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Day 7 - It’s Judgment Time - Part 1
By Mike Mindel | August 8, 2007
This summary has been taken from Day 7 training for the Thirty Day Challenge.
The Videos
High quality versions of all the YouTube videos will be available on the site as soon as the new servers come on stream. We were hoping that it was now frankly, but it appears it will be another day yet.
The Judgment Phase
We are now moving from the notice phase to the judgment phase. What I want you to do is to look at all your information, all your niches.
You’ve had a day to let it all percolate. Are there one or two there that jump out of you, have a bit more legs, action, activity even without me having to tell you any raw numbers?
They’re the ones I want you to focus on first as we move through day 7 and day 8. The videos today are a step up.
The Phrase That Pays
For people who have been experts and making money on the net for a long time - what we are about to reveal over the next days will blow your mind. We have discovered a way (with Wordtracker and Google Trends) to determine exactly how much traffic you will get.
With pay per click or with organic search people will have tried to get some free traffic. The numbers say the should be getting free traffic - but they don’t get any traffic - there’s none there.
We’ll be giving you a technique over the next two days that will allow you to identify the phrase that pays. You will know absolutely and specifically and with absolute certainty, phrases in your niche that will deliver you traffic.
Before we even do the work to get the testing, find out for certain whether there will be any traffic or not. This is an amazing revelation. Nobody has been able to figure this out. People who we have shown it to you have been blown away.
By using Wordtracker & Google Trends we can figure this information out.
The Tools of the Trade
I’m going to use two real world examples.
The first one is my hairdresser.
My hairdresser you think, should be underemployed. They don’t have to do much to get their $30 when cutting my hair. But there are other people where they have to cut a lot of hair. So I asked how much her scissors cost that she used to cut hair. She told me $700. Get out of here.
Sure enough. I did some checking. That’s what professional hairdressers pay for the scissors that cut your hair. There are a whole raft of reasons that for quality purposes, lasting purposes you would pay $700 for a pair of scissors.
I am an immense fan of reality shows. But this particular reality show which I adore is called Top Chef. There’s one things that all these top chef’s share in common. They walk in and out with their knife bag.
Do you know how much a set of professional knives cost?
I was checking this out - $2-3000.
Yet professional chefs happily pay it. Why? It’s the tools of their trade. Think plumbers and their toolbox, carpenters etc.
Yet people on the internet are different. People want to use the cheapest connection and the oldest computer to try and make money online. It’s like using Molly’s (Ed’s daughter) safety scissors to cut hair in a professional salon.
Not a good idea people.
People will pay thousands and thousands of dollars on education and courses and yet have a crappy, four year old computer. It just doesn’t make sense.
Or they’ll be on a broadband connection which is broadband in name only. In Australia this is a massive problem as the broadband is rubbish. In the US it’s a lot better. Seriously, you need to have the best internet you can afford.
Some people on the 30 Day Challenge are working from some stunningly remote places. We’re talking the wilds of Alaska, outback Australia. We’re talking Manchester England, we’re talking the inside of Ed Dale’s head.
Some of you are doing this challenge on dialup. That may be your only alternative and I absolutely applaud your effort. It is possible but the tools of your trade are:
- The fast broadband connection that is possible where you live.
- The best quality computer that you can afford & get.
In my mind the Apple Mac is the best computer for Internet Marketing.
Don’t even bother arguing PC heads - as all the new Macs run Vista, XP. You can run Windows & Mac OS side by side. You can run all Windows apps on the Mac.
Every internet guru I know is on a Mac. They work smoother, you can record screen captures. There is a perception that Macs are more expensive than PC’s. Nope. Not true. Macs are now cheaper than PC’s. The software you need to use is much cheaper than the equivalent on the PC.
Apple doubled its market share in the last twelve months. Admitedly from a small market base PC people. But it’s the best platform for audio and visual. New ones are out tomorrow and they are sexy.
If you are going to use a PC then get one that is up to date. It has lots of memory, a decent size hard disk, can handle audio and video easily.
Really you need to look at the tools of the trade. It does stun me that people will pay $3,000 for an internet marketing course but look at it on a four year old computer.
We just had a team meeting on Second Life. Your computer need the computing power to be able to run applications like this as this is the way the world is going!
What About People Who Won’t be Able to Buy Our Stuff?
Get with the program people.
The people we want to approach are the people with disposable income.
The people who buy ebooks and audio video programs already have disposable income. They don’t have a computer which is over twelve months old. Yes, you can point out opposite examples but as a general rule this is not the case. We are looking for people with high disposable incomes, who buy ipods and macs.
This is the market that spends money online.
It makes absolute sense to have the tools of the trade. Just like the hairdresser with the best scissors and the chef with the top knives.
Tools of the trade rant over (with added Apple psychopathy thrown in for good measure).
I Love Reality Shows
It’s a wonderful insight into human psyche and the way people think and work. My absolute all time favorite is the idol series.
What I love it more for is the analogy between it and internet marketing.
Before, in a record company an AR rep would go out to the clubs and try to spot talent. They’d see a band and think these guys can make a crack of it. They’d spend huge money on recording and marketing. Nine out of ten of these bands and musicians flop. They don’t get any further than one album. What were they doing?
They were trying for product first.
Lets look at idol. This is why I love it so much. What do they do first?
Market research.
They have tens of thousands of people coming to them trying to crack the big time. They have an initial filtering process.
They go from noticing to judging.
They get the traffic from having a television show - everyone wants to be on the television show.
As soon as they go through the market research - aka the competition - they are making money hand over fist.
They are paying for all the production, all the costs, they are making a huge amount of money from the phone in. The voting.
They get you the market to tell them who you want to see as a singer. It’s brilliant.
In the twelve weeks to build up it’s like a launch build up. And eventually the product rises to the top. It’s the one you voted for which is why it’s a guaranteed number one when it comes out of the process.
Not to mention three or four other artists which of course they have under exclusive contract as well as the eventual winner.
It’s a brilliant concept and it’s the third day challenge all over. Imagine getting paid to do the market research. Before you even have a product you’re getting paid.
Today It’s Time to Start Judging
Remember: I want you to start off with the one that you think from a gut feel perspective seems right to you.
Our brains are really cool. If you can allow yourself not to judge, and just to notice there are an incredible number of processes going on in your brain.
While you are in a noticing mode, all of this information is going straight into the subconscious - your brains hard disk.
Your brain is focusing on the information
Your subconscious is working on it, making connections, using the full power of all your experience. Everything you’ve read, everything you’ve known.
Everything.
If you just let it percolate.
You cannot help but have cream rise to the top. Now one of these niches will appeal more to you. I know this process happens. Good writers use the same process. Gary Halbert (the famous copywriter) used the same process.
If you judge then nothing gets through. There’s no material, no connections, nothing to work with. You can’t build anything - it’s like trying to build a house with two pieces of stick. It’s not going to happen because you filtered everything out.
That’s why I try to get you to notice. Take this lesson here and everywhere else in the thirty day challenge. Trust me, there is a huge amount of science behind what I’m saying. It’s not woo-woo stuff. It is just pure scientific fact. If you let it work for you, it will work brilliantly.
The Judging Process
Using Google to find out what you’re up against!
At this stage you should have a few market ideas and have begun the process of exploring the traffic potential for those keywords that relate to your market ideas using Wordtracker.
Our goal in stage 1 - the market & keyword research stage is to find an Umbrella Phrase.
Find An Umbrella Phrase
An umbrella phrase is a keyword phrase that has an acceptable amount of competition. An acceptable amount of competition is probably a keyword with below 25,000 - 30,000 competing pages phrase matched & an acceptable amount of traffic (80+ daily searches). (Don’t worry - we’ll explain what these terms mean in a second).
Pick the right phrase and it will be an easy challenge for you. Pick the wrong one and it will be much more difficult.
Let’s start in Wordtracker with the phrase ’speed reading’:
This is the traffic profile for the keyword ’speed reading’ with the long tail keywords beneath that. Wordtracker says ’speed reading’ has 417 searches a day, ’speed reading free’ has 58 and so forth.
These are estimates of total traffic across the internet by Wordtracker, scaled up from the limited data set from Dogpile & Metacrawler to the total amount of search traffic online. (Dogpile & Metacrawler keywords represent about 0.63% of searches across all engines and is still a weighty 350 million search sample for the last 90 days. See here for a more detailed explanation).
Wordtracker is often accurate in these estimations but there are some keywords where they are not accurate. In a later video I will show you a Google Trends trick which will give an indication of what the potential traffic might be in Google which has about 55-60% of the worlds traffic.
Our starting phrase is the keyword ’speed reading’. What does Google tell us about a search for ’speed reading’:
Broad Match Form
We’ll first type the words in broad match form which is just the words and nothing else.
We can see that Google tells us there are 117 million pages online which have the words ’speed’ and ‘reading’ somewhere on the page but not necessarily together. (I’m searching Google from the UK and I put &gl=US at the end of the url to get US search results).
That’s a lot of competition. Certainly we wouldn’t be able to compete effectively using the strategies we’re going to use in the Thirty Day Challenge.
But at this stage we’re only really interested in what the traffic for the phrase match is.
Phrase Match
That’s where you enter speed reading inside quotes (inverted commas) like this
We now see that there are
1,390,000 pages (1.4 million).
This is also extremely high and wouldn’t meet our criteria for acceptable competition for an umbrella phrase.
One Hundred Results
Before I move on I want to show you a phenomenon you may not be aware of. I always set my Google results to show 100. All in one go. I do that by clicking on the preferences link:
and setting the number of results per page to 100:
Make sure you click on save preferences:
If I now scroll down to the bottom of the first page for this phrase
and click on the 10 next to the word ‘Next’.
Google should be showing me pages from 900 to 1000. But you’ll notice that although that from 1,400,000 pages there are only 797 uniquely different pages with the phrase ’speed reading’ on it.
The rest are very similar to the 797 and have been omitted.
Effectively those pages are going to be in the supplemental index in Google and not the primary index. So this is a rather interesting phenomenon.
We started of with 1.4 million pages for the keyword ’speed reading’ and ended up with just 797 unique pages with that phrase on it. This phenomenon exists for almost all keywords online. Google in particular, but all the search engines are slightly pulling the wool over our eyes about the actual amount of optimized web pages there are for any keyword.
Generally any keyword you enter into Google will return hundreds, if not thousands of pages. But very little of those pages are actually optimized specifically for these specific phrases. So there is a lot more opportunity to bring optimized copy on to the internet and have it ranked for a keyword than you might otherwise think than looking at the broad match results.
Bear in mind that the only number that is important is the number of pages returned when you do a phrase match for that keyword. For this particular phrase ’speed reading’ 1.4 million is still too high.
Back to Wordtracker
Look at the second keyword - 58 searches for ’speed reading free’. Now lets go to Google and look at the level of broad match competition for ’speed reading free’.
Entering speed reading free without quotes (i.e. a partial match search)
gives us
nearly 88 million results.
We think we’re heading down the same track. ‘Speed reading’ was 118 million and ’speed reading free’ is 88 million.
Whilst the broad match shows us
just 618 pages. That’s 618 pages which contain the phrase ’speed reading free’ where all those words are together and in that order.
618 is well within the recommendation for competition in the Thirty Day Challenge i.e. below 25,000 - 30,000.
This is a candidate umbrella phrase on the basis of competition.
But it will only be a true umbrella phrase if we can confirm the traffic potential that Wordtracker suggests.
It’s only 58 searches a day. I would prefer to see 80 or 100 or better. But for the purposes of this exercise it is acceptable.
In the next video we need go off and check the traffic potential and confirm those Wordtracker numbers using a little trick I (Rob Somerville) developed using Google Trends.
Redux
This is based on the redux video By Ed.
Most people just type in speed reading into Google without quotes like this
You see where it says Results 1- 100 of about 114,000,000 for speed reading. That’s the competition number we are talking about. We are not talking about the Google Adword competition down the right hand side
So when Ed & Rob say competition they mean the number of competing web pages - in this case 114,000,000.
Now add quotes or inverted commas to speed reading to get the exact match
Again look at the number of competing web pages. That’s 1,390,000 competing web pages. That’s a lot less than 114,000,000.
There are 1,390,000 competing web pages for the exact match search “speed reading”.
This means we only want pages where the word speed is followed by the word reading. Thats an exact match. In quotes. “speed reading”.
We are not interested in the keyword without quotes aka broad match which means the word speed and reading can appear in any order on the page. That’s not helpful to us.
We only want a maximum of 30,000 competing web pages as the method we use to get free traffic relies on this maximum.
(Lower minimum to be confirmed with Ed - watch this space)
We would not use speed reading as a phrase. It’s not useful to us at this time. We do not have a chance of ever getting ranked in the first couple of pages (some smarting SEOs would probably disagree with Ed on this but we are talking about a simple but effective method designed for The Thirty Day Challenge).
Now enter speed reading (without quotes) into the Wordtracker bar
and press enter.
Look at the next keyword down. Ideally we would like to see bigger numbers than 54. But 54 is usable. Ideally we’d like to see above 100 searches per day.
So what do we do?
We go back into Google and now we enter “speed reading free” and hit Search
That shows us 601 competing web pages. So we can totally dominate this front page with our strategy.
Just to be clear: ’speed reading free’ meets all of our criteria.
Hope that makes everything clear.
Umbrella Phrase Criteria
- Does it have 80-100 plus daily searches in Wordtracker?
- Does it have below 25,000-30,000 competing pages (when you search with phrase match i.e. quotes)?
What Does Below 25,000 - 30,000 Competing Web Pages Mean?
This is my take on this.
The number of exact phrase match (i.e. with quotes) competing web pages should be under 25,000 but definitely not over 30,000.
But lets be pragmatic about this. If it’s 30,100 I don’t think it will make much of a difference. 30,500 is pushing it and probably a no. Use your judgment.
If you get under 25,000 competing web pages then ranking will get easier and easier. If you’re in the hundreds it’s going to be even easier still.
If there’s no competing web pages and some searches per day then that is still good.
So don’t sweat it. Under 25,000. Definitely not over 30,000 (unless we’re talking a couple of hundred pages here and there).
That’s my pragmatic view on this.
Summary
- Start off in Wordtracker with your initial keyword research.
- Enter your niche and take the first keyword in the list. E.g. if you looked up ’speed reading’ and ’speed reading’ is first then take that.
- Go off to Google and enter the keyword in inverted commas in Google to establish the number of competition pages there are - in phrase match form.
- Suggested competing web pages are somewhere between 25,000 - 30,000. To be added: What is minimum number of acceptable competing web pages?
- You do not compare unique or broad match pages - only phrase match from keyword to keyword.
- If there is an unacceptable level of competition (i.e. more than 30,000 pages for exact match) then go back to Wordtracker and choose the next keyword down.
- Plug this next keyword down into Google with quotes and see if the number of results is acceptable.
- Repeat until keyword has acceptable competing web pages (ideally between 25,000 - 30,000).
- Go back to Wordtracker and check that the traffic figure is 80-100 daily searches or more. Less is not so good.
- There should be several keywords in the tail. I.e. the list of all the niche keywords. If you see just 2 or 3 then it’s probably not a good use of your time.
- In the next video we will confirm the traffic numbers and complete the keyword research part of the Thirty Day Challenge.
Caro added some good comments in this forum post:
Keep working through the keyword lists for a niche idea if the first couple are over 80-100 searches, but have way too many competing pages.
If you don’t have over 80-100 searches per day to begin with - put onto the reserve bench* & move onto your second niche idea.
If you do have between 80-100 searches per day for the umbrella phrase but over 25-30K competing pages - keep going through the list until you find a keyword phrase between 80-100 searches per day that does have under 25-30K, if not move onto your second idea (but still keep it on the reserve bench for now*)
* You will see why tomorrow we say reserve bench - as Robert will show you a method to double check the traffic numbers - so at this stage you don’t want to throw anything out completely - granted some you may seem close to.
Just wait until you see the next two videos on this topic and how it all ties together - Robert has perfected this technique & knows his stuff!
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August 8th, 2007 at 3:29 am
[…] Who could say it better than Mike Mindel on his blog? […]
August 8th, 2007 at 3:41 am
Hi ya Mike,
Awesome as usual!
Just something we noticed…
You have actually put: But for this particular phrase ’speed reading’ 797 is still too high.
It needs to say: 1.4 million is too high.
The only number that is important is the number of pages returned when you do a phrase match for that keyword.
You do not compare Unique or Broad match pages - only phrase match from keyword to keyword.
During the 30DC we are ’suggesting’ that people use a level of 25-30K as phrase match as a defining number to filter out to judge keywords.
Caro
August 8th, 2007 at 6:37 am
Mike, just wanna say Thanks for all these notes and links. I couldn’t get access to YouTube, so I’ve missed some videos. Your blog helps me moving forward.
“I like it!”
P.S. BTW, did you include “Day 7 - Redux - Another way to look at this” in Blog here. I can’t view video there, but lots of compliment comments make me curious.
August 8th, 2007 at 8:48 am
What a magnificent job you are doing, Mike!
Thanks A LOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Martin Mølsted/Mölsted/Molsted
August 8th, 2007 at 8:56 am
Thanks Caro.
I’ve updated the lesson.
Redux is coming.
Can you please confirm its 25,000 - 30,000 and not 0 - 30,000?
Can you also confirm suggested 80+ daily searches and whether 0-80 is ok.
Thanks
August 8th, 2007 at 9:55 am
Redux now added.
August 8th, 2007 at 10:12 am
It is under 25,000 and if you are going to stretch it, MAX 30,000
Obviously the less competing the better.
Go to this thread for clarification:
www.thirtydaychallenge.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1558
Best to you
Caro
August 8th, 2007 at 10:15 am
And it is ideally over 100 - Ed talked about this today on the extra video.
So it’s at least 80, ideally 100 plus.
The MORE traffic the better.
And he has only used the speed reading free as an example for teaching purposes, even though the search number is too low.
You will see why - and how it all fits in with the next two video’s which apparently are very close to being released…
:-)
August 8th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
Hi Mike
Do you have any problem with me PDF’ing these pages for my own use. I realise that they are your copyright and would not want to infringe this in any way.
Brilliant job, no everyone can see the videos and I find walking through text and making notes after the event useful to me..
Thanks again for all your hard work.
Di - fool on the hill - Chapman
August 8th, 2007 at 1:11 pm
Mike, Thanks for Redux!
On Wordtracker search results page, it says “346,732,636″ searches (last 90 days). Then initially I thought detail below, too, is number of search for 90 days. As you stated “It’s only 58 searches a day”, so it’s my misunderstanding.
August 8th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
Yeh. 346,732,636 is the total searches in the database. I’m going to swap that for the total searches for the top 100 terms in the last 90 days.
Coming shortly.
August 8th, 2007 at 1:18 pm
Yes. Feel free to pdf pages as long as there is a link to the article on the blog please
August 8th, 2007 at 5:07 pm
Hey Mike,
Gosh, I have fallen in love with this blog.
This is the place for me after I have done my homework. A great place for me to check if I do everything right.
Thanks Mike. I appreciate your effort.
August 8th, 2007 at 7:10 pm
Thanks Mike
If I can get it all working I will offer it to others later in the course as your notes are actually getting folk through who cannot access You Tube for one reason or another.
Greatly valued content.
Di
August 10th, 2007 at 1:44 pm
Hi Mike - these notes are just the icing on the cake - thank you so much. They will also be invaluable for me next week as i will be on holiday and frequenting the internet cafes in Carcassonne and Toulouse - so much easier for me to read than listen. Thanks again
August 10th, 2007 at 1:55 pm
Thanxxxxxxxx!! This is the best place to come for clarification and helping to let the ‘penny drop’ after listening to the pods and watching the videos.(the ones I could access at least!) It’s even better to read after I’ve done the homework. It’s a bit like having Cliff’s notes for Shakespeare!!
super job, Mike
August 11th, 2007 at 4:50 pm
This is invaluable! I’ve been in internships before…they don’t compare with this…too cool. Keep it up!
August 18th, 2007 at 7:38 pm
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August 31st, 2007 at 2:17 am
[…] Day 7 - It’s Judgment Time - Part I […]
August 31st, 2007 at 12:34 pm
This is Quality Content !