SeoBlackhat.co.uk

I shared this recently with a colleague and he suggested I pass it on. Often, when you are looking to get into a market, you get in without doing some quick math in your head and a few searches to determine if you should do that $500.00 ad spend in AdWords as a test. When you find a potential market, spend ten minutes to determine if it can be profitable. If it can be, then turn on the PPC test to see if it can convert well for you. Sometimes, a great market just wont convert well for you it happens and it is best to know as soon as possible if the market is a dud. But make sure you do these steps first:

In this example, I will use ClickBank, which sells mostly eBooks. You can apply these steps to any affiliate program or network.

Step One: Write down the industry, exact eBook name and author.

Step Two: Write down the commission per sale.

Step Three: Based on a conversion ratio of 3%, project revenue. (while I realize that 3% seems high, it is what you should expect with the right targeted keywords, the right product and the right landing page).

Step Four: Write down your break even point in terms of Cost Per Click (CPC).

Step Five: Open the Keyword Tool in Google AdWords

Step Six: Enter the main keyword or the merchants site

Step Seven: Show Estimated CPC, Search Volume Trends and Highest Volume Occurred In (drop down Choose Columns to Display)

Step Eight: Change Match Type to Exact (we dont want non-qualified clicks)

Step Nine: Sort by Estimated CPC (highest first)

Step Ten: Scroll down to the range of the break even point you wrote down in Step Four. You must have at least 300 in Search Volume from the month prior to consider using the keyword phrase. This will give you ten potential searchers per day.

Step Eleven: Verify that at least 100 clicks per day can be had with the keywords which match the above criteria.

Step Twelve: Re-run Traffic Estimator and target the actual product name and the authors name and look for traffic estimates of ten clicks or more.

Lets do an example together:

1. Dog Training. Kingdom of Pets: SitStayFetch by Daniel Stevens

2. $31.23

3. $93.69 ($31.23 x 3) 3 sales is based on 100 visitors at 3% conversion (most will state that this conversion ratio is too high, but because we will focus on the keywords that sell, this is the minimum that you should expect).

4. $0.94 ($93.69/100) Paying $0.94 per click would break even on the campaign.

5. N/A

6. I prefer to target the merchants site, as it often gives me a faster pull of effective keywords. I can also use SpyFu as outlined in yesterdays edition. So I put in: http://www.kingdomofpets.com/

7-9. N/A

10. The first section are keywords related to how to train which is the focus of the site and the keywords we want to focus on to sell the guide. Here are the ones that I selected:

how to train dog ($0.96) 74,000. Yes, this is above the range, but just barely and it is highly focused.
how to train my dog ($.90) 3,600
how to train a puppy ($0.80) 27,100
how to train puppies ($0.56) 3,600

The other sections? You can target them, but you will need to create a new landing page for each because each has a different market and we want to keep our conversions as high as possible.Here are some ideas:

dog training collar – this would be an eCommerce product sale rather than an informational eBook.

dog trainer – with the slumping economy, many could be looking to moonlight to help make ends meet. This could spur you to create your own product on how to make a career out of being a dog trainer. There is plenty of information to pull from on the web and being the merchant often is the ticket you have been looking for.

dog bark – this is a problem. By targeting your landing page to show how the problem can be solved quickly, easily and affordably is what the prospect is seeking.

This is where out of the box thinking comes in. Business opportunities can come anytime and anywhere, but you must seize the opportunity.

11. Verified. On the conservative side, 3,000 searches per day should result in at least 100 clicks.

12. Searching for kingdom of pets, sitstayfetch, sit stay fetch and daniel stevens did not return results which were usable.

With the above, it can be assumed since we can get over 100 clicks per day at around the break even point that this would be a product worth pursuing. A $50-$300.00 PPC test would be worthwhile.

PPC Tip: I learned this one from Dan Thies over at SEOFastStart.com and StomperNet Faculty member. Make your bids half of what the top bid is, so if you do this, then you can target keywords at DOUBLE your break-even point to gain more qualified click throughs.

Amit Singhal, from Google, did a 50 slide presentation back in 2004, regarding the Challenges in Running a Commercial Web Search Engine.

Why am I covering it now? First, a member sent this to me to comment on, and I think it is rather interesting to see where things were then compared to five years later. Heres a hint: Not much has changed.

Question: How many queries are unique?
Answer: Over half

At first glance, you would look at that and think I have to do a better job of getting more keywords since users search patterns are not consistent.

Wait. After looking at the data from about 60 sites, here is an example from one of my typical sites.

108k visits from 28k keyword queries. Looking at it this way, it looks quite diverse, however, looking at the Top 100 queries, 56,656 visits came through. Which means about 52,000 visits came through the remaining 27,900 queries.

Am I optimizing for 28,000 keywords? Not even close. So how do you improve your chances of coming up for many of the phrases which may never come up on an analytics report or during keyword research.

If I can quote Dan Thies, Use modifiers aggressively.

What are modifiers? You already know them, but probably by a different name.

Examples of common modifiers are:

• best
• buy
• cheap
• discount
• wholesale
• online
• accessories

Modifiers allow you to expand your keyword set. So instead of having just blue widgets, you would have discount blue widgets, blue widget accessories etc. Geo Targeted (San Francisco, bay area, Chicago, etc.) would also be classified as a modifier.

Over the last week or so there has been a TON of press about the new Google algorithm change with brands – even some going as far as to saying it is bigger than Update Florida. I wouldnt go that far, because that update literally killed many markets. This one, not so much. But lets break this down as I have had a week to really hammer on it in my testing lab.

So what changed?!?!

Report: Google has flushed their index and rebuilt it again based on brand strength. Last fall Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, was quoted as saying Brands are the solution, not the problem and now brands are shooting to the top of the SERPs.

Reaction: Everyone who is not a brand is freaking out that SEO is now dead again.

What You Should Do Right Now: Sit back, take a deep breath, and know this: the sky isnt falling. And Im going to show you why you dont need to panic. SEO is far from dead.

Lets start out by defining a brand.

Definition of Brand: A company that is well known in certain markets. Examples:

Running Shoes: Nike
Photocopies: Xerox
Tissue: Kleenex
Jeans: Levis
Bandage: Band-Aid
Coffee: Starbucks

The sheer power of brand awareness is when the actual competitors product is called by the name of the branded company. For example, you dont ask for a tissue if you are going to sneeze, you ask for a Kleenex. If you get cut, you dont say, Do you have an adhesive bandage? No. You ask for a Band-Aid. And if youre old enough, making a photocopy was referred to as Making a Xerox copy.

With that out of the way, we can agree that branding is important and nothing will change that. Lets now look at the actual algorithm change. Well use RankPulse to track these changes as it has been the choice tool in all the Blog posts online.

Getting a good Quality Score in AdWords is always the push, right? Well, a few things could be tanking your Quality Score.

Sarah, from the Google AdWords team posted three tips and I wanted to add my commentary as well. Shes nails it by stating often the poor keywords in our accounts will cause the rest of our keywords to perform not as well. And the biggest issue are those low traffic keywords in the search network.

Start Small. The knee jerk reaction is to throw a million keywords at the wall and see what sticks. The problem with this is that it is hard to manage this many keywords. A keyword may have terrible performance, but it gets lost in the crowd and you may never notice. Its fine to use the throw and stick method, but I like to throw small batches of keywords at the wall so I can carefully monitor their performance.

: This goes along with Dan Thies Triangularation Approach that he did for AdWords last year. Throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks may work for organic search with auto-created pages, but not for AdWords. Too many groups and keywords leads you down the path of I have no idea how my campaign is succeeding or failing.