Entries from June 2008 ↓

Do you use pay-per-click? Are you into search engine optimization? Either of these marketing disciplines hinge on proper keyword selection. You want to be in front of your customer when they’re in a buying mood, not a browsing mood, right?

I’ve always found that keyword research is one of the hardest things to when creating an ad campaign. How do you find out which keywords make money, and which ones burn money? Anyone can add all the suggestions from a keyword tool into their campaign - but I guarantee they will lose money unless they take that a step further. So how do we find profitable keywords? Here are three steps to help this process.

Step 1

The first thing to do is have a little brainstorm session. For whatever product you’re promoting, try to get inside your customer’s minds:

• What is causing them to be looking for your product?
• What pain (problem) are they feeling or dealing with?
• What questions do they have?
• What solution are they trying to find?

Once you’ve answered these things jot down the different phrases you think they would use to find you.

Step 2

The second step is to use a keyword tool such as the free keyword suggestion tool at wordtracker.com. See if the terms you thought of are showing up on their lists, and find out how many searches are done daily for each keyword. The higher the better, obviously, though the highest keywords might not be the most profitable.

Step 3

Up until now, the information here is probably old hat for most of you. Here’s the golden third step. Head over to MSN’s AdLabs Online Commericial Intention Detector. Click on query, and punch in one of the keywords you think has potential. The web form will then spew out a number between zero and one. Here’s the readout for “affiliate marketing”

Result: NonCommercial (Query)

Probability for Commercial Query:

0.33748

As you can see, MSN thinks this phrase is by and large, non-commercial in intent. Having less than a 0.50 indicates non-commercial; anything over .5 (50%) is commercial in intent. The stronger or higher the co-efficient, the more profitable this keyword is likely to be!

Go to the tool, and compare the output for “personal loan” and “personal loans” - you’d perhaps be surprised to see that the singular is scored at 0.67969, while the plural is scored at 0.89554. So although both look to be quite profitable, “personal loans” is the keyword with the highest commercial intent, of those two.

So now you run your list of keywords from steps one and two through this tool, to make sure that they are all above 50%. If you’ve got keywords that you think would be good, but they’re under 50%, ask yourself why, and see if there isn’t a small variation that can be made to boost the score. If you can improve on it, use the new keyword instead.

Now, I should clarify that although I’ve talked about this as being a way to find profitable keywords, I guess really it is just a method to find the keywords that people are using to buy stuff. This is great, if you are doing SEO. If however you are paying per click, profit takes on a new meaning, as you need to consider what your costs are for each keyword. Chances are strong that the highest rated keywords are also those with strong competition.

However, in all markets, the presence of sharks indicates there is prey in the waters; competition isn’t a bad thing, you just need to find a way to best them, and you’ll be laughing!

A few weeks ago I wrote a post on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (mturk.com) and some of the potential I saw in it to get stuff done on the cheap. Well, since that day I’ve been running multiple HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) on the Turk and I’ve been getting some great results.

If you’ve got a blog or any kind of website, chances are you’d like for people to be looking at it, right? Well, one great way to do that currently is to promote it on social media websites like Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Facebook; the list is seemingly endless. You could spend entire days creating accounts at each of these sites, write a small review of your site and post the link, and in the end you would probably see a small gain in traffic. However, what if you could accomplish all that for 50 cents? Without spending any time on it yourself? Would you do it? I sure would. In fact, I did.

As I’ve previously mentioned, I’m currently in the process of launching a new webstore selling digital picture frames and as such I’ve been trying my best to find ways to promote it. So I created a HIT on Amazon’s web services (Mechanical Turk) asking people to bookmark my site on their favorite social network. My HIT looked something like the following:

Bookmark the URL http://www.digitalframeguy.com

Using one of the following sites:
http://del.icio.us/
http://www.stumbleupon.com/
http://www.propeller.com/
http://spurl.net/
http://diigo.com/
http://myjeeves.ask.com/
http://www.connectedy.com/index.php
http://www.myvmarks.com/
http://www.bookmarktracker.com/bt/home
http://www.oyax.com/
http://www.jumptags.com/
http://www.mylinkvault.com/
http://buddymarks.com/
http://linkagogo.com/
http://bibsonomy.org/
http://backflip.com/
http://www.mister-wong.com/
http://blinklist.com/
http://furl.net/

Include in the title or description one of the following terms:
digital picture frame(s)
digital photo frame(s)
digital frame(s)
wireless photo frame(s)

You may use either the singular or plural version of the keyword.
Please provide the URL of the bookmark in comments to receive payment for the HIT.
You can complete this HIT up to 5 times if you use a different bookmarking site each time.

So you can see I tried to make things as easy as possible for the turker to complete. Most of these people already have accounts at one or another of the social networks, so all they have to do is login and link to you. I offered 10 cents for these, only because I wanted a bunch in a hurry. 10 cents is actually a decent price for a HIT such as this. For another site, where I was more patient, I only offered 1 cent per bookmark, and I still got good results, though slower. As such, it is important to decide on your budget. It is worth taking the time to figure out if you only want to spend 25 cents promoting your site, or if you can actually afford a full $2.00. The choice is yours.

So I’ve basically given you a blueprint here for one way to get as many hiqh quality backlinks to your site as you want from the social media sites. If you want, you can specify only Digg links, or whatever you value. The great thing about this is the search engines love social media right now, most of the sites have high PR, and you get a link to your site that typically includes the keyword phrase of your choice. All for a few cents.

What’s not to love about that?

EDIT: I just got some article HITs back from Mechanical Turk and two of them were so good that I wanted to award a bonus to the authors. FYI - here’s how to do it. In the Manage HIT interface, where you see their unique ID number, beside the HIT results, click on that number (it is a hyperlink) and a pop down menu will appear. You can then award a bonus of any amount you wish through that link. I just felt bad paying 50 cents for these two great articles, so I doubled it for them.

I know, I’m a big spender. =)

A few weeks ago I wrote a post on using Google’s Website Optimizer (found inside your Adwords account). At that time I mentioned I was running a split test on a couple different background colors for a landing page I wanted to test. After only a day or two I was getting some pretty interesting results:

“As a side note, I’m currently split testing a different version of the page which at least in preliminary results, the splits are outperforming the original by 26% and 55%. The implications of a successful outcome from a split test can really make a big difference on the bottom line!”

I wanted to follow up on this to see if we can learn anything from this exercise. The first few days seemed spectacular; I thought for sure I had stumbled upon the ultimate background color. Then as more results steadily streamed in, things gradually started to equalize. In fact, the two tested colors suddenly reversed their leads! Anyways, I continued to run the test, from May 7th to June 16th. You can see the results here.

I should mention that the Original in this instance was color code #333366. Google doesn’t give you an option to edit that title. So you can see that color #0099CC came out on top, which is strange, because to my eye it seems the ugliest of the three. However, I guess that is neither here nor there. FYI, the original is kind of a dark navy blue, combo 1 is a light sky blue, and combo 2 is a light gray.

I don’t know if you can draw anything too substantial from these results, because I am sure different background colors work better with different page content as well. However, on the page that I’m using, apparently combination 1 turned out better. It is important to note that Google still didn’t come up with a conclusive answer, only that there was an observed improvement over the original of 5.86%, and that there was a margin of error of plus or minus 2%. Having run this for five weeks now, the numbers have not really been changing a whole lot, so I’ve decided this is as far as it goes. If I wanted to confirm these numbers I might try re-testing with only the original and one alternative.

You can see that there were a total of 2443 conversions during this period (I only used traffic from Yahoo PPC for this test). That gives me an overall conversion rate of about 50.3% - from there I still need to get them to apply for the offer after clicking through.

You can get some insight into how this tool works by looking at the conversions/visitors column. I think that the way they’ve built this, Google takes the assumed favorite combination and tests the heck out of it, while giving an equal share to the original. You can see that combination 2 got less visitors than the first two, but that the first two got exactly the same number of visitors. I think this is Google’s way of testing a hypothesis. First give everything equal traffic, then as soon as things start to gel a bit, pick the original and the favorite and push them farther.

Anyways, for the time being, I’m happy having found something that offers me a 5.86% improvement over what I had, for no cost. As I laid out in the previous post, anything I can do to increase this conversion ratio will net me more profit at the end of the day. I’ve already spent the money to get the visitors to come; from here on the more that click through the better.

For example, if I spend $100 on PPC to get 100 visitors, and previously got 49 to go through to my offer, and if I know that each time someone views my offer it is worth about $3.00 to me, then before I was netting ($100 - (49 x $3.00)) = $47 profit.

Now, with the new numbers, it would work out to ($100 - (52 x $3.00)) = $56 profit. That’s a $9 improvement, per day. That’s nearly $300 a month. Not bad. Of course, assuming I was actually paying a buck a click, and actually getting $3 per viewed offer - these are just made up numbers for the sake of illustration. However, it is close to reality, and the principle still stands.

I don’t recommend you all go out converting your landing page backgrounds to 0099CC because of this - but I do recommend you think of something that might improve your offer and test the heck out of it!

Lately I’ve seen a couple different product launches, all geared towards taking advantage of eBay. It’s like a whole bunch of people suddenly found a jar of eBay pixie dust and started throwing it around the marketplace. The two I’ve come across are the Four Tier Annihilation method and the eBay Code. Four Tier is your standard $77 ebook with a video upsell. The eBay Code is more like $1497, not sure if there’s an upsell (I didn’t get this one, my pockets aren’t that deep!).

So anyways, being the eternal sucker that I am for a good sales letter, I picked up a copy of Four Tier Annihilation, and read through most of it today. Here’s the basic plot. Guy is broke, living in a friend’s basement, etc. Buys every internet marketing product out there and fails miserably until he stumbles upon eBay by accident one day. One thing leads to another until now he makes tens of thousands per month, and has trained many others to do the same, not to mention you! Strange how many of these stories all sound so familiar… yet I digress.

So cut to the chase, right? Ok, so he advocates a few different ways of selling on eBay. The first that is dealt with is dropshipping. Probably most people have heard about that. Dropshipping is this sweet setup (which I’m trying to get going with my digital frame store) whereby you secure a supplier to ship small quantities of product on demand, directly to your customer. So you make the sale, then the dropshipper fills the order. You never carry inventory. It really is a terrific setup, allowing the seller to automate his business as much as possible. Anyways, probably the best part of the dropshipping segment is where he talks about how he goes about doing his research into which eBay niches to enter. Using the advanced search feature in eBay you can checkout all the closed sales in each category. Find an item that looks decent, and has closed for a good price consistently, then lookup the seller in a tool such as Goofbay. From here you can see how much they’re selling, and judge whether there is profit potential in the niche. Quite fun to find sellers that are doing $10,000 a month in eBay sales. Then he goes into finding suppliers who will dropship for you. This is the part that I’ve personally had the least success with so far. Mind you, at the time the product I was looking for was a bit harder to find. I’m quite interested in taking another stab at it with a more common product.

So moving on from dropshipping to info products. You’ve probably seen the $1 ebook craze on eBay. Well apparently that is going to be changing, as eBay has brought in new terms and conditions disallowing download-able products. Of course this means you just have to outsource CD creation to a company like Kunaki.com and charge more for your product. Still, it will keep a lot of people out. So he talks about how to get ebooks you can legitimately sell as your own, without spending a whole lot, and how to find the good niches. There’s a lot of good information there.

One little nugget mentioned is worth gold, in my opinion. He talked about how after successfully selling a bunch of cellphones like crazy on eBay he created a short ebook on how to sell phones like crazy on eBay, including the contact info of some of his suppliers (note: withhold your best supplier for yourself!). Then he would advertise this ebook right beside his cellphone listings, and sell it for $47 or so. Basically, look at me - I’ve got a successful cellphone store on eBay, and I’ll tell you exactly how to do it to! Cool concept. Of course, only 3% of people who buy info products actually act on the information that they contain (according to him - not sure where the stat comes from or the validity of it). So because only 3% will act on it, you’re not even really exposing yourself to much increased competition, plus you’re already established in the marketplace. Sounds like he ended up making more cash off the ebook sales than off the cellphones!

He goes on to talk about flipping websites on eBay, outsourcing the creation of simple turn-key web businesses, etc. Basically there is lots of good content in ebook. I’m not really concerned about giving away all the Four Tier Annihilation secrets in this short post, as the ebook is 175 pages or so. Nothing terribly mind-breaking in there, but definitely more than enough information to make a healthy living on.

If you’re one of the 3%.

I’ve been waiting a while for the iPhone to officially be available in Canada. Ever since I got myself an Airport Express and realized there was a strong possibility of being able to control my home stereo (room by room) through an iPhone I thought it would be uber-cool to get one. Plus I really like the iTouch, so it would make a sweet mp3 player. I’m sure nobody needs selling on these points.

Anyways, today the Steve announced that on July 11th, 2008, Canada will be getting the new iPhone 2.0, which runs on the fast 3G network. Apparently the original iPhones are going up for sale all over on Craigslist, so now might be the time to act if you’re not too picky about the 3G compatibility.

Speaking of 3G, apparently it will double browsing speed, nearly rivaling wi-fi. I think the data plan is going to be the kicker though.

Other improvements: longer battery life, assisted-gps functionality, slimmer case, big price but (8GB for $199 USD), better support for third party apps.

Do any of you have an iPhone, and are you looking forward to the new one? Is it reason enough to upgrade?

Well this blog was initially intended to focus on internet marketing strategies, and it will continue to do so. However, I’m currently in the middle of launching DigitalFrameGuy.com and as such I find my work life turning to the fascinating subject of SEO. Therefore, you’ll likely see a lot more SEO related posts here in the next little while.

So, since we’re talking about SEO, I wanted to let you know about another magnificient little tool I just discovered. My intention isn’t really to flog every product I can find on this blog, but I do want to make mention of tools that I’ve legitimately found useful so others can benefit. I’ve been getting SEO related sales calls quite a bit lately, and mostly they cost a pretty penny. So I opted to do my own SEO. However, I wanted something to help me with the often odious task of link building and search engine submissions.

Anyways, I came across iBusinessPromoter today, which is a cool bit of software that helps you with the complete SEO process, from ground zero all the way through keyword selection, site optimization, search engine submission, link management, and finally a top 10 ranking on the search engine of your choice - guaranteed. Yes, that’s right. Their guarantee is that if you follow their recommendations for your site, and can’t get a top 10 ranking on Google within one year they’ll give you your money back. That’s a pretty good offer where I come from.

So anyways, I downloaded the free version of the software to check it out. I also discovered that companies like eBay, Lexmark, Canon, etc etc have used this product, which gave it a fair bit of credibility off the bat. So after installation, I setup a few of the options and then ran an optimization test on my site. I was expecting something like what I’d seen from other tools online; however this thing took a good 5 minutes crawling all over the internet, finally spitting out a 40 or so page report for my perusal. It also told me that my site ranked at 87%, and then proceeded to tell me why.

The premise here is that if you want to get into the top 10 for say, “internet marketing tips,” then the software will look at the top 10 listings for that keyword on Google. It will analyze each of the 10 pages for something like 130 different factors, then compare your own site to those 10. The idea is that comparing these 10 sites will give you a range of what Google is looking for to get a high ranking, for each parameter. The report then goes into great detail telling you how you match up to the top 10, where you fall short, where you’re too far over the top (ie my keyword density was too high for some variables), and basically where you need to be.

My next step, after making a couple more tweaks on the optimization front, is to do a wholesale site submission to a bunch of search engines and directories. IBP has about 130 search engines that it can submit to automatically, plus a few hundred more that it gives you an assisted submission. In other words, it will fill out pretty much all the fields, then you get to do the CAPTCHA and hit submit. So its like manual submissions on hyperdrive, times 3. IBP apparently has all the updated specs on all the search engines - I checked ou their update log and there have been regular updates every week for a long time.

After the site submissions comes the link building and management. IBP will identify similar sites to mine, based on the keywords provideded and rankings, and work to help me get inbound links coming from those sites. It helps with both reciprocal links as well as one-way links. You can email webmasters from a standard form inside the software, which is cool. Plus you can now see all your inbound links from one tool, with stats on each one. Talk about link management. Prior to this, my link management involved managing the fact that I needed more links, and walking around in the dark trying to get some. This brings it to a whole new level.

Another thing you can do from inside the software is all kinds of keyword research and manipulation. You can generate keyword lists, then modify them for use in PPC as well as on your site. Take the list over to the search engine ranking tool within the program and run it through to get every keyword’s ranking stats: searches, number of results in Google, KEI, and the top link in Google for that word, along with the PR of that link. It’s pretty cool.

I don’t even know what else this software does, but all I can tell you is that as of right now, it looks like it’s going to be my ticket to SEO happiness. I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, feel free to checkout the free version of the iBusinessPromoter software.

If you’ve been following this blog for a little while, you’ll know that early on I decided to do a monthly post on my blog’s traffic. Seeing as this started and continues to be something of an experiment in SEO/free traffic, I figure my progress or lack of it can provide some helpful insight, taken in context with the traffic tactics I’m posting about. (See April stats here)

So here’s May:

Popularity Indicators
Alexa: 1,291,056 (up from 3,559,160)
Google PR: unranked (I heard somewhere PR gets updated quarterly????)
Technorati Authority: 6
RSS Subscribers: 8 (up from 0)

The Golden Rule
April 2008 Absolute Unique Visitors: 353 (last month I had 297)

Inbound Links
Unfortunately the tool I originally started using at SEOChat now produces meaningless results, so I’ve kind of lost my baseline for inbound links. By some measures I have somewhere around 250 inbound, as best as I can gather. If anyone has a really great inbound links tool I’d love for you to speak up!

Conclusions
My Alexa rank continues to improve, which is nice to watch. I suppose that is good for something. It is important to note that last month, nearly half the traffic I got was from one or two large spikes, while this month, traffic has been a lot more constant, indicating a gradual increase in the base level of the traffic (largest day was only 38 visitors). I’ve been doing my best to optimize every single post for search (I use All-in-One SEO Pack), and it is gratifying to see traffic continue to come in on old posts directly from the search engines.

As an interesting aside, as of today, I’ve now had 900 visitors to my site (yes, exactly as per Google Analytics) from a total of 54 countries.

I was talking to a friend of mine today about his computer. A few weeks ago, he mentioned to me that his computer was really slow. I recommded he un-install Norton, because it takes up lots of resources, and go with a free antivirus that I was using (AVG). Anyways, today he told me he had done that, and we got to talking about Norton. He assumed that it was one of the best, but I was quick to point out that when I had looked into it by reading reviews and stuff online, Norton rarely even hit the top 5. And yet he, along with millions of others, happily thinks Norton is one of the best out there!

Why do I say this? On a blog that is supposedly focused on marketing? Well, because although I previously knew this truth on an intellectual level, today it just sunk a little deeper:

“He who markets best is best”

Read it a couple times and let it sink in. Marketing and sales is often all about perceptions. He who markets best, builds the best impression in the minds of his customers. Who decides who buys a particular product? That’s right, the customer does. We can’t force their hand. Therefore, regardless of any empirical product testing, if you have captured first place in the consumer’s minds, you’ve won. Forget the product reviews and everything else, that is all secondary. If the customer believes you’re the best, just don’t give them a reason to think otherwise. Give them a half-decent product and they’ll love you for it. Look at Microsoft. Although it is starting to change, millions of people believe that they are still the best out there (for their application) and continue to buy Windows every time. As long as Microsoft keeps producing a half-reasonable product, that trend will continue, because they have the minds of the masses. (Side note: In my opinion, Vista is now lowering the bar a little bit too far… see previous post).

Anyways, this little epidsode had a fair bit of meaning for me because I’m currently working on developing an info-product in a niche where there is lots of competition (for sale, and for free!!). One of the products is currently selling like hotcakes, and has been for several years (still has a ClickBank gravity of 70 (down from several hundred in the heyday). I bought this product to check it out, and in my frank opinion, it really sucks at what it is trying to accomplish. Do you think the creator cares? He’s making a killing, and it’s all because he has the best sales letter out there (I’ve checked over 15 competitors).

Anyways, it was encouraging to remember that as an internet marketer, even if I don’t end up with the best product out there I can still have a good measure of success, because at the end of the day, it’s all about marketing.