Why do you buy stuff?
Why do you go online and buy things? Why do you buy things in stores? If you break it down, what information do you really want and need to hit that final “Buy Now” button.
Does it depend on what you are buying? The cost? Do you like really detailed specs or is just a summary fine?
What is it that tips you over the edge to say in your head “OK, I have enough information, I’m ready to buy?”
If you go through this process in your mind when you buy things, don’t you think most other people do too?
You see, this is the essence of marketing online (and marketing in general). Giving people the information they need to make a decision to buy.
Screaming “BUY, BUY, BUY” on your site simply DOES NOT WORK. It’s like a used car salesman and totally turns people off.
I have been guilty of it and so are about 99% of online marketers out there. Why is this?
Well, I think it’s because when you first get into marketing online, that’s most of what you are exposed to, you don’t know any better. All of the slick sales letters, and being exposed to all of the other crap that other new marketers are putting online influences you to do the same thing.
But you have to STOP. People DO NOT want to be sold to, they want to find answers to their questions and solutions to their problems. Your ONLY job is to answer those questions and offer those solutions, simple as that.
It’s hard to do, believe me.
One way I have trained myself to take this approach is to NOT think about selling anything on my site. I put myself into the shoes of my visitors and ask myself some questions:
- If I were looking for this information, what would I want to know?
- What questions would I ask?
- What questions should I ask?
- How would I want this information shown to me?
- How much is it?
- How much is it compared to other alternatives?
- How do the different ones compare in reliability and price?
- What would make me hit the “Buy” button?
Brainstorm a little bit and put yourself in the shoes of your visitors.
So, if you are having problems converting visitors into buyers, step back and examine your copy.
Are you screaming “BUY, BUY, BUY” or are you truly trying to help people find a solution to their problem.
The #1 Reason You Will Fail At Internet Marketing
People come and go in this business at lightening speed. Every day it seems there are thousands more giving it a go, which is great! The problem is, just like in the offline world, 95% of them will fail or give up saying that they can’t make any money.
Not too long ago, i was in the same spot. I got so frustrated with this business that I actually put up a website called isuckatinternetmarketing.com! It was my ranting and raving about how I am terrible at this business and how much I hated it and all the guru’s in it.
Looking back, it was kind of funny and stupid at the same time.
2 things turned it around for me though. The first was a phone call from across the world from Australia (I live in the US) from a guru named James Schramko. He talked to me about what I was doing, what to change and what to do going forward. I feel that I owe a lot to him for helping me get on the right path.
And what an incredible gesture on his part to call me at 2AM his time across the world to help me out. If there is ever a true gentleman, it’s him. Thanks James.
The second thing that turned it around for me, which if you don’t learn to harness it you WILL fail, is focus.
Now, I am about ADD as it gets. I own an offline business, a few online businesses, have 4 kids all under 8 years old, a wife, a dog, cat and a few fish. To say I have a few things going on is an understatement.
So, when I started online, I jumped around from one thing to the next, trying every new shiny thing that popped out of the woodwork. I was seduced by every sales letter promising that I could make $2,834.57 in 10 minutes if I just did “this” or “that.”
And I bought in and did “this” and “that” for a week or so then would jump to the next “answer” to make my riches. I swear I must have tried 100 different ways to make money online. You know how much money I made?
About $2,000 total.
You know how much I spent on books, courses, software, etc?
About $6,000 total!
Hmmm, not sure about you, but to me that looks like a business that won’t survive very long!
So, after I spoke to James, I decided to take a break for a few months. I shut off Internet Marketing and put it out of my head. I stopped going to any and all forums or blogs. I cancelled all my memberships except for one.
I simply shut it all off and spent more time with my family.
What I realized during my time off was that I was making it way too hard. Online business really is just like offline business.
In my offline business I provide way more value to my clients than they pay for and while we only do a few things, we do them extremely well – we overdeliver and focus on just a couple of things. I could not imagine how fast we would be out of business if we jumped around to one thing after another week after week!
Online is no different. Focus on one or two projects at a time and you will make money, I can virtually guarantee it.
Lack of focus on one method, strategy, niche or website, especially when you are starting out, will cause you to get frustrated and fail. Trust me, I’ve been there.
A question I get a lot is “OK great, I know I need to focus, but how do I know when to stop focusing on a certain niche or product?”
It’s a tough question because there are a lot of variables, but my rule of thumb is that if I get 100 click thrus to the merchant and I have no sales, something is wrong with my message, the vendor sales page or the product itself. It warrants further research.
If I get 200 click thrus and no sales, I usually move on to something else. I just ditch it and move on. It’s hard to do this, especially after you have worked so hard on that project. But its part of the business – you’ll have more misses than hits.
So, if you take one thing out of this post, it is to stay focused on your goals for a particular project and don’t get distracted. If you need to, stay out of forums and resist reading about all the “new” strategies.
Once you learn to harness the power of focus, the sky really is the limit to how much you can earn in this business!
Find The Cash Sucking Keywords That Will Bring You Loads Of Targeted Traffic! – PART 2
If you are just arriving here, this post is part of a series of posts where I show you, step-by-step, what I do to put together a profitable campaign. To start at the beginning, GO HERE.
OK, whew, that last post was a long one, and this one is kind of long too. But keyword research is soooo important to get right. It literally means the difference between making money or spending hours and hours making content that never gets looked at, which means all of your work will be wasted.
So, we have our spreadsheet with 10-20-30-however many keywords. If you find lots of good ones from the previous steps, great, use them. If you only have 5 or so though, go back and find more. Our goal here is to further narrow down our list to 5-10 keywords we will initially target.
I like to find 10 total, but then pick 5 to target. Once I saturate those 5, I evaluate and move on to the other 5, etc.
The first thing we need to do is fill in the columns we did in the previous steps with what we find out from Google. These steps explain how to do it for one keyword. Just go back through the steps for each keyword. Here’s what we do:
1. First do a search in Google with quotes around your search term. So, if I were searching for “jamorama review” I would type “jamorama review” into the search box with the quotes. Easy enough, huh? Make note of the total search results and enter that number in your “Quotes” column next to that keyword.
IMPORTANT**This is where most aspiring IM’ers make a major blunder – they are taught to only go after keywords with 5,000 or less results with a quote search. So, if they get more than 5,000 in this Step, they automatically discard the keyword as too competitive. Read on to Step 2 to see why they are WRONG…
2. Next, read THIS POST first on how Google lies to us. Hopefully after reading that post this makes sense, but basically you want to scroll all the way down to the bottom of page 1 of the search results from the search in Step 1.
At the bottom of the page, google lists out the results as 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10. Click on the 10 to go to the 10th page of search results.
Do this over and over until you get to the last search result. You’ll be surprised to find that the last search result is much lower than what you found in Step 1.
Make note of the total search results after reaching the end and put this amount in the “Revised Quotes” column.
3. Next, we want to go back to the Google search box and type the keyphrase in as follows (using the Jamorama review example):
intitle:”jamorama review”
This will tell us how many pages have our keyphrase in the title.
BUT…
after you do this search, do what you did in Step 2 again (go to the very end of the search results). Record this result in the “Intitle” column.
4. This step is exactly the same as Step 3, except you want to type into the Search box the following:
intitle:”jamorama review” inanchor:”jamorama review”
Notice there is no space between the : and “, but there is a space between ” and inanchor. Again, this tells us how many pages are specifically optimizing for our keyphrase by putting it in the title and anchor text. Go to the end of the results and record what you find in the “Intitle/”Inanchor” column.
Now, let’s pause for a moment so I can explain something.
Ultimately, we should only be concerned with how strong the 1st 10 results are in Google when doing a normal search (ie without quotes or operators) because this is where we are trying to rank. So, are the above not important?
I have heard some say that Steps 1-4 don’t even matter because we should only be concerned with the first page results BUT, I like to look at both the results in Steps 1-4 and the Steps I outline next. This is because if I find that the 1st page results are weak competitors, but there are 300 pages optimized for my keyword, I may still have a tough time ranking. As a result, I like to look at a combination of the above Steps with the following Steps.
Ultimately, you have to do what you are comfortable with, this is simply
the way I do it and what has worked for me.
OK, on to Step 5:
5. In this Step, we are focusing ONLY on the 1st page results. So, first you want to do a search in Google for your keyword without quotes or operators – just a plain old Google search.
We are looking at the Page Rank of each of the results on the 1st page. If you are not familiar with Page Rank, it is basically how important, on a scale of 1-10, that Google thinks a website is. The higher the page rank, the more important in Googles eyes. You can read more about Page Rank HERE.
So, how do you determine each pages page rank? Well, in the previous post I mentioned SEObook.com. We want to go back there and download their SEOToolbar. You can find it at http://tools.seobook.com/
Once you download this, you will have a Page Rank bar in your toolbar. So, every time you go to a page, it will tell you automatically what the page rank for that page is.
So we want to go to each page in the top 10 results and write down what the page rank is for that site. When we get all of these, we add them up and divide by 10. This gives us the average page rank for our keyphrase.
ONE IMPORTANT THING**do not add into the results any results such as Ezinearticles, Goarticles, Articlesbase, Zimbio, Digg, or any other social type site. This is because their page rank could artificially inflate our average. AND, we can publish on these sites too. We are really looking for websites other than these types of sites.
So, if you look at the 1st page results and you have 8 “regular” old websites and 2 Ezinearticles, you would add up the page rank of the 8 sites and divide by 8 to get your average.
OK, almost done!!
6. In this last step, I simply scan the 1st page results we got in Step 5 for these social type sites. You can really do this step in conjunction with Step 5.
The reason for this is that if there are Ezinearticles or other sites like Digg on the 1st page results (WITHOUT quotes or operators), I know I have a really, really good shot at getting on the 1st page also because I can put content on these sites as well.
So, on my spreadsheet, I just make a notation that there are some of these social sites on page 1 and which sites they are.
You’ll go through these steps for each of your keywords. And by the way, there are software programs, like Micro Niche Finder, that will do the majority of these steps for you, but it’s nice to do it for free and I think it’s important to understand the steps involved.
How To Interpret What You Have
So, we have all these numbers in front of us and we need to pick the ones that we think we will have the best shot at ranking for. We want to start off by choosing 5 that we like.
IMPORTANT**I am going to give some guidelines below on what to look for, but the absolute most important thing to remember is that you have to not get frozen in choosing your keywords and determining which ones to target.
ALOT of people get frozen with fear at this point because they worry if they are doing it right or wrong…
DO NOT DO THIS, and don’t make it overly complicated. It’s not rocket science!
Pick what you think is best and get to work with your site and content (I’ll get into way more detail on this in a later post) because as you gain experience and confidence, you will start to know pretty quickly what you will be able to rank for and what you won’t be able to rank for. Just remember, keep moving forward.
OK, the guidelines I follow are as follows:
1. intitle/inanchor results below 20-25, the lower the better
2. Average page rank < 2-3
3. A social site on page 1 results
These are my “ultimate” guidelines, but I am flexible because I can’t always have my cake and eat it too. If you meet 1 & 2, but not 3, it’s probably fine. If you meet 2 & 3, but not 1, you’ll probably be OK.
I have ranked on page 1 for phrases with 200 intitle/inanchor and I have ranked when no social site is on page 1. These are simply guidelines. Again, choose what you think is best and move on to your site – you can’t sell anything if you don’t get some content up!
OK, this will keep you a little busy…my next post will be on getting our domain and setting up our site – and a cool tool I use that gets my affiliate sites up in literally minutes!
To your SUCCESS!
Find The Cash Sucking Keywords That Will Bring You Loads Of Targeted Traffic! – PART 1
Catchy title for my post, huh?
If you are just arriving here, this post is part of a series of posts where I show you, step-by-step, what I do to put together a profitable campaign. To start at the beginning, GO HERE.
This post is kind of long so bear with me!! I am breaking it down into 2 posts so you can digest it all.
OK, so we have decided on our niche, and now we have to find the keywords that are going to bring us traffic from the search engines. In other words, we want to rank for these keywords, on the first page of Google, to get natural, organic traffic.
And keep in mind that we will initially get traffic from articles for these keywords, but the whole goal is to get our pages ranked. Articles will most likely die off, so we want our real estate (our sites) to gain value and go up in the search engines.
Here is exactly how I do keyword research, and the reasons I do it this way:
1. First, I open a new Excel spreadsheet and I list out in column A all “buying” keywords. Buying keywords are the ones that I feel people would type in to the SE’s if they want to buy a product. They typically include 1) the product names I am promoting, and 2) combinations of the words “buy” “purchase” “review” and “reviews.”
So, for example, for one of the guitar products I will be promoting, Jamorama, I would type into my spreadsheet:
jamorama
buy jamorama
purchase jamorama
jamorama review
jamorama reviews
2. Next, I go to the affiliate sections of the vendors sites I plan on promoting. Most vendors will have a fairly good affiliate section full of banners, sample email templates, other graphics, and yes, keywords. Take these keywords with a grain of salt though because I have found that they are generally just generic keywords.
I take these keywords from each vendors site and I paste them into my Excel spreadsheet vertically in column A below my keywords in Step 1.
3. I then go to the Google external keyword tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and I do a “Website content” search for EACH of the vendors websites.
I take every one of the keywords I get and paste them into column A of my spreadsheet.
4. I then go to SEObook at http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/ (register for an account, it’s free, and a great keyword tool) and I type in my “root” keywords. The root keywords are my main important keywords.
I am focusing this campaign on learning the electric guitar since it is a little more focused than just “learn guitar,” so I type in “learn electric guitar” into SEObook’s keyword tool. I take these keyword results and paste them into my Excel spreadsheet like the other lists.
Don’t worry about search volume or anything like that yet.
5. I then go to Micro Niche Finder and do the same keyword search as I did in SEObook. If you are not familiar with Micro Niche Finder, it is a keyword tool that you have to pay for. In my opinion, it is well worth the money, but it is not necessary to do the keyword research I am talking about here.
As a side note – any tool you use in IM should be judged on 1) whether it saves you time or 2) it helps you accomplish your goal. Like any tool I use, Micro Niche Finder saves me a ton of time and gives me some great keyword ideas.
If you have the time, do it by hand and save your money. If you don’t have the time, get Micro Niche Finder or another keyword research tool to speed up the process.
I take the keywords I get from Micro Niche Finder and paste those into my spreadsheet.
So, now I have a really healthy list of keywords.
6. I then go back to the Google free keyword tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal but this time I do a “descriptive words or phrases” search with my newly generated keyword list.
I simply take my list from Excel and paste all of them into the Google Keyword tool search box.
7. This filters out all of the duplicates and gives me a nice keyword list, with synonyms, to work with. I take this list and export it to a new Excel spreadsheet.
8. I then do a couple things. I create a couple column headers titled as follows (right next to the search volume column): 1) Quotes, 2) Revised Quotes, 3) Intitle 4) Intitle/Inanchor, 5) Average Page Rank, 6) Social Page 1.
Here’s what they mean -
- Quotes - this is the number of search results when I type in the keyword with quotes
- Revised quotes – this is going to the end of the search results found in number 1. For an explanation on this, read THIS POST.
- Intitle – this is the search results, in quotes, with typing in the “Intitle” operator. This tells me how many pages have my certain keyphrase in the title, in that order
- Intitle/Inanchor - this displays the search results, in quotes, with typing in the “intitle” and “inanchor” operators. This tells me how many search results there are for my search term in the title of a page and the anchor text of a page. This gives me an idea of how many pages are actually optimizing for my keyphrase. An example of what this would look like is as follows:
intitle:”jamorama review” inanchor:”jamorama review”
- Average Page Rank – this is the average page rank of the web pages in the top 10 (first page) search results on Google (searched without quotes or any operators). You can download a pagerank toolbar for free at SEObook.com (the same site with the keyword tool) to easily tell the pagerank of websites.
- Social Page 1 – this means when you do a non-quote and non-operator search in Google, are there any social sites, like Ezinearticles, Go articles, Articlesbase, Digg, weebly, etc. on Page 1 of the results. If there are, this is a great indication that you can get on Page 1 fairly easily. If you notice that most of the 1st page results are authority sites, like Amazon, Ebay, Wikipedia, etc., you’ll have a much harder time competing.
9. Now, I take my big list of keywords and I sort them according to search volume. I only pay attention to the Gloabl Search Volume and not the Local Search Volume. So, just delete the “competition” and “Local Search Volume” columns.
10. Next, I get rid of all keywords with less than 500 searches per month. You can adjust this as you see fit, but I have found some great, low competition keywords at 500 or so searches a month that have been goldmines. Some people go lower than 500, some go higher.
11. I then scan my list for any keywords that “look good.” What does this mean? To me it means they make sense and sound like someone who is looking to spend money. For example, if I am targeting people who want to learn the electric guitar online, “learn electric guitar online” is a slam dunk keyword for me to target. But, “learn acoustic guitar online” is not a good one. Make sense?
I highlight these for further research.
12. I also get rid of all the “junk” keywords or keywords that don’t make any sense. For example, one that showed up for my guitar keywords was “guitar learn online.” In my opinion, this is jibberish. It may show that it gets 10,000 searches per month, but it does not make sense that someone would type this into the SE’s. So, I just get rid of them.
13. I try to find 10-20 (or more, if possible) good keywords that fit my target market. Once I identify these, the real fun starts!
In my next post, I reveal how to look at each of these keywords we just found to narrow them down to which ones we think will make us a bunch of moolah and which ones don’t have a fighting chance.
Stick around, it’s awesome having you here!
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Tools I Personally Use & Recommend
