A Quick Look at Your Market
If you aren’t familiar with who David Bullock (conversion specialist) is, he is worth checking out. From 2007-2010 David and I put on SEO Rainmaker conferences. It was a good matchup. I knew SEO and he knew conversion. In a word, David’s smart. In our conversations, David and I basically mapped out our combined strategy for getting into and dominating a market. Even though we mapped this out back in 2007, it is still pertinent today.
Here it is…
Step One: Do you know the “language” of your market? What I mean is do you know your prospects “hot buttons”? Do you know what frustrates them? What keeps them up at night? You should. While you can do an online survey with Survey Monkey or another survey company, I prefer to get out of the office, away from my laptop and just go out and talk to people.
Taverns are often the best places as there are almost always groups of people sitting around having a few beers and talking. Offer to buy the next round if you could get their opinion on a project you’re doing. Be honest. My favorite approach is, “Hey, I’d like to buy the next round if I can get your opinion on a project I’m doing for work. I swear I’m not selling anything. I’m just stuck. And my friends are no help, all they say is how good it is. I really need some honest feedback.”
Not many say no to that. Oh, and make sure you buy the round AFTER you get the feedback. If you buy them drinks first what often happens is the table clears out pretty fast and then you just feel stupid. I speak from experience. Sometimes you get lucky and the group is very friendly. If the ideas are flowing keep up the pace. It’s okay if you buy a few rounds. As long as the ideas are great, keep the drinks coming! However, I highly advise you not to drink yourself. You want to remain alert and focused.
Why This Approach Works: You can spend $2k for an online survey or $50.00 on a couple of rounds of drinks and get better information from people you can interact with. Sure it isn’t scientific, but you don’t care. This isn’t the Presidential Race, you want ideas you can test in your PPC campaign. Some ideas you get will suck. Some will be gold. Some you will rework and make gold. For the time it takes me to get an online survey setup and get approval, I could be to the tavern and back with information I need to proceed.
Tip: Don’t just walk in with a blank pad of paper. If you’re going to do an affiliate offer, print out the merchant’s sales copy and bring it with you along with a couple of Sharpies. You want to lay it out in front of them and have them tear it apart. If you are doing different landing pages, bring them (three max) lay them out and let them rip those apart. If you are just performing market research bring an article or a site you like. You need to have something for them to concentrate on besides you.
Non-Bar Example: If I was looking to sell a house training guide for dog owners, I’d skip the bar and go to the park. Dog owners frequent the park. If you have a dog yourself, bring it. If you don’t, go with the intention of asking about their dog because you are “looking to get a dog soon.” Ask the dog owners in a non-survey manner about their dog.
- Who trained their dog?
- What was frustrating about the training process?
- What they would do differently?
Know that females doing the approaching are at a distinct advantage as it is typically easier for them to talk to both male and female dog owners than it is for males to do the same. If I have to explain why this is the case, then you really should stay out of bars.
Step Two: Take the feedback you received from talking to people and begin to write your headlines. Look for 2-3 problems that were expressed by multiple dog owners and then look at your product and find how you can solve each problem. Look for stress points. As one of my mentors said, “Find their pain and apply sufficient pressure until they buy.” It sounds harsh, but most of marketing is built around that concept.
For example, let’s say a dog owner said that the reason he was so frustrated training his dog was because all of the dog training guides were too difficult to understand. He may be complaining that there weren’t any pictures or video, even though he didn’t say it directly. He may talk about how the live trainers were too expensive and what he really wanted was a step-by-step process. Your follow-up could be, “Would videos have helped?” Their face lights up and they respond, “That would have been great!” Do you see how this process works now? Your headlines now just come together with very little effort.
The headline could be:
“Attention Fellow Dog Owners:
Expensive Trainers. Guides That Don’t Work. Stop Your Frustration.
Get a Step-by-Step Dog Training Process Complete with Videos to Show You
How to Turn Your ‘Nightmare Pet’ into ‘Your Best Friend.’ Guaranteed.”
Maybe it is a little long, but it is a work in progress and I can test it pretty easily to see if it is effective. The key is to take the frustration the market is dealing with and then offer a solution. It’s really that simple. Think about it, if every time you complained about something and your doorbell rang and a person was there with a solution to that very thing you just complained about, would you slam the door shut? Of course not. They have your attention. You want your problem to go away. That is effective marketing.
Real World Example: My daughter ran for Class President years ago. She was in the Fifth Grade. She asked me for some advice and I taught her about the “Points of Difference” of what sets her apart from those she is running against. She told me of a great idea of getting “box tops” from cereal boxes and the school can get new playground equipment. To adults, it sounds good, but to a fellow classmate? Not so much.
Box tops? Who cares?
Then the moment happened.
At recess, some kids in another 5th grade class who didn’t know my daughter well were playing with a ball and it suddenly went flat. “I hate this!” one student yelled. “This always happens.” My daughter walked up, introduced herself and said that she has an idea to get new playground equipment, including new balls which won’t go flat. Did she get their attention? Yes. While she didn’t win, she learned that people are more likely to listen to you when you have a solution to their problem.
Step Three: Speak Your Copy. This is a term that David came up with and I love it. Don’t get bogged down with writing copy. You can sometimes spend days and accomplish very little. Did you know some of the most successful copywriters on the web today are successful because they write the same way they talk to someone? It’s true. While that could get a few people in serious trouble, for most of us, we know if we could just talk to the prospect we’d sell them. This is your chance to do just that – but in your sales copy.
Note: You can use my “Kitchen Table Copy” technique which outlines some simple, yet effective techniques for writing copy. Get it in the Downloads Section.
Step Four: Keyword Research. Why do keyword researches AFTER you have written your copy? Simple. If you do keyword research FIRST (something we’ve all had ingrained in our minds over and over again) your mind can be tainted to what the market wants. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you are too smart to ask the public what they want. I still make this mistake from time to time and I pay for it in failed campaigns.
You can use tools such as SpyFu, SEMRush, or the keyword tool in Google AdWords. It seems the more the keyword market grows the more difficult it is to get reliable data. This is why it is always smart to use at least two sources. My personal opinion is that keyword research is overrated. With the tools that are available today, you can see clearly all the keywords your competitors are targeting organically and via paid traffic. Nothing is secret anymore.
Step Five: Take your keyword list (you can also hijack your competitor’s keywords) and setup a PPC campaign (Recommend: Google AdWords). Be mindful of the bids you make and what type of budget you have. Don’t go completely nuts because you can go through a lot of money quickly if you aren’t careful.
Step Six: Create landing pages based on the keyword groups you’ve compiled. Don’t send the traffic just to your home page, you need to have landing pages created so your Quality Score is high. The higher your Quality Score the lower your CPC.
Step Seven: Install analytics code on your “thank you” page to track sales/conversions. According to Bullock, 97% of PPC advertisers don’t do this. You read that right, 97%. Want an easy advantage over your competitors? Get the code on your thank you page. This is vital because you want to know exactly which keywords convert so you can concentrate on those and ignore all others.
What if you’re an affiliate and you can’t get your tracking code on the merchant’s thank you page? Remember, your job as the affiliate is to get the click and send them to the merchant’s site. It is then up to them to ensure the conversion happens. If the numbers are low, you can take the data to your affiliate manager and have a discussion. Without data, no real progress can occur. I have had affiliate managers agree to allow me to post a tracking pixel on their thank you page so I know if the sale went through or not.
Step Eight: Install “heat mapping software.” David recommends Crazy Egg to test and track your main web pages. Yeah, I know Google has an overlay on their Analytics, but let’s face it, their Analytics lacks key features. The “heat map” is one of them.
Make sure you get the Heat Map so you can accurately see, through color, what areas of your site are attracting the most attention and which are being ignored. You may be in for the shock of your life. “You mean the great graphic I paid a lot for isn’t attracting anyone?” The truth hurts.
Tip: Get the free version first. And if you like it, expand to more pages.
You don’t need the heavy duty version until you have used it and can commit to using it at least every other day. If you can’t commit to that schedule, don’t do it. Analytics only works when you take time to look at the numbers, make a decision based on the figures and then follow-through. If you don’t follow through you are just wasting your time.
Step Nine: Watch the campaign for any “out of control” keywords and pause the campaign after 3-7 days to analyze and make changes. David suggests you have a minimum of 100 clicks per keyword to get fairly accurate data. I agree. The more clicks, the more reliable the data will be. Never make a decision based on 10-12 clicks. It just isn’t enough.
Step Ten: Keep the profitable keywords. If you have time, test and tweak the marginal ones. Kill (or pause) the ones that aren’t making any sales. You can always come back later and make adjustments. For now, focus your energy on what is working and look for ways to make it even better. Look at writing a better Title, improving the headline, the landing page, the offer, etc.
Step Eleven: Now it is time to start the SEO campaign on the site. Take your five most profitable keywords (not by percentage but by dollars) that have at least a 50 cent per click charge in AdWords and do a “spot check” to see if you can quickly get in the Top 20 organically. Did you catch that?
Here it is again:
- Sort your keywords by dollars earned
- Take the Top Five that have at least a 50 cent per click charge in AdWords
- Do a “Spot Check” for SEO
Here is how you do the “Spot Check.” I want to know what I have to do, SEO wise, for a keyword to get in the Top 5, and it isn’t the same each time. Do I need just links? Do I need a better Title? More Co-Citation links? Better On-Page Optimization?
I used to use NicheWatch to get a good feel for the market, but I felt their results were often less than accurate, so I built my own tool: Keyword Competition. It targets, in my opinion, the three main key ranking factors: allintitle, allintext and allinanchor.
Here is an example of what you are looking for:
Let’s look at a highly competitive term, “insurance auto.” This term runs about $30-50 per click. It’s quite expensive. Estimates are that if a site ranked at the top it can enjoy 12,000 clicks a day. That’s good traffic from one keyword phrase. Taking into account what it costs for a top ranking in PPC, a #1 ranking organically could be worth as much as $360,000 a day. That is serious money.
Seriously.
The following screen shot was captured while doing an analysis of the top 20 sites for this keyword term. The area outlined in red singles out the “allinanchor” search. As a reminder, this search “constrains” Google’s search results to return the pages which have the highest quality and quantity of incoming anchor text with the phrase “insurance auto.”
Search Query Used: allinanchor: insurance auto
Because Google heavily favors off-page factors, many SEOs mistakenly look only at PageRank and the number of inbound links as the source of strength of the page. When in actuality what matters most in ranking is the actual anchor text. Let’s look at these results in more detail.
If ranking was based on PageRank, the number of incoming links and the “authoritativeness” of a site, why is it that State Farm’s site, who has more backlinks (1290 vs. 424), a higher PageRank (8 vs. 6) and has more pages indexed (20,000 vs. 200) ranks #8 while Progressive ranks #1?
Simple. Progressive’s site ranks at the top for the main “key factors.” It is #1 for the anchor text, #1 for the Title (which includes PageRank in the scoring) and it also ranks #1 for On-Page text too. How does State Farm fair? #8, #48 and #6. Can you see that? It is right in front of you. You can tell why each site is ranking the way that they are and based on competition for that keyword phrase, will depend on which one of those columns will be dominate. Heavy competition phrases will be “stacked” in the allinanchor column, while “low hanging fruit” phrases generally are stacked in the allintext column.
Since this is a heavily competed for phrase, you can see from the graphic above the “allinanchor” column is “stacked.” In other words, the column for “allinanchor” is nearly identical to the way the sites are positioned in the straight search results (SERPs). Since there aren’t any openings (sites that rank in the Top 20 but don’t rank in the Top 100 for allinanchor) this means the keyword phrase has been heavily optimized and it would be best to walk away at this time. Why? It would take far too much money and time to crack the Top 20. There are easier phrases to target; we just have to find them.
Let’s look at an example of one that would be worth optimizing for:
Do you see how there is a major drop-off in the allinanchor column after the seventh result? And the Title and Text columns are wide open too. It is a clear indication that this keyword phrase is not highly optimized by the competition and you can nail down a Top 20 ranking in about two weeks.
All you need is a good solid link campaign (about 10-25 links through webmaster outreach), write a compelling Title and Headline using the keyword phrase and then optimize the body of the page. It’s really just basic SEO, but the key is understanding what is needed, focusing on those areas and accomplishing it quickly so you can move to the next keyword phrase.
Step Twelve: Get content posted on other sites (guest blogging)…ones that rank well in SEO. Don’t waste your time doing article exchanges and posting the content at article banks. They are a huge waste of your time.
Then “Lather, Rinse, Repeat” the process. The key to a successful campaign is to focus on the keywords and landing pages which sell the most. Don’t get distracted trying to fix pages or keywords that aren’t working. Focus on what is working, fixing can come later. Don’t be the jockey who rides the horse which wins the race and then gets off the horse to train another horse. You have already found the champion, so ride it until it collapses!
Now, the twelve steps above will apply generally over all markets. Get busy and work!