Welcome to module 1 – Selecting your niche.
Now if you have already picked it, keywords, is a critical step to success. Keywords will carry through your entire landing page, sales page and blog campaign. There is a lot of keyword research here.
This will also help us to secure a domain name and a product name.
This class alone could change your internet marketing results forever.
 |
YOUR TO DO LIST |
1. Download the Worksheet Jump to download
2. Watch the Lesson Jump to Lesson
3. Watch 2 Reviews Jump to Reviews
4. Select a Niche Jump to Niche Selection
– do extra suggestions below if you have no idea
5. Do the Worksheet Jump to Worksheet
following the Lesson/Review instructions from step 1.
(From Step 1)
6. Select a possible domain name for the landing page
ie. www.HowDoIAcceptCreditCardsOnline.com
Click here and Use this worksheet for your keyword research
(Right click to download, Save Target As – Requires MS Excel)
** When you load it will say Read Only – Simply do a Save As – with a new filename and you can modify it as required. **
SPECIAL NOTE – This worksheet is for your research. To get friends and foes known, to help you with additional keywords you encounter for future landing pages, stuff like that.
Brainstorming Your Niche by Tracy Repchuk .
KEYWORD SEARCH SUMMARY
1. Go to google.com
2. See if you can penetrate with Adwords
3. Examine sites on page 1
Are they a Friend? or Foe?
– If Friend – future ad or JV opportunity
– If Foe – Swipe keywords and get ideas you like for yourself
4. Focus on ‘Pain’ and ‘You can solve it’ or ‘Obsession’ and ‘You have something for them’
5. With your search in Google for those in your niche, find out if anyone is selling products
or is it only as an information supplier.
6. For your niche – do you have the story to support it
Keyword tools after watching the video:
Click here Google Adwords Traffic Tool
REVIEW VIDEOS ARE HERE
You can watch to see live evaluations of my client’s work that they did and get the good and not so good reviews.
If you need help with this, or something doesn’t work for you, go to Maestro-Support.com and read the FAQ on this or submit a support ticket.
Review Class #051311
Review Class #033011
Review Class #030911
Review Class #101202
Review Class #101105
Review Class #93010
Review Class #9310
Review Class #72710
Review Class #070510
Review Class #6710
Review Class #52710
>>>
Review Class #31610
Review Class #218
More Reviews for You – Adds Certainty
Many different industries
FOR THESE REVIEW VIDEOS
You need to download a Special Video Player
Step 1. Download Webex Video Player
Step 2. Download Videos from Below
Step 3. Play Video on your PC by double clicking on the file
Oct. 14 09
(*save and run from your PC)
If you haven’t a clue what you want to do …
then have a look at this section and watch the training video again.
Brainstorming a Niche
The most important part of your new venture, is to be sure about what you want to do.
So this is where you want to dig deep, find your passion, and figure out what you want to spend the next part of your life doing. The alternative, is you simply pick a niche that will also produce good money, but for me, I always follow my passion, so the same methods apply, it just gives you more freedom to choose what you want.
The most fun way to do this is a good old-fashioned brainstorming session.
This is where you let your mind loose and don’t monitor any of your ideas, or censor them for logic. Get a pad of paper in front of you, and don’t edit, or even think during this process. It should be write, write, write – without any interruptions from yourself.
I’ve lost count of the number of times people have come to me with a “product idea”, or even a completed product, especially of the ebook or book nature. They are so convinced that their idea is going to succeed that they haven’t bothered testing the market. In fact, I was also a participant in this game when I released my first book “The Poetry of Business” – in which I was going to revolutionize the workplace by enlightening the business person through the use of poetry, to have them excavate whether they were on the right track, and not just the fast one. Discover their purpose. It was a journey that took them from their first resume, through their midlife crisis to retirement and beyond, and provided them with exercises along the way to make sure they were really looking inside for the answers. It is still a fantastic book, but did not produce the windfall that occurred in my mind when I developed it.
Let the market tell you what to sell.
This eclass is about ways to come up with your list of potential hot topics.
We’ll get more specific in the Product step later, but at this point I just want to start to wrap your strategy around a concept that fits the above criteria.
When considering your internet marketing strategy choose a niche that you are passionate about, that you have a knowledge of, and one that has a great audience already that can afford to buy what you are selling, and has a problem you can solve. Preferably, your niche satisfies both.
Choose something you can:
1. Make money at
2. Streamline and automate
3. Get others to sell for you (affiliates)
If it doesn’t satisfy that scenario, then this is a warning now that your niche may not turn out to be the ‘cash machine’ you thought it would. These might be best kept as a hobby. Remember, you are trying to make money at whatever your Internet endeavor is, so keep looking. Your focus is to select the market/area you want to be involved in. We’ll get more specific in the Product step later, but at this point I just want to start to wrap your strategy around a concept that fits the above criteria.
If nothing has sprung to mind yet, use these top 15 questions to help get you thinking.
What do you like to do?
What skills do you have?
How would your friends describe you?
What books do you enjoy reading?
What type of hobbies do you have?
What computer skills do you have?
What knowledge do you have?
Where have you traveled?
What problems can you solve with your knowledge?
What type of advice do you give out when asked?
What magazines do you read?
Do you have a bad habit you’d like to kick?
Are you married? Single? Got kids?
What have been your greatest successes?
What training or education have you had?
Do you like public speaking? Talking on the phone?
You could literally ask yourself hundreds of questions but I chose these ones as the top to help get you fine tuning what you would like to devote your time to. Realize that you know a lot of things, and have skills and knowledge that are unique to you. Figure out your message, and DECIDE.
Here are some places you can research information about niche markets. You can take advantage of focus groups and social networking sites as well. This section will let you see if what you have chosen is a viable money-maker based on the searches or popularity of it.
The tools I use to determine how popular ideas are www.NeedSearchResults.com
There is also the Google Adwords tool –
https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox
You can type in the keyword and it instantly displays accurate results.
More options for selecting your niche:
1. Groups.google.com and google.com
3. Groups.yahoo.com and yahoo.com
4. facebook.com
5. Bing.com
6. Meta Search Tool (uses multiple search tools simultaneously) DogPile.com
7. Subject Search Tool About.com
8. freekeywords.wordtracker.com – sign up for free weekly keyword report
9. Check out the top picks on Amazon.com or eBay.com
10. This is the 2nd largest search site, See who is saying what. YouTube.com
- You can also use research tools such as:
If you really want to make tons of money the rule of thumb is to ‘create your own product’, so start to think about this when selecting your niche.
Once you have come up with some ideas, search for the key words you think people interested in a topic might look for using the key word tool recommendations from above. You are looking for words or phrases which range between 230,000 – 780,000 hits per month for your topic.
If you already have a website set up that’s not performing the way you would like, you can analyze it using this list. It can help you diagnose the problem so you know what changes are likely to improve your sales.
In general here are The Top 9 Ways to Brainstorm and come up with a list of 20 potential topics:
1. Think about your own hobbies, if you could spend your time doing anything, what would it be?
2. Is there anything about your job (or the jobs of friends or relatives) that might appeal to people? Are you in a sought-after career?
3. Your personal problems or interests (as well as those of friends or relatives) can also be a good source of ideas. But beware of thinking that just because it is something you are interested in, that lots of others will be too. Remember, you are not your client.
4. Magazines, Oprah, or especially the trade or specialist journals. Remember, it doesn’t even have to be something that you know about or understand. With this route though, you will simply have to farm out more of the work – again though – this can be a good thing. You’ll have more time for marketing.
5. TV shows, especially current affair shows, news channels, and niche channels like Lifestyle, or Discovery. These channels often have a passionate following. Again, often people will buy anything and everything on a topic if they are passionate about it.
6. Stroll in a bookstore or wander through a library. What topic keeps drawing you to it. What book section can’t you resist. If you could pick 10 books, what would they be. If it’s the library, take them home and continue to get inspired.
7. Look at the list of bestsellers on www.Amazon.com. You’ll see that they are mostly topics that people obsess about. For example exercise, health and medical problems, making money, sports, sex and relationships, crafts and hobbies. Again, use this list as a trigger for coming up with a niche within one of these categories.
8.You can use Clickbank (the internet’s largest seller of ebooks) to find out how well different ebook topics are selling. That’s because Clickbank ranks their ebooks by popularity. You can see which topics are selling well (and view the sales letter) by browsing through Clickbank’s list of 10,000 ebooks. To do this, go to www.clickbank.com and click the “buy products” button. Choose a category to browse, (eg Home and Family) to see a list of the top ebooks in that category. The list is ranked according to the number of sales, so by looking at the ones at the top, you can see what’s selling the best in that category. You can then narrow it down by clicking on the sub-categories to see the top ebooks in each of the sub-categories. If you click on the ebook title it will take you to the sales page, so you can check out their sales copy, offers, guarantees, etc. Really useful research!
9. You can also use www.NeedSearchResults.com to do keyword research and then enter one of your ideas from the brainstorm, and it will give you the number of searches per month that have been made on a particular word or phrase. By typing in generic terms like “how to” “build” “learn” or “buy”, you will find the most common things that people are wanting to “build” “learn” or “buy”.
Additional Exercises:
There is something I learned the hard way, it’s that creating a product that is not researched, needed or wanted costs time and money. Skipping this step is a major reason why newcomers and even businesses fail. If you create what you want in a world of ‘What’s In It For Me (WIIFM)’, and don’t tune into that station and give them what they want, your product may sit on the electronic shelf. You should have your list of potential topics for your niche, but before you create your product or build the website, there’s six critical steps you can do to save you some time and money.
Here are the six factors to take you closer to niche magic and help you determine if you want to test any of them by doing a survey or setting up a survey site.
Side note: If you already have a website set up that’s not performing the way you would like, you can analyze it using this list. It can help you diagnose the problem so you know what changes are likely to improve your sales.
1. How much does the customer desperately want your product?
2. Is the topic an “inch-wide mile-deep” niche?
3. Number of people searching for your topic
5. Number of other ebooks for sale on the topic
6. Amount of free information available on the topic
Criterion # 1 – How much does the customer desperately want your product?
You want a market that is hungry for whatever you create. You want to find out “What does the customer lie awake at night worrying about that your product could solve?”
Products about “prevention” are much harder to sell than products that provide a “cure”. For example a book about how to prevent money loss won’t sell nearly as well as a book about how to restore credit ratings. The first one is something that lots of people need, but the second one is something that people who are affected desperately want.
Criterion # 2 – Is the topic an “inch-wide mile-deep” niche?
It seems to go against logic, but the more you narrow down your niche the more money you make.
As you keep searching deeper don’t think of it as losing sales because you are appealing to a smaller target market, at the beginning stages of a project, the opposite happens, because you can actually be heard.
To research your niche – once you have found a key word or phrase that looks interesting using the Google link www.NeedSearchResults.com , you can find a “niche within a niche” by clicking on that key word, to find any sub-niches.
ie. Diet – too many
add an s = diets – now you can see better results
If it’s applicable – some of those have numbers you can deal with
when I checked out diets that help you lose weight fast though – there was too much Adwords competition (coming up in a future check)
The one with the best results was diets for pregnancy – and we’ll talk more why in a minute.
Criterion # 3 – Number of people searching for your topic
You need to make sure you have enough volume in your chosen niche. That means that you need to have enough people (who lie awake at night desperately wanting a solution to their problem) looking for your key words.
Here are the numbers I use.
I look for 2-3 key words around the topic with around 330,000 – 750,000 searches on
For example, taking a look at the search word suggestions –
Type in “diets”
You get way to many hits to penetrate this generic word, but if you look below, perhaps there are better alternatives to focus on as a niche.
So look below and they have suggestions.
For example:
diets that work – 363,000 is a good place to start looking
diets to lose weight
diets for arthritis
diets for pregnancy
these are all good possibilities to continue researching
Criterion # 4 – Number of other Google ads
This is a major factor in determining the cost of your advertising. Google ads work on a “pay per click” basis. That means that whenever someone types one of your key words into a Google search, your ad appears on the right side of the screen. However, Google only charges you if someone clicks on your ad and goes to your website.
Generally, the higher up the list of Google ads you are, the higher the click through rate. However, positions 3-5 generally have the highest rate of conversion to sales, so this is a good area to aim for.
The position of your ad relative to other ads depends on 2 things:
1. The amount you pay per click. In general, the more you pay, the higher your ad will appear.
2. The click-through rate of your ad. If you write an ad that has a high click through rate (because you’ve written a good headline and good sales copy on the following 2 lines), then Google will reward you by putting your ads higher on the list.
However, if there are lots of ads (more than 20) you will struggle to get your ad in the top 10 for a reasonable price, at least initially until you build enough volume. Since most people only look at the first page of a Google search, your ad will rarely be seen.
Here’s how to find out how many competing ads you have on Google:
Go to: www.google.com
…search engine and do a search on one of your key words. Count the number of ads (“sponsored links” Google calls them) you see on the first page. Make sure you count the ones in blue on the top left of the screen, as these are also paid ads. These days you can have up to 11 or 12 on the first page.
Enter diets that work
Once you are on page one of the Google search, you want to see how many Adwords ads there are. (the sponsored links at the top or side). You are looking at the Adwords because you will need to pay for 3 days to do viability testing with a survey site.
You don’t want a niche that has tons of sponsored links/ads on the side, otherwise you end up paying too much per click to get on in the top three to see your survey results.
You can see that this topic has lots of Adwords competition.
However, at least at the time of this, diets for pregnancy
If you want, you can also click on the words “more sponsored links” if it appears at the bottom of the list of ads on the right side of the screen, and count the number of ads that come up. Note though that some ads show more than once, so be careful not to count them twice.
Important tip:
If a topic has more than 20 other Google ads, I would be very wary about continuing with it. However there are exceptions. If you have a really good niche within a niche, and you can convey this in a 3 line ad, then you should be able to get very targeted traffic to your site. Targetted traffic means that more people who go to your site buy your product. You have fewer “tyre-kickers”. If you can do this, then you can afford to pay more per click. However this is quite an advanced strategy – I wouldn’t be trying it as a first one!
Criterion # 5 – Number of other sites that deal with this topic
You will quickly get used to recognizing a good sales letter:
It is one with a grabbing headline.
It will be structured as a long one-page site.
It will have very few graphics so it is quick to load up.
It will have a number of inducements to buy, such as bonuses, offers, guarantees, and testimonials.
You need to look at every site on the first page of a Google search on your top 3 key words for your chosen niche, and see if there is another good sales letter. Look at both the free side and the Google ads. If there is another good sales letter, think carefully about whether you can compete. Is your product going to be significantly different? If not, can you change it enough to make it different?
Last, take a look at the top 6 sites – You don’t want a topic where someone is already using a good sales letter, landing page, opt-in and/or selling an e-book. If they are, this means there is too much competition for you to break into, and somebody already knows the formula and are working it.
So for this topic – it has too much competition ad wise. Pick again, or keep niching it down.
Important tip:
I would not go ahead with a niche where there is already someone selling an ebook from a good sales letter, and where I am unable to differentiate sufficiently.
If the search number is good, and there is a chance you can penetrate page one with a Google Adwords campaign, check how many websites there are on the topic (you want this to be in the millions) – in this case it is 47,700,000 so it is good to go.
You repeat this until the formula matches all elements, size, lots of sites, no sales letter type of sites already in it, not much competition from a Google Adwords perspective .
The key is to start with 20 ideas, filter it down to 5 possibilities, and then select the one from that, given all relative equality with what the search revealed, the one that you like the best.
This can be time consuming, but remember, you are taking the time to pick a winner that could carry you through the next year or more. This is a very important step that many people skip, so take your time, and pick wisely – this step alone will be the difference in whether you even have a chance of succeeding or not!
Criterion # 6 – Amount of free information available on the topic
This is one of the biggest traps if you are selecting your first niche. You can come up with what looks like a great niche. It meets the first five criteria really well. So you put together the sales letter and the ebook, and nothing happens! The reason is often that there is lots of free information already there, so people are not willing to pay for information on the topic.
A good example of this is recipe sites. They generally fit all the criteria, but the books don’t sell. I remember Matt Gill (the guru who taught us the survey site process) telling us how he put up a book of pizza recipes which he couldn’t make profitable. That’s because there are plenty of free pizza recipes already there, often from well known chefs.
To find out how much free information is there, again look at every site on the first page of a Google search on your top 3 key words for your chosen niche. This time, see how much free information is there that is the same as the information you will be providing.
If there is lots of free stuff, can you differentiate yourself? For example, there is lots of medical information about skin cancer. But it’s all written in technical / medical jargon, and there is absolutely nothing about the emotional reaction to being diagnosed with skin cancer, only the physical stuff. There are also very few “survivor stories”. And almost nothing on alternative treatments. We used all this to differentiate our book on melanoma skin cancer.
Compare this to breast cancer, where there are plenty of well-written survivor stories, and lots of plain-English explanations of the disease and the consequences and the treatments. I looked at putting together an ebook on breast cancer, and even though the volume is much larger, I decided against it, because there is too much free stuff out there already.
Important tip:
Don’t get emotionally attached to an idea. If the numbers don’t stack up, just say “NEXT” or you’ll end up wasting too much money on advertising, copywriting, and website building for topics that you’re sure will work, despite the numbers not being there.
