Don't start marketing a product unless you want to help build a community

(photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dnorman/)

In working over a new product, it occurred to me that there is a very tight relationship between the company, its product/service, and the community it serves.

Just in that statement, you can see tons of information alone.

Communities have needs and wants. Like corporations, they have a growth or decline. They have participants. Those participants (mostly) share common needs and wants. Doesn't mean they can't or don't also belong to other communities because of their other needs and wants.

So my story is this: I was scammed almost exactly a year ago and haven't made back the money they promised I was supposed to have in 3-4 months. The companies in this scam are Internet Income Solutions, Bright Builders, and Thrive Learning - all Utah-based companies.

While I'm pursuing a refund through Rip-Off Reports, as well as other complaint routes (FTC, FCC, FBI, state attorney generals, BBB), I'm also writing a book about these adventures and using the research I've done into this area over that past year. And I plan to promote that book down social media lines.

But then I plan to move onto other venues. I've got a lot of stuff that I need to get done, and other than this handbook, I don't intend to become a consumer advocate by any means. So my investment in the community of "stop telemarketers' internet scams" will draw to a close. (But my involvement in book writers/editors/publishers community won't.)

And so, while I can go full bore in promoting this book with social bookmarks, podcasts, videos, forum posts - why would I want to? I've got a whole series of books which are demanding my attention, forcing me to get this one up and off my lines, so to speak.

And that's the question I think that everyone should ask themselves about their products that they pitch or services they offer. Why am I promoting this product/service?

Is it for the community?

Is it just to "make a buck"?

Is it for personal fame?

If you look up or follow Dr. Mani or Chris Brogan and you'll see people who are completely working to build communities and to help others openhandedly.

Do Comcast or Dell or Home Depot really work to build the community - or are their social actions and participation simply CRM with a twist?

Now, if you follow Scott Monty, you'll see that you are dealing with a person who is trying to help a somewhat enlightened brick-and-mortar car company transition into our modern Internet age. And he's got his job cut out for him (but Ford didn't need to take bail-out money, did they?) If you check out his blog, you'll see he is tackling some tough issues that are actually contributing to the social media community as a whole.

As a book writer/editor/publisher - I have to ask myself about the products I'm bringing out: do they actually contribute something to improving this culture, our global communities?

But - what do you think?

Small Business Marketing Insight Tip #7 - Wordpress, SEO, and technical hocus-pocus

(photo credit: augustinrouchon)
All things build in Wordpress SEO marketing - especially for small businesses.

(Warning: technical search engine optimization verbiage ahead - not for the faint at heart...)

Your blog has to have good content, but it also reflects your business plan. Like the Russian nested dolls (matryoshka's), everything builds around the earlier one.

This is one thing that has kept me from really building out my own sites, that I kept finding another doll inside the one I was working with. Right now, I think I'm close to the smallest possible one.

Now: follow this chain of thought -

• Each product line you have - and we are talking mostly info products, although this is applicable widely - should have it's own mail-list (autoresponder series, or A/R).
• These product lines build into your product funnel. Cross-sales and up-sales. "Would you like fries with that?" and "Supersize your order?"
• As well, if you can set up mini-sites for each product line, that drives both SEO/linklove and keeps product lines distinct.

However, if you have a single Wordpress-driven site (and this is currently the best and easiest way to build sites), you have a common template for all pages. Means you can only promote a single A/R opt-in - or nothing.

The solution is to do custom templates and set up every category as a subdomain.

This essentially gives you a mini-site, since (for the time being) Google classifies each subdomain as it's own domain. Of course, they are all on the same IP address, so you won't get the real linklove you deserve - but organizationally, this starts to un-nest those dolls... Here's how it works:

1. Get a plug-in to make your categories into subdomains (there are several out there - I'm still evaluating them).
2. Set a custom template for each one. Means you can put an opt-in form for that product on that set of pages.
3. Your category pages then talk about a specific product line - in my case, it's best seller famous authors who have written self-improvement books. (At that link, you may find I haven't implemented this yet - life itself is a work in progress, and this blog is to brief you on the news as I find it - excuses, excuses. )

Now, this doesn't mean you can't have a static landing page. Just write a static page with your sales pitch and then set it to be a daughter page (junior) to another page on the site. (I'm not a big fan of landing pages, since I tell people how they work on my marketing sites. I then have to be far more honest and less hype-driven. Once you know how sales pages work, they are ineffective - but there is always the Collier method...)

Your external articles, remote blogs, other video content - all these can now link to your subdomain - or within that to a specific post. Or they can link to a specific static page, which then links to that subdomain (which might even get you more linklove).

The idea is to make it as simple as possible for your viewers and for the search engines.

Search engines see: keyword-subdomain.memorable-domain.com/keywordphrase.php

Because you set your Wordpress Blog to lay out the category and post title in the permalinks - and your categories become the subdomain.

With me so far? OK, so I need to do a complete write up on this at some point with sequences and everything - and as I re-release the Online Millionaire Plan (under different title, same brand), I'll get this out to you. (And as you subscribe to this blog, you can be the first to know...)

But your categories are your main keywords, right? How do you know that you have the right categories before you make them into subdomains?

Next point: supercharging your keyword lists with RankTracker

(That link above tells you briefly how and why to use RankTracker - and I really probably owe you a video on this.)

I was messing around a couple of days ago and found how to pick your categories when you're looking for keywords.

Simply, I was wanting to see how usable two keywords were. However, they gave me tons of new stuff. And within that new stuff were more categories I could use.

Essentially, you look up your keywords in the Google Adwords KeywordExternalTool, then get these text files and drop them into RankTracker. This program then finds your KEI - you then take anything above 100 and run it through Suggest->WordTracker and find the related high KEI terms. Copy/paste these into a spreadsheet and sort - at least that was the earlier method.

Now: watch closely...

• Taking that whole set of keywords once you're finished finding keywords with the WordTracker step - now, take out your low KEI and low traffic keywords. Save your work.
• Copy/paste the whole long link into your spreadsheet (I use OpenOffice - your mileage may vary.)
• At this point, you can search within OpenOffice for keywords ("find all") and then assign a background color to that series of KW. Makes your spreadsheet look very nice and easy to see relative values of keywords to each other - even if they are disrelated. But hang on there...
• Sort by competition and insert a row between everything above 3mil. Color it something distinctive. Now sort everything above that color bar by KEI, first by number of keywords in ascending order and then by KEI in descending order. What you wind up with is high KEI terms which have too much competition. (You have the spreadsheet do both sorts at once, so your 1-word KW's show up in KEI order above you 2-word KW's, etc.)
  
• Now, take each of those terms at it's base ("biblical" and "bible" have "bibl" as a base, "christian" and "christ" have "christ" as a base) and search for these in RankTracker. This gives you all related terms which a search engine will also find.
  
• Copy/paste your search results into a second sheet on the spreadsheet - one after the one you put the entire list on. Rename it with the keyword base you just searched for.
• Do this for all the top KEI single-term keywords you found. Each base term gets its own page on the spreadsheet - just add more until you have everything you want.
• Then sort out the pages by competition, then by KEI and you'll have what you want. (See the note below on this sequence if this is new to you.)

And you now have your publishing sequence. Work from the top down with articles and blog posts, etc. and you'll then take over that high KEI single term keyword as you take over the smaller niches.

Discussion

Where you find a high KEI search term that has few subordinate long-tail niches, you can skip it. Example: "Spirituality" search gives "healing", which gives "crystals". Related terms also gives you "crystal meth", "Crystal Gunn" (porn star) and "crystal balls". While crystal ranks high, if you take this down to only healing-related keyword phrases, you have little to work with. If you want to talk about crystal balls, there's a lot to talk about. Otherwise, no. "Bible" on the other hand, is massive with ripe keyword phrase niches. (But it's been around some 4,000 years...)

So your base terms (tidied up for your viewers - add the 'e' back to Bible) become your categories. Your long-tail niche keywords are the basis for your post names. As your categories become your subdomains - Google then thinks this particular (subdomain) site is all about Bibles, since every post on it discusses some other aspect about Bibles. And linklove is spread all around, since you will have pagerank just for that subdomain - while your crosslinks then share it with your ecommerce site.

And as you do your keyword searches, you'll find more categories - which can simply be added to your site, and they can be turned into subdomains, etc. etc.

That's a bit thick above, but when you do it for yourself, it becomes very clear. (Yes, I need to do a video on this, don't I? Well, as I can get to it, I will - look for the revamped Online Millionaire Plan coming to an embedded YouTube video near you...)

The point is that now you don't have to guess at what categories to use. You simply go after the top keywords by publishing effective content, properly optimized, which takes over the long-tail niche phrases. These then start ranking you higher for the high-competition, shorter keywords.

And since your subdomain is (currently) given the importance of a site, you are now creating a niche site just for that exact keyword. Google will love you for this one.

With separate templates for each subdomain, you can tweak up these subdomains to actually look like different sites - like mini-sites - and have them all crosslink neatly.

(And if you really wanted to take this right on out, you'd set up WordPress MU for a multi-user environment - and then you'd really have separate mini-sites for each product. But your maintenence costs - in terms of time - really expands with this idea. By having everything on one blog, you can then simply add more content without having to log into each blog, etc. I guess you could do it as an administrator...)

Subdomains with custom templates look to be the most elegant application at this point.

• Linklove - Google treats these as separate domains, each cross-linking, so greater trusted authority for each.
  
• Segregated product lines - so you can actually maintain several diverse lines without conflict. Someone who knows all about Dogs isn't expected to know much about Bibles.
  
• Customized user experience, so you can tweak each subdomain template to get better conversions without changing your main template.

But you still have to surf each subdomain as a newby user and see that the way you have your template makes sense for that subject area - "sense" is what the viewer expects to find.

- - - -

Setting up your spreadsheet to make the best of your keywords from RankTracker.

Here's the sequence:

1. You have your spreadsheet and RankTracker open, with your keywords searched the way you like them.
2. In RankTracker, delete any keywords less than 2.0 in KEI and less than 20 in traffic. Don't delete anything else.
3. Now, copy and paste the entire KW list into your spreadsheet (the registered/paid version of RankTracker allows you to do this...)
4. Sort your whole list on the spreadsheet by competition, ascending (biggest toward the bottom).
5. Insert a (colored) row between everything above 4 million.
6. Select and sort only that bottom section by KEI, descending (biggest toward the top).
7. Sort everything above that bar by traffic, descending.
8. Insert a row at less than 100, and then color it.
9. Sort this middle section by KEI, descending.
10. Now, sort the top section by KEI, descending.

What do these sections mean?

• Bottom section gives you your top keywords to take over.
• Top section gives you the sequence of content to publish to do that.
• Middle section is full of "less profitable niches" as traffic is lower - so you have to write more content to get the same amount of total traffic. But competition is waaaay lower, so...
  

Why these arbitrary numbers?

• About 1 percent of sites are properly/accidentally optimized. By taking 3 million competing , you will wind up (roughly) with 30K pages to compete with (WordTracker says that's a niche). Analyzing the top 10 out of these sites will give you what you need to do to compete with/out-create them effectively.
• You want at least 100 per day coming to your site. But the smaller traffic niches also usually have much lower competition - so if you can crank out pages, you'll be able to do five times the pages and have many times greater response. (Some niches actually have no sites optimized for them - easy pickings.)
• If it doesn't have KEI above 2.0 or better, it's not worth your time. Some say 3.0 - but I've found that this throws out some hot sub-niches and can really limit your ideas for content.
  
• You can pick any numbers you want, though. Try them out and you'll see what works best for you.
  

- - - -

OK? Well, I've got to run - a lot of content to produce on top of everything I'd already scoped out.

If you have a better idea or just think this is crock - feel free to comment...

Small Business Marketing Mix: How to get your startup profitable

(photo credit: emdot)

Marketing Mix: How to get your startup small business (more) profitable.

I've covered before how to leverage your product income, as well as the real basics to economics. But unfortunately, I can't find these links for you.

Let's recap (quickly):
I. Economics consists of four inter-related functions, not just two as is taught -

1. Supply
2. Demand
3. Information
4. Service

Defined:

• Supply means having a valuable product, but also covers how much competition you have - if you are selling a commodity product (and so have to compete on price as well.)
• Demand - is anyone actually looking for your product and how much can they afford to pay for it.
• Information - are you actively promoting this product so people can find you?
• Service - are you delivering high quality, or schlock?

These inter-relate: More promotion will increase demand. Low-quality will decrease demand - and if you are selling tainted peanut butter, can decrease supply as well. Non- or slow-delivery will decrease demand for your product. Information: An incorrect price (too high or too low) can affect demand.

Lately, I found there are some other terms floating around, which also describe and actually combine economics and leverage - called Marketing Mix. While I have to do another post to actually define this in non-gobbledygook language, you can see that these four economic principles above are actually a very workable description of how to set up your own marketing mix.

II. Income Leverage - Most marketing is based on simple math - and is a numbers game. Some relevant facts:

• The bell curve predicts that most of your buying public will be only consumers (until you turn them into subscribing clients).
• Additionally, this predicts you will have a base conversion of 2-3% (if you make no hideous errors in your sales copy.)

Your profit (or any retailer) is dependent on a simple formula:

Leveraged Sales - Overhead
- or -

(Products x Sales x Outlets) - Overhead

Definitions:

• Products: Number of products you are offering.
• Sales: Number of sales you get per week or per day.
• Outlets: Do you only have one website?
• Overhead: Cost of doing business (payroll, webhosting, taxes).

Examples:

• When you are selling one product per week on one site, you have a leverage of 1.
• If you increase the volume of that products sales to 100 per week on that website, you have a leverage of 100.
• When you routinely sell 20 products 100 times per week - this increases to 2,000.
• If you get 100 affiliates selling your product, your leverage is now 200,000.

Now subtract your overhead and you'll see that a brick-and-mortar store selling one product per week will have to sell a very expensive product to cover it's costs. This would be a high-end luxury car, or an expensive dress or suit. If you are selling one product on the web, you only have to cover your item cost, shipping, plus your web host. Online is obviously cheaper.

Sell an info product which is instantly delivered and is created digitally when it is sold - and your overhead is mostly just your web host cost.

However, when you use affiliates to sell your stuff and give away 50% of your sales price as a commission, then you are trading half your profit on those sales - which you wouldn't have gotten otherwise. So if you sell 2,000 info products yourself at $20 each, that's $40,000 profit. If you get 100 affiliates to sell them at half price, you just increased your profit by $200,000. But you didn't have to do anything except set up your affiliate sales to pay their commission after you delivered the product. $160,000 increase in profit over doing it all yourself.

Now, here's the Marketing Mix.

That post on the bell curve above covers why you want to move over to subscribers. Your conversion rate goes up from an average 2-3% upwards to above 50% or more.

This means that every time you add a new product to your shopping cart (and promote it to your list), you aren't just increasing your leverage value by 1 or 1,000 - you are also increasing it by a percentage of the number of people on your list. So the new formula becomes:

([Products x Sales x Outlets] x Subscribed Clients) - Overhead = Profit

And guess what - your affiliate sales outlets also have lists. So if you tell them about your new product (and send them one so they can see how good it is), then this can take your profits into a completely new range.

Assuming 50% of the subscribers buy - and say cumulative you have about 100,000 subscribed clients between you and your affiliates - so take a new $20 product and figure that on release day, you'll have about $20 x 50,000 = $100,000+ profit in about 24-48 hours.

And now you see how Rich Sheflin, Jack Humphrey, and some of these big-name marketing guys can rake in the dough by simply releasing a new product 5 or 6 times per year. All info products and mostly sheer profit. The rest of the time, they sell their "velvet rope" subscriptions so people can have "exclusive" access to their new products (and almost guarantee they will buy them at a "discount" in advance of the sales date). Humphrey used to sell a subscription to over 3,000 people at around $90 per month. A clean $3.24M income - and he worked hard to make sure those people got good value for that money, plus was able to afford a small crew working to provide that value. (A couple of $50,000 yearly salaried programmers wouldn't take too much of a bite out, would it? Or give them a percentage of the profit instead - keeps them looking to see how they could improve things to increase monthly, quarterly, and annual profit...)

Do the numbers on that: $100,000 6 times a year = $600K. Add in the subscriber monthly fees - and you get nearly $4 million in gross income per year. Overhead might run a quarter of that or less, so you have about $3mil profit every year. Not that this happens overnight, but certainly it is possible - as outlined above.

Now, there are a lot more details to this. And I hope to go into these in later posts, time and inspiration permitting...

III. Putting this into use for yourself or your company:

For the small business owner, or someone considering a start up, this means a couple of things to increase your profits:

1. Keep adding quality products every week (that's 50 or so additional products per year!)
   
2. Continue promotions and add to these so more people can find your site.
3. Get all possible new and existing customers to sign up for your mailing list.
4. Get your new products up on affiliate sites as quickly as possible.

Good Hunting - and good profits!

Small Business Marketing Insight Tip #5 - How to get started at all.

(photocredit: kapungo)

Starting a Small Business Online:

You have to start by picking out a basket to put your eggs in.

Trite (but true) aphorisms:

• One always learns from his mistakes.
• And as well, hindsight is 20-20.
• Thirdly, what you don't take care of in the beginning can set you back to the beginning.

Or you'll seem to think that. But it's not time to get depressed about things. Take stock of your resources and you'll find that you've been learning all the time. And are now in a much better condition to get really going. This next time will be faster.

I recently found myself back at doing what I should have done to begin with. However, I didn't know it at the time. The reason my sales aren't taking off is that I never set up a proper back end (terminal), followed by a regular runway, and using a definite flight plan.

The steps are simply in this sequence:

1. A proper back end first consists of having something valuable to offer.
2. Next, you set up a way to exchange for this - either affiliate sales, or dropshipping, or ecommerce.
3. Then, you promote this all over the place. So people can find your valuable offer and take you up on it.
4. And all of this is before you quit your day job.
   

Nothing new, perhaps. But here is something - and take this to heart:

You settle on one valuable item and
get that really moving before
you expand to another.

Sure, if it doesn't work out, then fine - start researching and picking out another. Now that you know what reasearch you need to do, the second one will be easier.

Practically, pick out your basket - one basket - and then get some eggs into it. And watch those eggs real closely

But the basket comes before the eggs (figuring that the chicken is around there somewhere - but let's not go there...) Basket first.

A. What is something valuable that you can offer to people who will exchange something with you for them?

Now, go and find out all about that item and what people think about it. Find your keywords, find your delivery methods, find out the demographics who will buy or subscribe to it. Get all this nailed down.

B. Next, figure out your delivery system. If this is an info product, figure out how you can offer it online and deliver it at very low cost - usually, this is an ecommerce site of some sort. If someone else already has that product, maybe you promote and sell it as an affiliate. Or you sel it directly and they dropship it for you. Or you buy in bulk, warehouse, and ship it yourself.

C. Third is to figure out how to promote it. Nowadays, this is best done through social media - a blog, usually - and also posted to the winds through bookmarking sites, etc. Some people tell you to use PPC (not me) to get started. And I recently found an article where the author recommended it as a temporary jump-start to get things going. (I don't tell people starting out to advertise as you can lose your budget very quickly with no results - and the best advertisement is by getting word of mouth through excellent products and delivery.)

D. Now, once you have successfully sold and delivered goods which are making you money - then expand into another (niche) line of work, another (niche) product. You use what you learned from the first time and expand. You keep producing and delivering products from the first one, but now you have some more income and probably some more time to invest in ramping up another product. This can be an additional product in the same niche, or a new product line in a new niche area. (Preferably related to the first, either in main subject, or in delivery mode - so you can use the existing shopping cart and blogs to start promoting these new products.)

Make the second line as or more successful than the first, and then start up a third. Research first, always.

As you continue to do this, life becomes simpler and more profitable.

But again: basket first, then eggs - and then to market.

- - - -

Here's the special news for all those stalwart readers who have made it this far:

I'm restarting the Online Millionaire Plan and reworking it from the bottom up. Meaning that I'm going to take all the many volumes of work I've already done so far and verifying the tests and results. And then re-release new versions with new materials. The emphasis will be on practical application for this new economic scene we just inherited. How to start or expand a small business online on a very small (tiny) budget. Step by step. I figure with all the mis-steps I've already taken, and the tons of data I've already poured through, this should be pretty valuable and useful. Emphasis will be on each step, tying it back into the overall.

And now I know how to really give value as we go, so I'll tell you the tips and secrets uncovered during this line of work.

Stay tuned to http://robertworstell.com - as this is where I'll give the core data - a lot of my peripheral blogs will be changing as I do. But I'll also tell you why and how to apply it on your own.

Good Hunting!!

Marketing Insight Tip #3 - Create a profitable ebook in an afternoon using NoteTab and OpenOffice

(photo credit: wonderlane)

How to make an ebook from PLR using OpenOffice and NoteTab

Hello - this is a pretty mundane one. But thought you might like a short post.

There are two tools which are both indispensable and free (don't you love it when that happens?)

• OpenOffice
• NoteTab

I use NoteTab as it has an incredible amount of built-in scripts to reformat your text any way you need it. (Like Making A Title Into Just The Caps.)

OpenOffice does just about everything else - and far better than any other office suite I've tried - especially MSWord.

Sequence here:

1. Get your PLR out - you'll have a bunch of independent articles in either .doc format or .txt
2. Convert everything to .txt with Open Office
3. Drop these into OpenOffice and then save as text.
4. Fix up in NoteTab as needed.
5. Open the text file in OpenOffice (haven't we just been here?)
6. Fix it up with formating and export to PDF.

Why this convoluted way?

Because NoteTab has better text editing tools than Open Office.

I've been working around with various other assembly programs (such as converting to PDF, combining them all in NoteTab first) and this is the fastest.

Reason: OpenOffice can take a drag and drop text file (doesn't do as well with .doc files) and put them in as Sections. You then save the whole file as a .txt file and you get only the text in that exact order. Saves tons of time.

Then, you can fix up the odd-ball titles with NoteTab, as well as search and replacing for excess linebreaks.

Now, when you re-open that file in OpenOffice, you simply use your H1, H2, etc. headers to format the pages the way you like them. And also put in page breaks. Just generally spice it up, do a spell-check, drop in some ads for other products you offer, etc.

Then export it to PDF and you've got an easy ebook all in an afternoon, depending on how fast you can edit (your mileage may vary).

That's how easy it really is.

You don't have to re-edit the PLR, unless you want to, since you have the Private License Rights to do anything you want with them. The duplicative content rule is for web pages and articles. An ebook is as good as the content in it.

- - - -

When you plug this sequence in with your keyword research, then you can quickly come up with a new ebook to give away or offer through your ecommerce site. Often, you can find a neat niche with nice demand/supply (traffic/competition) ratios, look up and buy PLR articles, create an ebook as above, then create your marketing campaign with your blog and shopping cart.

The viral part of this is that you can see some keyword keep coming up in the news - search your harddrive or the web for PLR which covers that keyword, then you have an instant ebook which you can then set up for sale on Amazon (via Mobibooks) for free - and then invite traffic over to that ebook via your blogging. (Or post it on Lulu.com at the same time.) You take advantage of the rising trend for that particular keyword and get into the hand of people who need the information quickly. Of course, you want to keep track of trends, probably using Google Trends or Google Insight...

Of course, once you have the ebook done, you can always excerpt article from it and offer these as an introductory mini-course - selling the complete ebook these were excerpted from... Imagine if you did all of the above - you'd have a huge mail list virtually overnight!

- - - -

And if you have a faster way to do this, let me know. I'd love to hear about them.

Marketing Insight Tip #2 - Getting people to register for their free downloads

(photo credit: danielbroche)
Getting People to Register for their Free Downloads

This just hit me like the proverbial brick. Problem with free downloads is the amount of bandwidth they take - and there isn't usually any return for these. Not monetarily, anyway. And let's face it, we are in the business of offering valuable solutions to problems that they will give something valuable in return... Usually, this is money, but it can also be something like - an email address.

Now a person will usually give away something to get an email address, and then will spend extra to deliver an email series to that address, with the idea of offering them materials which they will then purchase.

While writing a new small business marketing series, I found myself with a ton of great ebooks which can only be given away. Now if I just put these on my website, I'd probably have that link given away to all sorts of people - who I don't know and can't contact except by the IP address they used.

The simple solution is to put them on your ecommerce engine as a free download. My ZenCart installation requires they give their email address in order to login. Voila! Exchange has occurred. And I'd really like them to give that address away to any of their friends, wouldn't I? Meanwhile, they are also ableto simply look around and see if there is anything else they like.

Of course, even a free ebook will get a review on my blog - and that review also return links to that product page, doesn't it? Linklove - can't beat it.

And now you have, in those short paragraphs above, a simple way to invest in free downloads.

(ZenCart also has a nice newsletter email function, though I have to check it out more... One complaint about email could shut down your server. So I'll stick to exporting these addresses and offering them an opt-in via my GetResponse autoresponder.)

- - - -

Any better ideas? Let me know. The comment space is open to all (who register, of course.) ;P

Cheers!

Finding Long Tail Keywords for New Business Ideas

(photo credit: Nino.Smile)
How to Find Keywords for Long Tail New Business Ideas

Couldn't resist this X-Files image as we are on our quest for finding not just keywords, but quality content you can repurpose and republish. (Hey - I only count three hands - Mulder?!?)

I've talked about using Google Alerts and piping these to Google Reader for the content you want to find. And also how to use RankTracker to find the Long-Tail keywords for your selected niches (or vice-versa).

Now, I've additionally said in several places how you take your long-tail keywords and then start moving up the food chain toward shorter keyword phrases. When you rank for related niches, the common words in these phrases get you accumulative link love.

OK - I just found out today how to use Google to not only find you niche-related content, but to help you search within that existing content for other keywords.

What happened was - I've had a number of RSS feeds accumulating in my Google Reader (I don't really have time to view them all or even keep up - another organizing point, perhaps). And I just got into checking out a new niche, which I didn't have a Google Alert set up for.

(What's interesting is that - as you might know from my other blogs - I've mostly been aggregating self improvement articles and stuff in my Google Reader, nothing much to do with business or this latest small niche.)

I just put in a main keyword into Google Reader and searched it - voila! More articles and posts than I could even digest simply. But they "shouldn't have been there"?

What does this mean? Two things:

1. Like a Venn diagram, you'll have intersections on your keywords. Accumulate a bunch of feeds having to do with self improvement and some of these will also touch on telemarketing. People who post about self improvement also might grouse about phone scams.
   
   
2. Secondly, you need to set your aggregators for the Short Head keywords - the ones with good KEI, but ones you aren't going to target directly. Like "business" or "marketing" or "books" - you might be working on "small business marketing books" but not those others. Your aggregators pull in all these data and store it on Google's servers. Now you then just go and start searching on your own reader for the really long-tail, very profitable KEI search terms. (And no, you never mess with keywords that don't have good KEI - life is too short.)
   

The great part is that searching your Google Reader is much faster than Google Search. And the base it's using is much smaller and already pre-digested.

Means you have more time to concentrate on creating more content for your chosen niche.

Thought you'd like that idea.

- - - -

Got any better way to do this - or another application? Let me know...

5 steps to make PLR earn money online through proper SEO and keyword research.

(photocredit: thisisbossi)

5 steps to move your PLR into an "Earn Money Online" mode.

Here's a few simple steps to move your PLR over into a money-making online product.

Peanut butter is a great example of PLR. People make peanut butter - then they sell the raw (or packaged) product to others, who put their label on it. (And if they do this poorly, lots of people get sick, plus their and all these other brands get damaged.) Anyone can contract with them to package their peanut butter under their label and brand.

PLR (Privately Licensed Rights) material can be easily converted over into ebooks, whether re-written or not. The trick is to get it to sell - since a lot of people have access to the same data.

Most PLR packages don't take the extra step of providing a keyword list - which is essential in order to do any basic SEO so that people can find your product. I've tried simply dropping the whole text into a keyword extractor - and wound up with so much useless wordage and non-sensical keyword phrases that I didn't even bother to run them through my KEI generator (RankTracker).

But there is a logical way to find keywords and prep for your SEO efforts:

1. Starting with a set of articles or an existing book - generate and scrape the table of contents. (This should give you the important concepts for each chapter - unless it's poorly written - and then you write them yourself, based on content.)
2. Take these and break them down into logical keyword phrases. Save as text, one per line.
   
3. Now run these through Google's KeywordExternalTool with synonyms checked.
4. Download those two text files and run them through RankChecker to find KEI. Then again, with WordTracker, to find suggestions. (For good measure, run all KW which have over 100 hits through WordTracker again.)
5. Now you simply filter out (anything less than 20 hits/day or with KEI less than 2.0, plus disrelated ones) and you have a decent list of words associated with your product.

Now, revisit your original material and search for these keywords. Edit the titles to ensure that the keyword shows up there - but is still catchy and interesting.

Only at this point do you revamp the cover and upload it to your ecommerce engine. With the best keywords, you can now start generating content which link back to your product by permalinks.

- - - -

And that might be a new idea. Have word-based permalinks for every product you offer in your ecommerce engine. And link to those products with keyword phrases - not only to your blog posts and interior in your pages. This helps your product listing page to show up in Google on it's own merits along side your blog/squidoo/podcast/youtube content which has the same keyword phrase.

So, there you go --

Good Hunting!

Stratgic Internet Marketing Scheduling - Key to Sanity and Profits?

Setting your strategic Internet marketing scheduling may be the key to your sanity and profits...


Now I've recently completed a third course this summer in marketing and web building. To say the least, my head was full to bursting - until I sat down and scratched it all out on a yellow pad.

The simple priorities are these:

1. You have to make profitable sales to stay in business.
2. You have to market to get leads and convert these to buyers.
3. You have to research and review your progress against plans you made.

Now, these three programs agreed on these three, but differed in how to get them done - and in the sequence you should work on them.

There were simply a few points they also agreed on as to how to do this - but they didn't agree on an order:

• Build your web presence with a web host and a domain name.
• Use a WordPress blog to add content.
• Add monetized links that are relevant and contribute to the content.
• Promote actively - often three times more than you would spend on anything else.

Since these courses were all built on search engine discovery, they all had basic SEO tactics in that training. Two of the three were hinged on social media marketing (which is a bit of an oxymoron, since social media shun marketers...)

But our point is how to organize this. I've read the stories where a person spent months on building up an ecommerce site only to make nothing on it (and thank Gawd for his day job...) My first training was devoted utterly to learning how to use their proprietary web-building software.

And the other extreme was a course where they spend hours telling you how to do social marketing - 15/16's of the course, in fact - and then gave the final hour was on how to monetize. Meaning that the bulk of their students would simply opt for more training - since what they taught in that sequence would keep the person broke.

However, the breakthrough was in the third one. Here, they said to do your research and find your market first - but that you were also finding how to monetize it as part of that research. Then you built your blog and started promoting.


Let me break with all three - they are all right and also wrong.

• You don't build anything overnight.
• You do continuously build and refine what you already had going.
• Promotion is a big part of marketing, but you also have to monetize constantly to convert viewers to buyers.
• And you have to have a plan, plus review the metrics of that plan to make any success.

Part of this was learning and breaking down a 60-day plan. Which was great - but it really was a finite recipe and couldn't be used without a great deal of other data. (Which is why they only gave it to you behind a hefty paid subscription.)

When gridded out, that plan really boiled down to a repeating set of actions, plus adding one or two new promotional outlets each week. 8 weeks of basic content addition, plus tons of promotion.

But it was even simpler than that.

Weekly schedule:

1. Research and Review:
   Review your previous week, all metrics, and create your to-do list.
2. Monetize:
   Find new income sources (affiliates or new products) that you can add - and sign up for them or create them for your sales funnel.
3. Promote:
   Content - add more linkbait (truly memorable blog posts) to your site.
4. Promote:
   Comment - find where people are linking to your site and comment on theirs. Or Stumbleupon, Digg, or Twitter about them, if no direct comment possible.
5. Promote:
   Converse - join in the conversation on various forums which have to do with your niche.

So: Research/Review - Monetize - Promote - Promote - Promote.

This also follows a longer cycle of what you are going to be doing. In the beginning, you need to spend a sizable amount of time defining your niche and the long-tail keywords you want to optimize for (and write content about). Part of this will be finding if that niche is actually one where people spend money - and you'll be finding affiliates or products that can be sold within that niche. Once you have these two established, you can spend the rest of the time promoting and getting yourself - and your products - known.

Those are the bare bones - and you can see that this has lots more below it to make it work.

But I hope you can use this to streamline what you're doing and so become more profitable...

Your views?

PS. Note that this is only five days worth of work. Take the weekend off with your family - or go read a book - or go hiking -- or do some more of whatever you still need to get done withyour jobs.. Your choice.

(photo credit: stayviolation.typepad.com )