to write about what she truly loves – cooking.

Her first post reads as follows:

“Mastering the Art of French Cooking“. First edition, 1961. Louisette Berthole. Simone Beck. And, of course, Julia Child. The book that launched a thousand celebrity chefs. Julia Child taught America to cook, and to eat. It’s forty years later. Today we think we live in the world Alice Waters made, but beneath it all is Julia, 90 if she’s a day, and no one can touch her.

The Contender:

Government drone by day, renegade foodie by night. Too old for theatre, too young for children, and too bitter for anything else, Julie Powell was looking for a challenge. And in the Julie/Julia project she found it. Risking her marriage, her job, and her cats’ well-being, she has signed on for a deranged assignment.

365 days. 536 recipes. One girl and a crappy outer borough kitchen.

How far will it go? We can only wait. And wait. And wait…..

The Julie/Julia Project. Coming soon to a computer terminal near you.

Julie Powell is a little rough around the edges – meaning she uses the “F” word a LOT. But her ‘colorful’ language certainly adds spice to her posts — especially when things aren’t going as well as she’d like.

She built a following and her readers loved her for being real in her day-by-day cooking adventure.

So much so that she starts getting financial contributions to her effort after she goes with her friends’ suggestion to place a PayPal button on her site — a good thing, ’cause seriously, I don’t know how she could have afforded all that expensive food otherwise. She also receives foodie treats from her fans. (Hint: I like food too.)

What happens within the next year (from a blogger’s point of view) as she cooks and writes her way through all those recipes is truly inspirational.

After blogging for nearly a year, on August 13th, 2003, her story was featured in the New York Times Dine & Wine section, in a piece by Amanda Hesser called A Race To Master The Art Of French Cooking.

That article launched both her book, Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, and the movie.

How cool is that?

And don’t believe it can’t happen to you.

My McGraw-Hill book, Make a Fortune Promoting Other People’s Stuff Online: How Affiliate Marketing Can Make You Rich was in large part a result of this blog. Sure, the good folks at McGraw-Hill had seen the Super Affiliate Handbook, but what made them approach me to write for them (and I did ask them why) was the fact that I blogged regularly on NPT and that my message was consistent, i.e. I didn’t focus on promoting products, I was sharing helpful information with my readers along with my honest views about this business.

I certainly didn’t expect that to happen to me… all I did was blog about a topic in which I was really interested.

And You CAN do that too!

And although it’s unlikely that anyone will ever make the ‘affiliate marketing movie’, maybe your story is just waiting to be a feature film.

I hope so!

Until then, get inspired – rent or buy Julie and Julie and watch it more than once. (BTW, I’d recommend the DVD version at $9.99 – Blu-Ray at $25.99 was great to see but a tad pricey.)

If you’ve already seen it? What did you think?

Keywords play a major role in Search Engine Optimization. Generally people choose 2 kinds of keywords while optimizing a site.

They are:

1. High competition – highly profitable keywords.
2. Low competition – highly profitable keywords.

Generally it takes couple of weeks to months to get ranked for high competition – highly profitable keywords as the competition for these keywords will be too high.

I always go for low competition – highly profitable keywords as the competition for these keywords is low and they are easy to get ranked in Google in a shorter time.

Here is my strategy for finding low competition – highly profitable keywords. The goal is to find relatively high-search-volume, low-competition ‘keyword phrases’.

1. Open a spreadsheet.
2. Brainstorm and write down all relevant keywords that are related to the product you’re selling including synonyms. For example, if your main keyword is “dog beds”, list other keywords also like “pet beds”.
3. Go to google keyword suggestion tool and type in with the keywords from your spreadsheet. Make sure to select “Broad search’, analyze the results. Select the appropriate keywords by clicking the Add button at the right-side column. It is a bit tricky to select the keywords as nearly all results seem to be related to our products. Just choose the key phrase that you think is closer to your niche and for which you can write content for your website. Do not select, say, “discount on dog beds” if you don’t have or can’t provide discount on your products.

Note: Approximate Search Volume is not exactly the search made in Google.com. According to Google, this column shows the approximate number of search queries matching your keywords that were performed on Google and the search network.

Google Suggest

Go to Google.com (not a regional Google website like google.co.in) and start typing the keywords from the spreadsheet. Google Suggest analyzes what you are typing in the search box and provides relevant suggested search terms. You can choose one of the suggested key phrases by moving up or down the list using the arrow keys or mouse. As you type, it gives you you key phrases. You find few key phrases that are not in our spreadsheet. These are hidden keywords.

Try to find more and more key phrases by typing slowly in the search box and going alphabetical.

Examples:

“dog beds ab”
“dog beds b”
“dog beds ba”
“dog beds c”

Note down all such keywords. Put everything that you discovered to the spreadsheet.

Yahoo!’s version is called Search Assist.

However, unlike Google, Yahoo! suggests phrases that do not necessarily start with the letter or word you typed in. You find few keywords that do not exist in initial search of “dog beds” in Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

Try different terms and combinations to reveal more key phrases. Note all the keywords you discovered in the spreadsheet.

Yahoo Answers

Since most people visit Yahoo! Answers to ask a question, you have very valuable data — the actual keyword phrases used to find information related to your niche or the product that you’re selling.

Within the questions, we can spot phrases such “quality dog beds online” and “cheap place to buy dog beds“.

With a little imagination you can find more long-tail keywords that have little to no competition at all. Add all these phrases to the spreadsheet.

If you browse around the internet, you’ll notice that people all over the world are blogging and making money doing it!

These are people just like you; people with little experience, without a background in computer science, or a big bank account to dig into. They used programs like Google Blogger (blogger.com) or WordPress (WordPress.org) to quickly and easily set up their blogs, often at no cost. Now all you have to ask yourself is what hobby or niche should you blog about?

A recipe blog can be the perfect choice for people who have tried recipes and thought they could do something different, more exciting, or just plain better.

It’s a great way to tell others about new recipes, ideas, and products available in the world of cooking, as well as sharing regional specialties. But, don’t worry if you can’t cook. You can write a cooking blog for others who are learning to cook. How much fun would it be to share your successes as well as your “hope you don’t chip a tooth” muffins? Starting a recipe blog can be a wonderful way to share your interest and make money in the process. If cooking is your passion (or even if it isn’t) — a recipe blog may be a profitable way to get a taste of online business.

The skills needed to start blogging about cooking are simple.

You need a talent or love of cooking. You don’t need to know all the fancy gourmet cooking terms; you just need to know how to put a dish together that tastes good.

You also need to be able to write your recipes in an organized, concise, and easy-to-follow format. You may want to be able to use a digital camera, or find someone who can, in order to take pictures of your food, or you could use publicly licensed photos of food that you find on the internet. Of course, you’ll need patience. Every blog has a unproductive period at first, so don’t get discouraged. It will take time for your blog to build and for people to find you.

There are several ways you can turn your recipes and cooking blog into a money-making business. You can choose just one of these options or do a mix of them.

Here are some ideas…

Make Money by Selling Products: A person who loves to cook, often loves all the kitchen paraphernalia that comes along with it. If you have gadgets and cookbooks available to purchase on your blog, you can reap the rewards that the retail markets are enjoying. You can share your recipes, cooking tips, opinions, and sell products all at the same time. Nice little income producing idea.

Make Money by Selling Advertising: Once your blog gets noticed, and traffic starts coming your way, you’ll find advertising on your blog to be a nice, profitable way to generate income. This is something to keep in mind, but you won’t really hit your stride making money with this method until you start getting readers. Just file this idea away so you can start making your plans.

Make Money by Selling Your Blog: If you’ve been noticed by the search engines and media, you have arrived! Now may be the time to consider selling your blog for the big bucks. (Some blogs have sold for millions.) You can also create blogs for sale when you get this good.

With some focused time and creativity, you should be able to develop a recipe blog that is uniquely yours, a place to post your favorite family recipes, restaurant secrets, cooking disasters, or other information you want to share in the world of cooking. But, thinking isn’t doing — you’ve got to act in order to succeed.

Yes, you Can make money with a Recipe Blog. Need recipes for your new blog? Check out Yummy PLR Recipes.

In response to Q and A: Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing, Joe asked “Doesn’t Google Adwords keyword tool give you the same info regarding number of searches as wordtracker? What’s wordtracker’s advantage that you don’t get with Google?”

Those are good questions to ask, especially when you might be thinking about buying a subscription to Wordtracker, so I’ll do my best to answer them.

First of all, what you’ll notice when you do keyword searches using Google’s Keyword Tool and Wordtracker, is that you see wildly different numbers.

Here’s an example. The screenshots below show search results for the keyword phrase “weight training” using both services.

As you can see, Google Global Monthly Search Volume returned 550,000 searches versus Wordtracker’s Count of 434.

OK, so what we first have to realize is that Google is reporting monthly figures and Wordtracker is reporting daily figures.

More importantly, the default search on Google returns Broad match results whereas Wordtracker returns an Exact match. (See below for more definitions of Google’s Global Monthly Search Volume, Broad Match and Wordtracker’s Count and Predicted Count returns.)

Below are the results of a refined Google search, set to “Exact Match”.

Note how the Local search volume decreased from over half a million to 49,500 and the Global results amounted to 74,000 — both of which still amount to much more than Wordtracker’s 434 x 31 = 13,454 total results for the month.

Why the big difference?

Wordtracker is open about the fact that they extract and extrapolate their data from two metacrawlers, Dogpile.com and Metacrawler.com – services that query all the main search engines simultaneously. Their results represent approximately just under 1% of daily searches across all search engines.

However, only Google knows the size of the sample that they use to extrapolate their information, although it is known that Content Network search results are included.

Too, you must consider the fact that Google has a vested interest in making their numbers appear large – as primary users of the Google Keyword Tool are either current or potential Adwords customers.

Wordtracker, on the other hand, has no reason to inflate numbers. They simply provide a keyword research service.

Now, here’s one reason I’ve maintained my Wordtracker account for many years…

If you look back above at the results for “weight training routines”, you’ll see that Google reported “Not Enough Data”.

However, Wordtracker shows a daily count of 146 for the exact same phrase. (see screenshot below).

Furthermore, Google will only allow you to download 200 results, while Wordtracker allows up to 1000.

In overall terms, I prefer the Wordtracker interface which I think displays related results in a more intuitive manner and is faster to use. For example, the first 10 related keywords to “weight training” in Wordtracker were:

1. bodybuilding
2. exercise
3. weight lifting
4. strength training
5. weight
6. weightlifting
7. training
8. workouts
9. fitness
10. nutrition

You can click on any of those results and immediately get their Count and Predicted Count, whereas with Google, you have to type the word in again. Too, Google’s system logs you out after a short period of inactivity, and I usually find myself clicking on “Get Keyword Ideas” several times before the Captcha form comes up again.

Ultimately, I use both Google’s Keyword Tool and Wordtracker. I use Google for quick and dirty searching and Wordtracker for fine-tuning. To me, that “fine-tuning” is worth the price of maintaining a subscription year after year.

Visit Wordtracker (FULL service free trial for 7 Days) | Read my Review

Definitions

These definitions are taken directly from Google and Wordtracker.

Google

Google’s Global Monthly Search Volume shows the approximate average monthly number of search queries matching each keyword result. This statistic applies to searches performed on Google and the search network over a recent 12-month period. It includes traffic in all countries and languages and is specific to your selection from the Match Type drop-down menu. If we don’t have sufficient data for a particular keyword, you’ll see not enough data.

Broad Match – This is the default option. If you include general keyword or keyword phrases (such as tennis shoes) in your keyword list, your ads may appear when users search for tennis and shoes, in any order, and possibly along with other terms. For example, your ad may appear for the queries buy tennis shoes and tennis sneakers but not tennis players. Your ads may also be displayed on relevant variations of your keyword phrases and plurals, as well as some related keywords and phrases via our expanded keyword matching technology.

Wordtracker

Count shows the number of times a particular keyword has appeared in our database.

E.g. Our database currently holds 312,095,827 words. A count of 147 tells us that this particular word has appeared 147 times in (this is over 160 days).

Our keywords are taken from major metacrawlers (a service that queries all the main search engines simultaneously).

Our main sources are Metacrawler and Dogpile, the two largest Metacrawlers on the net. Metacrawlers have the major advantage of matching the search profile of the search engines very closely. But are not subject to the same kind of skew from software robots that continually check web site and pay per bid positions.

Predicted Count is the maximum total predicted traffic for all of the major search engines/pay per bids and directories today.

Get a Full Service FREE 7-Day Trial of Wordtracker

With your FREE trial you’ll receive the 7 Profit from Keywords Video series in which you’ll discover how to:

• Create keyword lists.
• Build a basic SEO campaign.
• Avoid common SEO mistakes.
• Optimize a web page.
• Plan PPC campaigns.
• Build quality links.
• Beat your competitors.

Completely risk-free. Cancel anytime.

Curious about pay per click search engine marketing?

Here are some of the most common questions that I regularly answer on the topic:

• What is Pay-Per-Click Advertising?
• Does Pay-Per-Click Advertising Really Work?
• Should I Bid the Top Spot?
• How Many Keywords Do I Need?
• Where Do I Find Merchant Keyword Lists?
• How Do I Do Effective Keyword Research?

What is Pay-Per-Click Advertising?

Pay per click (PPC) is an web-based advertising model where advertisers only pay when a user actually clicks on an ad to visit the advertiser’s site.

Advertisers bid on keywords and keyword phrases and when a search engine user types searches for a term matching one of the advertiser’s keywords, their ad may be displayed under the ‘sponsored listings’. In the screenshot below, sponsored listings returned for the phrase ‘Flip video camcorder’ are outlined in red.

The cost to advertise on PPC search engines varies according to the amount of competition for a specific keyword phrase.

Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter are the largest providers of pay-per-click advertising opportunities.

Does Pay Per Click Advertising Really Work?

Q. I noticed that you are currently advertising your web site on Yahoo! Search Marketing. I am thinking about using Yahoo! Search Marketing to advertise my company, and I was wondering how Yahoo! Search Marketing has produced for you. Are you generating leads, sales and traffic from Yahoo! Search Marketing and other PPC search engines?

A. I think pay-per-click search engine advertising has been an absolute gift to Internet marketers!

What could be easier than to list specific keywords and phrases that your potential customers are searching for anyway, and be able to pay as little as a few cents per click to have them visit YOUR site?

I’ve been using Yahoo! Search Marketing as a traffic generation tool since 1998 — STILL do — and yes, a HUGE portion of my traffic, leads, and sales originate from my Yahoo! pay-per-click advertising campaigns.

I particularly appreciate Yahoo! Search Marketing (as opposed to Google Adwords) because it appeals to a slightly more mature demographic which fits most of my niche markets well.

But as for PPC marketing in general, I use a variety of different search engines to drive targeted traffic to my various sites and at different costs.

I think that the greatest benefit of using PPC marketing to drive traffic to your site is both speed of delivery and the fact that you can worry less about search engine optimization or other ways of driving free traffic to your sites — which ultimately means spending less time working on your marketing strategies and more time for you!

Should I Bid the Top Spot?

Q. Would it be a good idea to for me to pay top dollar to be at the top?

A. Being in the #1 spot on a pay-per-click search engine doesn’t guarantee sales. It just means that you are likely to receive more traffic than advertisers farther down the list.

To determine whether it’s worth spending big bucks to be near the top you have to know and understand conversion rates, ie. How many clicks does it take to produce ‘x’ number of sales? What is your return on investment?

For example, if you make two sales per hundred visitors, then your conversion rate is around 2%. If your revenue per sale is $10, then paying 20 cents per click would completely negate your earnings.

REVENUE     – 2 X $10.00 (revenue/sale) = $20.00 EXPENSES    – 100 (clicks) X .20     = $20.00 NET         – $0.00

However, if your cost per click remains the same, but either your conversion rate or revenue per sale increases, then it might be worth paying 20 cents per click (in this case).

You need to work with your variables and test, test, test your campaigns.

Decide what percentage return you want on your investment, then work the numbers to make that happen.

How Many Keywords Do I Need in a PPC campaign?

Q. You mention that most of your traffic is from pay per click search engines.

How many keywords is necessary to become successful? How many do you have for sage-hearts.com? (I already use Yahoo! Search Marketing and I would think that the fierce competition would demand that I have thousands of targeted keywords.)

A. When it comes to keywords and pay-per-click advertising, I’ve found that it’s definitely a case of ‘the more the merrier’.

For sage-hearts.com, I advertise about 2500 different keywords and phrases at Yahoo! Search Marketing. I also advertise that site on several other PPCSE’s. In addition to wide exposure, having many keywords allows you to ‘dollar cost average’ your bids.

For example, if you pay 30 cents for 1 keyword, and 5 cents for another, and both receive about the same number of hits, your average cost has just gone down to 17.5 cents per visitor.

The trick is to bid on highly targeted keyword phrases (long tail keywords) at relatively low cost.

The best way to dollar cost average is to run numerous campaigns across different pay per click search engine accounts. The following 3 PPCSE’s are the most popular and will therefore drive the most traffic.

• Yahoo! Search Marketing
• Google Adwords
• MSN AdCenter

For PPC account deals and discounts, read FREE Pay Per Click Search Engine Traffic.

Where Do I Find Merchant Keyword Lists?

In a comment on How to Use the Buying Cycle to Choose PPC Campaign Keywords, Carolyn asked “Does every merchant give you a list of keywords you can use? I’ve never noticed these on linkshare or on cj. Can you tell us where they list these?”

Different networks and merchants handle their keyword rules differently. For example, on Commission Junction you’d click on the Advertiser Detail link, find the Keyword Link under Get Links and then click on Get HTML as shown in the next 2 screenshots.

How Do I Do Effective Keyword Research?

Q. Do you have any suggestions for doing effective keyword research?

A. Keyword research is critical both to determine profitable markets and to create web pages that get listed in the search engines and then found by visitors.

There are several articles that pertain to keyword (and market) research in the Find Your Niche section of NPT and I recommend that you first read Niche Market and Keyword Research.

For keyword research, I use both the Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool and WordTracker.

I particularly like WordTracker as it provides me with daily search estimates and lets me ‘drill down’ to the longest of the long tail keywords… just 2 of the many features that the service offers.

Here is an example of the keyword phrase ‘dog training’ dug to the first depth using Wordtracker’s Keyword Universe tool:

Click the image to see the full size image.

Click the image to see the full size.

Notice the little shovels? You click on those to go deeper and into each keyword phrase. For example, ‘dog training equipment’ produced the following keyword phrases (Count & Predict included_:

• dog training equipment 31 38
• dog training equipment in texas 6 7
• police dog training equipment 4 5
• Dog Training Equipment Dog Fence And Ring 2 2
• guard dog training equipment 2 2

‘Searches’ is the number of times the keyword has appeared in the Wordtracker database over the last 90 days. ‘Predict’ is Wordtracker’s prediction of the number of times the exact keyword will be searched for in a 24 hour period across all search engines.

With the Keyword Researcher, you can evaluate the number of results that appear when you search for the exact search term and check the ‘Google KEI’ — the keyword effectiveness index for Google.. ‘Google 24 hr Predict’ is Wordtracker’s estimate of the number of times the exact keyword will be searched for on Google.

The real trick is to go as deep as you can go, while still getting a fair number of searches without TOO much competition.

Wordtracker offers a free trial of their service at WordTracker or, you can read my Wordtracker review.

I received the following from Wordtracker yesterday morning about their beta version of the new Wordtracker tool.

We’d like you to try out the new tool and tell us what you think, as your feedback will help us prioritize what still needs to be done.

You’ll discover:

(i) A new dashboard feature that allows you to manage all of your keyword projects.

(ii) A quick summary of the number of lists, keywords and the total number of searches in each project.

(iii) That we’ve increased the pool of raw searches from which our data is drawn—from 288 million to over 700 million searches. This represents data collected over a period of 365 days rather than 160 as at present. And it means…

(iv) That we’ve increased the number of unique keywords from 24 million to 152 million keywords, giving you many more long tail keywords.

Note that last statement.

If you’re using PPC marketing, having more long tail keywords means you can get more visitors to your site for less money.

I checked out the new interface yesterday afternoon and definitely prefer the top-to-bottom structure to the original side-to-side. Seems more fluid and user-friendly. You can copy your existing keyword lists and projects from the Keyword Universe and Keyword Researcher into the new keyword tool and then access them all from the Dashboard – with numbers of lists, keywords and searches available at a glance.

Wordtracker does admit that many “features are missing from this new user interface” and that they are working hard to add more functionality.

So far, so good, I’d say – and I look forward to seeing what they have planned as “Alternative ways of assessing competition”.

Visit Wordtracker.

Note from Ros: This is the 2nd in DinerDave’s series. Click here to read the first, Affiliate Site Case Study: Introducing Diner Dave

In order to determine what content to put in the pages and posts of DinerDave.com I need to figure out what my target market is looking for on the search engines. Fortunately, there are lots of great tools out there to help with this market research. I used a couple of reputable keyword research tools from Ros’ post on “10 HOT Market Research Sites“, Wordtracker and Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

Since I want to provide helpful information on locating restaurant coupons, gift certificates, and reviews, I decided to test these aforementioned keywords first. Here is just a sample of the keywords I plugged in to both Wordtracker and the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to determine what type of traffic I could expect. I selected these keywords because each one has an affiliate program associated with it (ie Restaurant.com and Entertainment.com).:

1. Restaurant
2. Restaurant Coupons
3. Restaurant Discounts
4. Restaurant Gift Certificates
5. Restaurant Gift Cards
6. Restaurant Reviews
7. Dining Coupons

The results showed a VERY viable market for these keywords! I’ve included a couple of screen shots from Wordtracker and Google Adwords Keyword Tool to illustrate:

As you can see Wordtracker shows 1,113 searches yesterday on the keyword phrase “restaurant coupons” and Google Adwords Keyword Tool shows 550,000 searches done on the same keywords last month. I wondered how this discrepancy was possible and, after doing some research, I found that Wordtracker gets its data from Dogpile and Metacrawler as opposed to Google Adwords, which is ALL Google searches. Here are the results from my research on some other keywords I plan to use in DinerDave.com:

OK…So what do all these numbers ACTUALLY MEAN to me when preparing content for my blog? After reviewing the data, I made the following deductions:

1. When writing content for my site it will be very important to incorporate the word “restaurant” and “restaurant coupon” several times. According to the data these will be THE most popular keywords to include on DinerDave.com. I was planning on using the words “diner” and “dining” frequently throughout the site, but there are relatively few searches for any variation of “dining”. Good to know!
2. I’ve researched these keywords over the last 3 months and I’ve noticed that, even though the numbers change from month to month, their popularity remains consistent. “Restaurant coupons” always ranks higher than “restaurant reviews” and “restaurant gift certificates”. Therefore, I need to allocate more posts to “restaurant coupons” than any other category on my site. This is great news because my top 2 merchants, Restaurant.com and Entertainment.com, have high conversion rates on these keywords!
3. According to Google Adwords Keyword Tool there is a TON of competition for the top keywords I will include on DinerDave.com. Obviously, I will not be able to outbid other websites for these very popular keywords. However, I have the advantage of marketing my affiliate programs to a 15,000 subscriber email list! This will be the first order of business when making the transfer from DinerDeals.com to DinerDave.com. Plus, there are other less costly methods of marketing my site to fans of dining out (social media, visiting forums, back links, etc…)
4. Even though there is stiff competition for these top keywords, there are still opportunities with other restaurant related searches such as “restaurant gift cards”. “Restaurant gift cards” had 6,600 searches last month, but the competition was not as fierce for these keywords. I could write an entire post on reviews of the best restaurant gift cards available online. I have already signed up for the affiliate program for GiftCertificates.com and will incorporate that link to monetize that post.
5. When I reviewed the Wordtracker data on “restaurant coupons” I noticed some interesting variations I would not have thought of otherwise. For example, I would not have thought to include the keyword phrase “PRINTABLE restaurant coupons” in my content…but it fetched 469 searches in ONE DAY! Not too shabby. I’ll definitely be using that phrase too.

There you have it…and this is just the tip of the iceberg. I now have a list of over 250 keywords and phrases that I could use in DinerDave.com to drive traffic to the site using just these 2 keyword research tools.

Now I just need to incorporate these keywords into my site. In the next post I will explain how I created content on DinerDave.com by utilizing google alerts, email newsletters and reviewing affiliate sites.

If anyone had told me that I was destined to become an entrepreneur with a highly successful online business, I would have scoffed at the notion.

Being someone who hates to sell (and STILL hates to sell) I just didn’t see myself as a businessperson.

As it was, I became an entrepreneur entirely by ACCIDENT and it wasn’t until much later that I realized that running my own online publishing business (as an affiliate and ebook author) was absolutely PERFECT for me.

I now set my own schedule, write honestly about what I’m interested in, can reach for the sky in terms of income and get to help others do likewise.

PERFECT!

But as I said, I stumbled on my Utopic biz purely by accident, and I doubt I would have found a career or business that matches my strengths, interests and desires had I actually been LOOKING for it.

You, however, don’t need to be so haphazard in the search for your PERFECT business.

At the Underground Seminar, I spent quite a bit of time talking with millionaire entrepreneur, Steve Little.

Steve’s heart is definitely in the right place when it comes to helping new entrepreneurs find their PERFECT business. What he hates most is to see people waste their hard-earned money on hyped up bizops that just aren’t right for them.

FREE Survey Helps You Choose the RIGHT Business Model for YOU

So, to help you avoid getting into the WRONG business, Steve created a fantastic FREE 48-question survey which tells you all about your individual entrepreneurial strengths. Then he teaches you how to leverage those strengths into the success you desire with a series of 20 excellent video lessons.

And he’s made what it all available to you for free.

So, go check it out. It only takes a minute to get your survey results but the insight you get is invaluable.

And BTW, it doesn’t matter if you’re looking to start a business right now or not, you’ve got to hear what he has to say.