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

Prepare yourself mentally … this could be a bumpy ride!

In my introduction (if you haven’t read it, go back and read it first), I made some rather pointed statements. You see, I have never been one to sit on the fence and when it comes to helping people, I shoot straight from the hip. As I said before, my style might ruffle your feathers a little, but at least you’ll know I am always being honest and truthful. Now, let’s get started!

But, hold on! I first have to know; are you mentally prepared? Good, because “the stuff you didn’t want to know” might sting a little. You see, chances are that you are wasting your time in the traffic exchanges. OUCH! I can say this because I have seen hundreds of thousands of members come through our doors over the years and the incredible majority of them aren’t using them properly.

Now that we got that ugly little bit out of the way, we can get right to the part where I help you. Obviously, nobody likes to be told that they are doing something wrong (hence the part about telling you “stuff you don’t want to hear”), but the truth is that the sooner you can come to grips with the fact you are doing it wrong; the sooner you can get to doing it right. So, are you ready?

The first major “brain hurdle” that you will need to get over is that it takes TIME to do things properly. In the fast-paced internet world where everything is “instant”, this might be a hard pill to swallow. And it’s even harder when you are bombarded with endless promises of great wealth in short periods of time. The truth is that the only people making huge amounts of money quickly in those programs, are the owners. For everybody else, it takes a LOT of time to get it right.

I know what you’re thinking … “but I have spent years doing this, so I have definitely spent enough time and yet I am still not successful at it”. Although you may have spent all this time, the big question is “where did you spend your time?”. You see, most new internet marketers will join the latest and greatest program every few weeks. For the average person just starting out, this is a sure way to fail.

Let’s assume you are new to affiliate marketing. This would be a typical scenario. You join program “A” and you drive traffic to your affiliate link. You don’t make millions overnight like they promised (big surprise!), but that’s okay, because another program (“B”) has just launched so you join that one and start sending traffic to your affiliate link. Your time has now shifted to program “B” and on and on the cycle goes. Within 6 months you have joined 10 or more programs and haven’t spent enough time to make any of them work.

From the example above, you can see how somebody can spend a huge amount of time and end up with virtually nothing in return. This will lead to frustration and eventually giving up on everything altogether.

So, what does all this have to do with traffic exchanges? Well, traffic exchanges are a nice cheap way to get traffic to those affiliate links and so this is often where new internet marketers end up. And using traffic exchanges to send traffic to an affiliate link is exactly what you DO NOT WANT TO DO!

In my next article, I will start to dive deeper into what a traffic exchange should really be used for. Plus, I will share a little story with you on how my company (Logiscape) got started about 9 years ago.

Traffic Exchanges CAN make sense

Author: Tyler Huculak – President/Co-owner Logiscape Technologies Inc.

The next article in this series has been posted >> CLICK HERE

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Why The “Market Triangulation Method” Will Work For You

Most Internet marketers today who are trying to sell physical products, digital products and services on-line are performing marketing research backwards. They begin with a product which is selling and very hot within certain affiliate marketing circles thinking if there are marketers making money already with this product then they will also be able to succeed. This is of course one way of making money and it does work quite often, but it is often much more difficult to sell these commonly hot products than taking a top down approach towards a market and finding what you can offer it.

This is putting the cart before the horse so to speak and while many marketers make a fortune doing just this type of marketing…they are not only leaving valuable integration points of their markets untapped, but missing out on a lot more valuable business models. Would you rather approach a market knowing all the possibilities of monetizing it or would you rather just sell blindly? It is up to you and either approach can work, but remember that the marketer who knows his market better has a much higher percentage of profiting given the same actions and ability.

If you use my Market Triangulation Method you will know where all the traffic, products and ideas exist in a market from multiple angles. The work in building your web business is the hard part, but why start out handicapped to begin with? The marketers who make a killing by simply selling things which are hot without looking at other possibilities need to have some advantage or unique selling proposition in order to succeed because they are swimming with the rest of the fish. You as a marketer can form a whole new marketing proposition and live outside of the competitive box before anyone else catches on to your new approach.

The Market Triangulation Method (has three parts):

• Marketing Idea Brainstorming – Locate a new potential market based on your own interest using the Google SK Tool or use your existing product or service idea then…
• Locate Your Traffic Streams – Use Google Wonder Wheel and the Google External Keyword Tool (AKA – Google Sandbox) in combination to see all possible market areas and keywords within your market then…
• Locate All Potential Products And Services – Find out how much initial potential your market contains by using Amazon, E Bay, Click Bank and Commission Junction as beginning product finders based on the traffic containing keywords from the last step. This also unlocks new keywords based on new products which you might not have used the names of in your traffic research. You can then begin to dig into your market based on multiple competitor sites of all traffic and product keywords as deep as you like until you find a unique approach towards your market.

This is the absolute best three pronged approach to market research I have been able to develop by combining various methods which are not new. When you use these principles in combination with a the general principles I have laid out in previous articles about “Want Marketing” you cannot fail. My next series will show you why in more detail.

Market Research Blueprints With Google Wonder Wheel Can Make Sense

Author: Scott Holden – TrafficEraBlog

My Invention Changes The Online Mortgage Business

So I told my client, “Let me see if I can generate leads for you. Maybe I can come up with a new capture system, something totally innovative, then drive pay-per-click and other types of media to it. Would you be interested?”

He said, “Sure, you can take a crack at it. Who are you again?” He was pretty skeptical of me. He was dealing with Ameriquest and other well-known vendors. I wasn’t in that category. (By the way, a footnote: I hate the mortgage industry. It’s sure not something I’d want to do long-term.) But he said, “Go for it.” So I went to a high-end creative marketing company that did creatives for large corporations.

We paid a pretty penny for the design work, and I put together the concept for our new lead capture system. I made a list of what I wanted it to do, what fields we wanted data capture for.

It ended up being a unique approach to lead capture, different from anything else out there. We’ve all seen mortgage sites. They give you similar direct marketing to start with, like “Isn’t the security of your family worth it?” or some other psychological direct marketing copy on the front of it. And then a lead-capture system on the back, filling out certain fields.

Personally, I didn’t want to spend 30 minutes filling out the information they asked for. Some of them asked for different fields of information. That’s how the lead business works – different leads pay different amounts, depending on what you’re able to capture.

I ended up with a unique online mortgage squeeze-page lead capture system. The site itself looked like a Pepsi machine. Bright and shiny, fun for the user to play with. Big buttons you could push. It looked like a vending machine. The fields already had pre-filled information. Most of the other mortgage lead-capture forms used drop-down menus with a list of all the different ranges. You’d fill out each one.

Mine was the same, but the difference was, once I captured the information, they were automatically forwarded to another form that pre-filled the responses they had just entered. So it was a pre-calculation system.

I had talked to many people in the mortgage industry and looked at all their lead-capture pages, so I knew what kinds of information we needed. I asked the experts, “Is it possible to pre-qualify people? What are the legal stipulations?” So we came up with a really cool system. It was kind of like a mortgage calculator, but the difference was, it was built into the lead-capture system. We pre-qualified you for a loan, based on the answers you gave us.

What they’d see was something like, “Based on what you’ve told us, you qualify for a loan of …” then we had to put little disclaimers on the bottom. (A LOT of legal problems in that industry!) So the user ended up with a pre-qual form which they could submit to a lender of their choice. We’d give them the choice of a random mortgage house in their state or some of the vendors we suggested. And they would immediately get a phone call from the lender, or they could specify when they wanted to be called on it.

It was a neat integrated system, done in a way that was very enticing for the user. It worked because I talked to so many people about what they liked about the capture systems and what they didn’t like. We also threw in a bit of personalization, so that when they selected their lender, the form would populate the lender information to say, “Mr. Smith, Ajax Mortgage will be calling you by 7pm Wednesday.” It was more of a warm lead. They were more pre-qualified than the other systems around at that time.

That’s 4 years ago, which is a lifetime in the internet industry. So today, a lot of systems have caught up with that model. Back then, it was the first of its kind. I was happy about that, but it sure didn’t make me rich. Not even close.

My Life As An Affiliate Marketer

Another important lesson I learned was, don’t do business without a business contract. If you want to do joint ventures or the selling of a specific product, that’s one thing. But don’t actually start to build a separate business with somebody without having a contract in place.

I learned that not just with the stranger I tried to build a business with back then, but also with some of my best friends. It’s an important marketing lesson. Everybody knows it, but still, lots of people don’t bother with that business contract.

From there, I went into capturing leads for different affiliate offers. I got sick of the mortgage industry. The deal fell through as I was left holding air and my partner went on to use my lead system successfully. So I figured I’d take my knowledge and experience and do some affiliate marketing.

So I sold web hosting, as an affiliate. I found deals with different hosting companies where they paid you $100 or more per sale. What I figured out was, we could sell hosting and then offer services on the back end. Running their DNS server, providing articles & other content, and so forth. We had a good response.

We didn’t market through pay-per-click or any paid channels. We just posted all over on a bunch of different forums, and we did quite well. There were a few months we made $6,000 per month. We weren’t getting rich, but we were doing OK. I was able to survive on that.

That is the first thing people need to realize. They can make a living doing this. They need a system that already works. I was trying to create things on my own. I had learned some stuff, but I didn’t really use the stuff that was right there in front of me enough. It would have been a lot easier for me to just go to Clickbank and market something as an affiliate, and I probably would have done a lot better, as far as money.

To be continued…

Internet Marketing Success Can Make Sense

Author: Scott Holden – TrafficEraBlog

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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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