I Made My First Ever Internet Marketing Sale!!

I wrote a Squidoo article about 3 weeks ago before I started the 30 Day Challenge.

Check it out:
http://www.squidoo.com/manually-removing-spyware

Anyway, I look in my Clickbank account and there it was: $26.93 from a spyware product.

Here is the screenshot:

I am so much more motivated since it actually works!!

I've learned so much from the 30 Day Challenge and Wealthy Affiliate.

Simply amazing.

Are You Using Features And Benefits In Your Sales Copy?

I was checking out the Wealthy Affiliate forums and I came across this neat little tip on Benefits & Features.

First of all, do you even KNOW what the difference is between a Feature and a Benefit?

Features: These are the characteristics of the product or service. They talk about what the product or service will do.
Benefits: These are the characteristics that HELP the customer. They talk about how it makes the customer's life easier.

So here's the tip:
Write the Product, the feature(s) of a product, then write the corresponding benefit(s).

Examples:
Product: Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse
Feature: This mouse can be used 10 feet away from the base of the transmitter.
Benefit: This mouse allows you to operate your computer while relaxing on your couch.

Product: School Backpack
Feature: Backpack straps are padded with extra foam for comfort.
Benefit: These backpack straps are so padded that it will feel like you're not even wearing a backpack at all.

Questions to ask:
Feature: What does this product do? What are the technical characteristics?
Benefits: How does this help your customer? Does the benefit make the customer's life easier?

When you start implementing more benefits-driven copy, you will definitely be getting more sales because you are engaging your customer's emotions towards their decision making process.

Here are more resources:
Marketing Features Vs Benefits
Sell Benefits, Not Features
Entrepreneurs: Benefits vs. Features-Know the Difference!

Need More Niche Ideas?

Check out this post by Mark at 45n5.com:
695 Niche Ideas From the Thirty Day Challengers

He pretty much grabbed all the keywords that took 2 weeks of research in the thirty day challenge and compiled a list for all to see. (My niche is in there too)

I know many will be angry and some will praise him. But I think the message is pretty clear: Internet Marketers need to think differently in order to compete.

I guess this is the halfway point where all the 30 Day Challengers start all over again.

Oh well. Here we go again.

My Question Was Answered!

That question was: "Should I be moving my tumblr blog after the mass deletion of all the 30DC accounts?"

I log in this morning, and there it was: "ACCOUNT SUSPENDED". I'm in the process of working on ezine articles and I wasn't sure if I should point it back to the tumblr blog or not.

Well I know what the answer is now.

Lesson Learned: Internet Marketers need to come up with ways to be different.

Despite the guidance from our 30DC leader, we still need to think for ourselves on how we can better serve our customers. The key to competition is differentiation. We need to be able to come with different angles to be able to compete in a market.

How To Put Social Bookmarking Buttons On Your Blogger

I've always wondered how to put those neat little social bookmarking icons at the end of each post. If you take a look at the end of each of my posts, you will see a row of icons.

Here's a little guide to adding these social bookmarking buttons to your posts

1. First off, you need to download the icons. Right-click each icon and save it to a folder somewhere.
2. Open a photobucket.com account and upload the icons there.
3. Follow the resources at this blog: Adding Social Bookmarking Buttons To The NEW Blogger!
4. Add the code to your template between the "div class='post-footer'" tag
5. Save changes and enjoy!

You may have also noticed that I have a digg link at the beginning of each post. Here's the guide:

1. Open your Blogger Template by editing the HTML
2. Do a search for "data:post.body". This contains the content of your post. You will be placing the code after this tag.
   
3. Follow the resources at this blog: Add Digg button to Blogger or Blogspot
   
4. Save changes again and enjoy!
   

Start by "Digging" this post and clicking on your favorite Social Bookmarking icons below!

What A Crazy Week!!

It's been almost 6 days since my last post and I've been so busy (and lacking so much sleep!). Thank god it's Friday!

Here are the things I've accomplished this week:

• Wrote some articles (I'm still behind the 3 per day assignment)
  
• Created my tumblr.com blog for my niche
• Signed up in Clickbank and found an affiliate product to promote
  
• Submitted my blog to several social bookmarking sites including stumble, del.icio.us, netscape.com, and digg
• Created a landing page for my other niche to use for a pay per click campaign (This is for the Wealthy Affiliate 8-Week Course)
• Purchased a domain name and web hosting
• Setup Google Analytics and Feedburner for my new websites
  

Checking this morning, I have achieved ranking between #1 and #8 in Google for various phrases. I think this is really exciting because of the fact that it happened so fast. I was under the impression that getting a organic listing in Google would take weeks or even months to do.

I have yet to see my first sale, but generating traffic is so exciting!

Watch Out When Using Keyword Tools

There are a lot of keyword tools you can use out there:

• Wordtracker
• Overture
• Keywords Analyzer
• Keyword Discovery
• etc, etc.

I was reading this article on KeywordWorkshop.com titled "Keyword Data Is Almost Always Wrong".
http://www.keywordworkshop.com/articles/41/1/Keyword-Data-Is-Almost-Always-Wrong

Basically, it states how keyword tools will always have varying results. This is because of the fact that you can't sample all of the searches for the entire world wide web! Even google doesn't have a complete sample of the world wide web. I believe that maybe half of the Internet Users you Google primariliy to search, but this means that the other half uses other search engines.

Quote: from KeywordWorkshop.com
"Wordtracker (one of the leading keyword research companies) samples around 2% of the total Internet search volume. This sample size will provide some relatively stable data for popular keywords, but will proportionally become less accurate as the keyword popularity decreases. In simple terms, the less popular the keyword, the more likely that keyword data source will be wrong."

This is kind of interesting since for most Internet Marketers, we will be targeting Long Tail Keywords which does have less traffic than popular keywords.

This brings up interesting questions:

• Which keyword tool should I use?

• Wordtracker is able to sample 2% of the total Internet Search volume, which can be a healthy sample, but keep in mind that the less popular keywords may reside in that 98%.
  
• How reliable can a keyword tool be?
• Keyword tools may not be reliable because of the fact that the all searches on the Internet cannot be sampled.
  
• If it's not reliable, what should I use if for?
• You should use keyword tools to generate ideas. Use the numbers as indicators of popularity rather than exact searches per day/week/month/whatever. I believe that the numbers can be used relatively to each other to determine their popularity.
• What else can I do?
• Use your head, Internet Marketers need to have creative angles in order to survive in their industry.
• Also, when in doubt, use 2 or more tools to verify your results. In the 30DC, they advocate using Google Trends and Wordtracker together to verify the search volume.

Just keep in mind that since you are looking for Long Tail Keywords, you may be passing on a niche opportunity if the Keyword Tools don't add up correctly but you feel that it may be a good niche.

Over time, you will start to understand what might work and not work. Trust your instincts and your gut feeling!

I would have to say that overall, the best keyword tool is your Brain!

Need Resources in One Place? Solution: The 30DC Hotsheet

Here's a hotsheet of links for the first half of the 30DC.

The 30DC Hot Sheet

Software and Plugins

• Smart Digg Button: http://neothoughts.com/2007/04/27/firefox-extension-smart-digg-button/
• StumbleUpon ToolBar: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/138
• TwitterBar: http://spatialviews.com/twitterbar
• Session Manager Toolbar: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2324
• Del.icio.us extension:https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1532
• TDC Toolbar: http://thirtydaychallenge.ourtoolbar.com/exe
• ScribeFire: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1730
• SEOplugin: http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html
• Garrett's Wordtracker / Trends tool: http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com/blog/94/wordtracker-trends-tool/
• Google Notebook: http://www.google.com/notebook/download

Niche Research

• How to do stuff
• http://www.ehow.com
• http://www.howtodothings.com
• http://www.wikihow.com
• http://www.mygoals.com
• http://www.43things.com
• http://answers.yahoo.com
• http://www.wannalearn.com
• Discussions
• http://groups.google.com/groups/dir
• http://groups.yahoo.com
• http://www.technorati.com
• Hot Lists and Popular Items
  
• http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends
• http://pulse.ebay.com
• http://www.technorati.com/pop
• http://answers.yahoo.com/best
  
• Quick Checklist
1. Niche Brainstorming: Start looking for needs, wants, problems, questions in different industries
2. Keyword and Competition Analysis: Write down number of sites on Google Search, Wordtracker and GTrends
3. Niche Judgement: Evaluate keyword against criteria
   

Keyword Research and Testing

• Resources
  
• http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com
• http://www.google.com/trends
• Keyword Criteria
• Competiton: Less than 25,000-30,000 competing sites
• Search Volume: More than 80-100 searches per day
• Web 2.0 Properties
• An EASY way to assess Web 2.0 Properties: http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1933
• List of Web 2.0 Sites to watch out for:
  
• Squidoo
• Hubpages
• Tumblr
• Netscape
• Ezinearticles
• Myspace
• Youtube
• Ehow
• USfreeads
• Zimbio

Other Resources

• Official Notes for 30DC: Mike Mindel's Blog - http://www.webventurer.com/blog/

30DC: Is The GTrends Technique Really Reliable?

Someone asked on the 30DC forum about whether the Google Trends technique is a reliable source of determining Google Search traffic. This made me think that it's possible that maybe Dan's method may not be so accurate after all.

Here is the argument I made on the forum:

Quote:

Originally Posted by learningcurve Hi everyone, If you have Google Analytics set up for your site, you can track ACTUAL VISITS to your site by KEYWORD...so you can, in fact, determine how much traffic you're receiving per keyword per day (or any other period of time, for that matter.) This is how you'll be able to determine actual traffic numbers for your own keywords and replace MYI with your own phrase as your benchmark. So, if Dan says he's getting 500 visitors a day on the keyword "male yeast infection" - I'm pretty sure he knows that for sure. Suzanne

Google Analytics is a great tool and you can check the ACTUAL VISITS to your SITE by KEYWORD. For those who don't know what Google Analytics is, Check out the product tour on their website:

http://www.google.com/analytics/

Suzanne you are correct about being able to see the actual visits for your site. However, your conclusion is incomplete.

THEORETICAL EXAMPLE
Let's say I own a domain called www.mynicheproducts.com. I set up Google Analytics and rank #1 in the natural search of Google.com. I also heavily optimize my site for the keyword "sausage making in my basement".

For the sake argument, let's say that 100% of the time that someone types in "sausage making in my basement" in Google, they ALWAYS click on www.mynicheproducts.com. Let's say that Google Analytics reports that I have 500 clicks per day for "sausage making in my basement". Therefore, it would probably be safe to assume that I can go into Google Trends and just match the numbers with what I have on Google Analytics. Also, the line graph in Google Trends should be the same graph in Google Analytics.

REALITY
The problem is that for the #1 rank you may not get 100% of the clicks every time someone searches for "sausage making my basement". You may get 40%... 60%-80%... who knows... Marketing is almost an art because the science of consumer psychology are not always exact numbers.

A Guess at Dan's Methodology
1.) Take the average of the #1 or #2 spot (i.e. 40% of searches are click throughs) <<< This is where the problem is, how do you determine the average?
2.) Write the average of daily clicks over a week or 2 week period (i.e. 300 clicks daily)
3.) GTrends Baseline = (1 - [% of searches]) * [average daily clicks]

CONCLUSION
I really do like the technique, however, I think it's important to understand how reliable this technique is. The issue lies is how to determine the baseline of a Google Trends line graph.

RESOURCES
Here's an article that may help define the average of different ranking of sites:
Click Through Rate of Google Search Results - AOL-data.tgz - Want to Know How Many Clicks The #1 Google Position Gets?

So what is the Clickthrough Rate of the #1 and #2 spots on Google.com?
The following image is from Redcardinal.ie:



It gives an interesting statistic:

• The #1 ranked site receives ~42% clickthroughs of search results
• The #2 ranked site receives ~11% clickthroughs of search results

This means that the #1 and #2 spots receive HALF of the search results for a keyword. I don't know how this data was generated but it could be representative of the search results we see on Google.

30DC Criteria

Since our criteria for a keyword is at least 80-100+ searches per day, we should have the following:

• If we had the #1 spot for a keyword, we should be getting about 40-50 clicks per day
  
• If we had the #2 spot for a keyword, we should be getting about 8-10 clicks per day
  

30DC: Day 8 and Day 9 - The Quick Checklist

Back to the Drawing Board!

Wow! what a wealth of knowledge that was. I found out that all my niches had absolutely no potential in Google Trends. So I began my journey back to the beginning. The funny thing, though, is that the process was much faster the second time around and I was able to find 4 good niches to work with!

It also helps to have Garrett's toolbar: Wordtracker / Trends Tools (30 Day Challenge Blog)

Niche Research Checklist

1. Niche Brainstorming: Start looking for needs, wants, problems, questions in different industries
• Mike Mindel's "Getting Stuck for Ideas?" Post
  
• Google Groups, Yahoo Answers, eHow.com, technorati, wannalearn, etc, etc
  
2. Keyword and Competition Analysis
• Write down number of sites on Google Search
• Write down number of search on Wordtracker
  
3. Noticing
• Do " + affiliate" search and notice the number of affiliate programs
  
• Look at Google Sponsored Ads to see who is promoting a product
4. Niche Judgement
   
1. Make a matrix of Niche Market, Description/Notes, Umbrella Keyword, Wordtracker, Google Results, and Google Trends.
   
2. Criteria:
   
1. Wordtracker: 80-100+ searches per day
2. Google Search Less than 25,000-30,000 competiting sites
3. Google Trends: 80-100+ searches per day
   

Rinse. Wash. Repeat.