Know Your Market Competition And Win Easily

Today let’s finish up our work on how to best conduct your marketing research with the last section and possibly most important section on knowing your market and keyword competition for each keyword phrase you want to target before even getting involved in a marketplace.

We know now that it is crucial to have all four elements I have mentioned so far when going into a market niche in order to increase our business success chances 1000 fold. Those four elements once more are:

• Find High Volume Traffic Keyword Searches
• Target Want Market Keywords that have Commercial Value
• Introduce Traffic Streams to USP products and services
• Target Low Competition keywords which allow a quick ROI

The fourth market research element is really just another way of saying not to waste your time thinking you will easily dominate the most competitive keyword phrases without serious effort. Even if we follow all of these rules can we be sure we are even going to be able to beat the competition an take a top 3 position in the search engine and gain site traffic?

To be sure we will rank in the search engines for the purposes of organic and paid traffic based on Google’s rules which also carries over to Bing and Yahoo search as well. The two things we need to check are:

I. We must know the number of competitors in our marketplace or the SEOC column in the Market Samurai tool. This is the number of pages that mention our keyword phrase. 100k pages or less is a good size competition pool but the ideal suggested number is 30k or less which should allow you to rank in a few weeks at the top of Google. The number of competitors and the amount of competition is not a fast rule it has just been seen to usually be a good statistical range for lower competition. It is true that each market niche will have different competition levels regardless of number of pages.

II. We need to also know the strength of the top 10 competitor pages for our market keywords. This is really all that matters at all as far as getting free search engine traffic.

SO what things must we know to judge the strength of the top 10 competing web pages for a keyword?”

The On Page Factors Are:

• Page Rank
• Title Tag
• Meta Description
• H1 and H2 Tag
• URL Keywords

The Off Page Factors Are:

• Number of Links to Page
• Number of Links to Domain
• Number of .gov and/or .edu Links to Domain
• DMOZ and/or Yahoo Links to Domain
• PR of Links to Page
• Keyword Anchor Text to Page

There is no guessing with how to get SEO rankings for the most part it is a science especially when you use Market Samurai. You will know on each keyword how hard it will be to rank against your competition. Ranking will be even easier than what Market Samurai shows you if you use these proven methods when building your site online:

• SEO Themed Siloing including relevant home page, categories and articles.
• Get relevant keyword anchor text links coming into all of your sites pages.
• Use a Mini Net Syndication Method which includes social web 2.0 platforms as well as content syndication across many content syndication platforms to surround and feed into your main sales site.
• Use Proper Syndication Tools to push and boost the power of every effort and piece of content you make.

Here is my USP or incentive for you to buy Market Samurai from Logiscape. Anyone who purchases Market Samurai through me may email or post a comment on the blog asking any market research question relating to the tool and how to best use it to improve your business. That’s right ask me anything at all and I will respond with my best information and even help you with your marketing idea within reason.

Market Research Commandments Can Make Sense

Author: Scott Holden – TrafficEraBlog

Matching Streams of Traffic With Products and Your USP

The second important marketing research commandment we just went over was commercial value in keywords or what is sometimes called OCI “Online Commercial Intention”. There are a couple more things to consider in this regard but let’s also take a look at the third commandment which is a must. You must take an affiliate, existing or new product or service and match that product or service with appropriate traffic streams. In addition you need to consider how and why to offer specific products when doing your market research. It is a common sense approach to decision making and most marketers just don’t use this concept.

Ask yourself two questions:

• “What product or service can I offer to this traffic stream?”
• “How can I offer it with it’s own unique selling proposition?”

By asking these two questions what you are doing is essentially playing two roles at once as a marketer. You are following the age old economist theory of supply and demand or “giving the market what it wants in the right place at the right time”. Many people call this affiliate marketing which is fine but it is broader than that… what you are doing is satisfying a demand.

The second question addresses a more powerful and more difficult question and skill. “How can I offer something which is either a hybrid product, has added value, is completely a novel idea or any combination of these three?”

This is what some people call product development and some call this alchemy. It is a purely imaginative and creative skill. It is not measurable and can have immense value. It is the ability to coin new ideas completely. It comes to some people quite easily and others not so much. Sometimes such ideas flow rapidly and sometimes it is a process which takes weeks or even months.

Do not rack your head over it if you cannot make this alchemy part of marketing reveal a novel approach for you. The easy way to move forward within your market is to simply match traffic to products and services for starters and then use a hybrid approach or a value added proposition to that idea.

Let us backtrack to my latter point of finalizing commercial value when comparing keywords. In order to finalize commercial value let us look at our data through a different lense than our last example. Now let’s use this model for analyzing commercial value:

1) SEOV or SEO Value which is the sum of adding organic traffic or searches per day the top spot would expect to get from Google times the cost per click of that word in Adwords top positioning. We are assuming that the value is at least as high as the cost of the keyword otherwise competitors wouldn’t pay that price.

2) OCI or the pure Online Commercial Intention number as pulled from Bing. It is good to look at this number because it often reveals the percent of those keyword searchers who intend to buy. We cannot see that with CPC alone.

3) USP where traffic meets products and services. We must use our ideas to measure from a conceptual space if we can create a combination which is not already existing in the space of promotion to these keywords. This is the creative and ground breaking method by which whole new businesses are born.

It can take your research to a new level, but for completely new ideas you should test the water before moving forward with your idea. You can run a survey from: related forums, social sites, and competitor sites. The other option is to buy traffic and survey it about your idea and to glean new ideas.

4) Competition must be considered for the keywords you intend to target as a final measure of assurance. Do not proceed until you have looked at your competition. I will present the competition analysis in the last part of this series.

Here is my incentive for you to buy Market Samurai from Logiscape. Anyone who purchases Market Samurai through me may email or post a comment on the blog asking any market research question relating to the tool and how to best use it to improve your business. That’s right ask me anything at all and I will respond with my best information and even help you with your marketing idea within reason.

A Market Research Commandment Can Make Sense

Author: Scott Holden – TrafficEraBlog

Target Keywords With Commercial Intent Or Flop

The second major thing for us to pay attention to when exploring our marketing research is to target keywords  which have commercial value. We can call this “Commercial Intent” or a Want Market. Once again this idea of a  perfect prospect is defined by their need for a solution or an irrational desire to purchase something. (some people would call these types of people fanatics)

The major thing we are trying to determine here is what types of keyword searches are being used by buyers.  Who is a buyer in our market based on the psychology of the keywords they are typing in the search engines?  This might sound very daunting to think: “OK, wow now I need to figure out what the heck someone is thinking  when they type a specific word into Google?”

The answer to the psychological question is NO this is much simpler than that. All you need to do is determine  from common sense after researching your market keywords which ones would indicate a buying impulse from people  and which do not. Now let me admit firstly that there will be keywords which don’t seem to be a buying prospect,  but end up being buyers. This occurs in every market I have ever seen.

Your goal at the outset is not to find every single converting keyword under the sun, but only the ones which  would more obviously convert into sales. This can be done by using one tool in aiding us to see the possible potential of a keyword for becoming a sale. We will use Market Samurai to help us find the more obvious keywords  we are wanting, but also just to lay a groundwork which can be built upon.

When using market samurai we will need to look at several main data columns to indicate if the words we are  looking at have sales potential or not. These data columns are:

• AWCPC – Adwords Cost Per Click
• AWCTR – Adwords Click Through Rate
• OCI – Online Commercial Intent

AWCPC will show us what the number one positioned advertiser can expect to pay per click when a person who  typed in our keyword clicks on the number one spot Adwords ad. This is crucial because it tells us if advertisers are spending money on our keyword. If there is a lot being paid for the top position we can guess  that the keyword has value or the potential to create sales.

AWCTR will show us what percentage of people clicked on the number one ranked Adwords ad as a percentage of total traffic for our keyword. It is also another fairly good sign if the top advertiser is getting a high CTR  that this keyword has many interested people. This is not a straight away sign of buyers but of interest for sure.  You must now look at the ad that is ranked number one to get an idea why people are clicking on it. You will check  to see if the ad is well written to just get a lot of clicks or if it appears the clicks are coming due to a buying  interest. Not a clear indicator of buying but it certainly shows us how active people are in the market.

OCI will give you an idea based on BING’s data if people are likely to buy based on your keyword. It is not always  accurate but once again can be a helpful indicator if a word is obviously a converting keyword.

Keep in mind to check these statistics Market Samurai yields against the actual sources of the data or the tools  they come from just to be sure the software is accurate. Watch the following video to see how I use these pieces  of data to gain an idea if my market keywords have sales potential or not. You won’t always have a clear indication  when using this data if you have winning keywords or not, but more often than not you will.

Keep in mind to use  common sense as well to decide if there is money to be made with these keywords by using a different approach to  the market than other advertisers may be using.

Here is my incentive for you to buy Market Samurai from Logiscape. Anyone who purchases Market Samurai through me may email or post a comment on the blog asking any market research question relating to the tool and how to best use it to improve your business. That’s right ask me anything at all and I will respond with my best information and even help you with your marketing idea within reason.

Market Research Commandments Can Make Sense

Author: Scott Holden – TrafficEraBlog

Ignore This Methodology At Your Demise

There are tons of marketers out there who teach various methods for performing market research and they have some good information to share on some new bit of good advice or a new tool which will give you an edge when finding markets to pursue.

What I am about to show you is as fool proof of a step by step list of marketing research as you will find anywhere. This is a no fluff way to uncover the traffic, sales potential, product positioning and competition analysis you need to have the best chance to succeed possible.

There are essentially four main steps to what I will call my “marketing research commandments“:

• Find High Volume Traffic Keyword Searches
• Target Want Market Keywords that have Commercial Value
• Introduce Traffic Streams to USP products and services
• Target Low Competition keywords which allow a quick ROI

Everyone knows finding high volume traffic keywords is essential to succeeding in online marketing, because without a constant stream of relevant visitors to your web site your business will not earn a return on investment and become a waste of time. This is why I use two tools to initially uncover large market area keywords right out of the gate once I know what area I am interested to investigate.

I use the Google External Keyword Tool and Market Samurai when I am wanting to easily uncover the possible areas of a market to target. I begin with the external keyword tool and then import my findings into Market Samurai just to be sure I don’t miss out on any keywords possible.

You must ask the question: Are people searching in my market niche? You then must answer the question what are they searching for based on the keywords I am finding?”

Then you need to filter these keywords in such a way that the amount of daily searches going on with your overall keyword list is adequate enough to possibly convert enough sales to allow you to have a positive ROI without much tweaking and testing. If you already have an existing product or service as a starting point you will be able to roughly determine the answer to this question. Try to use very conservative estimates with a 1% starting conversion rate on sales expected or less as this is a safe way to think.

It should be obvious to you then that if you get 100 site visitors total per day for your site based on your batch of keywords you will target and being in the number one spot for one or more words which will pull in 100 searches a day that you can survive or profit as a business quickly. This is not an easy thing to guess at all what your site visitors will do once they arrive on your site, but just play it as safe as you can and allow that sales will be extremely low at the beginning. They could in fact be 10 times what you expect, but plan for the worst and you will succeed much more often.

Please watch the following video as I show you my step by step using the Google External Keyword Tool and Market Samurai together to uncover as many niche keywords which could pertain to an existing product or new product you will create based on your research. You will be introducing streams of site traffic to a unique selling proposition so keep this concept in mind when researching initially.

Here is my USP or incentive for you to buy Market Samurai from Logiscape. Anyone who purchases Market Samurai through me may email or post a comment on the blog asking any market research question relating to the tool and how to best use it to improve your business. That’s right ask me anything at all and I will respond with my best information and even help you with your marketing idea within reason.

Market Research Commandments Can Make Sense

Author: Scott Holden – TrafficEraBlog

I just watched a video about a new Technology or should I say combination of social mashup and communication tools all rolled into one from suggestion of a good programmer friend of mine. To say I am absolutely FLOORED would be an understatement.

Every time I think Apple has topped the technology cherry on the whipped cream along comes Microsoft with their really cool new browser Bing. Then I begin to remember hey Microsoft does have tons of pull still don’t they?…Now I am a Linux Ubuntu operating system user and when I first started using it like all former Windows users I thought:

Well this certainly is a nice clean fast and secure operating system?

But then I grew tired because I have like so many others been spoon fed with the ease of use of Windows and just how handy it really is when it’s not getting the occasional virus. I had grown lethargic with my lack of needing to do much to get programs to run properly. Ubuntu was a new mountain and seemed like I would not ever be able to type some scripts into the console for the occasional need to add or move something….Please see: Totally incompetent non-programming marketer.

Then just when I finally feel after a year that I have been sitting on what is possibly the most advanced OS on the planet and I am just beginning to really see how much it can do…along comes Ole You Know Who. Yes that’s right I’m talking about the big G “lion of the domain” Google.

Bam, Smash, Zap, Zoom…will they never stop to make our jaws drop? Google Wave is the sickest thing I have never seen until today. Combine Social Marketing, Twitter, Mashable Media Content, Email, Instant Messenger all served up on an html 5 platform. What is html5? Ah that’s another conversation for another day.

If you cannot see the value of Google Wave then you definitely aren’t using the Google Internets thing rightly. It’s all unfolding before us now and some of the tools I will be getting into soon will explain why now is the time of the you marketer more than it has ever been since the Internet began.

Enjoy the web playground.

Google Wave and New Social Media Platforms Can Make Sense

Author: Scott Holden TrafficEraBlog

It started with network marketing back in the 90s. I jumped around to a bunch of different opportunities. I had some success, but didn’t really commit enough to any one of them. I really loved the model of network marketing. It seemed like a Utopian system for people who didn’t want to operate in the corporate world anymore. MLM had the possibility of being a paradigm-shifter all over the world for a lot of people.

So I believed in the model but like so many people, I didn’t believe in myself enough that I could really do it. That seems to be a big problem. People just don’t put enough energy into their business to make it really work, whether it’s network marketing or internet marketing. They don’t believe they can actually be successful.

So they’re stuck in this corporate construct trap. They figure it’s just easier to work for somebody else. There’s nothing wrong with that. But for those of us who have the entrepreneurial spirit and want to take back control of our lives, we’re looking for a different way.

I Couldn’t Do What The Gurus Told Me

I started down that path in the 1990s. In 1999 or 2000, after Google came online, I started paying attention to all these internet marketers. I liked that model more than network marketing, because I didn’t have to do as much legwork. I could just stay home and work on it.

So I began to study the handful of successful internet marketers at that time. I was following the same guys everybody else was following back then. I saw that what they were saying was do-able, but I kept hitting the same roadblock.

I understood what they told me to do, but I couldn’t do it! There were a couple reasons that happened to me, and why it seems to happen to everybody who wants to get into internet marketing. First, there’s a technological barrier. If you don’t know how to do web design, if you don’t understand programming, then you’re at a disadvantage. You’re stuck. You either have money to hire somebody to do that for you, or you begin on your own journey of learning how to do it all.

People think internet marketing is the same as “brick and mortar” business. It is, in a lot of ways, but the real difference I saw was, it’s not as easy. It’s actually quite a bit harder. First of all off-line your business can succeed purely by the location of your building. You have a demographically targeted market in a specific location. Your competition is easily definable. Online your competition is the whole world so you have to find a niche and ways to bring internet surfers to your business site.

To market on the internet, you have to be an expert in multiple areas, in multiple fields. Just to market online, you must be able to program. You have to design and create a lead capture page. You have to learn how to run different tools. Anybody can learn to use an auto responder, but there is time involved, a learning curve.

You have to become a good copywriter. You need to learn a lot about direct marketing, how it works. So it’s interdisciplinary. It’s quite overwhelming, even for someone like myself who understood all the concepts.

People Trust You When They Know Who You Are

Over time, it began making more sense. I had observed for about 2 years by 2001, but had never taken the plunge to get active in internet marketing. I joined a couple deals I saw on TV infomercials. I got some experience and laid a groundwork to learn more.

In 2001, I was working for a small IT company here in Denver, a 4 or 5-man shop. The owner put me in charge of creating new business for the company. So I started looking at anything and everything as a means to generate leads.

I began focusing on pay-per-click and mailing off-line postcards, buying leads, pay-per-view to our crummy website that we built way back then. I did a lot of different stuff. Then I started working on how to generate clients for a business. I was horrible at it at first. Had no clue what I was doing. But by going through it, I began to understand the different things that had to be in place in order to actually capture a lead … creating a squeeze page, and so forth. So I began to generate some new customers for our business that way.

What I found effective was pushing off-line leads to online. I’d send out postcards to people to get them to our website. What internet marketers weren’t teaching back then, and which I found effective, was to be transparent with people, to be real. Let them see who you are, what your background is, what your company represents, and so forth.

I didn’t understand at the time why it was working, but looking back, it’s simple. People will trust you when they know who you are. And back in 2001 and 2002, you had the biggest scam artists in the world online. Everybody was anonymous, with private domains. People were putting fake pictures on their website. The landscape has evolved rapidly over the last 7 years. Today, people realize that transparency is very important. Even corporations are becoming more accessible.

My Own Company And Some New Lessons

Anyway, I left this IT company after a couple years and opened up my own mortgage company in 2004. I did that for 2 years. At the same time, I was dabbling in affiliate marketing, selling satellite TV systems online as an affiliate, through paid banner ads and through networks like Zango.

I had some success, but I didn’t have enough money to really push it that far. What happened was, whenever I made $1000, I spent it. That is a tough thing. When you actually get to the point where you’re making some money, it’s very easy to think, “Oh, I’ve made money now, I can make more!”

Well … fact is, you need to invest back into your company and wait until the nest egg grows. It’s the same with lead generation or anything you’ll need to be out of pocket for your business. You can’t ever really look at your profits as 100% profits.

You have to set a goal of a certain return on investment number. Then, and only then, can you take some out for yourself and pay yourself. You still have to re-invest the rest of it. Back to the story. My friend was a mortgage loan officer and owned the company with me. He taught me everything about the loan business and I started figuring how to capture leads in such a competitive business. That niche is very difficult to generate leads in, because it’s so competitive.

I spent about a year working on it and figured out a couple very effective methods. We used a telemarketing call center. We gave them a script and the qualifying questions to ask prospects, so we’d wind up with a real, legitimate lead that you could use for your own business, or else sell it out a couple times in the lead market.

So there was very specific information you needed to capture. If people are filling out a form online, you have specific fields of information, such as:

• What is your loan-to-value amount?
• Do you have a 2nd mortgage?
• How much is your 2nd mortgage for? And more …

So I figured how to capture leads through pay-per-click and telemarketing. Those were the two primary means. Then I also got into brokering mortgage leads myself. I thought that would be a way to make good money. I aligned myself with a couple individuals who were doing quite well in brokering leads. They resold an existing supply of leads. You’d find a lead generator, buy leads from them, and then sell those leads a couple times to different mortgage houses. That part is easy to do. The difficult part is setting up a distribution and online billing system to manage it all.

My job at that point was just to find new buyers of leads. I did OK, made decent money re-brokering leads. But before long, I asked one of my clients, “Wouldn’t you really rather generate your own leads? This is such a sketchy business, trying to buy leads and actually getting quality.” And of course, THAT is the big problem when you buy leads, no matter what kind of leads, from anyone. If you don’t generate them yourself, no matter what business you are in, time and time again you will buy bad or worthless leads most of the time.

You don’t get the quality you want, and you can figure the leads have already been rummaged over by several other companies by the time you get them.

Internet Marketing Success Can Make Sense

Author: Scott Holden – TrafficEraBlog

Next Article: A Windy, Curvy Path 2

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