Archive for January, 2008

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Most people that buy something whether in stores or on the internet go through a distinct buying cycle. The more you know about the intricacies of your customers buying cycle the sooner and more efficiently that you can make money from them.

Firstly lets go through how a person decides to buy a new car. Now a new car purchase may not be the most obvious or even typical buying process but is has a number of distinct steps from start to purchase.

1. You start by noticing that people around you are buying new cars

2. You start looking in magazines in the store for new cars and car reviews

3. You start looking at car features that are important and the deeper important features of different cars

4. You start test driving cars

5. You decide on a car that you would like to buy.

This is a classic buying cycle and something that you need to be aware of if you want to hit the prospect at the right time. If you write reviews then you can get prospects into your marketing funnel immediately and as you go in depth in your reviews you will have keywords that people will be looking at in part 3 of this cycle.

Finally if you want to get you prospects attention really well you will do comparisons between different products in the same niche. Your prospects at this point will have a lot of knowledge of the products that they are interested in so you will not be able to bullshit at all. The really great part of this last type of marketing is that the comarisons that you are doing should allow you to have the buyere buy directly from you no matter which of two or three choices they have.

This process is of course different in different markets but if you are looking closely at forums and following blog posts about the products in your  niche you should be able to look through the buying process and have a good idea of where to insert yourself so that your buyers will find you near the end of the cycle instead of too early when you can lose their attention easier.

One of the worst tendencies that I have is to jump into projects that are not very well thought out and very difficult to win at. I have tried some Amazon stores some Clickbank malls and even some crazy RSSG schemes to create huge sites that are not very original and quite spammy while I could spend a lot more time creating good content instead. These days hopefully are behind me now.

One of the things that is very popular these days is the idea of blogging about celebrities. Lots of people are interested in the lifestyles and transgressions of celebrities and as you may have heard there is huge volume in traffic going to celebrity scoop sites. I know because I have been caught more than once looking at Perez Hiltons site.

Getting good celebrity content

The problem with creating this kind of site is not just in one place but in two. We are all willing to put in time to a great venture, but just how much time? Perez puts out blog posts day and night, around 20 or so posts a day and the real problem for most people would be to get the pictures, that is what everyone is interested in and the content which is also really tough to get on a timely basis. If Britney Spears is dancing around naked at a club and you post it 10 hours after it happened then 10 popular sites have already posted about it, with pictures and even CNN has an article about it. And the next day? No one cares about day old news when there is always exciting news today. So you archives are useless.

Interesting Blog style

The next thing that Perez or TMZ or I don’t like you in that way, is that the writers are witty, make up names and have all sorts of funny pop culture references that are more of a writing gift then something that can be learned. I try to ber personable in my posts but I am nothing like Perez writing about UnFitney or pAArty times and I certainly could not make up a good nickname.

Low CPM

Lastly the problem with celebrity sites is that people just do not click the ads. The cost per 1000 clicks (CPM) is really really low. There is no reason for most people that go to a celebrity page to be interested in what would be interesting on the page besides the pic and article. The readers are not stalking Britney or Paris, they are just interested in the funny new story. Because of this you need huge traffic which of course is an expensive hosting proposition.

So if you are looking at any one of the always new popular niches to make money in you need to take a closer look at the market within that market. How fresh does the content have to be? How personable do you need to be, and even knowlegable to a large degree and finally, with these types of sites, constant huge content to get lots of visitors and still having a low CPM means that you will be always disappointed, well always disappointed unless you are Perez maybe.

one of the really great systems that I have read in the last few years was the Getting Things Done book by David Allen. Getting Things done lives on the principle that if you organize every part of your life then you are not thinking of the things that do not matter, you are only thinking about the things that will make a difference and acting on those. Anything that you can not get done in a simple 2 minute process becomes part of a project that you work towards completing.

I was over at David Allens GTD site and there was a bunch of pdf files that you could download. While going through these I ran across a really great way to organize the journal that I wrote about a few days ago. Instead of having just a few sections this is a way to sort all of your thoughts and projects into a few sections. Read the rest of this entry »

There has been a bit of talk over the last few days about how quickly blogs are ranking high for keywords and very quickly at that. Rosalind Gardiner of the Affiliate Blog talks about how she ranked in Google in 9 seconds and I believe her. Why would I believe it? Because I have done it myself. Here is how I ranked number 1 in Google in just a few minutes with one blog post.

I wrote a post about a fitness ebook called Turbulence training and one night while I was writing a follow up post I noticed that I typed Turbulense Trainig a few times (notice the S instead of a C in the name) I checked Google saw that there was no competition for the term so I tried it out as a post name and a couple of times in the post.

Well 15 minutes after I posted I did a search of Turbulense Training on Google and there I was at number 1 on Google for the term. I was pretty excited about this term coming up as number one as the misspelling I would have thought would be common. Well it isn’t.

Over the last two months or so I have been able to get only about 20 pageviews from the term Turbulense Training. This tells us two things. Firstly it is great and quite easy to rank for misspellings, but, secondly it is probably not as profitable as we might think. There is one thing to blog for long tail keywords but finding misspellings in them so that you can rank number 1 in Google is a bit of a lost cause

Well the first day of the year has come and my plan of action should start to really take shape starting today. I have outlined a few strategies but more importantly is the daily habits that I may have known about last year but did not actually do. Here are the daily work plans.

Plan every day - As we all know it is very easy to get on the computer, find an interesting thread on Digital Point and then surf from there for an hour and a half connecting the dots in some not very useful process. Instaed I will start the day with a plan of action that I will finish before I start any surfing at all. And I will think of it as work so that I do not get a chance to distract myself or do a half ass job of it.

Blog Posting - With my journal full of stuff to blog about I will be writing to three blogs initially daily whether with sales pitches or just content.

Forum Posting - In each of my niches this will be my way of keeping up with new idea, niche research and backlinks all at the same time.

Blog Commenting - Same as the Forums, all about knowledge, new niche ideas and getting new people to see who I am so that they can surf their way to one of my site.

Niche research - After going through all of the above steps I will have written down a bunch of ideas for little sub niches. I will start doing keyword research and see if there is anything new that I can apply my niche process to.

I have processes written all over the place but often I do not get a chance to implement them because I am busy getting lost in the surfing of knowledge. There is a whole industry behind internet marketing that seems to teach that you don’t ever know enough . Great culture to sell ebooks in but bad for having people implement what they already know.

What if you just made the assumption that you knew enough and just built into niches all of the stuff that you need to do. This is what I have tried to do more and more over the last year and then I find another ebook  that takes me on another tangent which is away from the actions that will build my business.