Google has lots of excellent tools to help you research your niche - including Google Trends,  Google Reader - and now Google Blog Search.

And they’ve just added RSS and Atom feeds to the Blog Search, to make it evn easier for you to get fresh information from your Target Market.

Simply click on the links under “Subscribe” in the left-hand column of the Blog Search front page to subscribe to any topic or story in any feed reader, like Google Reader. Google also offer an iGoogle gadget that lets you embed the Blog Search front page right inside of your iGoogle page or any other page where iGoogle gadgets are accepted. You can browse topics and drill into stories from within the widget, and you can customize the gadget to choose which topics you want to follow.

And Google have added two new features to the Blog Search homepage to better help you discover what people are talking about right now on the web: Hot Queries and Latest Posts.

Hot Queries lists searches currently popular in Blog Search — it’s an easy way to quickly dive into the trending points of conversation on the web.

Latest Posts, on the other hand, shows new posts from popular blogs. While Hot Queries highlights what people are looking for, Latest Posts lets you find out about stories even before people start searching for them.

There’s a lot of great, fresh content being published in blogs every day.

So use these tools to help you research your markets and plumb new depths of your inch-wide, mile-deep niche!

Happy researching!
John

Google added a new set of tools on it’s search pages last month that will help you find new untapped niches!

So go and check out the enhanced Search Options capabilities – including the ‘Wonder Wheel’!

First, go to Google and do a search – say for “lose weight”. On the results page, look just below the Google logo (in the light blue bar below the line), and click on ‘Show Options’.

Down the left side, you’ll see a menu of options. Click on ‘Wonder Wheel’ and you get a map of your search term and related search terms – the spokes.

Click on any of the spokes and you begin to dig into sub-niches – just keep repeating to find sub-sub-niches.

You can also get a list of similar results (spokes of the wheel) by clicking on the ‘Related Searches’ link in the menu on the left side.

At each step, check the number of results for the search (in the upper right hand corner) until you get to a ‘manageable niche’ (say <200k websites) where you’ll be able to compete effectively for the keyword… You can also use the phrase-match option by putting your search term in “inverted commas”.

And don’t forget to check the organic and paid search results being displayed on the right side of the page (your competitors).

Also, click on ‘Review Sites’ and ‘Forums’ to check out the opposition or find topics or material for your own pages!

Pretty useful and quick way of checking out niches – huh?

Oh, and the spokes of the Wonder Wheel should give you ideas for associated products and further pages for your website…

And don’t forget to check out the other Search Options – you can filter by time period and the Timeline gives a useful indication of interest in a topic (and is a bit faster to use than Google Trends for a ‘quick-and-dirty’ appraisal).

When you use the Search Options in conjunction with Google’s Keyword Tool (just type the niche term into the tool to check the number of searches for that and related terms) and Google Trends tool, you’ve got some of the fastest and most powerful free research tools available to internet marketers!

Click on the screen below to see Google’s summary of Search Options and the Wonder Wheel!

Happy niche-spotting!

What a reminder that the Internet world is constantly changing!

Google announced it’s new on-line communication and collaboration platform – Google Wave – on the same day as Microsoft unveiled it’s new search engine ‘Bing’ (it’s replacement for ‘Live Search’).

And just preceding this was Wolfram Alpha, the new search engine that’s reputed to actually answer your queries with useful results!

While many see Bing as being an attempt by Microsoft to catch up with Google and Yahoo, and they’ll be spending a reputed $100M on advertising in the coming year, it is unlikely to do more than dent Google’s lead.

Microsoft Search continues to struggle to gain market share from Google, who last month secured 64.2 per cent of all search queries in the US, compared to Live Search’s paltry 8.2 per cent.

And Google continues to enhance it’s own search engine with capabilities that include the ‘Wonder Wheel’! It’s a great tool to help you with your niche research – see my blog post Find Untapped Niches With Google’s New “Wonder Wheel”!

As well as looking rather like Google Search, some of the results options in Bing are similar to Googles’ new Search Options - although in Microsoft’s overview of Bing, they say that it’s supposed to provide much more fulfilling search responses.

But what does this all mean for you?

Well, in addition to using these new tools to help you find new niches, pull in more prospects and communicate better with your customers, just stop a moment and imagine how on-line search, interaction and meetings are likely to evolve – and the host of extensions and applications that will be available very shortly – with these enhancements and platforms!

I’ll be posting further articles on these developments, and how you can use each to enhance your own marketing, on the Internet-Tycoons Blog and Forum.

Spin the Wheel, cry ‘Bing’ and join the Wave!

Niche research can be challenging - but there’s a simple way to get ideas, whether it’s for an affiliate product or for your own information product.

One of the best ways to find a hot selling product is to look for a problem that lots of people are facing, and then offer them a solution.

But where do you find people talking about their problems? Well, wherever people ‘hang out’ to chat - particularly in online forums, especially if they are busy ones.

You can locate suitable Forums by browsing through directories listing online forums - such as www.big-boards.com.

Or you can search for them using search engines by typing in the search term: “(Your niche topic) + discussion forums” - using the inverted commas (”") for a ‘Broad Match’ search.

You can tell if a forum is suitable for your niche research by looking at how often people post there, and how recent the latest post is. If there are few visitors in the last few days, the forum’s probably not suitable for your needs.

Check the quality of the discussion before you make your decision to use that forum or not - and then move on to the next one.

The best way to do your research will vary from forum to forum. But generally, you should look for ‘hot’ threads - discussion topics where there are a large number of page views or responses.

For example, if a discussion has over 400 views in a day, or over 1,000 views in 3 days, the topic is likely to have great potential, and will show you what are the ‘triggers’ that will get your target market’s attention - and the issues or problems they are seeking solutions to.

If you often see the same or similar questions being asked on forums, this can indicate an opportunity you can tap into.

So think of a topic and go and look at some forums!

Happy Niche research!

John

Hi Masterminders!

Thank you to all of you who made it to this special BONUS event for Mastermind Members!

Urmil and I had fun - hope you did too! And I hope you found that it gave you both further training with the Program materials and also additional impetus to take your Web Business forward!

At the Mastermind Workshop, we covered:

* Refresh of the Mastermind Program & Material

* Website building tools – Gimp, Kompozer, Filezilla, Blog Themes/Headers, etc

* Niche Selection – Physical Products + Information Products

* Outsourcing – how to specify and source what you need

* Your Business Plan

* Q & As

* Individual Consultations

Please let us have your feedback on the day and what you would like to help you move forward rapidly with your business by posting your ideas on the Forum - click here.

PLEASE WOULD YOU ALSO HELP US TO HELP YOU BY COMPLETING OUR Mastermind Program Feedback Questionnaire - Click Here . We will also review the format and frequency of training in the light of your responses.
(PS: This is also an example of how YOU can use free online surveys, too!)

So that we can help YOU become successful with your Affiliate Marketing, please would you also respond to the Affiliate Support Questionnaire on that page.

Thank You!

All the best!

John Thornely
Internet Tycoons

Urmil and I had a another very interesting 2-on-1 consultancy call with one of the Mastermind Program Members recently, which covered a lot of great insights into how to get high rankings for a website!

And I thought you’d also like to share some of the ‘insider’ tips on linking strategies that emerged – so here goes…

As I mentioned in my recent blog post Linking Tips To Improve Your Search Engine Ranking, you can’t just put up a single website and expect customers to find it amongst all the other billions of websites out there! You need to build you own little net of interlinked websites to catch the traffic you seek – and with billions of searches a day there’s lots of traffic out there to catch!

The linked Hub and satellite Mini-Sites model is about catching free highly motivated and targeted search traffic from Google and the other search engines and driving it to niche product mini-sites and then channelling this traffic through affiliate links on your Hub sites to merchants such as Amazon, collecting a commission on all purchases.

Bear in mind also that there are two types of buyer that you’re looking to capture:
•    Those that know exactly the product they want to buy (eg a Samsung Digital Media Centre - YPK-5JZB)
•    Those that are still looking generically for a ‘Media Centre’

So you’re trying to get the first group to click through the links on your Mini-Site dedicated to a specific product and shepherd the latter group to your Hub Site, where they can compare various models and make a buying decision.

Now, your Hub Site is going to be positioned in a fairly competitive market – I looked at Google search and competition criteria for your Mini-Sites in an earlier Blog Post – Niche Product Strategies For Your Hub And Mini-Sites.

So your ‘web’ of Mini-Sites is there to trawl for traffic from lower-competition keyword searches and send this to your Hub-Site, as well as creating a ‘net’ of inbound links to your Hub sites to improve their ranking.

The major purpose of your Mini-Sites is thus to get high ranking in Google as ‘content-rich’ traffic-catching web pages. Each Mini-Site should thus focus on one product and each Mini-Site page should be focussed on, and optimised for, one keyword (or ‘long-tail’ keyword string) relating to that product.

The primary links on your Mini-Site pages should be contextual (keyword-based) and should link to the relevant product page on your Hub Site, providing in-bound links to your Hub site.

You should also include links on the bottom of your Mini-site pages to other Mini-sites, to spread your ‘web’ and get Google ranking ‘credit’. But make sure your links aren’t ‘reciprocal’ – site A should link to Site B, B to C, and C to A, etc – no two sites should just ‘swap’ links back to each other, as Google discounts these.

Your Hub Site is the portal to your suppliers, so the primary links on your individual Hub Site pages should link to your suppliers, through your affiliate links. Your Hub sites can also carry page-bottom links to other Hub sites, but should not link back to your Mini-Sites.

Other linking strategies you should use include:
•    your internal links between pages – you should particularly make sure that your ‘Site Map’ is properly set up and all the links work properly, so that the spiders can crawl through every page of your site and onward to your other sites using the links discussed above.
•    Your Useful Links page can be used to boost your search engine ranking by linking to other, unrelated websites. Again, the Useful Links on your Mini-site should link to other Mini-sites; those on your Hub-site should link to other Hub-sites. The linked sites need not be on related topics – your ‘media centre’ site can link to your ‘freezer’ site, etc – all you’re seeking to do is provide the conduit for the spiders to find each of your sites and to improve your search engine score by providing in-bound links. Again, no two sites should link reciprocally to each other – always link A to B to C, etc.

This can all get to sound a bit complicated but the underlying principle is Keep It Simple – think like your prospects when writing the text and setting up the purchasing process and think like a search engine when setting up the linking strategy.

Happy linking!
John Thornely
Internet Tycoons

The more visitors you get to come to your website the better your business will do – that’s kind of obvious, isn’t it?

But I’m sure you appreciate that you can’t just put up a single website and expect customers to find it amongst all the other billions of websites out there! Unless you can afford high-budget advertising, you’ll need to be optimize your website for both visitors and search engines and use a variety of lower-cost methods to direct traffic to your site – much as you would do for traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ businesses.

And your Linking strategy is a vital element in this.

To maximize the number of visitors to your site, you need your site to rank well with search engines – and make them use-friendly for the ‘spiders’ and ‘bots’ the search engines use to analyse your web pages.

Tip #1: Build your Net to catch Traffic and your Web to catch Spiders!

So – continuing the ‘Spider’, ‘Web’, ‘Net’ and ‘Fishing’ similes – you need a net to catch fish (traffic) and you’re trying to build a sticky ‘web’ to catch the SE ‘spiders’!

As a friend of mine said – “Don’t try to create traffic – just go and stand in the way of the traffic that’s already out there!” – and with billions of searches a day there’s lots of traffic out there to catch!

What you’re trying to do is to build your own little net of interlinked websites to catch the traffic you seek and to make it all attractive and easy to follow for the SE spiders.

Your Linking Strategy should be about catching free highly motivated and targeted search traffic from Google and the other search engines, driving it to your niche sites and then channelling this traffic to your sales pages.

Now, free traffic rarely comes quickly. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a waiting game… you need to put in the work then wait for your traffic and rankings to increase, tweaking things along the way and adding extra links to help things along.

Tip #2: Create lots of Links

There are three types of links: incoming links, outgoing links, and internal links. You need all three to build your ‘net’.

You want to create as many incoming links (also known as ‘backlinks’) as possible, as these ‘count’ highest in the eyes of the search engines.

When a SE ‘spider’ sees lots of inbound links to your site, it says “this must be an interesting site if so many other sites link to it” and gives you higher ranking – so your website is displayed higher up the ‘natural’ search results pages.

Backlinks are particularly helpful to search engine ranking, so you should try to get other relevant websites to link to yours, if possible. And you can use links from your other websites to do this too – more about this in upcoming posts.

Tip #3: Help the Spiders!

Now when the SE spider is looking around your website, you want it to find all the ‘goodies’ you’ve put on your website, and to visit every page – and then to go on and follow your links to your other websites.

So, make it easy for the spiders – put links on each page of your site pointing to other pages of your site, so that the spiders can find their way around easily!

Tip #4: Don’t use Reciprocal Links or Link Farms

Now, the more incoming links and internal links you have, and the easier it is for the spiders to follow out-bound links to your other websites, the better your sites will rank with the search engines.

But there are two traps to avoid here!

Reciprocal links don’t work. If you think about it, it’s a bit like you lending me $100 and me lending you $100 – neither of us is actually better off, we just exchanged $100.

And that’s just how the search engines see it too – there is no ‘added value’ in reciprocal links, so they don’t help your ranking.

And stay away from link farms. Don’t pay to have thousands of incoming links created for you. The search engines will see this as link spamming and they’ll stop ranking your site altogether.

So there you have 4 tips on using links to improve your search engine rankings. Follow these tips you will get a higher ranking for your site, bringing more traffic to your site and more money for you…

You can read more in my article Linking Strategies For Your Niche Sites.

Watch out for further linking tips in future blog articles.

Happy linking!
John Thornely
Internet Tycoons

Did you know that there’s a very simple way to get Amazon to find your Niche Products for you?

Go to www.Amazon.com or www.Amazon.co.uk and select a ‘Department’ from the drop-down menu at the top left of the main page or  the fixed menu on the left side. Let’s select ‘Camera, Photo & Video’ from the ‘Electronics’ Department (‘Camera & Photo’ on .co.uk).

As well as category listings and a search box, you’ll also see ‘Most Wanted’ and ‘Best Deals’ listings (we’ll come back to these a little later).

On the menu bar at the top, click on ‘Bestsellers’ and you’ll get a page listing all the hot products that are selling best at present. In other words, Amazon is telling you what products people are buying most of right now! And you can safely assume that people are searching for those products to buy (although the two things are not identical)!

Ideas on a Plate!

Now, did your competition in the ‘bricks and mortar’ world ever tell you straight out what was selling best? Talk about giving you ideas on a plate!

But it doesn’t stop there, there’s plenty more…!

In the top left corner, under ‘More in Camera and Photo’, you’ll see four more categories that are of distinct interest to you…
* Hot New Releases (or Hot Future Releases on .co.uk)
* Most Gifted
* Most Wished For
* Movers & Shakers

While there are some variations, these pages will display many of the same products, underlining what’s selling well. The ‘Movers & Shakers’ page also shows you how the rankings are changing – ie what’s ‘hotting up’ just now!

The only thing Amazon doesn’t tell you is how many of each product they sold and from which suppliers, but you can check out the top ranking sites just by clicking through the links on the Amazon pages!

Niche Ideas

Now, let’s put all of this together and think about what Amazon is telling us about your potential niche markets…

Go back to the ‘Bestsellers’ page. At the time of writing, Canon cameras occupied 10 of the top 15 spots, while Flip video cameras occupied 3. So you could set up a Hub site offering Canon cameras and a series of Mini-Sites for individual Canon camera models (and accessories for each, too of course).

Keep an eye on the Hot New Releases and Movers & Shakers pages and add new Mini-Sites and Hubsite pages for new products.

And don’t forget to target keywords and page titles, etc, to respond to the ‘Most Gifted’ and ‘Most Wanted’ items.

You’ll note that the top sellers on Amazon.com, which is aimed at the North American market, are different from what’s selling fastest in the UK on Amazon.co.uk. So think about which market you’re targeting with your niche sites and how to optimize for that market.

Don’t forget your Research!

And before you rush in and set up mini-sites galore, though, don’t forget to do your research and optimise your website for both longer-tail keywords – but don’t leave out the more competitive keywords from your pages, either.

Have a think about some of the criteria I discussed in ‘Niche Product Strategies For Your Hub And Mini-Sites‘.

Check the number of searches using Google’s keyword tool. So, for example, when I looked there were 450,000  searches a month in the UK for ‘Canon Powershot’ and 8,100 for ‘Canon PowerShot SD1100IS’ – a pretty healthy market!

And make sure you check the product type numbers available in the market you are targeting before you optimise your page – you don’t want to set up to sell models that aren’t available in the country you’re targeting, do you!

Do a ‘broad match’ search for ‘Canon Powershot SD1100IS’ on Google and you’ll see there are around 27,000 competing sites. A ‘phrase match’ search – ie using “” marks around the phrase – indicates only 4,900 or so competing sites, so there’s surprisingly low competition for such an in-demand product.

And don’t forget you can see the keywords your competition are using and how they’re attracting customers by using tools like www.keywordspy.com and www.spyfoo.com!

Talk about giving it to you on a plate…!

Happy Niche-ing!
John Thornely
Internet Tycoons

One of the first questions that people have when looking to start up any web business is… “What niche should I choose?” – I’m sure you, like me, have been there too?

This question has surfaced several times recently, in talking to Mastermind Members, so I though it might be helpful to look at some of the criteria for selecting suitable products to promote with a Hub and Mini-site strategy.

As ever, the first thing to do is take off your ‘YOU’ goggles and put on your prospective customer’s shoes, hat and glasses – and see life as they see it and live it! As they say in marketing circles… ‘walk a mile in your customer’s shoes’ – see my blog post “The Anatomy of Great Copy”.

Next thing is search volume, of course… As a general rule, go for a product (range) that has good traffic – more than around 3,000 searches a month.

And the number of competing websites should, preferably, be less than 200,000 – that’s using ‘phrase match’ on Google by putting quotation marks (“ ”) around your search phrase. If you use ‘broad match’ for a term like ‘portable garden equipment’, Google will return ALL websites that have EITHER the term ‘portable’ OR ‘Garden’ OR ‘equipment’ – ie likely to be in the millions and not relevant to you.

Stiff Competition?

Now, 200k other websites would seem like stiff competition – but you can bet that most are not well optimised for the keywords you’re targeting and you’d be surprised how easy it is to get up in the top rankings, as a result. Especially if you focus on ‘long tail’ keywords (more on that in a moment).

And think how you would react, as a prospective customer, to the website you’re creating and the product you’re targeting…

Yes, you want to maximise the return you’ll earn from affiliate commissions by going for higher-priced products, rather than $2.50 toys (unless you can attract thousands of visitors a day).

But people looking for products online costing over say £100 will want to shop around much more than people buying lower-priced products, where the differences in price between different sites are likely to be rather less important.

And the higher the price, the more prospects will want to buy from a ‘professional’-looking website and the more pre-selling you’re going to have to do on your website, so the more effort will be required in setting up the website.

So it’s perhaps best to focus the Hub and Mini-site strategy at products in the range of £100 or so, rather than higher-priced products, where price differences between sites encourage shopping around.

Your Keywords

Now, back to Keywords… The trick is to focus on ‘long tail’ keywords, that include the primary (highly searched) keywords and have a reasonable search volume themselves, but on which you’re not competing with the whole world…

And each page of your Mini-site should be optimised for a different keyword. So your ‘Butterscotch Pony’ mini-site could have separate pages focussed on ‘Butterscotch Pony’, ‘Butterscotch Pony Saddles’, ‘Butterscotch Pony Gadgets’, ‘Butterscotch Pony Interactive’, etc. And you’d have one page of your ‘Toy Pony’ Hubsite focussed on the ‘Butterscotch Pony’.

Or your Mini-site might offer Flip video cameras, for example, and the individual pages might focus on ‘pink Flip cameras’, ‘silver Flip cameras’, etc. And your keywords would reflect the subject of the page. See for example www. flip-cameras .co.uk (Tip: check the keywords they’re using for each page by right-clicking on the page somewhere and selecting ‘View Page Source’). Your Hub site might offer hand-held video cameras, and the individual pages of the Hub site would include Flip and other cameras.

So I hope this helps with Niche ideas for your Hub and Mini-Sites!

Happy Niche-ing!
John Thornely
Internet Tycoons

Seasoned Marketer Larry Dotson offers these ideas for increasing your Web sales:

1. When you make your first sale, follow-up with a “thank you” email and include an advertisement for other products you sell. Follow-up every few weeks or months.

2. Upsell to your customers. When they’re at your order page, tell them about a few extra related products you have for sale. They could just add it to their original order.

3. Tell your customers if they refer four customers to your web site, they will receive a full rebate of their purchase price. This will turn one sale into three sales.

4. When you sell a product, give your customers the option of joining an affiliate program so they can make commissions selling your product. This will multiply the sale you just made.

5. Sell the reprint/reproduction rights to your products. You could include an ad on or with the product for other products you sell. You could make sales for the reproduction rights and sales on the back end product.

6. Cross promote your product with other businesses’ products in a package deal. You can include an ad or flyer for other products you sell and have other businesses selling for you. You can do this very effectively on your ‘Thank You’ page.

7. When you ship out or deliver your product, include in the package/web page a coupon for other related products you sell. This will attract them to buy more products from you.

8. Send your customers a catalog of add-on products for the original product they purchased. This could be upgrades, special services, attachments, etc. If they enjoy your product they will buy the extra add-ons.

9. Offer gift certificates for your products. You’ll not only make sales from the purchase of the gift certificate, but when the recipient cashes it in they may buy other items from your web site.

10. Send your customers free products with their product package. The freebies should have your ads embedded in/printed on them. If you’re giving physical products, such as bumper stickers, baseball caps, t-shirts etc, the ads printed on them will allow other people to see your ad and order.

John Thornely
© John Thornely www.johnthornely.com 2008

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