« That Magic Feeling When You Find a Niche Market | Home | There’s Never Been a Better Time to be Online »
Day 3 – The Getting of Stats
By Mike Mindel | August 5, 2007
This daily summary is taken from the Thirty Day Challenge day 3 training.
Note: There are two videos (one on itunes & one in the training area). I’ve combined the best parts of both into todays summary.
HOW DO I JUST PICK 7 IDEAS?
I’ve seen forum posts along the lines of ‘how do I just pick 7? I can’t. I’ve got dozens of ideas. I need some metrics around those 7′ Well. True. You do. Just pick any 7. As Caro said’ you might as well flick a dart’. That’s true.
From today going forwards we’re going to show you those metrics, including some stunning stuff on day 6 / 7, which are totally new market research techniques. A lot of trouble people have with Web 2.0 stuff is wasted effort. They don’t put their focus & all the power of what web 2.0 can do in the right spots. That is the biggest problem we’ve seen happening.
There is no criteria for the 7 ideas. You may find after going through the criteria that those 7 ideas weren’t really that good. In which case go back to the well and choose another 7. The vast majority of successful 30 day challengers were those that restarted after around day 14 having found their niches didn’t pass the criteria.
WE’RE TAKING IT VERY SLOWLY FOR THESE THREE DAYS
There won’t be anything more until Monday (EST timezone in the US). You have a huge opportunity to catch up and this is where the softness ends. We do have a lot to do and we have a lot to teach. So we’re taking it easy on you on the moment to make sure you have your tools all ready. It all ramps up next week.
Even though we’re breaking you in nicely this year, learning and testing different things.
WHAT IS TODAY ALL ABOUT – MARKET RESEARCH
We’re introducing our first free external tool: Wordtracker’s free keyword tool.
Wordtracker acts as a replacement for the Overture free keywords tool (see this article for why). These tools are great as an indicator of interest – how many people are searching in your particular market place.
You’ll see me doing a specific example on Speed Reading. That gives us an indication of how many people are looking for that on any particular day. So we use the free keywords tool to test a marketplace.
This is the first stage of testing. You can do huge amounts of research on a marketplace. In the thirty day challenge we’re going to show you the highlights.
Mike (me) gets the official nod for Thirty Day Challenge summaries plus lots of unexpected praise (gush – thanks Ed). Hey – I’m taking notes from Ed’s podcast about using my own tool. Cool.
NO NICHE IS TOO SMALL
No niche is too small.
Since we’re not paying for traffic we don’t have to be as worried about profitability as the other thirty day challenges.
In the other challenges we had to have minimum product pricing because it was pointless to sell a product for a ten dollars that cost twenty dollars in pay per click traffic.
OUR AIM
We want to deliver the largest ever internet marketing training the world has ever seen then you’re going to kill it when it comes to your sausage making market. It’s not about production values, it’s not about the quality and editing, redoing things fifty million times over.
In this day and age people want a real feeling of connection and community. Which is why 2.0 is taking off in the way it is. Something we have been missing for a long time now.
This is why I (Ed) do things the way I do it. The gear & technology I use is very cheap. It’s not super duper high quality stuff as you don’t need it. You need to know the little tricks and techniques but we’ll be showing you those.
The cool thing about this years challenge whether you want to create a product or marketing other people’s product, you still need to think and communicate with people like you’d communicate to your best friend. I’m speaking to you as if I was speaking to one of my friends on the phone. You don’t need all the mystique, the professionalism & voice training if your content is compelling and your heart is in the right place.
This does have an effect though. My particular communication style will annoy 10% of people. It’s just the way it is. People are wired differently. For those of you where this does grate – put it all aside – and focus on the core training.
TEAMS
I’ve been pushing teams because of some of the social techniques we use will be more advantageous to those in teams. There was a great post that showed that some people really do not like to join teams.
But I’ve got a great idea. I’d suggest setting up a facebook group ‘people who hate teams’ or ‘people who hate people’. This way you’re forming a sneaky team.
It will be of huge advantage to you as we go forward as you do really need your buds there helping you spread the love.
ITUNES
Leave your itunes on over night so it downloads new content automatically. This is especially useful for those on dial up internet connections. Or use a nearby internet cafe with faster downloads and plug in a USB stick to capture the content.
The feed is getting fixed up. The content will be fed out slowly over the course of the weekend to avoid running into more server problems.
ON NOTES
Mike & I make the point that just doing the thirty day challenge off notes is like Ray Charles driving. I know he did drive and I did see him drive on occasion – but 9 times out of 10 this is not going to end well.
It wouldn’t end well for you either if you do this thing just from the notes.
There are a lot inferences, some asides that come across in the audio / video that you don’t get with the notes (plus you get to listen to Ed try and say Wordtracker in the worst accent imaginable – I think he was attempting an English accent at one point and then changed his mind half way through).
WEEKENDS
Each of the weekends during the thirty day challenge is a catchup weekend.
If you’re all up to date then you go and play golf, play guitar or do something cool. To avoid getting too frustrated, turn the computer off and go and do something else for 24 hours and come back fresh. It’s easy to get stuck behind your computer.
SUPER COOL WORDTRACKER FREE KEYWORDS TOOL
Go to the Wordtracker free keywords tool and type in each of your 7 niche markets. Lets start with speed reading:
Here are the results:
AN EXPLANATION
Each time you enter a search into the free keyword tool you get up to 100 searches that people are searching for in the real world.
There are two columns: searches and keyword.
Searches means total number of estimated searches for a keyword per day.
A keyword means one or words separated by a space. So ’speed’ is a keyword as is ’speed reading’.
Once you’re used to the tool and you understand it’s numbers and you start translating those numbers into real numbers in the real world. After a while you really start to understand the numbers.
For example 419 people somewhere around the world are typing in ’speed reading’ and 38 are typing in ’speed reading courses’.
Each keyword (one or more words…) is a real search by a group of people somewhere in the world.
We estimate daily search volume from a huge database of 350 million searches on search engines for the last 90 days.
Sometimes in some topics you might see some deviations. For example if there happened to be a rock band called ’speed reading’ then you might see some different results.
Wordtracker have two two key improvements over Overture.
- We have removed all adult terms &
- We have removed all the robot data (position checkers, keyword spammers etc).
At the bottom of the screen you’ll see a total:
That is the total number of searches for the top 100 search terms for that keyword. So if you add up the top 100 search terms for ’speed reading’ you’ll get 1,414 total searches today.
Now select the top number (in this case 417) and drag the mouse down to the bottom of the screen.
Then right click on the mouse and click copy:
Then open up your favorite text editor (e.g. notepad in windows), right click and click paste:
Then click File, Save As and save the file as ’speed reading’.
That’s all you need to do for each of your seven niche market ideas / topics.
There’s some things you’ll start to notice. Some niche markets will attract a lot more total searches per day than others.
As a general rule would you say a topic is more popular if it has more searches than one that has less. The answer is yes.
But in the thirty day challenge, more is not necessarily better. Often less is more. We’ll explain this in detail on Monday.
At this stage I want you to start noticing things.
So do a comparison between your seven ideas and check out the differences.
- Notice the number of searches
- Notice how quickly the searches drop off. E.g. in ’speed reading’ the searches drop from 419, 61, 49… Other niche markets may drop down even quicker.
(Incidentally ’sausage making’ gets 419 total searches a day so there is clearly a market there!)
GOOGLE COMPETITION ANALYSIS
Choose the top term and enter in to the thirty day toolbar. In this case ’speed reading’.
You’ll see these results:
Notice the sponsored links at the top. This is one step in ‘competitive analysis’. The sponsored links are all Google ads.
Note: Google delivers different content depending on where you are. Which you can use to devestating effect (outside the scope of the thirty day challenge).
What we are looking for here is: are there real people selling real stuff to real enthusiasts for money. Speed reading is a classic example as there absolutely is. In the ads you can see www.ReadFaster.com (double your reading speed) and www.AceReader.com (download free 30 day demo).
(Note: that’s why I banged on about Niche Markets so much. If you’ve found a niche market then there should be a market for your niche – i.e. lots of people searching for your niche and lots of different ways of searching for the same thing so lots of keywords!
Aaaahhh – CLINK – CLink – clink. The sound of one penny dropping.)
Let’s look at one Google ad in particular:
If you click on this ‘Speed Reading Review’ ad you get:
This is a very smooth, very slick adsense style review site. This is not real product or service. It’s just a way of people profiting off clicks.
Anywhere you click on this review site you will make this person money. But when you do research into marketplaces you need to ignore them. If you see lots of sites like that and no real sites then you need to be worried about it.
Take this other ad:
If you click through you get:
Guess what folks. It’s also a review site!
The top two sites are review sites.
The good news is that these dudes only bother when there is money to be made. That means it’s worth advertising in Google for this topic as the money they make justifies their spend.
But if all the ads are review sites then that’s bad news.
SO WHAT’S A REAL SITE?
Now let’s take a look at this ad:
When you click through you see:
Now this is good! This is your absolute classic sales letter. It’s even got a drop down opt in box:
So if you’re researching a market what do you think you’re going to do? Absolutely enter your name & email address so you can get the free content of the course.
(NOTE: Get a throwaway email address from somewhere like www.googlemail.com or mail.yahoo.com so that you can keep this daily email content separate from your main email. Or else you will get bombarded!)
COMPETITION IS WONDERFUL!
So it’s good if you see sales letters as you are seeing competition. You might think – hang on Ed – isn’t competition bad? No. Competition is wonderful, it’s marvelous, it’s fantastic.
If you look at a topic and you see a bunch of competitors often people think oh no, it’s been done.
In any reasonable sized town is there just one real estate agent, just one doctor, just one car yard? Of course not. There are plenty and it works well for everyone as the overall traffic is increased.
That’s the key here. If there is competition then there is money to be made. All you need to is out market them. Fortunately you have your home boys Dan & Ed to show you how.
(Now come on Ed… what on earth is a bartootski?)
There are techniques that we know and the Immediate Edge members know which you are going to learn about.
So what you need to do for each of your seven niche markets / topics and have a look at the ads.
Go to www.google.com home page and look up ’speed reading’ straight. (The previous example used the thirty day challenge toolbar).
Again we see a bunch of review ads, but also a bunch of proper products. E.g. an ad for the Sciene of Speed Reading shows:
Again another sales letter for a product.
When you see competition – be excited! It’s good.
Yes. It really is. Competition is good.
If you don’t see much competition, that is bad.
LOOK BUT DON’T JUDGE
I just spotted Caro’s comment in the forum. This is quite important. So I’ve quoted it verbatim:
Ed really just wants you all to start to get to know the niche idea, RESERVING final judgement at this stage.
What I suggest you create for your seven ideas is a Grid or Template.
List the idea in one column and then as each research section is revealed – and he’s just touched (and I emphasize the word Touched) on two in one video as I type this.
So create a grid with many columns, including one for notes.
And then at this stage just put a simple tick or cross.
For example – on the first video Ed shows us PPC advertising and asks us to go through and see if there are real people selling real things to real enthusaists for money.
So in that column simply put a tick or cross.
AND RESERVE JUDGEMENT
I know it’s super hard not to judge – as we all so want to get this ‘right’.
In order to get the result you want – which is to make $10, Ed & Dan’s methodology is to really go into fine detail in the research/criteria stage.
As it is with the research stage that people go wrong – they rush it.
So get onto Excel or Google Docs and create your Grid and let’s all have pens poised to see what the next video’s show us to look at without judging.
SUMMARY
- Go to Wordtracker’s free keyword tool and check to see if anyone is searching for your idea / niche market.
- Cut and paste the results from the free keyword tool into notepad (or editor of your choice) and save to your computer. Use something meaningful in the title e.g. speed reading keywords.txt.
- Do a search on Google (either from the home page or from the thirty day challenge toolbar) and look at the paid ads (top and right). Competition is good!
- Don’t judge your ideas yet!
-Mike
Technorati Tags: day three, thirty day challenge, ed dale, mike mindel, free keyword tool, competition, competition is good, pick seven ideas, taking it slowly, market research, overture, overture replacement, daily notes, no niche is too small, itunes, super cool, speed reading, speed reading free, speed reading software, speed reading course, speed reading programs, review sites, daily search volume, sausage making, notepad, google competition analysis, niche markets, niche topics, topics, ideas, opt in form, competition is wonderful, salesletter, internet marketing
Powered by ScribeFire.
Topics: Daily Summaries | 24 Comments »
August 5th, 2007 at 8:34 pm
What a great summary of Day 3. Thanks!
August 5th, 2007 at 9:22 pm
Mike, this rocks mate! Thanks for all the effort, it’s very much appreciated!!
Donal
August 6th, 2007 at 12:41 am
Video’s were great and this is an excellent summary. Thank you
Much appreciated
August 6th, 2007 at 12:49 am
[...] To see a text & screen shot explanation of this lesson just hop over to Mike Mindela’s blog where he posted an excellent recap of it. See that here. [...]
August 6th, 2007 at 3:06 am
Excellently done. Thank you.
August 6th, 2007 at 3:21 am
Wonderful note-taking! Thanks for your effort.
Cheers!!
August 6th, 2007 at 3:37 am
Really great summaries Mike, and well worth keeping for future reference.
To that end would you consider modifying your CSS file to provide a printable version, which would exclude the reader’s comments and sidebars?
XOXOX
Rosie
August 6th, 2007 at 5:45 am
Mike, thanks so much for taking such amazing notes for us!!
August 6th, 2007 at 6:19 am
AB FAB!!
great prose style, gr8 elucidate!
paul hughes
August 6th, 2007 at 6:48 am
Wonderful! Kudos to your efforts! I’m stumbling this.
August 6th, 2007 at 7:16 am
Just got to this – and Mike – what can I say…this is awesome!
WOW – I just imagine the time it must have taken you.
Thank you for your major contributions to the 30DCIII (clapping sound at this point
)
Caro
August 6th, 2007 at 7:55 am
Actually. It takes me just an hour each time.
Using ScribeFire to write and edit posts & SnagIt + Flickr to capture images makes it a breeze.
-Mike
August 6th, 2007 at 11:45 am
Excellent stuff – Thank you so much.
August 6th, 2007 at 2:44 pm
Thanks for summarizing the videos. It is a invaluable resource as I cannot download the videos due to bandwidth limits.
August 6th, 2007 at 2:45 pm
BTW, I can’t wait for the next ones. Thanks alot for doing these posts!!
August 6th, 2007 at 4:20 pm
Thanks very much for taking the time and effort to summarize the video. I haven’t been able to download the last video/podcast for several days.
I much prefer to read then listen because I will remember it longer and can easily refer back to it when needed.
Thanks again Mike!!
August 6th, 2007 at 6:22 pm
Brilliant Mike — I was just trying to recall where something came up on the last few days training — these posts are invaluable and great time savers.
Thanks for taking the bother —
I’m off to freekeywords.wordtracker.com right now!
Cheers — Al
August 6th, 2007 at 11:59 pm
Mike….you are a love!!
Thank you
xx
August 7th, 2007 at 12:10 am
Just brill. It would take me far longer than 1 hour to do it myself. The ideal course notes to compliment the training material. Keep up the good work.
August 7th, 2007 at 6:55 am
Excellent you are truely worth your weight in gold,what more can we ask for ,well done.
Stanley.
August 8th, 2007 at 1:06 am
What a great service you’re providing, Mike, with these summaries. I’ve been using them to review and revisit previous lessons and am sure they will be more valuable in the future. Thanks.
August 8th, 2007 at 3:33 am
Thank you so much for this made things a little clearer as to what Ed is wanting us to do with our niche ideas!
August 8th, 2007 at 9:14 am
Mike,
I’ve just found your notes via the link in the 30 DC toolbar,… you are an absolute lifesaver my friend.
Thanks for putting an incredible set of notes together about the 30 Day Challenge!
Cheers,
Pete
August 26th, 2007 at 4:50 am
[...] Today, on Day 3, we talked about the Getting of Stats. Basically what we talked about is how much traffic are these topics generating. A free tool was introduced for our use, Wordtracker Free Keywords Tool. . [...]