Entries Tagged 'Marketing Ideas' ↓

Have you ever dressed your website up as a giant carrot? Probably not. If you have, please let me know ASAP because I’d love to hear that story!

Occasionally you hear about unique marketing methods that work really well. Someone comes up with a brilliant idea, and implements it. Often these ideas are quite cheap, but just require you to be unusual, which a lot of people aren’t comfortable with.

A good example is a story I recently read where a guy dressed up as a giant carrot, and started going to events around Saint Paul, Minnesota. His business, the Crazy Carrot Juice Bar, got a huge amount of free advertising in the newspapers, radio and even on TV. He quickly grew the company to 5 stores with 65 employees, and then sold it to Jamba Juice, presumably making a bucketful in the process.

Here’s the best part: the suit cost him $73 to make.

Examples of this kind of marketing are all over the place - the question is, how can you, in your business, make an impact? Chances are there is a way you haven’t thought of to really get your business the public attention it needs to become profitable. As affiliate marketers, we’re typically confined to the internet (not always though - that’s a different topic), but how can we use these concepts to promote our products? Viral videos can make a big splash, and blog contest giveaways can be huge as well. There are lots of ideas out there - which one will you use?

To succeed in business on the internet, you need to pick a niche and specialize. There simply isn’t a lot of room for more eBays and Amazons out there. There will always be a few of these uber-players in the game; ingowever the vast majority of successful businesses on the internet are specializing in a niche.

I’m going to assume that I don’t need to convince you of the merits of choosing a niche; it is one of the most talked about things in internet marketing. Instead, I wanted to focus on some concrete ways that you can go about identifying a market niche that is going to work for you. This process is well suited to those who are looking to develop a product of their own, though it will work equally well if you’re planning on building a site promoting affiliate products.

Researching a Market Niche

1. Brainstorm. Take a piece of paper and start writing any market idea that comes to mind. The conventional brainstorming wisdom applies - don’t discard any idea - just write it down! Even if you don’t think it is any good, write it down!

Think of your own hobbies or those of your friends. Think of a common problem in people’s lives - is there information out there, or a product, that can solve it? If you absolutely can’t think of anything, go to the public library or a good sized bookstore and have a look at their magazine section. Magazines represent topics people are interested in; topics that people are willing to pay money for more information on. Once you’ve got 25-30 topic ideas on paper you can move on to the next step.

2. Research Keywords. You don’t have to come up with an exhaustive and comprehensive list at this point of every keyword you’ll ever use in the niche. Rather, use this step to get a feel for the highest traffic keywords in your niche. Try to pick around 5. Go to SEOBook.com and use their free keyword tool. Type in what you think is the main keyword for the niche, and see what you can find out. There are likely other common variations or sub-niches you haven’t thought about.

3. Assess the Niche Potential. Ultimately, you want to be able to deeply penetrate your chosen niche. Go through your list and consider whether each niche has the potential for additional products. Would it be possible to create a home study course around it? A membership site? Something you could upsell your customers on after the initial product? How about a monthly newsletter? Is there sufficient depth that people are likely to pay for additional products? Is there a good selection of affiliate products available for that niche? Checkout the usual culprits for this: Clickbank, PayDotCom, CJ, LinkShare, etc. You might need to search around in your niche market to find some good products, then google those products + “affiliate” to see if there are affiliate programs available.

4. Understand the Niche. Now that you’ve hopefully narrowed down your list somewhat, take it to the library and see what kinds of magazines and books exist on your subject. What topics are they writing about? Are there sub-topics that have product potential? Keep your eyes open for complementary niches as well. Once you’ve developed a list of customers, people who have purchased your main product, you’ll want to be able to continue to use that list to sell your customers other related products in the future.

Another idea is to go to Amazon.com and type in your top 5 niche keywords from step 2. See what products come up. Amazon can show you a ton of useful information about your target niche. You can see what people thought of competing products (ie what they liked and disliked), as well as additional products that they purchased. Try to get a feel for the price points as well.

5. Check for a Community of Interest. Go to Google and type in your niche keywords and the word “forum” and see what comes up. Click on a bunch of the results. Are people talking about your niche market, or is it dead? If forums exist on the topic, check them out and see how many active users there are on the relevant threads. Try to get a feel for the topics they are discussing, and the level of participation. Take note of the best forums, as you’ll want to come back to these later on to participate and promote your own product.

Another idea is to go to blogsearch.google.com and search for your niche in there. See if blogs come up on the topic, if so, check them out for content and try to get a feel for their traffic volumes. Are people actively commenting on the posts? Identify the best forums and blogs, as you’ll want to come back to these later to participate and promote your own product. You can also look for article directories.

6. Check out the Competition. Run searches on the main keywords for your niche and see what paid ads come up on Google and Yahoo. What products are being promoted? What are they doing well that you can emulate, and what are they doing poorly that you can do better? Checkout the organic listings as well. Read their squeeze pages and sales letters. Do they have newsletters available? Sign up for them; see what they’re talking about. Keep your eyes open for products you could partner with in the future.

7. Don’t Slack Off! This might seem like a lot of work, and it is. Choosing a niche market is possibly the hardest part of the whole process, and arguably the most important. Put your head down and slog through it. Once you’re established later on you’ll be happy you did.

I was over at AskHowie.com and found a clip where he was talking about finding the correct triggers for your product. He gave an example of selling a weight loss product for kids. What are the triggers that would prompt a concerned parent to search for such a product? It could have been a doctor’s visit, a comment from another parent, a comment from the kid themself, or any number of other things.

By understanding the different events that would trigger a motivated buyer to start searching for your product, you can market to them much better. A “triggered” searcher is one who emotionally is ready to buy, right now. All you need to do is get your product in front of them and clinch the deal with some compelling copy that plays on that trigger.

Take the weight loss example again; if you identified a common trigger being a doctor’s visit, and you created an ad that was titled or included “Fed Up With Doctor’s Visits?” or something of the like; your searcher is more likely to identify with that ad because of their recent experience. Immediately they feel a connection with your ad because you’ve identified with their experience. They get the impression you understand what they’re going through.

Taking this beyond the ad, if you can exploit these triggers in the sales letter itself you can take this to a much higher level. Suppose a concerned parent got to your site by searching for “weight loss for kids,” and when they get there, they immediately see a leading statement related to doctor’s visits. Do you think they’re more likely to at least read the whole sales letter?

If you can get inside your target market’s minds, you will have a far higher success rate than simply taking the “if we market it they will come” approach.

PS: today I randomly discovered that 138 people per day search for the keyword phrase “excuses for being absent from work” and there are no Adwords campaigns running! I wonder if there’s potential here for a work from home product… then again perhaps its a bomb? Let me know if you try it out…

Do headlines like these grab your attention? I have to admit, I am a bit of a sucker for these things, and to a degree I think that is human nature. Yet over time, you start to get desensitized to the endless “The Widget To End ALL Widgets” type of claims.

I realize that an effective sales letter is absolutely crucial to the success of a product; however at what point do ethics come into play? Personally, I am trying to learn how to write a better (well, better is irrelevant because I haven’t written one of my own yet) sales letter, in fact I’m attending a webinar this afternoon on the very topic.

You see topics discussed like “Writing Hypnotic Sales Letters.” Now, persuasive is one thing, but do you want people to buy against their will? Do you really want them to turn in their will at the door and mindlessly get your next product? Well, the pocketbook screams a unequivocal and resounding YES!

What if your product sucks. You know it and I know it, however we write a sales letter saying that this thing is going to be the silver bullet that takes away the client’s widget-related misery. Sure, it might get them to buy, and sure, they’ll probably be too lazy to return the thing when it doesn’t live up to their expectations, but they won’t likely buy another from you. Then again like good cattle, once they’re on your mailing list they just might. Is that the kind of business we want to be in?

I guess the place to start is with a great product; then you really can make some serious claims about it in good conscience. However, even for some of the truly impressive products that I’ve purchased, I’ve still been let down after the incredible hype of the sales letter.

Is it possible to “over-wow” your customer? I know that when I see a sales page now, credibility is one of the first things I look for. If I don’t see that in seconds, I’m out of there. Credibility though, is a funny thing. It’s like a gut instinct that I can’t peg down to any one or two items. I can’t say “If the headline is blue, I’m outta there” or “If they don’t have testimonials, I’m outta there” because credibility is more complicated than that.

I guess the whole point of this post is in regards to the ethics of sales letters. I do not seek to dispute what works and what doesn’t in terms of getting the sale. There’s time for that later and plenty of others have done that as well. However, if you can write a sales letter that will make you a cool million, guaranteed, at the expense of violating your morals (perhaps by making unsubstantiated claims about your product) then should you? I know many people do. It is the same argument that led to the creation of the nuclear bomb and pursuing human cloning. Just because you can, does it mean you have to?

I’m not going to answer this question because I can think of all kinds of “what if’s” that make it hard to just say yes or no in such a short space; however I’m interested in having the conversation.

What do you think?

I read this e-book recently called Project Quick Cash. The basic premise was why bother with all this “build your marketing empire” nonsense when you can reliably make a few hundred bucks from 10 minutes of work? Well, he’s got a decent point I guess; it is at least worth considering.

So one of the methods talked about is a way of capitalizing on a tool called Google Hot Trends. The purpose of this tool is to flag any terms that are skyrocketing above their average search volume. For instance, if national TV suddenly runs another expose on Britney Spears, even though her name is normally searched quite a lot on Google, the sudden increase in traffic due to greater interest at that moment causes Google to register a spike in traffic and call it a hot trend. This list contains the top 100 and is updated hourly.

So as marketers how can we capitalize on this laser targeted interest? Well in theory it should be easy: find a product that people consider relevant to the hot trend and put it in front of them! This can be accomplished in a couple of ways. The most obvious is to find an affiliate program selling exactly the thing people are searching for. For example, often times the hot trends include specific models of a product. I’ll open Hot Trends and see what is up right now to illustrate (click on the graphic to see it fullsize):

The above pic is a screen capture from today, and several items are immediately obvious as specific products. Checkout #19 and #27. These are two keyword versions of the same product, a Kodak v1003 digital camera. So now that you know there are lots of people looking for this particular item right now. The trick is, you’re not sure why people are looking for this item - perhaps it was just featured a “Worst 10 Products of All Time list!” Then again, more likely it was featured as a great product on some review program. If possible, it helps to figure out why it is hot before you promote it, but use your judgement.

So now you have a product idea; now you need to find a site selling it that has an affiliate program. Amazon and Ebay are two obvious choices, though there are many others. Try searching for your keyword and “affiliate program.” Another good idea is to search for exactly the terms shown, find the top site or two and see if they have an affiliate program. Sign up, and setup a Google Adwords campaign using the keywords provided by Google and turn it loose!

A word to the wise: pay as little as possible for your keywords! Using this strategy you WILL get hundreds of clicks in pretty short order; you need to make sure you aren’t paying through the nose for a lot of lookey-loo traffic.

My Experience

So I’ve tried this tactic myself a couple times so far, because the principle of it really clicked with me. It’s like selling umbrellas when it’s raining, and sun lotion when it’s hot, which just makes good business sense.

I noticed that a weight loss book was featured on Hot Trends one day, so I got an affiliate link setup through Amazon and setup a Google campaign. My results:

Clicks: 675             Cost: $80.29             CPC: $0.12
Total Amazon Sales: $351.56                Amazon Commission: $20.67
Net Profit/Loss: ($20.67-$80.29-) = -$59.62

On a different occasion I found a Panasonic digital camera trend, and again used Amazon:

Clicks: 196             Cost: $23.69             CPC: $0.12
Total Amazon Sales: $32.14                  Amazon Commission: $1.29
Net Profit/Loss: ($1.29-$23.69) = -$22.40

As you can see, I kind of missed the profit boat on these experiments, losing nearly $80 altogether.

“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes \
that can be made in a very narrow field.”
-Neils Bohr 

Experience rarely comes free: I’ll chalk this up as part of my tuition. Another quote:

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over
and expecting different results”
- Albert Einstein

Burning $80 just to pass time does no good unless you can learn something from the experience. Here are a few lessons I learned:

Lesson 1: Don’t Pay Whatever The Heck Google Wants You To Pay

Google is now infamous for the “Google Slap” part of which means they can just arbitrarily make your minimum bid whatever they want to. Some keywords are okay at 5 cents, and others Google mandates you need to spend 25 cents, or even several dollars. Presumably, this all relates to their epic quest for relevancy; however often it is hard in practice to see how. Anyways, on the weight loss experiment, I was a cocky little newbie and bid way higher than I should have. I actually accepted some of Google’s minimums (20-35 cents) because I wanted active keywords (the alternative is your keywords don’t run). This led to a much higher campaign cost than I should have had. One thing I noticed though: I had incredibly high click through rates (in excess of 20-30%) and as I checked back in every few hours, Google would let me slide my bids downwards a bit because they recognized the high relevancy. Over time I cut out the high-cost keywords, and my overall CPC came down a bit.

On the camera experiment, I didn’t cave to Google unless their minimum was only a few cents higher than I was willing to pay (I was aiming for 10 cents or less; they offered 12-15 cents for some keywords). However, I still ended up with a 12 cent CPC overall.

I suggest aiming for 5 cent keywords and little else, unless you know you have a real winner of a sales page/product combo.

Lesson 2: Amazon’s Commission Structure Sucks for PPC

When you are making in the 4% range, it is difficult to make pay per click work with Amazon. The interesting thing was that I only sold a half dozen weight loss books and all the rest of the revenue came from items like Brita water filters, camera tripods and DVDs. So I was able to take advantage of additional revenue, because my cookie was on record as the referral. This is a benefit of using Amazon versus a more targeted site; however I suspect a more targeted site would perform FAR better on the promoted item.

I suggest finding a more direct affiliate program where you’re actually able to make a good return on each sale.

Lesson 3: Pick a Good Sales / Landing Page

On the weight loss example, I was too eager to get going because the trend was volcanic hot and it was my first one, and I just KNEW there was money to be made ;). So I looked on Amazon, and they were sold out of the exact book that was listed, except for a couple of used copies, and they didn’t have a real good sales page for it. (Many products they have a good product page, but this one didn’t for some reason). So I linked to the page displaying the Amazon search results for that term. My book was top of the list, but there were a lot of other related items on there too. Mistake. I suspect this caused a number of dropped clicks right there, as people really wanted THAT product, and probably went back to Google to find it.

I suggest picking a good landing page that clearly displays exactly what people are searching for. Make it easy for them to buy! This is PPC 101.

Conclusion: Does it Work?

Although I haven’t made any money on this strategy so far, it makes so much logical sense that I find myself wanting to try it again. I think I’ve learned a few lessons, and I think with tweaking (and the right products) there is good money to be made. One serious advantage of this strategy is the sheer lack of time required to get setup. If you’re familiar with PPC, and have the necessary accounts setup already (Google and a relevant affiliate program) you can have one of these setup in less than 10 minutes.

Project Quick Cash has additional tips to making this strategy successful, but I don’t really have time to get into them here. There are also about five other low-cost strategies to turning a quick buck in the book; perhaps I will experiment with them as well and then share my results here later.

Starting out with affiliate marketing, the question is inevitably: “Where do I find products to market?”

Let me assure you - there is no shortage of them out there. However, you don’t want to spend your whole day signing up for new programs, you want to get down to business right? Likewise, every little mom and pop store out there doesn’t want to spend their days managing their affiliate programs, and would rather have someone else do it for them. Thus the rise of companies like CommissionJunction, ClickBank and many others. These companies act as hubs, linking vendors to affiliates who want to promote their products. They provide the interface and usually handle the transactions, payouts, all that fun stuff.

So which one is best for the aspiring marketer?

There’s actually no easy answer to that, as it totally depends on your style and what it is that you want to promote. I started out using CommissionJunction and ClickBank primarily, and to a large extent they are the ones I still use. However I just recently dicovered PayDotCom as well, and so far it looks pretty promising.

Here’s my take on the ones that I’ve used most extensively.

CommissionJunction (CJ.com)

Commission Junction is great because they host hundreds and hundreds of offers, and they’re constantly adding more. They have lots of training materials and in my opinion are one of the most established players in the game. They have a good link tracking system and it is easy to generate fairly detailed reports. CJ has many established businesses using them, as well as smaller players. For example, you can find offers on there from Dell, Ebay, WeightWatchers, and many other well known names. They also do direct deposit, which I like. Nothing like getting paid ASAP, rather than waiting for USPS! One downside though is that they only pay once a month. Starting out, you’ll need to wait until the end of next month before you’ll get paid for the sales you generated this month.

TIP: One trick I learned though is you can phone your credit card company and get them to change the end date of your credit cycle (for FREE) so that it aligns more closely with the CJ pay dates, so that by the time the advertising bill comes from Google or Yahoo or wherever you have been paid by CJ and you never have to use your own money out of pocket to cover the time lag.

ClickBank (ClickBank.com)

ClickBank has thousands of products available and has been around since the beginning of this game. They focus primarily on information products (such as ebooks), which are huge business on the internet. One big bonus about ClickBank is the they pay twice a month - so you’re able to get your money a lot sooner. They don’t do direct deposit though.

TIP: One thing that can save you a lot of money is to buy information products through ClickBank on your own user ID! As far as I am aware this is fully legal and you’re able to save up to 70% on many products! This can be great as ClickBank has a lot of great products related to internet marketing.

PayDotCom (PayDotCom.com)

PayDotCom is the latest site that I’ve come across, and it is rapidly gaining popularity, due to industry leading vendor terms. More and more vendors are choosing to list here instead of ClickBank. PayDotCom is tightly integrated with PayPal, so if you have a PayPal account you can receive your money in your account right away! I’m not aware of any other program that pays this fast! They don’t hold back money as ClickBank does (in case of refunds they hold a small percentage for months!) and they also have a lower refund rate.

TIP: When you sign up for PayDotCom, your account is free. However, after joining you’re presented an amazing offer where you can get up to $1000 in account credit! This offer is well worth it as they also throw in Mike Filsaime’s Butterfly Marketing course - which has been successfully used by thousands and thousands. PayDotCom splits their fee for each sale between the affiliate and vendor, so this credit goes towards those fees.

Well those are the three that I’m currently using, though to be fair I’ve also got accounts at LinkShare, CPA Empire, NCS Reporting and maybe one or two others that I can’t remember off the top of my head. There are more programs out there too.

One trick that I’ve learned is if I have a great idea for marketing campaign for a particular product (for instance if it suddenly gets on national TV and everyone is looking for it) I do a search on Google for “Product X affiliate” or “Product X affiliate program.” Nine times out of ten, if there is an affiliate program out there for that product, you will find it by this method. You can also look at the bottom of the site you’re interested in promoting, often there will be a link there called “Affiliates.” They will often direct you to register with CJ, or whichever site they’re associated with.

Until next time…

We all speak English and take it for granted that everyone who could possibly be interested in our ads does too. Let me tell you a little story. A couple months back, one of the affiliate programs I’m promoting decided they wanted to penetrate Canada more, so they implemented a bonus program if you could bring in a certain quantity. I had good stats with them, but only in the US. So I thought, what can I do to really penetrate the homeland? I tried city based campaigns in Google with dismal results. Then I thought, hey - a big chunk of the country actually speaks French! So with that I took a few minutes and converted two of my well performing ads into French with one of the many free translation sites on the net. I knew the result wasn’t quite right, but it was close, so I got someone I knew who speaks French to proof it for me, and a tweak or two later the ads were live. Oh, I also translated the keywords to French.

Anyways, what do you know, but that French campaign has done remarkably well! (Yes, it is wise to setup tracking on every campaign you run so you can tell if it stands or falls on its own merit and doesn’t get absorbed into everything else. More on this later perhaps.) I even got a bonus from the affiliate program for breaking some quantity thresholds!

So just a thought, if you are able to find an affiliate program that is doing well for you, expand it to every area you can think of. First go to the other search engines, then to other regions of the world if the shoe fits, then you can even experiment with some non-English ads. Make sure the program offers a landing page in your language of choice though!