Internet Marketing ABC

I know that many online marketers pay no attention at all to MySpace anymore – it’s “dying a slow death”. But heck, there are still millions of people on there, and you want to look at the groups.

You can see how many groups there are in each category (that’s groups, not members), and then how many members in each group. It’s huge amounts of people, and those numbers can be excellent indicators for markets that are really worth entering.

Google Analytics will get a lot better soon. This new feature is called “Intelligence” and will show up in Analytics accounts over the next few weeks. It will basically alert you of significant changes – for example, if a new blog post that you published has a much higher (or lower) on-page time rate (which would be an indication of higher engagement, because people spend more time on that page). This is great feedback for you, because you know that your audience either wants more of this (if they spent more time on the site) or isn’t interested in this (if they spent less time).
There are different things that Intelligence tracks, not just on-time site. You can also create email alerts, so that you don’t even have to log in, but automatically know when something significant happened. Very cool, very neat. Can’t wait to see it in action.

Watch the video below for more details:

Tiffany Dow recently put out a good video that introduces you on how to do market research by spying on your competitors. It’s 9 minutes long, and if you are new to this, very insightful. Check it out. She basically talks about checking out the clickbank marketplace, but what’s even more valuable is that she “thinks out loud” while she’s going through the process. If you take into consideration how much experience and knowledge Tiffany has, then it’s easy to see how valuable that is.

Billion-dollar copywriter Clayton Makepeace just published a GREAT article on how to get access to marketing research worth billions of dollars – totally free. Rather than summarize it, I tell you to just read it – it’s worth your time.

Want to become a msater of research? Well, you should if you are serious about making money online. Because while there are many products out there that will promise you: “just follow my step-by-step plan and you’ll get rich!”very few of them can deliver.

Doing research is the most boring part of internet marketing – but it’s also one of the mostimportant tasks. If you don’t do proper research, you don’t know what you’re doing. If you do proper research, you have a way of checking your idea against reality. You are able to make data-based-decisions.

Research can’t guarantee success – but it will guarantee that you improve on previous results.

Robin Broitman published a great post where he assembled online research tools that you can use to research… well, pretty much anything!

I have really good research skills, but there are lots of research and monitoring services in this post that I never heard of and am testing out right now. And so should you.

If you are not yet using Google Alerts, then drop everything else you’re doing and read this right now. It’s one of the most powerful tools in my business, it’s 100% free and it will keep you on top of your game.

I call Google Alerts my PIA (Personal Intelligence Agency). Because it’s almost like having your own “web agents” going out there, crawling the web for any new piece of information on any term you want.

The most important thing that you want to keep track of is your own name, and your business’ name. This way, everytime someone talks about you or mentions your business, you will know about it and can become part of the conversation. Prior to Google Alerts, big corporations where hiring people to do just that. There were companies that did nothing but that – they were called “media monitoring services” – they kept track of what the media says about them. Now, it’s not just the media, but it’s the whole web – blogs, websites, forums, news and videos.

This is extremely powerful – and you can also use it to keep track of relevant terms for your industry.

For example, if you are selling bird cages, you could set up Google Alerts of “bird cages” and keep track of every conversation and every piece of news that mentions the phrase bird cages.

Do you write a blog and are afraid that you won’t have enough ideas what to write about? Google Alerts will easily fix that. Just comment on what people are talking about, current events and so on. There is an unlimited amount of information on the web, and Google Alerts helps you to “wiretap” that information and filter out only what’s relevant to you.

Spy On Your Competition

Of course, you are free to not only get alerted about your own name and relevant industry terms, but also about competitors. So if your number one competitor is “Best Bird Cages Ltd.” then set up a Google Alert for that – and each time someone mentions them, or they put out something on the web, you’ll know about it.

Setting Up Google Alerts The Right Way

You can set up Google Alerts as Email service or as RSS feed. If you regularly use an RSS reader, I’d really recommend that option for you.

Next, if you don’t know about Google’s advanced search features, be sure to familiarize yourself with them. They can bring you a lot better results than just the basic standard searches.

I would always recommend that you go for the “comprehensive” option – but if you put in broad terms (like “Internet Marketing”) that can be overwhelming, because just about any forum post and blog that has the term in it will be sent your way. So in those cases, you might want to limit the notifications to News, and maybe Blogs.

The next thing is – you really want to schedule a certain amount of time for taking care of Google Alerts. Otherwise you’ll be all over the place. Google Alerts is great, but if you don’t set a time frame, you can end up spending your whole day chasing Google Alerts. So for example, say you’ll read and react to Google Alerts for 30 minutes a day at first. If you find that you get good results from that, you can commit to 45 minutes a day and see if that yields even better results that are worth the additional time investment. And so on. There are no hard rules for this. You gotta figure out for yourself what’s best for your biz.

And in case that’s not enough for you – there are other web intelligence services too:

• Windows Live Alerts
  I have tried them, and found that it really wasn’t worth the time. Google Alerts is so much more powerful.
• Yahoo! Alerts
  Yahoo generally has a younger crowd, so if you market to a young audience, then you should try out their service too.
• Google Alert
  (this one is NOT Google Alerts – it’s a professional solution that has free and paid accounts).

Recommended Reading:

• How To Build A Reputation Monitoring Dashboard

In case you don’t know about Google’s advanced search yet – it’s a must for internet marketers. You absolutely need to become Google savvy. Research is one of the most important things for internet marketers, and the top-research tool is without the shadow of a doubt: Google.

But most people never make full use of the power that Google offers them. Because they don’t know about Google’s advanced search.

You can use the advanced search form, or – like really advanced Googlers – like to use advanced search queries in the normal Google interface – if you do lots of advanced searches, it’s a big time saver to learn them.

Google itself says that advanced searches use these queries less than 5% of the time and that usually a basic search is enough – but I really found that the advanced search helps me to save a lot of time, and I use it frequently – and so do many of the most successful internet marketers (like Rich Schefren and John Reese).

For example, if you would wanted to see all the instances where I use the word “research” on InternetMarketingABC.com, then you could do a Google search like this:

You could also use a query like this:

site:internetmarketingabc.com "market research"

In that case, the term “research” alone wouldn’t be enough to show up on the results, but only pages where specifically the term “market research” is used within the domain of internetmarketingabc.com would show up.

If, for example you wanted to know every instance where Rich Schefren blogged about anything that’s related to affiliate marketing, you could use the following search query:

site:strategicprofits.com/blog affiliates
(click here to see the results page)

There are lots of things this can come in handy when you do research, so I suggest you start to use it right away.

Before you enter into a market, you should check that you can actually make money from it. Some people are passionate and knowledgable about fruit shakes, but that doesn’t mean that they’d be able to make a lot of money selling a fruit shake recipe book.

So, determining market viability is not that difficult. Just type in your main term for that market into google and see what shows up – are there lots of sponsored ads? If you get three top sponsored links, and on the right side there are 8 sponsored links and a link that says “More sponsored links”, then there are lots of people making money in that market.

If you then also look in the Google keyword tool and see that the term has a high advertiser competition and click prices of more than $1 per click, then it’s very likely that is a profitable market in which people are making lots of money.