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Here is the link to the old thread: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3564355 Some of you may remember me as the guy that did analysis work on your sites and AdWords accounts in the old thread. I’ve been performing audits/analyses ranging in scope and scale for years at my agency. In the old thread, I did over two dozen analyses and a few of you went on run successful sites. I’ll let the owners come out and talk about their success if they want to. I haven’t kept up with the success stories from the old thread, or what they have done to stay viable in their niche and I would be curious to hear how they turned out. A lot has changed in digital marketing since the old thread was open and I figured that there should be a thread to discuss it. Below is lx2036 OP and guide to starting up a new business selling stuff online. Below that is a few added sections on channels and tools to help new sites or existing ones. ===================================== Basic Overview of Making Money Online ===================================== So, there are several ways to make money online. All involve selling a product or service. The basic idea is that the farther you get away from the product the less money you make, but you also have the added benefit of less customer hassle and less business management. This is a general rule, and is subject to change based on your particular situation. So, let’s begin with a general summary of internet business ideas, starting furthest away from the product. Simple advertising: This is simply running a successful blog or website with high enough traffic that you can make a reasonable profit from advertising alone. It should be noted that simply putting up Google adsense is not enough. To be profitable, you must learn the entire platform of AdSense and tailor the ads to your website. There are also methods of identifying niche blogs that would gain more traffic than a random “good idea”, so if using this approach sound due diligence should be practiced before starting the blog. Pros: a. Just about the easiest way to start making money. b. Can be started in any niche of passion. Does not have to be related to a product. c. Can be a great way to build a ‘list’. (Lists can be used to make lots of cash through JVs (joint ventures) by broadcasting a sales letter and splitting profit.) d. If there are applicable products that can be pushed, this is an excellent way to make a hybrid business by combining affiliate advertising. Cons: a. While money can be high, it will most likely not be enough to free you from a 9-5. b. To maintain a readership, frequent posting is often needed. I.e. 1-2 posts per week. c. Advertising the blog is typically not an option, so this business is based chiefly on Google search rankings and can take some time to rank for a specific keyword phrase. (and to build readership and make money) Affiliate advertising: Rather than get paid for someone clicking on an ad, you get paid a commission of a product if it sells. This is done through a special link or ad on your website that contains tracking information so that if someone clicks on it, they are then taken to, let’s say, amazon.com and if they buy the product you are awarded a commission of the product. This is usually somewhere between 5-15% of the total sales price. However, affiliate programs outside of Amazon have been known to be as high as 75% (such as online degrees). Others offer a flat rate, such as giving $200 every time someone signs up for a special credit card deal. The way people typically capitalize on this type of business is to create a blog or review site in a specific niche and write about these products; then providing the affiliate link if someone chooses to buy. Pros: a. No customer support b. No initial investment c. Substantial increase in profit over ‘Simple Advertising’ business concept d. Lower maintenance than ‘Simple Advertising’ business concept e. Can be combined with the above business concept (and motherfucking should) Cons: a. Relies heavily on Google organic search ranking b. Total profit, while significantly higher than above, is severely limited. This makes paid advertising usually not an option. So, money sucks, brah Information Products: This is where it’s at. Ideally. (provided you don’t vomit poo poo into an ebook and try to sell it) This is where you identify a niche that could benefit from an information product, let say: how to make pasta. You then research, then write a guide/ebook around this niche. It’s important to note a few things. First of all, this is not a gimmick. You must really research, and write the best possible guide to the best of your ability. Additionally, this is going to be a legitimate business and must be treated as such. Alsoooo, don’t be afraid of writing about a niche you know very little about. Often a newb will write the best beginner guide due to their understanding of someone’s complete lack of experience in said niche. So, pros and cons: Pros: a. Huge profitability. If done with electronic delivery, margins are near complete profit. b. Customer service is surprising low in that you can issue a full refund with any complaint and lose no investment. c. There is no cash initial investment. d. No inventory means the business is infinitely scalable. I.e. only limited by your ability to draw traffic to the sales page. Cons: a. (VERY) Large initial investment of time. (it should be noted that testing PRIOR to creating a guide will limit loss of effort) Drop-shipping Products: This is where products are shipped by the manufacturer or a dropshipping business (more on this in a sec) on your behalf. They will then charge you a handling fee, add the shipping and cost of the actual product, and send you a bill at the end of the month. An alternate form of this is where the manufacturer has a special website that you input orders into and have them charged to your credit card but shipped to the customer. The best thing about this setup is that you can actually sell shippable products with no initial investment. Let me say this again for emphasis: the customer buys from you, and then you use that money to buy the product to ship to them and keep the profit. Earlier I mentioned dropshipping business. This is where a company has a warehouse or series of warehouses that hold a very large assortment of products. Their inventory is integrated into their online website where you then can browse and pick stuff to sell on your website. Pros: a. No initial investment required b. No making orders when supplies get low c. margins are high due to the product being available to you at manufactures price d. typically deals with damaged or defective products Cons: a. Not all manufacturers offer a dropshipping option (see fulfillment centers below for a solution to this problem) Fulfillment center based business. (this is what model my business is based off of) A fulfillment center is a company that has a very large warehouse and stocks other companies’ products. They then (though some sort of online website integration) pick, box, and ship products on your behalf. They typically charge a monthly fee, a monthly storage rate (based on warehouse spaced used), a picking fee (often referred to as handling), and the shipping cost. A neat benefit of this is that because they ship many companies’ products their shipping rate is usually significantly discounted, often offsetting all of their other fees. Pros a. A great solution to selling products from a manufacturer that did not have a dropship option. b. Discounted shipping often will turn an expense into yielding a little bit of profit. Cons a. Requires an initial investment of capital to stock the warehouse. b. While you can setup notification of low stock, you would still be responsible for placing orders. ===================================== Product Requirements ===================================== Think of these more as guidelines instead of absolute rules. The only exception being #1. 1. Start with something that is within your passion: I was a big believer in just covering your bases by making money first, then pursuing your passions after. However, after seeing many people try and not succeed due to simply ‘burning out’, I’ve come to embrace this as a requirement. Simply put: pick something that will hold your interest throughout your learning process. 2. Price Point: This is a big deal, as we will use it to filter customers. -Min max --Minimum price point of $50. The reason for this is that cheap people buy cheap products. If they do not have discretionary income then they will be much more critical of their purchase as well as taking advantage of any warranty or money-back guarantees. So, we set the bar at a minimum of $50 simply to out-price those bad customers. --Maximum price point of $300. This is really a soft rule, but understand why it’s even here in the first place: higher cost means that someone may be uneasy about laying down that much cash at a business they’ve never seen. This means that you are more likely to get calls from people wanting to make sure it’s not just a scam. Most of this however, can be avoided by making a very trustworthy site. 3. Low number of customers: let’s say you have a product that sells for $50 and one for $100. The % of profit is the same. If you could sell 100 of the $50 or 50 of the $100, which would you rather sell? The $100 of course! The lower number of customers means the lower your customer service will be. Also, by increasing price you can further price out bad customers. Win-sauce all around 4. Limited variation: this basically excludes poo poo that you would sell in many different color options, sizes, or features. Think: jeans. Too many sizes you’d have to stock. Same with colors or features. Read on. -Inventory costs: the more selection you offer, the more inventory you’ll need to purchase. This is bad. Especially with something that has many variations and sizes. Also, it leaves more room for orders to get messed up, or customers to change their mind. Speaking of customers thinking, we don’t want that. Why? --Eliminate indecision: it’s proven that the more choice a consumer has, the more likely they will be unable to make a choice. If they can’t choose, they won’t buy. Mr. Ford put it best when talking about the model ‘T’: “The customer can have any color they like, so long as it’s black.” 4. Shipability: shipping can have an impact on your choice of products, here’s why. -Avoid fragile products: obviously shipping out champagne glasses would suck compared to an equally priced/sized product because the glasses are more likely to break. This will result in a pissed off customer, a call, and a return. If you can avoid it, do. --Weight: avoid overly heavy products. The maximum UPS or FedEx will ship is around 65lbs. And that poo poo is expensive. Even if you’re under the cut-off point, keep in mind that shipping cost is based on weight, so the lighter the product the better. This can open you up to offering free shipping, which will increase trust on your site. ---Size: same deal as above. Even if your product is light, it may be large, which could be bad. Shippers also calculate what they call ‘dimensional weight’ which is based on a calculation of LxWxHx(somenumber) which will give the dimensional weight. If the dimensional weight is larger than the actual weight, you are charged at the dimensional weight price. 5. Marketability test: make sure your product passes the marketability test. That is, is there ALREADY an existing market for your product? The easiest way to determine this is to google your niche. Are people advertising? If yes, then you passed. If no, be careful. Many a wonderful idea and invention has been brought to market after many years of blood, sweat, and tears only to find that nobody ACTUALLY wanted it. The marketability test helps us avoid this pitfall. Keep in mind, there is the chance that your niche is actually new, where a product is wanted, but nobody has capitalized on it yet commercially. This is rare, but possible. Use your best judgement and try to do so without being seduced by the niche you’re exploring. Be objective. 6. Ease of use/simplicity: the easier it is to use, the lest customer calls/complaints you’ll have to deal with. When given equal products of varying complexity, always opt for the simple widget. 7. American manufacturing: awesome benefits. -Lead time to ship: this is the time it takes from when you place an order to when you can actually ship the product to a customer. When dealing with international manufacturers lead time to ship is usually huge. Consider the following. Orders are received next day (usually) to time difference (-1day). Payment takes longer due to the use of intermediary banks and currency conversion (-2days). Manufacturing (normal). Shipping (by air -1-2 weeks, by sea -4-8weeks). Clearing customs (-1-2weeks). Shipping to warehouse (normal). Total lost time: 4-12 weeks of lost use of capital. --Liability: if you are an American business and import something from another country for sale in the US, YOU are legally the manufacturer. Annddd therefore LIABLE for any injury or legal claim resulting from a manufacturing defect. (big deal, and might influence your legal structure) ---Disagreement: if there is a disagreement with an American company, you have easy legal recourse. If you have a disagreement with a, let’s say Chinese company, good luck. ----Dropship: probably the best perk of American manufacturing is that you most likely have the option to drop ship. European manufacturers do as well, it’s just shipping for individual items across the pond typically exclude this as an option for them. 8. Option to dropship versus fulfilment center: obviously the perks of a dropship arrangement would be more attractive. So, if given an option between two equal niches, pick the one that has a manufacturer that dropships. 9. Minimum net profit of $250,000 (initial calcs @ 1% conversion and 30% profit margin) this should be a rule. Using market samurai, calculate your annual possible profit: SEOT * Conversion * Retail Price * Profit Margin * 365 = AP (annual profit) The ranges we typically use are conversion rated of 1%, .6% or .3% based on what we feel will sell. For example, higher priced products typically have lower conversion rates. For profit margin, use 40%, 30%, or 20% based on competition in the niche. The more competitive it is, the lower the margin will typically be. -So, why $250,000? If a niche passes this test then we can proceed with testing and reasonably assume that even if testing goes poorly, it will still not have been a waste of time. If the business is only ten percent successful we will still make $25,000/year. Enough to sustain ourselves at the very least. Better put: if our conversion is only 33% o what we assumed, and the margin is half of what we thought, we’re still profitable at $37,000/year. --This guideline also helps us avoid ‘pet’ projects. Those little ideas that we cling to thinking they’d be amazing one day, or once people realize the product exists, or whatever. Those things are nice, but get money coming in first, then feel free to rub the guidelines once you know what you’re doing. ***EDIT*** Market samurai has made some major updates. Read this to make a bit more sense of it. Also, there ARE alternatives to MS, such as longtail keyword planner or just using google for free. Once you understand how competition and traffic play into a niche, it really doesn't matter what you use. ===================================== Basic Series of Steps to Starting a Product Based Business ===================================== 1. Identify product niche -Come up with initial ideas. Do not focus too much on one specific idea. These typically don’t pass the product guidelines mentioned above. The important thing is to write them down and use them for your keyword research in market samurai. An example of this is that when I was doing research for the Whiskey Still Company, the keyword was ‘moonshine still’ which failed miserably. However, ‘whiskey still’ worked out quite nicely. So how do you come up with these initial keywords? +Brainstorm – Yea, that simple. +Amazon – Go to amazon.com and click all departments. Then browse their departments. Also, their magazine department is pretty enlightening when it comes to niches. *Pro-Tip – once you choose a department, drill down until the ‘sort by price’ option is available. Sort by $100-$300, and back up to the department view then arrange by average customer review. This method is gold* +Magazines – go to a bookstore and browse the magazines. Pay attention to the different types as well as the ads in them +Catalogs – out of curiosity I was browsing through a Cabela’s catalog at work (/what’s that?!) and they are absolutely amazing sources of ideas and information. They even tell you if they dropship. (like the 3 person sauna they were selling “this product is shipped directly by the manufacturer” too easy) 2. Plug into market samurai (or google keyword tool, but for the sake of this guide, all numbers are in MS) Once you have a list if keywords to throw into market samurai, do it. Then work your magic. Always keep in mind the product requirements from above, but now we’ll add a bit more to your plate: Niche Requirements --SEOT – usually I won’t consider a niche unless the SEOT is at least 1,000. This may change in the future, but as it stands now, there’s no reason to waste your time on anything under 1,000 because they are so plentiful (even when including the following requirements) I usually set the filter at SEOT=500 so I can see what’s out there. So, filter @ 500, minimum @ 1,000 --PBR – Phrase to Broad match Ratio. This is the chief indicator of relevance and must be at least 15% for a niche. I usually set the filter at 10%. 50-80% is godlike. For instance kitty house might have a pbr of 5%, and you’re like WTF? Then you realize ‘hello kitty’ has a pbr of 79% and you’re like awwwwwwwww damnnnnn. **EDIT** thanks unixbeard "Is SEOT daily or monthly" "Should i be using broad partial or exact" SEOT is daily, and you should be set to broad. Moreover, for goons in different regions, make sure you select the region. I realize that this will affect the $250k rule below if you're in a small region, so you've got harder decisions to make because it will probably take awhile to find a niche, and you may end up throwing in the towel and settling for something less. 3.SEOC – Search Engine Optimization Competition Search Engine Optimization Competition is a complicated subject. For the real quick once over, anything below 300,000 is good and accessible. However, this is only a general indicator. The way I approach this is if it is under 300k I will investigate the top 10 under market samurai’s SEOC module. If it is 2,000,000 or under, but very attractive, I will also pull the SEOC module information with the understanding that it may be difficult to break into. All of that being said, the SEOC module will be the determining factor for passing this test. In general, green is good, red is bad. Pages with PR (google page rank) 0 or 1 and pages with DA (domain age) of 2 or less in the top ten is a great indication you’ll do well. The absolute best indication is to review the URL of each webpage in the top 10. Does the keyword appear in the domain? If not, usually you’re good to go. This go or no-go decision based on SEOC and top-ten will be the most difficult decision you will make in internet business. Do not take this lightly, and do not hesitate to contact others for advice. 4.Select products Here you do your due diligence and in a timely manner discover most of the products for your niche/keyword phrase and choose ONE to sell. I would recommend basing the initial research off of the amazon reviews. Also, this particular manufacturer/model my change in the future, but selecting one model now is important because it lets us proceed with testing. 5.Create testing website This is where you will create a website, an actual real website, from which to sell your products. In the next step we will pay for advertising to send real people to your website to see if they will actually buy what you’re selling. Several important points to take away from this idea are: --This is a testing website… DO NOT put too much time and effort into making this perfect. If the conversion is too low, it may be scrapped. --Conversely, do not do this step too quick. Trust is a HUGE factor in online conversion. If you do a quick and lovely job, the conversion rate will be grossly under represented and you may have lost a good niche along with a bit of effort. --Keep in mind that when you perform this test, this will be the absolute worst your business will ever perform. With learning and testing, your conversion will only increase. --Also, setup payment services and link them to your paypal account. 6.Test conversion So, you will send people here through google adwords (I say adwords, but there are other options out there, like renting lists, but that’s a little too deep for this article) So, basic steps: --Setup google analytics on your page. Google it… (this may be a little complicated, contact me if you can’t figure it out) --Setup a google adwords account (along with billing information) --Use whatever credit you have (like the code for $100 if you use shopify as your shopping cart) --Create your ads --Do a final check of everything including the website and checkout. It’s important that you can receive orders, you can just cancel them later. --Turn on the adwords campaign. ---The longer you can let your campaign run, the more data you can get, and the more accurate your test will be. However, there’s a trade off. A longer test costs more money and if your niche CPC (cost-per-click) is high (like $2.00/click), this will be a limiting factor. I would say you would want a bare minimum of 200 visitors, 600 would be better, and ideally 1,000+. ---Now, turn off the campaign. Divide your completed (and then canceled) orders by the total number of clicks you paid for. This is your test conversion, and will be used in your calculations for your go/no-go decision. 7.Register business Your manufacturers will require a business ID, so you must register your business at your county clerk’s office. In Texas this only costs $15. This will also be needed when you open your business checking account (below). 8.Contact manufacturers (pricing/dropshipping) Now you contact the manufacturers you found in your initial research, or do more research and contact those peeps. In my experience this was a MAJOR hangup for me. So, here are a few solutions: --Find someone who sells the product, preferably a big box store. They usually show off the manufacturer in the details, or you can read it from a picture. Google searches will take it from there. --Check out alibaba.com or thomasnet.com --PROTIP: got a picture, but the people selling it don’t want you to know the real manufacturer? Do a google reverse image search. This also works well for identifying competitors. ---Once you have the manufacturer and they have approved you they will send you a pricing sheet. This is the final piece of data that you will use in your calculations for your go/no-go decision because it will give you your final test profit margin. 9.GO/NO-GO DECISION: Remember this equation “SEOT * Conversion * Retail Price * Profit Margin * 365 = AP (annual profit)”? Well, now you apply your test data and subtract 5% for the overhead of running an online business. (go to alibaba.com and find a similar product to determine your possible cost) --Organic success – If your profit is now acceptable enough to justify the effort you will need to put into ranking organically, rock on! go Go GO! (and remember, this is the weakest your business will perform) (also, keep in mind that the higher the competition, the more you will need to work, and the longer it will take to rank #1, so it’s not all sunshine and dasies) --AdWords success – This is what you realllllly want. If your CPC is low enough, then you can start making money immediately. For this test, divide your CPC by your conversion (CPC/Conv). This will give you your average cost per conversion. Simply subtract this from your profit margin, and re-run the numbers. ---Let’s be clear: if your margin is only $30, and your CPC and conversion is $0.50 and 1% respectively then CPC/Conv = $0.50/.01 = $50. So, if we pay $50 to get one person to buy something that only makes us $30, the test obviously fails. --If your adwords margins are low or in the negative (like the example) this may merely mean that you cannot start with adwords, but as your organic work grows, your website will gain creditability and your CPC will go down. --Using this information, you can make three decisions: scrap, life support, or go Go GO!!! ---Scrap – if the test falls on its face and it is clear people don’t want your poo poo, bail. ---Life support – if the profit is a close negative or not where you want it, I’d suggest leaving it up and working on it maybe once a week or two. The goal of this is to gain domain age, and the occasional link or two. After awhile you should rerun the test. You may find that the CPC will go down, or you might start to get a trickle of traffic that makes it profitable. ---go Go GOOOO!!!! This will be obvious. Bust out your conversion and traffic skills after completing the next few steps. 10. Make initial investment If your manufacturer does not offer dropshipping, you will need to make an initial purchase of inventory as well as find a fulfillment center. -For fulfillment centers, google that poo poo. Just keep in mind you want to make sure they can integrate with your shopping cart, else there will be a lot of needless work for everyone. Tim Ferriss also had some good words to say about choosing a fulfillment center in the 4 hour work week somewhere. -For your initial investment, you can spend a lot, or spend the minimum order price. Keep these thoughts in mind: --grow your business much much faster. --Spending less limits risk (due to a bad test) and lets you stay flexible. Being flexible means you may find out that people prefer an alternative product, and you may need to switch. --My thought: if the test was successful with more than 1,000 test subjects, spend as much as you can. If less than 1,000, weigh the pros and cons. iv. If you have issues coming up with capitol, contact me. We *might* be able to work something out. --Complete the step below, then send an order and check to the manufacturer. 11. Create business checking account Shop around for a bank that offers business checking accounts. I use wells fargo and overall I’m unhappy with the personal service. Also, they are greedy as poo poo and hit you with all sorts of fees. However, after using them for awhile I can get around all of them. So, think about this when you’re interviewing banks. Once you get one, you’ll need to deposit cash to work out of. It’s important that you keep your personal and business finances COMPLETELY separate from this point forward. NEVER withdrawal cash from your business checking account unless you fully understand what it will do accounting and tax wise. If you want to pay yourself, write a check. (the bill-pay and direct deposit services are awesome for paying people and yourself) 12.BONUS: Setup merchant account/credit card processing (paypal, initially) So you’ll be using paypal to accept payments, and that’s fine, but it’s unprofessional and lowers conversion. So, you’ll eventually want to run with the big dogs and have payment processing done without leaving your website. Paypal offers this service, but they have a horrible initiation period, so screw that. Contact your bank and ask them about merchant services. Often they’ll be linked to a service provider like authorize.net (whom I use) and you can setup everything through them (the bank). This can be confusing as hell trying to setup, but stick to it. Also, you will be able to negotiate the rate (the price and fees the credit companies charge). So, do that. Negotiate. -This would also be a good time to create a separate paypal account for your business. I’d suggest calling them first because you’ll have to anyway. ===================================== Tools ===================================== Competition Analyzing Market Samurai - Tool to see how much competition is in your niche https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxN5KjOLDXg http://www.marketsamurai.com/ SEMrush - A better tool to see rough ad spends of competitors and their keywords in adwords/bing. http://www.semrush.com Quick Sprout - Once your site is built, use this to see areas of SEO you are missing. You can plug in your competitors and compare your site to theirs. Great for technical SEO. http://www.quicksprout.com/ Ghostery - Tag analysis tool that lets you see what competitor is doing on their site. Are they running G Analytics? Are they using Optimizely (if so drop this niche)? https://www.ghostery.com/en/ Internal Google Analytics - Install their code on your site and link it to your G Analytics account, its free and one of the best analytic services out there. You can also connect it to your Adwords account. http://www.google.com/analytics/why https://www.ghostery.com/en/ ===================================== Pay Per Click ===================================== AdWords - A Great channel that is primary function is fulfilling demand. You got a product or service and want to get in front of people looking for your solution? This is where you go. Its similar to phone book marketing in 80s, but its much more powerful. AdWords is complex and it is very easy to blow your entire budget on poor keyword choices by using AdWords Express, or setting match type to broad. Nevertheless, its a staple of internet marketing that every business does. http://www.google.com/adwords/ Bing - A cheaper alternative to AdWords. There is less competition, with cheaper clicks, than on AdWords. However there are far less searchers. Bing/Yahoo has roughly 30% of search market while Google controls 60%. What I have found is companies that have a hard time staying viable using AdWords can make a switch to Bing and perform relatively well. http://advertise.bingads.microsoft.com/ Comparison Shopping Engines - These are sites that lists products from vendors with pricing. Amazon is one, but there many out there that have their own pros and cons. Shopzilla, PriceGrabber, Google Shopping, Bing Shopping, Houz, etc. However, Google Shopping (which is setup within AdWords) has by far the most growth in the past few years, and is the most effective. ===================================== Native Advertising ===================================== I am still not certain if I should put this in the OP since most of you will never need or do Native, but I felt I should make you aware of its existences. Native Advertising is a way content sites like Buzz Feed, The Atlantic, News Week, etc can earn extra money with content produced by Brands instead of banner ads. This is a new form of digital marketing that doesn’t have best practices yet. Some companies produce content that is a blatant ad for their company, while others produce effect content that people want to read and consume. The purpose, if it all, for start ups is generating backlinks to your site on legitimately large sites. Sometimes the links are a no follow, which doesn’t help your site out really, but the possibly of the right person stumbling onto your article and then going to your site is much higher now. Here are a few native ads distribution platforms. http://www.nativo.net/ http://www.outbrain.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc ===================================== Inbound Marketing (SEO & Content Marketing) ===================================== If were to start up a new business, most likely I would invest my time and money in developing my on site technical SEO and creating quality content. SEO should be viewed as a foundation to your site, much like a house, not as a solution to your lack of traffic. Content however, is a great use of your time and money. Content creation and promotion is a strategy with long lasting effect that will result in more revenue over time. With paid ads you are renting traffic from search engines. With SEO you are optimizing for Google’s current algorithm. With content, you are driving relevant traffic and creating an evergreen piece of content that will continue to help your site long after publishing. With that said, inbound marketing is a huge topic with many strategies and points of view. I am leaving out descriptions on social marketing purposely since it really falls into inbound marketing. Screaming Frog - A great tool that you can quickly pull your site’s tags and export them into file to manipulate offline. Use this to check your yoast work. http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/ Bottlenose - Remember the Google Wonder Wheel? Bottlenose has one of the best Wonder Wheel alternatives, providing a quick visualization of topics related to your core topics. http://sonar.bottlenose.com/ KeywordTool.io - is my go-to source for long-tail keyword variations. You won’t find search traffic numbers or trend data, but skimming a long-tail list should help you better understand the conversation around the topic and the needs of your customer base. http://keywordtool.io/ ClearVoice - is a great tool for influencer research, but it also shows you “Popular Topics.” If you find an influencer in the space, click through to their profile to see what they’re saying about your topic. https://clearvoice.com/search Social Mention - searches a bunch of blogs, microblogs, social comments, YouTube and more. http://socialmention.com/ Content Strategy Helper - by BuiltVisible really shows off the power of utilizing Google Docs for API integration. This Google Spreadsheet tool integrates Topsy, Google Insights, Reddit, and much more. Sure, it’s a hack, but it’s a great tool for quickly accessing content conversation data. http://builtvisible.com/content-strategy-generator-tool-v2-update
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Mar 27, 2015 16:39
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Golden Bee posted:Glad for your help next year on analysis. Here's hoping to send more your way, although most of what I'm doing lately is straight dev instead of metrics work. So, I'll talk with you in what... about 1.2 years? lol I hate dev work.
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Mar 29, 2015 16:57
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jon joe posted:I'm trying to simplify the OP's formula, but for some reason it's producing absurd numbers to the point that I don't think it's doable for most niches? You would be surprised how many products are searched that often. Also, $100 item is almost too low of a product and I would start at $500 as minimum personally. Take for example this company, https://wisesales.com. They rank extremely well on the main product, honda generators (at the product and category level at least.) The key term "honda generator" has roughly 49.k searchs and with all its variations 600k. That is not even targeting product level or going long tail with the keywords. With that said, there is fierce competition selling power equipment and probably wouldn't be a great niche to break into. However, there are tons of products out there most people don't think about on a regular basis, or even while researching, that have hundreds of thousands of searches every month. Products like this Panasonic's vent fans have over 160k monthly searches. I hope this helps answer your question.
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Mar 30, 2015 04:07
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jon joe posted:I tried testing this one and the honda one. Honda actually checked out to have more than you suggested, but panasonic fan has 1,600 searches monthly average. Panasonic Vent fan, 170. Panasonic Vent, 70. I wonder how market samurai is pulling the numbers it is? No broad match. The campaign did have over 3,600 keywords, however. These included product name, sku numbers, colloquial, and branded terms. I would suggest staying away from broad match keywords when you do decide to test campaigns. Edit: My point is that you can take a relatively mundane item like that panasonic fan and get huge volume by adding every possible search query related to the product. At that point volume isn't the problem, but return. Thats if you decide to run Adwords campaigns. Snatch Duster fucked around with this message at 05:54 on Mar 30, 2015 |
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Mar 30, 2015 05:43
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jon joe posted:Okay, so just that I'm clear, the goal is to rank #1 for multiple related key words, not a singular broad match keyword, correct? I believe the OP in the old thread suggested to rank #1 on the most searched term. If you can do that, a lot of other terms will follow. If you also run ads on the search terms you cant manage to rank well on, you will be doing great. EDIT: To be clear, you will want to rank #1, or on the first page, on many keywords. However if you find a single search term with 50k searches every month, or even 5k, you can increase the search volume by a huge amount by going long tail, using product details, and with branded terms.  This is typically what I find for most products/services. Keep in mind this lovely graph is from my own experience. With that said, many experts find these conclusions as well within their client work. Here are a few articles on this strategy. http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/short-tail-vs-long-tail-keywords/ http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/study/2214529/head-vs-long-tail-keywords-analyzed-impressions-clicks-conversions-profitability http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research Snatch Duster fucked around with this message at 18:11 on Mar 30, 2015 |
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Mar 30, 2015 15:04
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Knyteguy posted:I do the niche selling stuff selling microscopes that are around $150, which I got the idea from the first OP. I'll mention this: make sure you have the profit margin here. My product cost is $96.85 per microscope, I sell exclusively on eBay which is the only place I've had success selling (I had a very nice website created, but getting volume is difficult). That means I eat shipping @ $12 each, 10% on the eBay fees, $5 on the Paypal transaction fees, and then the time to make the eBay setup look nice, product research (weeks), a logo, hosting, etc. Those are pretty tight margins. Have you tested other CSEs like price grabber, g shopping, etc? If so was the margins too low or not enough volume?
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Apr 1, 2015 02:49
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Ribsauce posted:Do any of you marketing guys have any advice for me? I keep meaning to pursue this and stop. (I even PM'd Golden Bee once). You can run ads on Google for really cheap. However, if you don't set up the campaigns correctly you can hurt yourself. First, you will need to set locations and exclude locations you don't want people clicking your ads from. For example, if you are willing to pay for people that live in another state, on the off chance they are actually interested in buying/selling homes in your area and are not just looking, then you should run nationally or at least regionally. (I don't recommend this) If not, then exclude bunch of states and cities you don't want this traffic coming from. The next thing you will want to do is find the keywords that have enough search volume every month, with a cost per click you are willing to pay for, and that can get you placed in the top 3 positions. The reason the top 3 is important, especially for your industry, is the ad extensions. You will want to have the call extension along with site links. Call is straight forward, it puts your phone number in the ad. Site links will allow you place 4 links in your ad that goes to 4 other pages on your site, along with a short description. These links could be other category pages of houses for sale, about us, contact, etc. But the big thing is site links increase the size of your ad, giving you larger real estate on the page. Site Links extension gives 45% increase to click through rates, this is Google's global average. You can easily run a hyper local campaign for less then $500 per month, and you will be getting people that actually interested in what you have to offer and filling out your form. Hopefully your site/listing is designed for capturing leads.
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Apr 2, 2015 16:50
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Radbot posted:Is Google Call Metrics available to everyone now? It uses JavaScript to replace the phone numbers on your site with ones specific to every paid search visitor, so you can see exactly which keywords drove a phone conversion. It's extremely valuable if you rely on phone leads. Yea, its free now I believe. I am not certain if you need to be a Google Partner.
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Apr 2, 2015 19:39
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Radbot posted:Just got my GP badge. Feelin' pretty bling. You should do it for Bing too. The cert test takes like 15 minutes, it stupid easy and funny.
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Apr 2, 2015 21:02
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Sepist posted:Maybe you guys can offer some marketing advice for someone not selling a product per se. I am assuming you were doing Adwords search network. Did you try their display network? Its often cheaper and helps build awareness and branding. Since you have a copy writer, do you think he/she has the capability of producing long form pieces of content that you can use to promote your website on other sites that your target market reads regularly? If so, then get them creating this stuff and placing it. Hubspot is the leader in inbound marketing, and here is a pretty good blog about it. http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-to-make-the-most-of-your-content I sent you a pm as well.
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Apr 2, 2015 23:38
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jon joe posted:I feel pretty confident in my abilities to create a good website SEO wise, but I'm terrible at design. I just have no aesthetic eye at all. I also don't like the idea of spending money for a website designer. What's the best option? If you are looking for a site that looks decent and has an integrated shopping cart then I would suggest shopify.com. They also give you $100 in Google AdWord.
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Apr 3, 2015 17:10
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If it does, then it shouldn't be that big of a deal. Bing in many ways is better than Google. The biggest two are cheaper cost per clicks and less competition. The best ROAS I've seen for an ecommerce company was on Bing since their CPA were ~70% lower than Adwords. If your product has decent volume Google, Bing will do really well for returns. Probably not when it comes to volume of conversions.
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Apr 8, 2015 23:38
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cumberlandwatersports.com wisesales.com Those two are the largest seller of honda boat stuff. They might have your model. On topic, many of you are probably aware that Google is about to update their search algorithm again. For those of you that aren't here is a short article explaining it. http://searchengineland.com/how-large-is-googles-mobile-friendly-algorithm-larger-than-panda-or-penguin-217026 Basically, if you have a lovely site that isn't mobile friendly, you will lose your mobile ranking on Google and bunch of organic traffic. If you don't have any mobile traffic, then you shouldn't care.
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Apr 10, 2015 15:17
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Sepist posted:An update to an earlier post about what to do next about our marketing efforts. I spoke with the OP through a phone call the next day and he was incredibly helpful, and we ended up signing a deal with his company to handle our adwords campaigns and more marketing services in the future once our revenue ramps up! Thanks! Absolutely, it was great chatting with you and I am looking forward to working together in the coming months. Also, for everyone thinking about how to do SEO on your own here is a great guide. http://webris.org/complete-guide-to-seo-for-lawyers-attorneys/ Sure it is about lawyers, but you can apply the same strategy to your site/niche.
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Apr 16, 2015 23:32
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Armchair Calvinist posted:I'm taking over the role of adwords account analyst at my current job and am in the process of completing the adwords certification program. Does anybody have any other good material I should be reading for such a role? What are some routes I can branch out from with this sort of knowledge? What are your duties? Do you manage accounts or are you more of a sales rep?
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Apr 17, 2015 15:10
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trescoole posted:I've been thinking about setting something like this up for a while, and at the moment have a fun little niche t-shirt biz but seeing about 2k hits to something very niche and making between 60-120 bucks / month from it. Not great, but enough to cover my monthly Steam addiction. I'm not too familiar with APIs and most manufacturers don't have one or use them. For example, Honda and its competitors prefer to use sales folks because they can get the resellers to buy more stock or get them to carry different products. With that said, there are API's out there that do have thousand of products but they don't advertise what they are. Your best solution is figuring out what you want to sell, then contact these API drop shipping companies to see if they carry your item. The other option is to contact the manufacturer directly to see if they drop ship.
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Apr 20, 2015 15:48
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invision posted:I've recently noticed a niche for a thing here in the states - companies exist in Europe that cater to it, and some big-box stores carry some of the items related to it, but there is nothing specifically for the niche here in the states, except for one site and they don't offer very much. The angle is obviously "dont have to deal with customs/buying things from euroland/get it sooner/etc". The problem is that I have to actually get the items, which isn't an issue, except I'm not sure how to go about applying to be a wholesaler to some of these places. What should I have on my site? Should I offer the product as "coming soon" or something? Just pretend like I already have the wholesale contract? I'm not sure how to go about this, but I definitely don't want to gently caress it up because it's dealing with 2-3 suppliers that would be the lifeblood of the business. In the old thread, goons would setup a site and advertised the product when they didn't have it, just for testing if any of their users would actually buy. If people did buy, then the product and site was viable. My suggestion is test first, then worry about becoming a dealer/distributor. GDN is great if you are doing remarketing, especially so with dynamic remarketing. That is really the only ROAS use of GDN, or any display network for the most part. The few times a display network would be of value, other than remarketing, is driving traffic for the sake of traffic or branding/awareness. Companies like Nike, Gatorade, Mercedes, etc use display networks to constantly hit people with ads to push them further into the buying funnel from the awareness stage and into the interest stage.
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Apr 21, 2015 22:02
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Moridin920 posted:I recently started working at a company that sells poo poo online - basically a drop shipper selling medical supplies and physical therapy equipment. The site used to do ~$3m+ a year in sales but after getting hit with Penguin and just generally not keeping up with the evolving Google poo poo sales have dropped off significantly. The way things are going this year we might not even hit $1m in sales. I could take a look at your account for you if you want. I do analyses on exactly what is troubling your company and I am very familiar with MAP, especially Honda. Shoot me an email at snatchduster@gmail.com, that forwards to my personal email which I don't want to post on the internet. Not that I don't trust you lovely goons. 
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Apr 30, 2015 01:37
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Moridin920 posted:Sent you an email, thanks. Replied! If you have any questions or problems in the future, don't be shy asking. VVV Snatch Duster fucked around with this message at 01:36 on May 2, 2015 |
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Apr 30, 2015 19:20
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Knyteguy posted:Anyone have input on lead generation / brokering? I'm about halfway finished with my entire project (the software side of it), but I'm trying to figure out the best way to distribute leads. I'm not clear on what you are asking. Are you asking on how to generate leads or how to distribute leads that you get to companies/sales teams?
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May 5, 2015 21:47
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Knyteguy posted:I'm curious if there's any input on how to distribute leads, or perhaps if there's an industry standard. As far as lead generation I think I'll be relying mostly on SEO since it's kind of niche, and no one has done it yet. If you are dealing with sales staff you can distribute the leads by region, industry specialty, round robin, or use it as a sales incentive (the best closer gets the best leads). Most CRMs have ways to do this, espcially Sales Force. Here are a few other lead distribution software companies I've looked into in the past. http://www.getapp.com/pipelinedeals-application http://www.b12leads.com/ http://getcake.com/ If you are creating a company like Reply! Inc where you sell off leads you get to companies that are interested in the lead vertical, you could simply distribute them by first come first serve or whoever pays you the most. Since your software is a niche with little competition, I highly recommend creating engaging content (white papers, buying guide, ebook, etc) and promoting it. This should quickly establish your company as an authority with Google and it will have a greater impact in the long run than creating killer meta tags.
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May 5, 2015 22:39
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BaseballPCHiker posted:I have a feeling that I'm about to make this thread way more active than it has been. Another question, using the first post as a guide I've been searching for niches and good keywords. I think I've found a niche, there aren't any commercial sites for it yet, which I take as a bad sign. There don't seem to be a lot of searches for it. So while hypothetically I could rank near the top would it even be worth it for me? Ranking #1, or even on the first page, for keywords with little volume is pointless. However, if you can cobble together a 100s of keywords that individually have little search volume, but combined they have thousands of searches then I would say its worth it.
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May 12, 2015 15:19
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BaseballPCHiker posted:So if I'm doing all of this right I think I may have found a niche that I could do well with blog posts, ebooks, etc to drum up more content to get eyeballs to the site. In fact I've started to write articles already and have 5 in the can for a potential launch. I still don't know if I'm reading Market Samurai correctly though. For my potential site I've got a monthly SEOT of 3402, 8100 searches a month, an average ad-word of $,71 and a monthly SEOV total of $2415. Is that too small of potential money to pursue? If the 8k searches are across bunch of keywords, then yes. If that is the search volume for just one then maybe. You should bank 1% of the searches will click your ad and 3% will click your organic result, that is if you are one of the top three on page one. Then assume your site will converts 1% of your visitors. The real unknown is what your average conv dollar value will be. Honestly, if you can make decent margins on your product, you can make money selling it online. it is just easier if you have a high volume, expensive product but those are pretty competitive and will take time/money to carve out a share of the pie.
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May 15, 2015 07:52
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Golden Bee posted:I found Bing was 70%-80% cheaper at the cost of customer support being 300% worse. And my keywords fill INSTANTLY in google...in Bing it might take a week to build equal volume. Yea, Bing is bad when it comes to B2C, the search market break down is 80:20 roughly. But it gets a little better when its B2B searchers, 70:30 is what I am finding. However, Bing has introduced their version shopping. In a lot of niches there aren't any companies running these kinds of ads since this network is relatively new and Bing doesn't give a poo poo about support.
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May 17, 2015 01:05
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Ron Don Volante posted:I've started a new Shopify business but my photography skills are lacking - are there any good online services or marketplaces where I could hire a photographer to take some product pictures for my website? Are the photos provided by the manufacturer not any good? As far as unique content concerns, photos have the least impact in Google's ranking algorithm from what I have seen. I can understand wanting your own, but if the manufacturers photos aren't too terrible just use them. With that said, here is one of my clients snapknot.com. Sure, the sites purpose is for hiring wedding photographers but I am certain if you found one in your area that they'll be willing take photos for you. In my experience, $100 per 10 products is a decent rate.
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Jun 4, 2015 15:38
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This might be the most hilarious development in digital marketing industry in years. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/apple-launching-search-engine-destroy-google-jason-calacanis Apple plans on launching a search engine to rival Google. I seriously doubt that it will be a "search engine" in any sense of the term.
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Jun 15, 2015 23:10
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Knyteguy posted:"Search Web" well gee I wonder if that opens up a traditional search engine. From what I understand, that "search" in the image is actually pulled from Bing. So Apple products are using Bing as the search engine currently. FYI: The guy that wrote that article was an investor of Mahalo which Google de-index a while back cuz Google saw the site as spam farm (which it was.) Snatch Duster fucked around with this message at 23:32 on Jun 16, 2015 |
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Jun 16, 2015 23:30
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I'd guess my boss wrote this if it was about Microsoft instead of Apple.
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cptInsane0 posted:I have a question. I am thinking about doing something like this. I already have web hosting, and I can set up sites super fast. In fact, right now, I am trying to grow my company, where one of my services is building web sites. I already have an LLC. No clue, but maybe? I mean it is really easy to incorporate. My company is a Delaware corp which took barely anytime or money to do.
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Jun 17, 2015 21:58
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BaseballPCHiker posted:Just wanted to give an update to my unbridled enthusiasm from earlier in the thread. I still haven't launched my site. I spent about $350 on my business license and 3 years of web hosting so I'm in the red. I have been still working on my articles and ebook however so it's not a total loss yet. Seems like the more I write the more research I do the bigger the book gets. I'm hoping to keep at it for another few months and edit it down to a nice concise gem of a book. Dang, keep up the good work. Also, one thing i like to do is jotting down any questions i have in the research process. This way i can go back to the questions and write up a blog post or other smaller pieces of content.
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Jun 23, 2015 05:13
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the talent deficit posted:he's right that google has basically turned search into yellow pages 2.0. duckduckgo now routinely returns better results for things that aren't basically 'i want to spend money on ____' Can you give me a few examples? I get the same results or a list of directories/spam sites whenever I use duckduckgo. Snatch Duster fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Jun 23, 2015 |
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Jun 23, 2015 21:56
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Solo posted:Set up a webshop using Volusion and I'm having serious trouble finding an easy affordable way of accepting credit cards. Either what I find isn't compatible with Volusion or it'll cost me a fortune, effectively eating away all potential profits. I'm based in the UK as well, so a bunch of companies doesn't want to touch my site because they're racist towards anything non-US. Anyone have any experience with this? I hate volusion and magneto with a passion as a marketer. I get why devs recommend those platforms, but god are they frustrating if you aren't dev or company with capital. Does your site have north American version? It may seem silly but that is an easy way garner trust from US and Canadian buyers.
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Sep 18, 2015 15:14
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Moridin920 posted:Can anyone recommend a good firm that builds ecommerce websites? I can recommend several. Shoot me an email snatchduster@gmail.com.
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Sep 23, 2015 18:29
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Moridin920 posted:Just got your email, I'll look it over and talk options with my boss. Looks like a decent chunk of change is required to build a good website but it sounds like it'll be worth it just from the operating expense savings from not having to host our own servers, not paying for a server farm location, and not having to have a programmer on retainer to fix poo poo when it breaks. Right now (I asked my boss, I think I told you $400/mo on the phone) we're paying $500/mo just to have our servers up and running. Sure thing bud. Good sites are costly, but you can find them on the cheap sometimes. However, having a kickass site sometimes isn't necessary. I brought this up a couple times, but peep this guys site. https://americanbeautyequipment.com The guy makes ~$325k per month from it.
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Sep 24, 2015 19:08
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Vomik posted:Revenue? or that guy clears profits of $325k from that? That's pretty funny - haven't seen frames in forever. Revenue, ~30% of that is profit. fruit loop posted:So the OP says we want to rank #1 on Google for a bunch of search terms... How big of a time investment is that for someone who knows what they're doing? 40hrs/wk for four weeks? I figure there has to be lots of work since people are employed doing it. Ranking #1 on Google isn't "hard" or "time consuming," its not exactly knowing what out of the 200+ signals that determine rankings will effect your site the greatest. Sure, there are a lot of people that do SEO as a full time job, but not many sites out there need an SEO working 40 hours a week. So for the sake of this endeavour, if you knew what you were doing, it would take 2 months roughly at 5 - 10 hours a week. In that 2 months you will be spending a lot of time testing what affects your rankings, which search terms are easier to rank on, how long till Google crawls your site, etc.
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Oct 1, 2015 15:44
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laxbro posted:I have a short story blog (horror) that hasn't been updated in months but gets about 8 or 9k visitors a month through a #1 Google keyword. 70% is mobile traffic, so I threw a couple of ads up and get about 20 bucks a month from that. Find products that you could endorse or become an affiliate for, then earn extra cash when your visitors buy products you think they would like. Off the top of my head; horror board games, atmosfx.com like products, or products featured in your horror stories.
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Oct 1, 2015 17:14
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thegasman2000 posted:Back here again. My last niche failed hard and I wondered of sharing my experience would help. Also I need to find a new one! I would probably try it out. Keep in mind some manufacturers do CO-OP advertising, so if you find a niche that has OEMs that offer it then totally take advantage of it. Some OEMs offer up to 50% of the total cost of advertising!
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Oct 16, 2015 21:31
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fruit loop posted:Is a SEOT score of > 1000 actually a thing that happens for keywords that aren't just a single word that could mean several things that don't necessarily signal buying intent? I've only done about an hour of keyword research but I haven't found one. On the other hand, that's probably expected if such keywords are so good, no? I imagine months of keyword research would be worth it when you finally find the right product and keywords. It does happen but not too often.
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Oct 19, 2015 18:52
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lx2036 posted:Ohhhh. Look what we have here... I do, i think the guy gave up on that site.
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Oct 21, 2015 22:01
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Molotov Cock Tale posted:Set up a 301 redirect from the old page to the new and do it quick in case the page gets delisted. Plenty of resources out there to show you how This. Who ever did the site really dropped the ball, and it happens all. the. time.
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Nov 7, 2015 00:25
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https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/6276125?hl=en This was released about a month or so ago, but it can be huge for some of you. The basic jist is if you have a list of emails, you can upload them into Adwords to run remarketing ads on search, gmail, display, and youtube. The great part is this, these people don't even need to have visited your site to remarket to them. Something to consider for you more established sites/companies to try out.
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Nov 11, 2015 20:23
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