How Can I Tell if A Market is Worth Getting Into?

All too often I hear horror stories about how after many months of costly product research and creation, an eager entrepreneur sets up shop, spends another yacht load of cash SEOing the web site then, a dingy load of cash for an expert copywriter, only to find when launch day arrives, no one will buy the product. At which point our unwitting entrepreneur is pretty much sunk, pure and simple. The worst part of all, in that situation, the person frequently has no idea why they have failed. The facts of the matter are, our captain of modern industry wound up pitching a tent in Antarctica and ended up adrift on an iceberg headed for the equator!

Kudos for diligence to our entrepreneurial bastion of endurance. Managing a product from conception to market is no small feat and should in no way be underestimated. Unfortunately, many small businesses, at the outset of their world changing conception, overlook the single most important issue surrounding their initiative. Proof of concept or, more to the point, will your product sell? The process, in a nut shell should go something like this;

1. You have a great idea
2. You do keyword research
3. You set up a ‘quicky’ web site
4. You launch a PPC campaign

Now that you have overview of the process, whats most important here is the keyword research. Below is a list of some great resources I like to use.

• Google’s Zeitgeist, pronounced ‘zit-gist’ (a German word meaning general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era) shows weekly, monthly, and annual trends and patterns based on the countless millions of sear queries conducted through Google.

• Google Trends is an excellent tool that lets you compare the world’s interest to your chosen niche markets. Entering up to five topics, you may see how often they’ve been searched for on Google over time. The result also displays how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions.

• Magazines.com lists their 10 Top Titles on their homepage. These include publications such as Sports Illustrated, For Kids, Time, People, InStyle, Woman’s Day, Money, Newsweek, Women’s Health and Disney Adventures. Any of these topics are hot ones.

• eBay Pulse is a daily snapshot of current trends, hot picks, and cool stuff on eBay, listing it’s popular searches, largest stores and most watched items. You can also use the drop-down menu to filter the lists to show content for more specific categories.

• Yahoo’s Buzz Index focuses on the entertainment industry, providing their most popular daily searches for actors, movies, music, sports, TV and video games.

• comScore Networks provides insight into consumer behavior and attitudes by compiling reports based on a global cross-section of more than 2 million consumers who have given comScore explicit permission to capture their browsing and transaction behavior, including online and offline purchasing.

• JupiterResearch provides research, analysis and advice to help guide technology vendors and service providers on market opportunity. Guest access is available, however, to quickly gain access to salient sections of recent Jupiter Research reports, try Googling “jupiter research ____” with the subject of you inquiry.

• Google Insights for Search allows you to compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames as well as narrow data to specific categories, like finance, health, and sports so you can anticipate demand for your business helping you to budget and plan accordingly and know where to find your customers by seeing how search volume is distributed across regions and cities.

• Google Adwords Keyword Tool is another free tool that reports on search performance and seasonal trends on keywords and keyword phrases that you enter into the search box. Statistics show the relative amount of users searching for that keyword on Google.

• WordTracker shows you exactly what people are looking for online by showing you exactly which keywords and phrases they’re searching for. Wordtracker’s suggestions are based on over 330 million keywords and phrases that a sampling of people across multiple engines have used over the previous 90 days.

Now we are lrft with PPC. What is PPC you ask? Pay Per Click advertising. You know, those little ads on the right site of your web browser. What you need to do is blow some of that seed money on advertising before you spend a dime on development. After all, wouldn’t you like to know you have no chance of making money after spending only $250 instead of $25,000? More importantly, throwing a few hundred or a thousand dollars at proof of concept will save you the one thing that can never be replaced, YOUR TIME!

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SEM by the numbers

So now, at long last, Google had fulfilled one of it’s greatest promises. Actual, real search volume numbers. No more will we be forced to guess if a green bar 3 is good or, if a green bar 4 is almost 5 or almost 3. Thats right folks real live actual number for search volume. Rumor has it though, that the numbers, much like what Yahoo displays, are inflated.

A highly reputable SEO demonstrates this with excellent results. In a nutshell, comparing the external keywords tool volume data to the AdSense volume data will show the discrepancy. That aside, being able to use this development to get an actual number is so incredibly helpful in so many ways. No more guessing at what that green bar actually means. Hard and fast numbers can make all the difference. One can only wonder how well that bodes for Google’s Page Rank green bar. My guess it that won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. Certainly not until several years after Yahoo is consumed by Google.

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blind mice, a carving knife and academic voodoo

I read a quote recently in an article published by a Harvard Business School associate professor that stated, “Just because the Internet makes it possible to offer a near-infinite inventory of sale goods does not mean that consumers will want more obscure items in any great numbers” This prognostication floored me as all I could murmur was, “gee, ya-think?”

What’s worse is the representative data was drawn from popular song and movie databases which, in my experience, has nearly no tail at all or, depending on your viewpoint, is nearly all tail but, thats an entirely different article. Combine that with the notoriously cloudy weather 30,000 foot view of academia, it’s then no wonder it took a Harvard genus to cut to the blatantly obvious core of the issue.

Also stated was;

“No matter how I slice and dice the customer base, customers give lower ratings to obscure titles. A balanced picture emerges of the impact of online channels on market demand: Hit products remain dominant, even among consumers who venture deep into the tail. Hit products are also liked better than obscure products. It is a myth that obscure books, films, and songs are treasured. What consumers buy in internet channels is much the same as what they have always bought”

(once again) - ENTER ‘THE FLOOR’ - uh,ya, OK. Apparently there was a good old fashioned Nor’easter in full blow when that quote was written. Expanding that data to other vertical markets, thats like saying no one wants the ‘Netgear wpn824 Rangemax MIMO Wireless Router’ because it has only sold less than 1% of all routers sold.

Without delving too deeply into how a ‘hit product’ is defined as compared to how a ‘obscure product’ is defined ( I won’t even get into treasured), I think the real world translation is, “sell whats selling, not whats not”. I love the ambiguity of a false dichotomy, don’t you….

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another piece of the action

During the stone age of the internet, a new species was born to the affiliate advertising tree and it’s branch was know as Performics. After being consumed by DoubleClick in 2004 Google then this year devoured DoubleClick and , now, behold, the ultimate evolution of affiliate connections, the new Google Affiliate Network.

The $3.1 Billion paid for Doubleclick must carry allot of cosmic ca-ching because as if reborn from a previous incarnation, Perfomics seems to have retained it’s karmic essence as when you attempt to log in to the newly announced Google Affiliate Network, what you see is a redirect to connectcommerce.com Performics. One can only presume that what Google has announced is it’s intent to get yet another piece of the action. Hey all those phd’s are good for something after all.

So, now, the *all new* Google Affiliate Network offers;

• Industry-leading advertiser and publisher service
• Rigorous network quality standards
• Reliable conversion tracking
• Detailed reporting
• Automated payments to publishers
• Simple link and creative delivery tools
• Flexible commissions
• Access to top brands on the web

and features companies such as

• Target
• Kohls.com
• Citibank
• Circuit City
• Zazzle
• Bank of America
• Verizon
• Barnes & Noble.

No doubt, far from now, on a brilliant sunshiny day, Google will fully integrate it’s new affiliate network into AdSense and on that day all will rejoice and be thankful.

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Download Day Arrives

Today June 17th at 10AM PST marks the long promised FireFox 3.0 Download Day Release. Up to 5 million downloads are expected to occur which if reached, would set a Guinness World Record for the most single piece of software downloads in a single day. If the 1.6 million pledges are any indication, then they just may pull this one off. The new firefox has a great deal to offer such as being:

More Secure

• One-click site info: Click the site favicon in the location bar to see who owns the site and to check if your connection is protected from eavesdropping. Identity verification is prominently displayed and easier to understand. When a site uses Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificates, the site favicon button will turn green and show the name of the company you’re connected to.
• Malware Protection: malware protection warns users when they arrive at sites which are known to install viruses, spyware, trojans or other malware.
• New Web Forgery Protection page: the content of pages suspected as web forgeries is no longer shown.
• New SSL error pages: clearer and stricter error pages are used when Firefox encounters an invalid SSL certificate.
• Add-ons and Plugin version check: Firefox now automatically checks add-on and plugin versions and will disable older, insecure versions.
• Secure add-on updates: to improve add-on update security, add-ons that provide updates in an insecure manner will be disabled.
• Anti-virus integration: Firefox will inform anti-virus software when downloading executables.
• Vista Parental Controls: Firefox now respects the Vista system-wide parental control setting for disabling file downloads.
• Effective top-level domain (eTLD) service better restricts cookies and other restricted content to a single domain.
• Better protection against cross-site JSON data leaks.

Easier to Use

• Easier password management: an information bar replaces the old password dialog so you can now save passwords after a successful login.
• Simplified add-on installation: the add-ons whitelist has been removed making it possible to install extensions from third-party sites in fewer clicks.
• New Download Manager: the revised download manager makes it much easier to locate downloaded files, and you can see and search on the name of the website where a file came from. Your active downloads and
• Resumable downloading: users can now resume downloads after restarting the browser or resetting your network connection.
• Full page zoom: from the View menu and via keyboard shortcuts, the new zooming feature lets you zoom in and out of entire pages, scaling the layout, text and images, or optionally only the text size. Your settings will be remembered whenever you return to the site.
• Podcasts and Videocasts can be associated with your media playback tools.
• Tab scrolling and quickmenu: tabs are easier to locate with the new tab scrolling and tab quickmenu.
• Save what you were doing: Firefox will prompt users to save tabs on exit.
• Optimized Open in Tabs behavior: opening a folder of bookmarks in tabs now appends the new tabs rather than overwriting.
• Location and Search bar size can now be customized with a simple resizer item.
• Text selection improvements: multiple text selections can be made with Ctrl/Cmd; double-click drag selects in “word-by-word” mode; triple-clicking selects a paragraph.
• Find toolbar: the Find toolbar now opens with the current selection.
• Plugin management: users can disable individual plugins in the Add-on Manager.
• Integration with Windows: Firefox now has improved Windows icons, and uses native user interface widgets in the browser and in web forms.
• Integration with the Mac: the new Firefox theme makes toolbars, icons, and other user interface elements look like a native OS X application. Firefox also uses OS X widgets and supports Growl for notifications of completed downloads and available updates. A combined back and forward control make it even easier to move between web pages.
• Integration with Linux: Firefox’s default icons, buttons, and menu styles now use the native GTK theme.

More Personal

• Star button: quickly add bookmarks from the location bar with a single click; a second click lets you file and tag them.
• Tags: associate keywords with your bookmarks to sort them by topic.
• Location bar & auto-complete: type in all or part of the title, tag or address of a page to see a list of matches from your history and bookmarks; a new display makes it easier to scan through the matching results and find that page you’re looking for. Results are returned according to their frecency (a combination of frequency and recency of visits to that page) ensuring that you’re seeing the most relevant matches. An adaptive learning algorithm further tunes the results to your patterns!
• Smart Bookmarks Folder: quickly access your recently bookmarked and tagged pages, as well as your more frequently visited pages with the new smart bookmarks folder on your bookmark toolbar.
• Places Organizer: view, organize and search through all of your bookmarks, tags, and browsing history with multiple views and smart folders to store your frequent searches. Create and restore full backups whenever you want.
• Web-based protocol handlers: web applications, such as your favorite webmail provider, can now be used instead of desktop applications for handling mailto: links from other sites. Similar support is available for other protocols (Web applications will have to first enable this by registering as handlers with Firefox).
• Download & Install Add-ons: the Add-ons Manager (Tools > Add-ons) can now be used to download and install a Firefox customization from the thousands of Add-ons available from our community add-ons website. When you first open the Add-ons Manager, a list of recommended Add-ons is shown.
• Easy to use Download Actions: a new Applications preferences pane provides a better UI for configuring handlers for various file types and protocol schemes.

Improved Platform for Developers

• New graphics and font handling: new graphics and text rendering architectures in Gecko 1.9 provides rendering improvements in CSS, SVG as well as improved display of fonts with ligatures and complex scripts.
• Color management: (set gfx.color_management.enabled on in about:config and restart the browser to enable.) Firefox can now adjust images with embedded color profiles.
• Offline support: enables web applications to provide offline functionality (website authors must add support for offline browsing to their site for this feature to be available to users).
• A more complete overview of Firefox 3 for developers is available for website and add-on developers.

Improved Performance

• Speed: improvements to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimizations have resulted in continued improvements in performance. Compared to Firefox 2, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run twice as fast in Firefox 3, and the popular SunSpider test from Apple shows improvements over previous releases.
• Memory usage: Several new technologies work together to reduce the amount of memory used by Firefox 3 over a web browsing session. Memory cycles are broken and collected by an automated cycle collector, a new memory allocator reduces fragmentation, hundreds of leaks have been fixed, and caching strategies have been tuned.
• Reliability: A user’s bookmarks, history, cookies, and preferences are now stored in a transactionally secure database format which will prevent data loss even if their system crashes.

Until the starting release time is upon us, you will have to be satisfied with Firefox 3 RC3 (release candidate). You can get a really great sneak peak at what surwe to be the next smash hit for open source free culture.

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100 FREE A-list drop ship suppliers

If you know e-commerce then you know that if an eBiz owner doesn’t have an A-list of genuine wholesale suppliers then they don’t have a profitable business. You probably also know that there are other well-known ‘directory’ sites out there that CLAIM to provide real wholesalers though the fact is, they are full of middlemen, product sourcing scams and ridiculous up-sells to other expensive and ineffective ‘products’. My source for dropship suppliers is actually giving away ONE HUNDRED absolutely genuine, guaranteed Wholesale Suppliers for FREE.

Thats right. To demonstrate that Worldwide Brands is the ONLY real provider of this information online, they are giving away a $97 for FREE. This gift demonstrates that one hundred genuine suppliers is simply a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the thousands upon thousands of real wholesalers listed in their full product directory and, it doesn’t end there, though. This stand-alone tool also comes with 5 critical ecommerce education videos, and 23 eBiz expert interviews. It is the perfect way to get an eBiz up and running successfully with REAL wholesale suppliers– and it is absolutely FREE!

So why do I think you need this?

It’s simple - whether you’re just looking to add new products to your mix, or even if you’re just starting out with e-commerce, drop-shipping is one of the fastest ways to get up and running. Drop-shippers will work directly with you to stock the products YOU want to sell and will ship them directly to YOUR customers when you make sales. No warehousing, no stock, AND you get paid by the customer BEFORE you have to pay for the merchandise to fill their orders. When things get lean, there’s nothing better than not having any of your own money tied up in inventory. Even if you are already set up with warehousing and stock, drop-shipping is a great way to test different products and markets with little to no risk. You can easily identify hot-selling products without having to invest any of your own cash in advance.

So what are you waiting for, head over to Worldwide Brands now for the FREE offer and get started dropshipping now!

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and add zero’s to your bank account
continuing from part 3

Similarly, the words used in the links anchor text on your sites page are your own votes about your authority on the keywords you chose to self define. While your own internal links pointing to your own internal pages do not count as much with Google as the links others use to point to you from their web sites, they are a contributing factor to your SERP rank.

Title

The title tag, much like the road sign that tells you “Now Entering (any ‘Body’ of land)”, is used to define the overall body of content contained on a web page. Your page title typically consists of your primary keywords in order of importance. Something like “Dog, Dog food, Dog Bed’. 3 two word keyword phrases are whats considered best practice. When building inbound links to your site, try to get them from pages with titles relevant to you own pages titles.

Headline

Your headline tag, much like the street sign that tells you what street your on, is used to define a single section of content on a web page or pages. Heading tags include h1, h2, h3 and so on. The hierarchy denotes not only importance but character size as well. H1 carries the most algorithmic weight of the h tags as well being the largest visual size. As with the title tag, your h tags should contain your keywords. When building inlinks, exactly as with title tags, try to get them from pages with headlines relevant to your own.

On to part 5

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Tools You Can Use

Jerry West and Howie Schwartz have been working on a new web site analysis tool. The result is StomperNet’s new Site-SEER. The tool will gather all the key information you look for in order to make informed decisions as an SEO. This is merely the first incarnation and it’s mainly the basics but, as it’s fine tuned over the weeks to come it should be yielding even more intricate results. As of now the results gathered are

• Gather the number of pages you have indexed in Google and Yahoo!
• Alexa.com, Compete.com and Quantcast.com data
• EzineArticles.com and PRWeb.com coverage
• How Google “views” your site in terms of the “targeted theme”
• Title Tag
• Meta Description
• Meta Keywords
• Headings (H1, H2, & H3)
• ALT Tags
• Yahoo! & DMOZ directory listing
• AdWords ‘worth” of the keywords you are targeting

The report is free to run on your site. Free. Just watch this video.

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(more or less)
A.K.A, open a web store without spending a dime

Scenario A: So you have a the need to open a web store. You have your product all picked out and have found a drop shipper. What now?

Scenario B: You just found this super great affiliate program and don’t want the hassle of getting a web host and so forth.

Scenario C: You want to sell your service online and don’t want the same old hassles

Scenario D: Sell Google adSense.

Scenario E: Any other offer you can think of featuring.

Now there’s Totally Free eCommerce Have yourself a look. What we have is a web store serving adSense, selling a physical product, selling an affiliate product and offering services. Best of all, every single thing on that page is completely free to offer. In fact, the only time you need to spend anything is when a purchase is made and, that money is not out of pocket, it’s deducted from the physical product purchase as a PayPal fee. The site hosting is FREE, the products are sold FREE, the cart is FREE, it’s all FREE. The store even has a way to phone you for FREE or chat with you directly and yes you guessed it, EVERYTHING THERE IS DONE TOTALLY FREE!

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again

Google got *slapped back* yesterday with an advertising fraud lawsuit, yet again.

A Massachusetts based private investigator, David Almeida, is seeking class action status. The lawsuit claims Google defrauds advertisers by omitting a critical default setting during campaign set up. This default is set to display advertising on both Google’s search results pages and, all partner pages, through both shared search results and Google’s Adsense programs. Advertisers don’t see this option while creating a campaign. Only after creating a campaign is the setting in dispute both available and visible. This requires the user to go back and change in Adwords, this disputed campaign setting by un-checking the box labeled “Content Network” which is, you guessed it, checked by default.

No doubt Google will take action to remedy this legal *broad match* quickly as it is in Google’s best interest not to allow this joust to run *un-checked* as the lawsuit could become quite an expensive proposition otherwise!

On a more serious note, If you’re not creating separate search and content campaigns you really should be, it’s a best practice and, will help you spot these little gotchyas on the fly as they say!

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with desktops

Have you heard of the expression, ‘designing above the fold’? It is terminology taken from print media meaning, put your best stuff where it can be seen. In the case of a news paper that would mean, place your most eye catching content above where the paper would be folded, similarly when it comes to a web sites home page,

you want to place your most ‘profitable’ offerings where web surfers can see it immediately upon seeing your page.

With all the varying desktop PC screen resolutions currently in use, designing for less bounce and more conversion is getting more and more tricky to do. The key thing to remember is, this is not your 1985 experience any more and this is not you high school PC. Believe it or not, there are actually some out of touch folks still designing for 800×600 screen resolutions. All those folks really to need to smell the e-java and take a look around to see how many new PC’s are now coming with a ‘wide screen’ as standard equipment.

Design Above The Fold 2.0 Center of left justify will have the same results

At this point in time I would have to say that designing a site presentation with any smaller than a 1024×768 screen resolution in mind is a an ill informed decision. In fact, if your offering has even the slightest hint of high tech, you may want to go the next step, 1280×1024. If your offering is exclusive or pricey, then you know your clientèle will have the latest equipment so, design with 1600×1200 in mind.

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no chanting and dancing here!

So you think you know SEM and SEO? Think you know conversion and analytics too do you? Rest assured you will realize just what a papoose feels like in a tribe of true comanchero chieftain warriors when you powwow at the SEO Rainmaker. Ok no more code talker conversion ease, I promise.

Seriously, Jerry West and David Bullock have joined forces to create a dynamic duo of Rainmakers that can really “make it rain,” meaning bring in revenue.

In the exclusive two-day event hosted by David Bullock and Jerry West, you will learn how to become a Rainmaker… regardless of your industry. Get your website or marketing materials personally scoured, reviewed and, critiqued by two of the best in the web marketing industry all while attending an event unlike any other to date.

Here is a small bit of sampling of what will be covered:

Tools & Systems

1. A full step-by-step system personally created for you (following a detailed review of your site or marketing materials).
2. Competitive Intelligence Unleashed.
3. How to properly implement testing methods and/or advertising on your website to achieve top conversion.
4. Why “Traditional Marketing Methods” continue to fail online and what you need to know and understand to increase your sales volume almost immediately.

Your Business

1. Why customers should do business with you.
2. How to use “Points of Difference” to dominate your competition.
3. How to “dollarize” your products or services so that prospective customers fully understand the benefits.
4. How to properly decipher customer needs.

You (Your Greatest Asset—and often the most neglected)

1. How to be more productive and decrease your frustration.
2. Must-have habits of the Rainmaker.
3. How to always deliver on your promises.

If you would like to get a stronger understanding of both David and Jerry, feel free to browse their blogs. Folks, you really do not want to miss this one. You don’t want to find out the hard way that your competition didn’t miss out!

PS

Don’t pass on the Motivational Factor Index Questionnaire over on Jerry’s site. Filling it out only takes a few minutes and you will likely find it quite enlightening!

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Excellent question Francine, it’s all in the tools. There are quite allot of software tools available for keyword research. Lets start with some of the free keyword research tools;

1. Google Adwords Tool
2. SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool
3. Trellians Keyword Discovery
4. kwbrowse

All the above tools are excellent free tools but now lets list the best paid tools.

Fore those in the know our first tool is a no brainer and, the rest of the list will be no surprise;

1. Wordtracker
2. ThemeZoom
3. Nichebot
4. Keyword Discovery

With every tool listed, you simply type in your keyword/primary market, and see what the results yield and, there you have it, a list of keywords related to your filed/query!

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