EzSEO Newsletter # 172
This week:
1. Finding Seed Words for Keyword Research
2. Essential Reading
3. How to sell a product online - Part II
4. Other Stuff
Hi again.
I hope you are well and that you are enjoying the summer. If you are in England, I hope that you didn’t get flooded over the last few weeks. The weather there looks terrible.
Here in Tenerife the weather is a little strange. Yesterday, at my house, the temperature was 25C. I went off to the market (its about 10 minutes away on the motorway), and the temperature there was 36C there. After the market, I went of to Santa Cruz (another 15 minutes drive), and the temperature there was 42C. Phew, that’s hot.
Anyway, we headed off back home, and the temperature began to drop. Within the space of 1 Km, the temperature dropped a staggering 9 degrees. Back home, the temperature was 26C. That’s 16 degrees difference in temperature for two places 20 minutes drive from each other.
OK, enough weather. Let’s get on.
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1. Finding Seed Words for Keyword Research
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Starting a new website often means keyword research time. In the past, I have shown you how I do keyword research at Wordtracker, and Nichebot. In fact, you can sign up for my fr.ee video series on Keyword Research & Handling here (Sign up box top left).
When you login to your chosen Keyword Research tool, you are prompted with a text box. You are expected to type in a word to begin your research.
This initial word is called a “seed” word. It “seeds” your search, so relevant keyword phrases can be brought back.
Today, I want to discuss these seed words. They are often over-looked in keyword research tutorials (mine included), yet they are very important.
If you were going to create a site on Contact Lenses, you might use the seed word “contact lens”. You will undoubtedly get a lot of relevant keywords back. However, if you want to get all of the keywords in a niche, I recommend you use multiple seed words.
Start off with “contact lens”, and harvest all phrases offered by your keyword research tool. Then, move onto another seed word, e.g. “RGP lens”, and another “rigid gas permeable lens”, etc.
When I start my own keyword research, I have a list of seed words/phrases, that I will plugin, one at a time (or several at a time). Although a lot of phrases that are suggested for each seed word are duplicates of earlier searches, many are not. I’ll collect them all. Wordtracker only saves one copy of each phrase, so I don’t need to be concerned with duplicates.
OK, let’s use the contact lens example, and see exactly how I would create my list of seed words.
First thing I do, is go to Google and type in “contact lens”. This is my “master seed phrase” if you like :o)
I am going to use some insider information to build my seed phrase list. How? Easy! Ask the people who specialise in the niche!
What I am looking for are websites selling a range of contact lenses. Good sites will have menus that list both type of lens, and make of lens. I want both.
The best place to find many of these sites is the sponsored links on the right.
Here are three that I found:
http://www.justlenses.com/
http://www.lensworld.com/
http://www.shoplens.com/
OK, the next step is to visit each of these in turn, and look at the menus. If the menus contain makes or types of lenses, swipe the list. Here is my list from the first site:
1-2 Week Disposable
Bifocal Lenses
Color Disposable
Daily Disposable
Gas Permeable
Monthly Disposable
Novelty Lenses
Private Label
Toric Lenses
Vial Lenses
Bausch & Lomb
CIBA Vision
CooperVision
Johnson & Johnson
Ocular Sciences
Wesley Jessen
1-Day Acuvue
Acuvue
Acuvue 2
Acuvue Advance
Acuvue Oasys
Biomedics 55
Focus Dailies 90PK
Focus Night & Day
FreshLook ColorBlends
SofLens 66 Toric
That’s a good list to start with.
Now site number 2:
Bausch & Lomb
Ciba Vision
Coopervision
Johnson & Johnson
OSI/Ocular Sciences
Wesley Jessen
Extreme H20
1 - 2 Week Disposables
Bifocal Lenses
Color Lenses
Daily Disposables
Monthly Disposables
Toric Lenses
Vial Lenses
Special Effects
Lens Cases
.. and finally site number 3:
Colored Contacts
Toric Contact Lenses
Daily Disposable
Disposable 1-2 Week
Monthly Disposable
Daily Wear
Extended Wear
Bifocal Lenses
Special Effect
Sports
Aphakic
Johnson and Johnson
Bausch & Lomb
CIBA Vision
Wesley Jessen
CooperVision
OSI/American Hydren
iKeeps
Toric Contact Lenses
Colored Contact Lenses
Bifocal Contact Lenses
The next stage is to remove duplicates from this list. Here is my cleaned list:
1-2 Week Disposable
1-Day Acuvue
Acuvue
Acuvue 2
Acuvue Advance
Acuvue Oasys
Aphakic
Bausch & Lomb
Bifocal Contact Lenses
Bifocal Lenses
Biomedics 55
Ciba Vision
Color Disposable
Color Lenses
Colored Contact Lenses
Coopervision
Daily Disposables
Daily Wear
Extended Wear
Extreme H20
Focus Dailies 90PK
Focus Night & Day
FreshLook ColorBlends
Gas Permeable
Johnson & Johnson
Lens Cases
Monthly Disposables
Novelty Lenses
OSI/American Hydren
OSI/Ocular Sciences
Ocular Sciences
Private Label
SofLens 66 Toric
Special Effect
Sports
Toric Contact Lenses
Toric Lenses
Vial Lenses
Wesley Jessen
iKeeps
I would also add my “master seed phrase” to this list (”contact lens”).
That’s about 40 seed phrases in only a couple of minutes.
Some of the phrases do need to be modified. If you look at the list, some of the words and phrases are not 100% related to lenses. Therefore we can add the word “lens” to make it relevant. e.g. Sports becomes “sports lens”
By adding the word lens to all phrases that could refer to something else, we create a specialised list of seed words.
Now, the only thing left to do is to plug these into your keyword research tool, and build a very comprehensive list of words and phrases.
This method of creating seed phrases, and then plugging them into your keyword service, can lead to very large, comprehensive lists. If you are using Wordtracker for your keyword research, the competition analysis could take a very long time. I use a tool that automates this competition analysis. You can see a video of this tool here:
Wordtracker Competition Automator tool
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2. Essential Reading
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Occasionally, I come across articles on the Internet that are so good, I bookmark them. I want to share good articles with you, so I setup a page on my website called “Essential Reading”. When I find an article that I think you will benefit from, I’ll post a link to it on that page, and then mention it in my newsletter.
So far, there are just two links on the page. One is an article I wrote about a long time ago, but I still use that information to find profitable niches. However, that isn’t the article I want to mention today.
On the following page, make sure you read article #1. In it, Jerry West tackles an issue that many people have asked me about recently.
This article all started in response to blog post by another well-known marketer.
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3. How to sell a product online - Part II
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Last week, we looked at an overview of selling a product online. I left you with this mind map (note I have modified it slightly from last week):
For those with the mind map viewer I told you about last week, here is the modified mind map:
It is difficult to treat the various branches of that mind map as completely separate entities, since everything is inter-connected at some level.
In this mini-series, I ‘ll look at setting a system up first, and we will then go on to look at marketing the product. That makes sense, as you need to have your system in place before you take your first order.
Let’s think of what happens early on in the purchase process, so that we can highlight our specific needs. We’ll go through the problems first, and then I’ll outline possible solutions.
One of the things that you need to have clear in your mind, is how a customer will flow through your system. I am going to show you another mind map, but this time, centred around the customer, and the customers needs. Once you understand this, you can start planning a system that will cover the needs of your customer, and your own needs too!
Here is the customer mind map:
For those of you who downloaded the Mind map viewer, you can download the actual mind map here:
When a customer pays you their m0ney, they need to be added to a customer database.
This database serves a number of useful purposes such as:
* Proof that the customer paid
* Mailing list to keep in contact with customers
* Used to authenticate license
Ideally, this customer database should be linked with your payment processor. That way, when someone pays for your product, they are automatically added to your customer database.
If someone then requests a refund for your product, you can remove them from your customer database, and therefore cut them off from future updates. However, it would be even better if you could deactivate their product once a refund is issued.
Deactivating products is something that takes a little thought.
1. Deactivating eBooks
If you are selling an eBook, then deactivating it isn’t going to be possible. At least, I don’t know of a way of doing this, unless your eBook is packaged into one of those horrible executable “exe” programs (which will increase refund rates anyway, since people hate them, and want PDF eBooks).
Also, protecting eBooks from piracy is very difficult. You can password protect the download, the zip file, and even the PDF file, but passwords can be passed around.
The best method to help protect your product if you are selling an eBook, is to provide extra value to the product that reduces your refund rate. Maybe you have a customer site linked to your database, where customers can login for bonuses, support, forum community, other reports / tools, etc. Another nice idea is to send out an autoresponder series that lasts for the period of your guarantee. You could have this series of emails building up to a valuable bonus, which they only get once the refund period is up.
You will need to be creative when thinking of ways to reduce refunds on eBooks.
2. Deactivating Software
This can be done relatively easily. I am sure you have all bought software that requires a username and password in the software itself. Periodically (sometimes every time you run the software), it connects to the software server, to verify your username and password.
When someone asks for a refund, you simply remove them from your database (so that customer is no longer on the server), and when the software tries to authenticate that user, no details are found, and the software doesn’t run.
This is relatively easy to setup.
There is a single script that can handle most of the tasks we have looked at so far. This script is called aMember.
This one script can:
* integrate with your payment processor.
* automatically add new customers to database after purchase goes through.
* allow you to protect your software products, and prevent sharing of your software.
* act as a mailer, sending out information to your customers via email.
* Integrate with forum software, help desk software etc
* has basic affiliate program built in.
* a lot more.
Go to the aMember site, and read about this incredible script.
We’ll look at this next week.
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4. Other Stuff
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Alan Gardyne & Jay Stockwell released their much anticipated Speed PPC software package last week.
Speed PPC offers PPC advertisers a number of fantastic features. My favourite feature is the datafeed integrator.
The datafeed integration of Speed PPC allows you to take a merchants datafeed, and create a campaign around EVERY SINGLE PRODUCT. These campaigns link to a pre-selling landing page on YOUR site that matches the products keywords. This landing page then links to the merchants site via YOUR affiliate link. How cool is that?
If you haven’t seen this yet, you must go and watch their promotional video here:
Well, that’s it for this issue. If you want to read the recent issues of this newsletter, you can read them online at my blog:
http://ezseonews.com/blog/index.php
For older newsletters, you will need to visit the old archives at:
http://ezseonews.com/archives
Have a great week!
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