How To Quickly Test A Market

Often, when a typical marketer is looking to get into a market, they dive right in and often fail far more than they succeed. It doesn’t have to be that way. Just by doing some “quick math” in your head and a few searches can greatly help you determine if you should proceed with that $500.00 ad spend in AdWords as a test in the market. When you find a potential market, spend just ten minutes. That’s it, just ten. Remember, sometimes a great market just won’t convert well for your offer … it happens and it is best to know as soon as possible if the market is a dud. And to figure that out just do these steps first:

In this example, I will use ClickBank, which sells mostly eBooks. You can apply these steps to any affiliate program or network.

Step One: Write down the industry, exact eBook name and author.

Step Two: Write down the commission per sale.

Step Three: Based on an aggressive conversion ratio of 3%, project revenue. (while I realize that 3% seems high, it is what you should expect with the right targeted keywords, the right product and the right landing page).

Step Four: Write down your “break even” point in terms of Cost Per Click (CPC).

Step Five: Open the Keyword Tool in Google AdWords

Step Six: Enter the “main keyword” or the merchant’s site

Step Seven: Show Estimated CPC, Search Volume Trends and Highest Volume Occurred In (drop down “Choose Columns to Display)

Step Eight: Change Match Type to “Exact” (we don’t want non-qualified clicks)

Step Nine: Sort by Estimated CPC (highest first)

Step Ten: Scroll down to the range of the break even point you wrote down in Step Four. You must have at least 300 in Search Volume from the month prior to consider using the keyword phrase. This will give you ten potential searchers per day.

Step Eleven: Verify that at least 100 clicks per day can be had with the keywords which match the above criteria.

Step Twelve: Re-run “Traffic Estimator” and target the actual product name and the author’s name and look for traffic estimates of ten clicks or more.

Let’s do an example together:

1. Dog Training. Kingdom of Pets: SitStayFetch by Daniel Stevens

2. $31.23

3. $93.69 ($31.23 x 3) 3 sales is based on 100 visitors at 3% conversion (most will state that this conversion ratio is too high, but because we will focus on the keywords that sell, this is the minimum that you should expect).

4. $0.94 ($93.69/100) Paying $0.94 per click would “break even” on the campaign.

5. N/A

6. I prefer to target the merchant’s site, as it often gives me a faster pull of effective keywords. I can also use SpyFu. So I put in: http://www.kingdomofpets.com/

7-9. N/A

10. The first section is keywords related to “how to train” which is the focus of the site and the keywords we want to focus on to sell the guide. Here are the ones that I selected:

how to train dog ($0.96) 74,000. Yes, this is above the range, but just barely and it is highly focused.
how to train my dog ($.90) 3,600
how to train a puppy ($0.80) 27,100
how to train puppies ($0.56) 3,600

The other sections? You can target them, but you will need to create a new landing page for each because each has a different market and we want to keep our conversions as high as possible. Here are some ideas:

“dog training collar” – this would be an eCommerce product sale rather than an informational eBook.

“dog trainer” – with the slumping economy, many could be looking to “moonlight” to help make ends meet. This could spur you to create your own product on how to make a career out of being a dog trainer. There is plenty of information to pull from on the web and being the merchant often is the ticket you have been looking for.

“dog bark” – this is a problem. By targeting your landing page to show how the problem can be solved quickly, easily and affordably is what the prospect is seeking.

This is where “out of the box” thinking comes in. Business opportunities can come anytime and anywhere, but you must seize the opportunity.

11. Verified. On the conservative side, 3,000 searches per day should result in at least 100 clicks.

12. Searching for “kingdom of pets”, “sitstayfetch”, “sit stay fetch” and “daniel stevens” did not return results which were usable.

With the above, it can be assumed since we can get over 100 clicks per day at around the break even point that this would be a product worth pursuing. A $50-$300.00 PPC test would be worthwhile.

PPC Tip: Make your bids half of what the top bid is, so if you do this, then you can target keywords at DOUBLE your break-even point to gain more qualified click throughs.

By http://blog.seorevolution.com

Social Media and Small Businesses

Unless you’ve been hunkered under a rock or in the back of a cave, you’ve at least heard the term “social media.” Depending on your perspective, social media either represents the fall of western civilization or the perfect marriage of people and technology.

The term “social media” actually refers to 4 specific types of tools. The first type, “social connection sites” like Facebook and Linked In, allow users to make, share, build, and interact with social contacts online. The second type, “social stream of consciousness” sites like Twitter, allow users to share their thoughts quickly and easily (regardless if anyone actually cares). The third type of tool, “social bookmarking” sites such as Digg.com and Delicious.com, let users share and rate individual sites and other media. The fourth type of social media tool involves sites like Kongregate.com or games such as Farmville which contain “social features” to link users together.

In theory, users of social media link up, interact, and use the sites and tools as their creators intended. And, if your intentions are strictly about keeping up with friends or professional contacts you actually know in the real world, you can easily use social media to do just that. However, once you try to go beyond just networking with people you know (and the people they actually know), the world of social media gets murky fast. Though powerful and effective when used correctly, social media quickly becomes a never-ending rabbit hole of time, energy, and effort, especially for small business owners.

If you want to use social media to build your small business, keep the following in mind at all times.

Create Dialogue

Most businesses mistakenly use social media as a one-way communication tool. In fact, this represents the core mistake anyone makes with social media. You must use Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to create a real dialogue – a real exchange of communication. To do that, you can’t follow 20,000 people or have 50,000 friends. Bottom line, if the communication isn’t authentic, you’re fooling yourself that it’s actually worth doing in the first place.

Gather Intelligence

Members of your target audience hold the key to your success, not the other way around. Use social media communication to get direct input from people on your products and services. Get them to tell you their hopes, fears and problems and, more importantly, how you can help them. While building your following, you can use social media search tools (like twitter.com/search) to spot trends and problems you can solve.

Watch Your Time

Most of what you need to accomplish with Facebook and Twitter can happen in less than 15-20 minutes per day. Any more time than that is a waste of precious time. Until and unless you can track business directly to your social media activities, keep a tight rein on you time.

Share Value & Fun

The number one reason anyone sends their friends or comes back to you themselves is because of value. Always remember: nobody really cares about you and your business, they only care about what your business can do for them. Share information and news others can use and you’ll build a list of meaningful contacts. Put out a stream of useless drivel or “quotes of the day” and you might as well not even sign up for a Twitter account.

Bottom line: social media tools are just that, tools. You will not get rich overnight just because you signed up for a Twitter account, nor will you get inundated with business because you hang out a shingle on LinkedIn. You can, however, experience real results if you use these sites as originally intended: to create meaningful connections with real people.

By Jim Edward

http://www.vagazette.com

WordPress.com Launches Food Blog Aggregator

Do you like this story?

Leveraging the continuing popularity of food blogging and its own vast content collection, WordPress.com has just launched FoodPress, the service’s first swipe at niche content aggregation.

FoodPress is a hand-curated collection of food-related posts from across the WordPress.com network. Using the tagline, “serving up the hottest dishes on WordPress.com,” FoodPress will be updated each weekday to offer excerpts and links to the latest food-related posts, photos and recipes on WordPress.com.

Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, has partnered with Federated Media to handle the publishing, and, we assume, advertising opportunities for FoodPress.

While additions to the FoodPress blog are hand-picked, most content is aggregated and discovered by going through food-related tags across WordPress.com. There is a post on the FoodPress site that details how to get featured on FoodPress, but there is no way to submit a site or post for inclusion directly.

FoodPress’s blog also says that it has plans to find and incorporate WordPress.org blogs into the mix in the future, but for now the target is just WordPress.com.

As a potential vertical and monetization strategy, FoodPress is pretty interesting. WordPress.com is able to leverage content in its networks, sell ads on that content (well, ads on those excerpts) and drive more pageviews to WordPress.com as a whole.

The big question will be how the community embraces the idea. The platitudes about “helping drive visitors to your content” is nice and all, but this is still a business.

Assuming FoodPress is a success and an overall traffic driver, we expect that other niche content aggregators or “presses” will be launched, too.

As it stands, it’s a nice way to find lots of food-related content and an example of how Automattic can leverage the content it hosts.

What do you think of FoodPress?

Source: http://mashable.com/

Apple takes the lead in the US smart phone market with a 26% share

With a 33% share, Nokia is still the leading vendor worldwide, but Android-based smart phones grab a quarter of the market

Palo Alto, Singapore and Reading (UK) – Monday, 1 November 2010

In Q3 2010, the worldwide smart phone market grew an impressive 95% over the same quarter a year ago to 80.9 million shipped units. Nokia retained its leadership position, albeit by a diminished margin, with a 33% share of the market. Apple’s healthy performance this quarter saw it achieve a 17% share worldwide, a little ahead of RIM, which held a 15% share this quarter. In the world’s largest smart phone market, the US, Apple ousted RIM from the top spot, seizing a 26% share as iPhone shipments continued unabated. RIM has also launched its latest generation smart phone, the Torch, though it only saw half a quarter’s shipments in the US. But the plethora of smart phones running the Open Handset Alliance’s (OHA’s) Android platform meant that Canalys’ final published country-level data shows that it took the lead in the US market by operating system (OS), with a 44% share.

http://www.canalys.com/pr/2010/r2010111.html