EzSEO Newsletter # 90
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EzSEO Newsletter # 90
Andy Williams ez SEO
ez-search-engine-optimization.com
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This week:
1. The Positive Mind by Colin McDougall
2. Building Affiliate Sites - Miniseries Part II
3. Other Stuff
Hi again.
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1. The Positive Mind by Colin McDougall
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Back in issue #67, I published the first ever guest article in this newsletter.
The article was called “Six Lessons for Getting in the “Right Mindset” For Starting Your Own Business” by Colin McDougall.
I highly recommend you go back and read that before continuing to read here.
Those of you who read John Evans eBook “Success Alert” will have read all about Colin and his successes online with affiliate programs.
Today, Colin is still running a successful affiliate business - in fact, these days, he uses my SEO Website Builder software to expand his empire :o)
In the last few weeks, I have had the pleasure of reading Colin’s first book. “The Positive Mind” is a work in progress, and one that is dear to Colin’s heart.
As regular readers of this newsletter will know, I place a very high value on being positive, setting goals, and believing that I can achieve those goals. That is really what this book is all about. The Positive Mind is like a roadmap to becoming positive, staying positive, and getting the positivity to work in your life, both business, and personal.
Being an Entrepreneur often means thinking outside the box, so it is often difficult to learn how from someone else. The Positive Mind covers many aspects of being an Entrepreneur and how to handle situations that arise, and even turn the negative into the positive.
I enjoyed the book. You will too.
Get your copy of The Positive mind.
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2. Building Affiliate Sites - Miniseries Part II
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Today we will look at how you can identify a profitable niche (which includes checking for products that you can promote).
If you are following this miniseries to build your first affiliate site, I recommend you write down this goal, and stick it somewhere prominent.
************************ MY GOAL ***********************
“By Sunday 4th September, I will have researched a topic, and found a profitable niche that interests me”.
************************ MY GOAL ***********************
Finding a profitable niche is a two-step process.
1. Find several potential niches.
2. Check to see which one is most profitable.
1. Find several potential niches.
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Step 1 is often the biggest stumbling block for those starting out in this affiliate marketing business. Where do you get ideas from? I get a lot of people asking me for ideas, but it really is not that difficult.
There are lots of places you can get ideas. Here are a few that I use:
a) Go and surf around Amazon.com. Amazon is a huge online retailer that stocks not only books, but a huge range of other products, separated into a large number of niches. Make a few notes of potential areas you might consider.
b) Visit online portals and directories. I recommend that when you find some good ones with lots of categories, you bookmark them.
For example, visit http://dmoz.org. Drill down some categories to find potential niche markets.
Here is a directory I found by accident
http://www.oramd.com/resources/index.htm
This site has a huge category list which you can use for ideas.
Go to http://www.ebay.com/ and drill down through the categories on the left hand side.
e.g. Just click on the Health & Beauty category and see how many sub-niches are available for you to choose!.
c) Use Wordtracker to find what people are looking for (you can use the trial version if you don’t have a membership).
Try entering words like this into Wordtracker and seeing what is phrases you get back:
buy
purchase
online
prevent
fix
info
learn
remedy
There is a huge amount of potential niches that can be found this way, and the best of all, they are being actively searched for at the search engines, so you know there is a demand.
If you have a subscription to Wordtracker, you can also browse down the top 1000 reports. The long term report gives you 1000 phrases that have consistently been search for in the last 120 days.
As you can see, there is a wealth of tools and places you can go to get ideas for your site.
Write down a few ideas that interest you before moving on to the next section.
So I can use some real examples in the next section, I will choose two of the sub-niches from the Health & Beauty category on eBay (I recommend you choose 4 or 5).
My potential niches: “hair removal” & “electric toothbrushes”.
Let’s see which one has the most potential.
2. Check to see which one is most profitable
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To be profitable, there has to be:
a) Demand
b) Good affiliate programs you can promote (also high bids at the Pay Per Click Search engines is a good indicator).
To find out this information, I use Wordtracker and affiliate networks like Commission Junction.
Let’s check Commission Junction (CJ) first.
Once you are logged in, click on “Get Links”.
Select Links from the Search drop-down box, and type in hair removal into the search box.
Looking down the advertiser list of the results, you will see that there are several merchants offering hair removal products.
Click on the 3 Month EPC link at the top of that column to order the results by EPC. Those top performing ads look great. Check out the advertisers by clicking on the Advertiser link for any particular link.
I clicked on Folica.com to see more information about that advertiser. Look at the EPC for the advertiser as this gives a better indication of overall advertiser performance than individual links.
A 3 month EPC of $11.28 (at the time of writing) means that for every 100 clicks from affiliate sites, the affiliates average $11.28 commission. Anything over $10 is good. You can also check out the 3 month trend for the advertiser. In this case, Folica.com have a very consistent EPC.
This is a good niche as long as there is demand.
Repeating the above steps for my other potential niche “electric toothbrushes” does not return any results in CJ. Even a search for “toothbrush” does not return anything of interest.
As a final check, select Products from the drop-down search box, and type in toothbrush.
Again, nothing as promising as the hair removal niche.
I know I can find electric toothbrushes at Amazon and promote them from there, but Amazon has a very low commission rate.
If you have chosen several potential niches, check them all at CJ, and order them by most promising to least promising.
Since I only chose two potential niches to begin with, I need to hope that hair removal has a high demand.
Checking Demand
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Wordtracker is the best tool for determining demand. I don’t personally rate the accuracy of the Overture suggestion tool (and all keyword tools that use it for demand figures).
Login to Wordtracker.
In the Multiple Search section, click on Compressed search.
Type in hair removal, and select 500 from the Number of Results drop-down box.
Click Proceed.
When the results are all displayed, you will notice that 500 results are returned. This is good as it means that there are a lot of potential phrases for this niche.
Now for a little trick I use.
Scroll to the very bottom of the page. The table gives you the “Count”, and “Predict” figures for each word.
You will see that the count and predict figures are both 5 for the last phrase in the list.
Anything above a 5 for the last phrases in the results (assuming 500 results were returned), is a good indicator to me that the niche has a lot of phrases to target. The higher the value of the count for the last phrase in the list, the more phrases you will find for that niche when you carry out your in-depth keyword research.
Want to see an example?
Type in insurance and select 500. Scroll to the bottom. The count figures are over 100 for the last phrases in the list. That means there are a huge number of potential phrases for the niche of insurance.
Another example. Type in barbie doll.
The last phrases in the list have counts of 2, which means this niche has far fewer potential phrases than the insurance niche.
A final example. Type in cadbury chocolate (the best chocolate in the world in my opinion).
Only 40 rows are returned, meaning this would not be such a good niche.
Now, you may be wondering why these count figures are that important if there are at least 500 phrases for the niche anyway. Well, that will all become clear in the next few weeks, as we carry out the keyword research and then manipulate and group our keywords.
Before finishing, there is one other check I like to carry out. How much are these phrases attracting at the Pay Per Click search engines?
Type in hair removal again.
Scroll to the bottom.
Click on the perform a competition search.
Select Overture and click the proceed button.
You will need to type in the security code displayed, into the small box before you can get the results.
Scroll to the bottom of the results.
You will see the top bids are close to $40. Wow. Companies are prepared to pay nearly $40 per click at the search engines for some phrases related to this niche.
This niche is hot, and potentially very profitable.
Putting Adsense on our site could prove VERY profitable.
Your job now is to carry out the same checks on your potential niches. By next week, you should have found the niche you are going to tackle for your site.
Next week, we will be continuing by looking at how to carry out the keyword research.
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3. Other Stuff
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Only one Niche Blueprint has been released so far this month. I am hopeful I will get the other one released soon.
If you have never bought a niche blueprint, you might like to get one of those still available. They take the guess work out of building an affiliate site, by providing all the information you need, including lists of affiliate programs and keyword lists, all done for you. Niche Blueprints provide a detailed guide to creating a site. Many of my customers buy both each month, and are seeing good results.
Well, that’s it for another issue. If you want to read the recent issues of this newsletter, you can read them here at my blog.
For older newsletters, you will need to visit the old archives.
Have a great week!
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