Market Research for Internet Marketing
You have been searching on how to start a blog, looking for the blog tips and tricks, learning how to promote a blog, thinking about money making blog ideas and really getting into this WordPress thing. You know you want to make money on line and want a few more tips on market research for internet marketing. Here is a little more information to get you headed towards that successful internet business.
There are many ways to make a living online. But no matter which route you choose, it all begins with market research. You have to find a group of buyers who have a common problem or need. Then all you need to do is sell them things that solve the problem or meet the need.
Market research can be divided into two parts – finding a profitable niche and finding long tail keywords within that niche. The good news is that there are many free tools available to do this. Some of the best tools are provided by Google itself. So the first thing to do is sign up for an account with Google. Once you have done that, go to Google’s search-based keyword tool at www.google.com/sktool. Type in the words ‘buy, purchase, order, get’ (without quotation marks) into the search field. The sktool will list out 800 words or terms that contain these buying keywords together with other useful data like level of competition, searches per month etc. All you have to do is choose the term that you feel is most suitable for yourself, preferably one that has at least 2,500 searches per month.
Next, click on the icon that looks like a magnifying glass next to the search term that you have chosen. This will take you to Google Insights for Search, another free tool from Google at www.google.com/insights. It will automatically search the term that you have chosen and produce the relevant data at Google insights. Scroll down to the bottom part of the page and you will see other related search terms. Take note of all the related search terms that you find.
Now you would have about 10 buying keyword terms in a particular niche. This basically indicates that there are people searching for information to solve a problem or meet a need in this niche. Next, you should investigate further into how big a market this niche is and get more keyword ideas.
Go to amazon.com, ebay.com, magazines.com and clickbank.com. Put the main keyword of the niche into the search field and see if there are products that are listed in these websites within this niche. Chances are you will find products in all these websites pertaining to your niche. Briefly review some of the products for ideas – both keyword ideas and product ideas. The next step is to find long tail keywords.
To do this, go to Google’s external keyword tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. Type in your 10 keywords and it will generate a list of related keywords. Take note of the keyword phrases with at least 3 words in them (long tail keywords) and that produce at least 2,500 searches per month.
Now go to the Google search engine at www.google.com and type in the main keyword in quotation marks. As you are typing, Google will give you related search terms. Take note of the long tail keywords. Once you hit the search button, Google will list out all the websites related to your keyword (this is called the SERP or Search Engine Results Page). Take note of the number of websites listed (it is listed at the top right hand corner of the page). You are aiming for keywords with a maximum of 1,000,000 websites. If it is significantly higher than 1 million, then the keyword is too competitive. Do the same thing with each of the keywords that you have and choose those which have less than 1 million competing websites.
For each of the keywords you type into Google, look at the bottom of the SERP and you will find more suggested related keywords. Click on them and you will find even more keywords. Drill down into the keywords as deeply as you can until you find long tail keywords with less than 1 million competing websites.
If you have done your market research well enough, you will now have identified a niche with ready buyers and the long tail keywords (about 10 will do) they use to search in the search engine for information on a product to buy. The next step would be Product Research and Creation which will be covered in the next article.
E Commerce Web Hosting a Few Things to Know
When you decide to start a blog and sell a product from your WordPress blog or website, you need to find out more about e commerce web hosting, compare prices and choose the ideal e commerce web hosting solution. You will need to offer a way for your customers to pay for your product that is safe and secure. You will want to provide with a way to pay with a credit card that protects your customer’s identity and credit card information. In addition, if you are selling multiple products from your website, you will want a way for the customer to buy more than one thing at a time. Most of these things can easily be handled through shopping cart software and your hosting company will need to be set up to accommodate this type of software.
Choose an e commerce web hosting provider that suits your needs and demands. Many hosts will provide shopping cart software for you. You also need to be sure that your hosting company provides a secure server to protect your customer’s identity and credit card information.You want to be sure that your host can handle as many or as few transactions as you have in a month and doesn’t penalize you for exceeding estimated transactions. You will also need to know about any transaction monetary amount limits that may be in place to make sure that they are sufficient to cover your monthly sales.
If you plan on building an e commerce web hosting solution, you will be trusting numerous daily transactions with your web hosts. You want to make sure that they are up to the task. You want a host that will either provide shopping cart software for you or can accommodate the software you have. You want to be sure that you have a secure server for your transactions and you need to know how many transactions you are allowed on a monthly basis. Not all hosts are created equal and some will provide you with more service for the money spent. Make sure your host is reliable as well because ‘down time’ equals lost sales.
When selecting an e commerce web hosting service, research the reputation and credibility of the provider. You don’t want to trust your customer’s transactions and your money to an unreliable host. You want to be sure that your hosting provider has a good ‘up time’ record because if your site is down you are not making any sales. You also want to be sure to have a secure server to protect all the transaction information. You will want to be sure that the provider can handle the amount of transactions that you will have come through your site as well. You don’t want to lose sales because you have exceeded any limits. The main thing is to do your ‘due diligence’ before signing up for a service.
Promote a Blog With Link Building
A writer at one of my favorite article sites InfoGoRound wrote a good article on link building, another area that I need to get better at when it comes to how to promote a blog. Many of us that have WordPress sites not only enjoy blogging, we also like to make money with our website. I am certainly not one of those internet “gurus” but just another techless blogger that is trying to do better when it comes to promoting my blogs and does not mind sharing good information such as this link building article.
One of the most important factors, of the many considered by search engines in calculating your search ranking, is how well your website or blog is linked to other sites. Almost nothing you can do to improve your ratings will have as dramatic an effect as increasing the number of these links. There are several simple and inexpensive ways to improve the number and quality of the sites linking to you. By concentrating on this one metric, you can have an amazing impact on how well your site does in a search for a particular keyword.
The simplest thing you can do to improve this link count is to start visiting other blogs and websites that have to do with the keyword you care about. By visiting these sites, you have the chance to comment on posts and leave a link back to your site. These all add up over time to help improve your link count.
You could also start your own blog, or even a group of blogs related to keywords you care about and link these back to your site as well. Be sure to add appropriate links on these blogs to your site to help build additional links to specific areas of your main site. This will encourage visits by people that read your blog and you may get additional links from them as well.
Submitting your site to website directories is another good idea for helping to boost your link count. These directories will naturally link to your site and can help direct traffic your way as well as raise your sites ranking. The thing to remember with site directories is to submit to a few each week and not to do them all at the same time. Some search engines will punish your ranking if you suddenly appear in a lot of directories at once. Also, the ranking of the directories you submit to can impact your ranking as the search engines give more credence to sites with a higher ranking and will raise your ranking accordingly.
Writing articles that your publish on your blog, or on your website is another great way to build additional links. You could submit these articles to other blogs for additional exposure as well. Each of the articles you write should have both your name, the name of your website, and a hard link back to your site. Most blogs that accept submissions will publish them with this information intact and help you build even more links back to your site.
A recent phenomenon is the availability of sites with good search engine rankings that are willing to sell you links on their site back to your site. These sites will give you an immediate and dramatic boost in your rankings for a keyword based on the link they provide back to you as a trusted site, it’s like they are vouching for you. Be cautious with this as some search engines are aware of this and will punish you if you use it too often.
Another thing a lot of good webmasters do to help raise the ranking of their sites is to visit and participate in some social networking sites on the web. These sites allow you to submit content from your site and comment on posts or articles they publish and also allow you to post your name and a link back to your site. This helps them with traffic, and helps you with another source of links and traffic.
The final approach you can take is to find other websites and blogs that center on your main keyword or topic and see if you can trade links with them. This is a fairly common practice and really helps raise the ranking of both sites involved in the trade. You might be surprised to find how accommodating a lot of the folks that run these sites can be. Most of them are more than willing to trade links with you and may even be willing to trade content as well.
Applying these techniques to your sites will certainly help their rankings with the search engines. The number and quality of the links back to your site by others is a very important factor in determining your search engine ranking. By spending a little time and effort, you can improve it dramatically.
10 Great Reasons to Start a Blog
As those of you that keep asking how do I start a blog? Or how do I promote a blog? Blogging is very popular and becoming more popular every day. This does not mean it is right for you but for me and many others we have found it an excellent way to promote our offline business and/or make money online. If you are thinking about starting a WordPress or other blog or website here are 10 really good reasons to start a blog: Read more
Email List is Vital to the Growth of an Online Business
As previously discussed I am a member of InfoGoRound and this site provides me with some very good and very timely articles. For those that keep asking how do I build a blog or how do I promote my blog the following article makes a very good point about email list. I need to make a big improvement in building and utilizing an email list and found this article informative. Let me share the article and you can see what you think.
If you really want your Internet business to thrive you absolutely must succeed at email marketing, and the only way to do that is with a good email list. Maintaining a good email list can provide all kinds of benefits for an Internet business.
To start with, regardless of whether you are trying to make sales, promote an affiliate website, provide content production, or just generate ad revenue, e.g., adwords campaigns and the like, you’ve got to have customers. With a good email marketing campaign you can give your customers a sense of real appreciation. Reinforce that you did not forget about them the moment they gave you their money. Their business mattered to you, and you want more of it. In a world where business dealings are becoming increasingly impersonal, this is a sure fire way to build a rapport with your customers that will ultimately boost your bottom line.
Not only do you need to keep track of the email addresses of your existing customers, it’s essential to try to obtain the email address of any prospective customers as well. Whether it’s by keeping a log of customer service emails, or setting up some kind of membership feature, you should try to get their email address. If they are interested enough to have found your website, they are interested in whatever you may have to offer. You may not be able to get them to buy your product, subscribe to your pay service, or even click an ad, but you will be able to let them know when you have any specials, or any new content for them to look at, or any new services that they may be interested in. If they did not have any interest at all in what you had to offer, you would not have their email address in the first place.
The best part about having a good email list, and using a clever email marketing campaign, is the way it can generate revenue. If you can drive Internet traffic to your website and get a steady flow of new customers, that is great. It would be even that much better if you could obtain there name and email address to add to your list.
If you want to grow your volume, and grow your business, you are going to need to make sure that you not only get new customers, but repeat customers. The longer you work at building the customer – business relationship with an email marketing campaign, the more people you will manage to pull into your customer base. As your customer base expands, so does your business, and your profits.
If your goal is to expand your Internet business until you are living comfortably, working from home and working for yourself, you absolutely must maintain a robust email list, and conduct effective email marketing campaigns.
Publish Your Own eBook at No or Low Costs
If you have spent much time surfing the Internet or are on many email list you see a lot of eBooks offered for sale. Perhaps you have your own WordPress blog and figure this would be a great place to market your own book. There is obviously a demand for eBooks or you would not see so many of them. With a quick Google search you will find eBooks that range from raising chickens or children to building your own WordPress Blog or home based business and just about everything else you can think of. The fact is that while some eBook subjects will certainly be better seller than others there is a market for just about anything. You may just be wondering how a person with a tight budget can go about writing and publishing their own eBook. Here are several tips that may interests you! Read more
Affiliate Marketing the Good Bad and Ugly
Affiliate marketing a term we are hearing more of and perhaps would like to know just what this affiliate marketing is all about. Both this year and last many individuals have lost their employment and layoffs appear to be on the increase. Our expenses are up and income is down. Many people are in the position of looking for a new job or finding a way to increase income or replace lost family income. On television, radio and the Internet we hear that you can make a lot of money using the World Wide Web and a format such as a WordPress blog and theme. Read more
Getting Screwed by WildBlue or is it WildScrew Fair Access Policy?
I live and operate my business in an area where cable and DSL high speed services are not available. Actually Qwest DSL stops a couple hundred yards from my house but they have tried but been unable to get a strong enough signal for it to work at my house. The cable company offers television programming in our area but they say that the lines are too old to offer high speed Internet service. Without high speed service operating a consulting business and my internet business using WordPress or any other format would be very difficult.
For the almost 4 years now I have had Wildblue Satellite “high speed” service. You notice that I put “high speed” in quotes for while it is quicker than dial up when working it is much slower than DSL. With WildBlue or WildScrew which ever it is, I pay for one of their premium plans and not the basic.
One year ago I upgraded to an even more expensive plan when WildBlue cut back on the speed of my service for a month when the bandwidth was exceeded by backing up my computer to an offsite service. This exceeded what they refer to as their usage threshold. My instructions at that time were basically to grab the Vaseline and bend over. Now don’t get me wrong, the employees at WildBlue are very polite and very nice but unfortunately not in a position to do anything for you.
A couple of weeks ago my main computer had to be replaced. This required that I upload all of the information stored off site on to the new computer. The result was that I once again was required to grab the Vaseline and bend over.
Now here is another place WildBlue really screws you. If you do not decrease you Usage Total to 79% or less of the Usage Threshold within the following 30 days this is a second violation and the penalty continues for another month while the charge you the full price.
Here’s another kicker. For the first couple of years that I had the WildBlue service it was regularly down when it rained, snowed, cloudy or windy. I live in Oregon a green but wet state. Did they give me any credit for all the time that I was down? Hell no!!! They kept saying they would issue a credit after they got the satellite working properly. The truth is they never do get it working and I am still waiting for that credit, so be warned.
When one of these so called high speed satellite companies screws you like this and your business depends on the Internet it makes it nearly impossible to operate. Presently I am operating on dial up for it is quicker than the so-called “high speed” service of WildBlue.
I have called Wildblue and told them that if they were unable to restore my service I would be changing companies as they were putting me out of business with this Fair Access Policy. The reaction of the WildBlue “no service department” was polite yet a firm “I am sorry there is nothing I can do about it.” I let them know that while they can do nothing about it I can and I would be looking for the service of another provider.
I feel that I have received the royal screw and for me WildBlue is now WildScrew. If you are in the same position that I am in and unable to get DSL or cable I would suggest that you do the same thing I am in the process of doing and check out Hughes and the other providers first. You will also find that the other providers do have a Fair Access Policy the difference is that some of them are for a short period of time such as 24 hours. While these policies can still be unfair for they do not credit you for all the months or years that you use a lot less than your allotted service or the times when their service did not work, they screw you when you do exceed the usage.
How to Promote a Blog with Twitter
Twitter is a rapidly growing micro blogging platform constantly in the news. Its growth has been spreading quicker than a wind blown wild fire. I hate to admit it but I have not been participating in it though I really know that I need to and will soon be getting started. Today I received this article about Twitter and it reminded me of my failure to take advantage of what has been such a fantastic marketing tool for many operators of WordPress blogs. Read more
Money Making Blog Ideas with PPC Kahuna
Perhaps you have now started to build one or more WordPress blogs and like me you want to make money online. You have heard that some people are getting rich on line but it just hasn’t happened to you yet and to be honest it has not happened to me yet either but I have really been learning a lot of new blog tips and tricks and money making ideas since becoming a member of PPCKahuna Elite. Read more
