Wordze Keyword Research for only $4

July 9, 2008 | 3 Comments

I just got an email from my Wordze account manager…

I hope everyone is enjoying July.  As I had talked about to some of you we have
something really special for July that is going to knock your socks off!

Until July 14th you or your friends can get access to Wordze for ALL of July for
only $4, then in April you will only pay 38.98 a month to continue to use Wordze.

I have still not used Wordze enough to really know how to explain it to you all… but if you want to try it out for $4, its probably well worth it! By the way it looks, there will be a $39 fee to continue using it into “April” <sic> August (I am sure they meant August)…

If you do take the Wordze Trial, come back and let us know how it worked for you!

Mark

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Using Google Adwords Tool with WordTracker to Create Targeted Content

July 9, 2008 | 5 Comments

After my last post about Google Search Volume Metrics, I just had to jump in and see a quick and easy way to use the figures alongside WordTracker, to build visitor based content! This is actually a 10-12 minute video walking through the process… only because I talk alot though! The actual keyword research can be done in less than 5 minutes!

The most important data we get comes in part from both tools. From Google, we get search volume and from the WordTracker database, we can see the number of competing pages for the terms!

In the video, I used the following resources:

• Google Adwords Keyword Research Tool
• WordTracker Keyword Research

Let me know how the process works for you!

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Google Gives Back - with Real Search Volume Numbers!

July 9, 2008 | 8 Comments

All I can say is WOW - Google is sharing Search Volume Stats!

If you have ever used the Google Keyword Tool, you know it has been frustrating seeing nothing but small image graphs with the various amounts of volume. Guess what… it now shows actual search volume numbers!

If thats not too cool… I don’t know what is!

To learn more about the stats… visit the Google Answers section for the tool.

1. Google External Keyword Tool
2. Google Help Center Docs

This is the part that caught my eye:

Date range: The Approx Search Volume [Previous Month] column shows search volume statistics for the last calendar month. The Approx Avg Search Volume column shows average monthly search volume over a recent 12-month period.

Makes me wonder what will happen to all the companies who have built a business model out of the stats they would never release!

To see a side by side comparison… watch this video by Ed Dale, comparing one of his site visitor stats to the volume!

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Free WordTracker Trial - Limited Time Offer

June 9, 2008 | 5 Comments

Just a quick post to let you all know I got an email today from WordTracker…

Dear Mark,

We recently launched a promotion offering new subscribers unlimited 7 day access to the full version of Wordtracker for FREE. This promotion has been very successful to date as it has allowed many more people experience how Wordtracker Keyword Research can greatly benefit their online marketing efforts.

Anyhow… I have had several readers ask if WordTracker was really worth the money, now is your chance to try wordtracker for free!

Edit: From what I am hearing, WordTracker is REQUIRING new users to register for the free trial with the use of their credit card.

Enjoy!

Mark

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Knowing your Niche Market is the First Step to Selling!

May 16, 2008 | 20 Comments

Knowing your Niche Market is by far, one of the most important steps in avoiding failure with Build a Niche Store or any niche website! Number 3 of the 20 Reasons you will Fail with Build a Niche Store… You Don’t Research your Niche!
image courtesy of: http://www.inflagrantecollecto.info/

In this post, we will look at several of the factors you need to consider when looking into the development of a new niche website. In less than 30 minutes, you will know whether or not a niche is even worth pursuing before you go out and buy that new domain name or get started with hours of development work.

Yesterday, I talked a bit about your Affiliate Website Budget as a whole and determined a few key monthly expenses. Before you ever start working on a site, you need to determine a baseline for profitability, so you have an idea of how much affiliate revenue the site will need to earn, in order to break even.

1. You will have a fixed monthly expense of $9.95 for Hosting with HostGator for an unlimited number of websites. If this is your first and only, you need to pay the full amount from earnings on this site alone. I will assume for the purpose of this exercise, you will have 10 sites total on this account.
2. Your domain name will cost at least $7.15 for the first year through GoDaddy
3. You will need to spend a few dollars on site promotion, $15.00 for directory submissions through a place like SubmitEdge
4. Your TIME is worth something, for the sake of this post, lets use $20/hour, but we won’t count your initial development time, only the time you need to spend each month for maintenance of the site. The initial development time is sweat equity, required for almost ANYTHING you do to make money! Why am I using $20/hour versus the $50-$100 I spoke about yesterday? When you start any job, you have to start at the bottom and earn your way up the ladder! After you become more efficient doing this, you would quickly see that hourly number rise!

Niche Site Breakeven Point - How Much do I Need to Earn on this Niche Site in Order to Make Money?

Using the figures above as a broad baseline, I can determine that in order for this site to recognize any profit, I need it to earn AT LEAST $348.55 in 12 months! How did I come to that number? 

1. .95 cents a month for hosting x 12 months = $11.40
2. $7.15 for 1 year domain registration
3. $15.00 for Directory submissions every other month for the first year = $90.00
4. 1 hour a month at $20/hour = $240 for the year. (You can adjust this figure up or down, according to what YOU want to earn hourly)

Breakeven Point: $11.40 (Hosting) + $7.15 (Domain) + $90.00 (Directory Submissions) + $200.00 $240.00 (Your time) = $348.55 / Year
If you chose to purchase a keyword research tool or additional services, you need to add the portion of the cost for this single site into the equation as well.

Niche Site Demand - Do People even need Your Niche Market Site?

This is where you start researching the demand for your niche market! Assume for the sake of this exercise that you are only going to attract a small number of the search visitors for the first year as your site grows, hopefully you can get in front of 2.5% of the total! Of that 2.5%, only a small number are actually going to convert to sales… lets shoot for 10% of the visitors converting to a buyer. If you are using free research tools, this does become a bit harder to measure at this point as Google and several others do not provide raw numbers you could use for figures.

I am not going to do the actual research for this, but instead provide a set of values as an example in the broad market of “iphones”. In order to narrow the market, I use WordTrackerto gather my long tail phrases with little to no competition and find that there are more than 15,000 monthly searches across 100 very specific longtail phrases. That tells me that I could hope to see 375 monthly visitors on average for the first year, with 37 converting sales each month!

1. 15,000 specific monthly searches X 2.5% = 375 monthly visitors X 10% = 37 conversions.

Niche Market Average Selling Price - Is it even Profitable?

Thus far, we know that we may only see 375 monthly visitors and get only 37 sales from them, now we need to find out what our niche product will produce for an average selling price and determine our cut of the commission from the affiliate sale. For this, I use Terapeak! You can even use their free tools to get this figure, but they only provide 14 days of history… For the sake of this, I used the term iPhone in the search box and the results are:

1. $129.91 Average Selling Price
2. 49,000 +/- Monthly Sales Unit Volume

After I know the average selling price and see that there is sufficient sales volume (More than 375 in this case) I head over to an eBay fee calculator to determine what my cut would be.

1. Visit this site and insert the average selling price in the opening and closing price boxes.
2. Remove the PayPal fee checkbox and click on calculate fees.
3. $11.88 is the total eBay fee for this exercise, of which we get 50% or $5.94 per sale.
4. $5.94 per sale X 37 Sales = $219.00 Per Month

ACRU or Active Confirmed Registered Users also bring a little money to our earnings! I was in the crowd that thought EVERYONE had an eBay account, again, I was wrong! Up until the EPN changeover, my ACRU per lead ratio was in the 2-3 % range. Meaning that for every 100 people I sent to buy on eBay, 2-3 of them were new accounts. Every ACRU = $25.00

1. 2% of 37 buyers is roughly 1 new ACRU or $25.00

Niche Website Earnings with eBay Affiliate Program $244.00 per Month

In todays post about Knowing your Niche Market:

• We have determined that we CAN make money with our new store.
• Early on, we determined that in order to make this a Profitable Niche Store, we needed to earn at least, $348.55 in the first year.
• After researching the market with WordTracker, we were able to see that we can expect 37 sales each month based on the search demand of our market.
• When we multiplied the sales volume with the average selling price and that lonely ACRU, we found that our site would earn approximately $244.00 every month, or a total of $2928.00 for the year!

After figuring all of our numbers, we will see a net profit of $215.00 per month!

Now that we know we can make money… its time to get the domain and get started! Split that profit down the middle and use $105 or so to both promote this site more and start developing new sites!

How do you decide whether or not a Niche Market will be profitable?

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