I started my first serious ppc campaign about three weeks ago for a small dropshipping ecommerce store I had built. The store was in the gaming niche and I had seen a similar one for sale on Sitepoint which claimed an amazing $1700 return a month on a $10 a day ppc budget, which sounded too good to be true, and it was. (I later found that this was a scam. A post on this is on the way!)

The person who bought the site on Sitepoint was still running ads which meant that it must be profitable, if not to the extent the seller claimed. Impossible as it seemed for a complete novice with Google Adwords, I took on the challenge of bringing my site into profit on a $10 a day budget. I wasn’t looking for a $1700 return but doubling my money would be nice.

Week one was a disaster. I hopped from content to search, to search only to content only to search only in 3 countries to search and content in 179 countries …. you get the idea. I was clueless. Needless to say, there was no profit this week.

Week two I slowed down and broke even and week 3 was similar.

Feeling really frustrated, I remembered an email I had gotten from Rosalind Gardner a long time ago that I had glimpsed and then trashed.  Some guy was paying over $3 a click in the spyware niche for specific keywords. How did she know this?   She was using  ppc keyword spy to check out what keywords competitors were bidding on, how much they were paying and how many clicks they were getting.

At last, a glimmer of hope.  I could possibly find out what keywords my competitor was using to keep her campaign in profit.

When I checked it out,  I was amazed to see that I could try out  ppc keyword spy for free and it was a simple Firefox plugin!

Immediately, even with the trail limitations I could see my competitor was bidding on keywords that I hadn’ t even thought of and I could see how much I needed to pay to be up there in the ranks.

The PPC Keyword Spy plugin simply places a ‘View Keywords’ link under each ad. The free version shows only 10 results, which sometimes can be enough to give you competitive advantage. The full version will display up to 100 competitor keywords. Simply clicking on the

View Keywords will pop up all the information you need. PPC Keyword Spy is a dream come as far as competitor espionnage is concerned.

PPC Keyword Spy, the full version is definitely next on my list of IM investments. I don’t run enough ppc campaigns yet but this tool has given me the little push to feel safer experimenting with dropshipping.

So is my Adwords campaign turning me a profit.  Yes! I spend $10, I make $20. That was my goal.  Nothing to shout about but I know now that I can create 10 more dropshipping sites, confident that I have the tools to set up and manage a profitable ppc campaign!

A few weeks back, I wrote that I was testing Howie Schwartz’s google ranking techniques as taught in his Conversation Domination program.  I was cynical about the whole thing, mostly because after I had signed up to his program, on the $1 free trial, I wasn’t too impressed with the quality and depth of information I found in there.

I still don’t have enough money to sign up to any of Howie’s programs, but I continue to listen to all his free videos and seminars.  So after hearing about Howies’s techniques on Micheal Campbells Internet Marketing Secrets Podast, I did decide to give it a shot and write an honest review.  So here goes.

The first thing I needed to try out Howies Conversation Domination tactics was something to market.  I logged into my nichebot account (another $1 free trial tool) and did a little big of digging. Eventually I found what looked like a promising niche, averaging 600 searches per day for a  long tail keyphrase with only 150 competitors using the same phrase in their page title.

I quickly put together an information product based on this niche and popped the product onto its own domain.  This was the site I wanted to rank number 1 in Google, if at all possible.  That process took me about two days.

Then I went to work promoting the site using Howies ranking techniques. I find this part tedious and boring and as soon as I can, this is definitely first to be outsourced!  I used Onlywire.com to add the site to a whole array of social bookmarking sites. I then logged in my ping.fm account and got busy there, posting my link to other sites such as blogger, wordpress etc. I was a little bit lazy and didn’t go through the whole ‘create a Squidoo, hubpage etc thing’, though in the end I didn’t really need to for this niche. I then Pinged everything I had done using Pingomatic.

To my amazement within a few hours my primary domain was number 1 in Google and I had 6 spots on the first page of Google for the long tail keyphrase I had targeted. I was elated and slapped myself on the head for being such a cynic about Howie! But alas, the story doesn’t have such a perfect ending ….

About eight hours after my web 2 link buidling work I checked back again and my primary domain was no longer number one in Google. In fact it had dropped right off the first page and the second and the third ….  Still, I was holding steady with most of the other social bookmarking links, though there was a little shuffling.

A couple of days later and another check on my rankings.  I find all my social booking marking links still on page one of Google, giving me five of the 10 spots and my primary domain first on page two for my specified keyword phrase.  I’m happy with this result and I’m guessing that with time, my primary domain will find its way on the the first page of Google.

So does Howie’s Conversation Domination technique work?  I think so and regardless of anything else I owe my first $47 payment for my very first Informatino product to Howie Schwartz, since my Info product made a sale within the first couple of days. That’s a milestone that I won’t forget in a hurry.

Oh my god, I find twittering so intimidating.  Am I the only person who agonizes over a tweet, dithers on the update button and then after spending 20 minutes composing the tweet decides not to update after all. I’m alone on this  one, right?

I know, it’s absurd. The whole point of micro-blogging is that it’s quick and impulsive.  But offline, I’m not the kind of person who is comfortable mingling in a big crowd. I’m more of a one to one person and big personalities scare me. So it was a surprise for me to see that my offline shyness would carry over online. I mean, surely the anonymity of the web would knock that kind of sillyness on the head.  Well, apparently not.

For me, twittering is like standing in the middle of a huge chatting crowd . For some reason I’m seeing the crowd gathered in a great big Plazza or Square.  Anyhow, the crowd is chatting and there’s a low hum. Then I let out great big shout …. something like “Hey, you guys … I’m listening to Paul Colligan’s podacst. Good stuff!” Everybody looks for a second, ignores me and continues chatting.

I’m just not getting to grips with the “Informal Intimacy” thing that Paul and Alex talkabout in their “Why We Twitter” Podcast.  I haven’t found my comfort zone with it. Not yet anyway!

So I’ve had to find a way to compromise and get a handle on my twitter anxiety. People twitter for all kinds of different reasons. Marketers twitter to sell products, build loyalty and gain immediacy with their market, friends twitter to share new stuff in their life.  I’m twittering (or not) to learn.   I’m following only tweets from people I can learn from.  It’s my way of being a part of a social space that I think is amazing but for now, intimidating. The downside, I come off as an anti-social, grumpy boots sitting in the corner rather than sharing in the fun but hey, it’s my comfort zone right now.

On the upside, I’m eaves-dropping on some of the most valuable conversations going on on the web and learning lots.  All of which will be empowering I’m sure.

So for now I’m comfortable being an old grumpy boots rather than an obsessive twitterer. I imagine when I have something great to twitter about I’ll be up their with the best of them, getting informally intimate with anybody who willing to listen!

If you’re like me, the most advanced you’ve ever gotten with Google search is to keep it specific by enclosing your search term in inverted commas.  So you might be surprised to know that besides the very basic operation of telling Google what to search for,  Google has some very cool advanced search features.  Once you get the hang of these, they can be used for executing some pretty serious niche marketing research.

By fine tuning your search query, Google will reveal a whole bunch of information regarding keyword competition, indexed pages on competitors sites and much more.  So roll up your sleeves and let’s get familiar with using Google’s advanced operators.  Once you mastered them,  you’ve got a very efficient and best of all, completely free niche marketing tool.  So let’s take a look …

The first thing you need to know before we start is that all operators end in a colon but don’t include a space between the operator and the query following it.  It can make the search tempremental.  Ok, so let’s take a look at some of the most important operators for the purpose of niche marketing research.

So you have an idea for a profitable niche and you want to look into it further. We’re assuming that you’re not using Jim Morris’ Nichebot, so you head straight off to Goolgle and type in your keyphrase, let’s say, credit repair help. This is a big highly competitive niche and Google returns 777,000 results.

With this basic search query,  Google has given us every website containing the words, credit, repair and help. Not very useful at all!  However, if you use  Google’s intitle: operator,  these results can be filtered to show how many website contain these specific keywords in the their title.

Most web sites insert a carefully chosen title in each of their pages, usually one that will please the search engines. So, being able to search site titles matching your keyword is a very powerful piece of kit.

So intitle:credit repair help returns 288,000 results. A little better than 777,000 but still nothing to get excited about!

If we now restrict our search futher by containing our keyphrase in inverted commas like so,

intitle:”credit repair help”

we are now down to 3,520 results. We now know that 3520 websites have the exact match for our term credit repair help in their title. So, credit repair help is a pretty competitive term.

Certain keyphrases can also be restricted from the title search by using the ‘-’ sign. For example,

intitle:”credit repair help” -intitle:bad

This query will return titles with credit repair help but restrict titles that also contain the word ‘bad’.

Taking it a step further, using the inurl: operation will show how tight the competition is for our keyphrase in the url, rather than the title of competiting websites.

inurl:”credit repair help” shows 1,910 search results.

You can also specify a word to include or exclude in the search with the  inurl: operator.

The word can be anywhere in the URL, and not just in the domain name. By adding the ‘-’ sign, we can exclude sites we don’t want to see results from.  For example, the following query finds pages that contain “credit repair help” in the URL,  but excludes listings from www.ezinearticles.com.

inurl:credit repair help -site:ezinearticles.com

So by using just a couple of Google’s advanced operators, we have managed to find the number of competitors with an exact match to our search term within our niche market.

Specify Multiple Words in URL with allinurl: to examine competitors keyword use

The allinurl: operator is similar  to inurl: except that it can be followed by many words. This query will restrict search results to pages that contain all of the query words in the url. For example, the following query will return pages from debtsteps.com that have either “credit” and “repair” or “help” and “advice” in the URL.

allinurl:debtsteps.com credit | repair | help | advice

Use the intext; operator to find Specific Words in Site Text

Let’s say we want to search google for a specific term. For example, if we have a niche credit repair help product, we might want to search specifically for people looking for help with credit repair.

By using the intext: operator we can do this pretty well while eliminating sites that have this keyphrase in their url, title or metatags. This means were are likely to dig up real people looking for real help and not just competitors taking advantage of the keyphrase for search engines.

intext:”I need help with credit repair”

Now that we’ve checked out the number of competitors in our niche and researched some ‘in text’ keywords, we can gather more intelligence on our leading competitors by using the link: operator.

link:www.aaacreditguide.com will return all the pages that link to aaacreditguide.com.  Examining the page rank of those links can reveal useful intelligence on where to place links for our own niche site.

But we don’t want to link on just any old page, even if the pagerank is good. We want to link on pages being visited regularly by Google. To find these we use cache: operator.

cache:www.aaacreditguide.com will show how recently aaacreditguide.com had been visited by google. Use this operator for any page that you are considering linking from.

Finally, let’s wrap up with two more useful search operations, related: and define:

define: affiliate marketing returns a whole list of definitions for affiliate marketing. Not really so useful for niche marketing, but one I like.

And finally related: is a great operator for digging out competing sites.  Typing related:www.ezinearticles.com into Google, for example,  will throw back a whole list of similar sites.

So there you have it.  You can now happily use google to dig up keyword and linking intelligence on any competitor within your chosen niche.

I’ve just come across a neat little tool thanks to Lynn Terry’s blog, Clicknewz.  Odiogo allows bloggers to add another distribution channel to their content, by translating any written blog post into the spoken word.

No only this, but Odiogo also turns blog posts into a podcast, and offers a whole range of subscription offers, including iTunes. Great for those of us who hate the sound of our voices, or have no idea how to go about pod-casting.

Ok, so if you’re listening to the podcast for this post, you’re hearing him right now and maybe thinking his voice is a little tedious to listen to. Right? But Odiogo’s digital voice, is a leader in the new generation of computer generated speakers. He will inflect nicely, and an appropriately placed comma will generate pauses in all the right places. Text can flow pretty well, if you’re au fait with your grammer.

Integrating Odiogo into your wordpress blog is a breeze, even for techno-phobes. All you’ve got to do is upload the plugin and activate, just like any other wordpress plugin. Within minutes, you’ll have instant audio posts on your blog pages, a feed to your podcasts on itunes, and various other syndication options on your own Odiogo page.

Will the service work for large blogs? I installed the plugin on another blog of mine and Odiogo was able to can more than 50 pages into audio format in less than 50 minutes, from the time I signed up for the service. Pretty impressive?

Once installed, all of your previously published posts will be odiogo-ified, and new posts should become available for listening within a few hours, even minutes. What’s more, it will syndicate all your posts into feeds that can be added to your RSS reader or whatever program you use to pull down podcasts for listening on the go. While it’s certainly not as efficient as reading blog posts in Google Reader, the service is excellent for listening on the go, to your favorite blogs on your ipod or portable media player.

Ok so it does have some quirks. The tedious voice issue, that lacks inflections found in natural speech, will undoubtedly put some people off. The integrated flash player can be a slight pain in the ass. Sure, it’s quick to load and can squeeze long posts into tiny files, but there’s no volume control, and it is inclined to blast at ya, so keep your thumb on the manual volume control and be prepared to jack it right down. As for wearing headphones, don’t go there!

Check out Odiogo’s demo page if you’d like to explore more. You might also want to take a look at this cool Firefox plugin, ClicK, Speak, which add stext-to-speech functionality to any site you’re browsing. Pretty neat!

]]> http://the364project.com/review-odiogo-turn-your-posts-into-podcasts-with-no-hassle/feed/ 0 http://the364project.com/review-nichebot/ http://the364project.com/review-nichebot/#comments Fri, 05 Dec 2008 23:05:39 +0000 Tracey http://the364project.com/?p=39

The original NicheBOT keyword research tool was one of the best free keyword research tools around. This old classic has now been pushed aside to make room for the new and improved NicheBOT V2. I decided to take this shiny new keyword research tool for a run to see if it lives up to the high expectations many had for it. Here’s what I found.

First Impressions

After doing keyword research for a long time, people tend to develop and refine certain procedures to get the best results in the minimum amount of time. I’ve certainly got my own methodology which has several procedure pathways depending upon what I’m trying to dig out.

For example the way that I research for pay per click (PPC) is quite different to how I research to find new profitable niches. Perhaps I will share these different procedures with you some day.

Anyway, regardless of the style of keyword research I’m doing, I loosely follow a basic procedure. This workflow can be crudely explained as:

* I poke around a bit.
* I assess difficulty.
* I assess profitability.
* I go “lateral”.
* I blow it up.
* I clean up the mess.

Now each of these steps will be executed slightly differently depending on the outcomes I’m trying to achieve, but that’s my basic workflow.

Now the problem with that up until recently, there weren’t many tools that would allow me to smoothly work like that with much continuity. That is until now. Enter NicheBOT V2.

(The original NicheBOT (now NicheBOT Classic) was a free tool that has now moved here).

Going with the grain instead of against it

I’ve got to say from the outset that I love NicheBOT V2. It fits my keyword research style like a glove. Now, I’m not saying that it’s perfect. The interface is a bit messy, the keyword management is a somewhat lacking and there isn’t any pricing data for AdSense or heavy duty PPC. These things definitely need improvement.

However, even with those shortfalls, NicheBOT V2 just feels right. Perhaps the most right of any of the 25+ keyword research tools I have spent time with. It feels like the tool is finally going with the grain instead of against it.

Let me give you a quick tour. You can give the system a run yourself for 14 days for a lazy buck here.

Getting started

When I first logged into members home page I heard my inner monologue say;

“Whoa! Steady on guys! It feels like I just walked into a room and everyone started talking to me at once. This page is busy!”

It actually took me a minute or two to assimilate all the content on this page and how it all hung together. Once I got my head around it, I got started.

As you follow this little tour, see how the different sections matched my keyword research style. See if it matches yours too.

Quick Digging

NicheBOT V2 allows you to use a whole bunch of free tools to poke around researching different keywords. These tools won’t cost you any of your premium credits. The free tools include:

* Keyword Discovery Keywords (Top 10)
* WordTracker Keywords (Top 15)
* Overture Keywords (Top 100)
* WordTracker Thesaurus (Top 15)
* Find Niche Products (Directory Style)

Using these tools, I pulled out a bunch of keywords that look pretty good, and wanted to check out a bit more. No credit required.

Assessing difficulty

Once I had these keywords in my investigative basket, I was able to run a bunch of checks on them to assess competition.

The info I could get for each keyword included:

* Volume
* Google Competition (using checks to see how many pages contained that term in both the title and in anchor text)
* KEI
* Ratio
* Analysis

Now I will just stop for a second here to explain this neat feature. For every keyword, you can hit this analyse button. NicheBOT V2 goes out and grabs the top 10 sites (can be up to 50) on Google for that phrase, and sees how tough they would be to crack SEO wise. For each of those top 10 URL’s it looks at the backlinks, the number of indexed pages and the page rank. Nice!

* WordTrend

This is a great feature if you wish to see the kinds of seasonal trends of your chosen keywords. It also allows you to run some visual comparisons of search volume between keywords. Some neat stuff that will probably chew through your credits pretty fast if you get hooked on those fancy graphs!

Using these free tools I was also able to find myself lots of related lateral keywords to add into the mix.

Deep Digging

Normally when I am keyword researching I like to bring my lists down to small group of keywords I call my seed group. These are the result of my initial “poking around”, difficulty and profitability analysis, as well as my lateral research. It’s at this point I try to “blow up” my keyword lists.

NicheBOT V2 does this perfectly by tapping into the Keyword Discovery enterprise level data (normally $495 per month) and lets you expand your list to as big as any service on the market will provide. That means up to 10,000 keywords per seed keyword. So if you have 100 seed keywords you can potentially expand your keyword list to 1,000,000 (1 million) keywords. Very slick stuff.

Keyword Cleaning and Management

When you can blow your keyword lists up to that size, you are going to want a healthy way to both manage and clean up your keyword lists.

On the whole, NicheBOT V2 does a good job of doing this. As far as keyword management goes, the interface is good, and the continuity between features is excellent. The only thing that annoyed me was that I couldn’t see how I could combine lists (and remove the duplicates). Perhaps other NicheBOT V2 users can help me out with that?

With respect to keyword list cleanup, NicheBOT V2 on the whole hits the nail on the head. The only thing that it lacks (and so does pretty much every other tool so I know it’s a minor quibble) is that the appending tool doesn’t add the keywords with the appendages as new keywords, but just replaces the old ones. I want the tool to keep the existing keyword, AND create a new keyword phrase with the appended words. I’m sure it’s not hard to do, so Jim, if you’re reading this…

The verdict

The verdict? The verdict is I love it!

If you do any keyword research at all, you must at least try this service. It only costs 1 buck to get your feet wet. Just make sure that you set aside at least 30 minutes to get your head around how it all hangs together so you can get the full picture of the power of NicheBOT V2.

Summary

A keyword research tool that makes sense as it closely follows how users conduct their research. Ability to expand your lists to up to 10,000 words per seed keyword. Recommended. Go get it!

Strong Aspects

* Design matches solid keyword research methodology
* A variety of tools pulling from several different data sources
* Ability to expand your lists dramatically
* Strong keyword cleaning functionality

Weak Aspects

* Interface a bit messy
* Doesn’t have keyword bid data
* Keyword management could be a little better

Who is it ideal for?

This tool would suit almost anyone who does any kind of keyword research, although it would probably suit PPC and AdSense focused users less as it doesn’t provide bid data.