Entries Tagged 'Resources' ↓

A few weeks ago I wrote a post on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (mturk.com) and some of the potential I saw in it to get stuff done on the cheap. Well, since that day I’ve been running multiple HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) on the Turk and I’ve been getting some great results.

If you’ve got a blog or any kind of website, chances are you’d like for people to be looking at it, right? Well, one great way to do that currently is to promote it on social media websites like Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Facebook; the list is seemingly endless. You could spend entire days creating accounts at each of these sites, write a small review of your site and post the link, and in the end you would probably see a small gain in traffic. However, what if you could accomplish all that for 50 cents? Without spending any time on it yourself? Would you do it? I sure would. In fact, I did.

As I’ve previously mentioned, I’m currently in the process of launching a new webstore selling digital picture frames and as such I’ve been trying my best to find ways to promote it. So I created a HIT on Amazon’s web services (Mechanical Turk) asking people to bookmark my site on their favorite social network. My HIT looked something like the following:

Bookmark the URL http://www.digitalframeguy.com

Using one of the following sites:
http://del.icio.us/
http://www.stumbleupon.com/
http://www.propeller.com/
http://spurl.net/
http://diigo.com/
http://myjeeves.ask.com/
http://www.connectedy.com/index.php
http://www.myvmarks.com/
http://www.bookmarktracker.com/bt/home
http://www.oyax.com/
http://www.jumptags.com/
http://www.mylinkvault.com/
http://buddymarks.com/
http://linkagogo.com/
http://bibsonomy.org/
http://backflip.com/
http://www.mister-wong.com/
http://blinklist.com/
http://furl.net/

Include in the title or description one of the following terms:
digital picture frame(s)
digital photo frame(s)
digital frame(s)
wireless photo frame(s)

You may use either the singular or plural version of the keyword.
Please provide the URL of the bookmark in comments to receive payment for the HIT.
You can complete this HIT up to 5 times if you use a different bookmarking site each time.

So you can see I tried to make things as easy as possible for the turker to complete. Most of these people already have accounts at one or another of the social networks, so all they have to do is login and link to you. I offered 10 cents for these, only because I wanted a bunch in a hurry. 10 cents is actually a decent price for a HIT such as this. For another site, where I was more patient, I only offered 1 cent per bookmark, and I still got good results, though slower. As such, it is important to decide on your budget. It is worth taking the time to figure out if you only want to spend 25 cents promoting your site, or if you can actually afford a full $2.00. The choice is yours.

So I’ve basically given you a blueprint here for one way to get as many hiqh quality backlinks to your site as you want from the social media sites. If you want, you can specify only Digg links, or whatever you value. The great thing about this is the search engines love social media right now, most of the sites have high PR, and you get a link to your site that typically includes the keyword phrase of your choice. All for a few cents.

What’s not to love about that?

EDIT: I just got some article HITs back from Mechanical Turk and two of them were so good that I wanted to award a bonus to the authors. FYI - here’s how to do it. In the Manage HIT interface, where you see their unique ID number, beside the HIT results, click on that number (it is a hyperlink) and a pop down menu will appear. You can then award a bonus of any amount you wish through that link. I just felt bad paying 50 cents for these two great articles, so I doubled it for them.

I know, I’m a big spender. =)

I’ve been so busy lately trying to work out some kinks in getting my first webstore online (selling digital picture frames - and yes - I’m trying to get some link love here =) that I’ve somewhat neglected my affiliate marketing endeavors. However, as the site is slowly coming together I find myself starting to think about how I’m going to market it. As I previously posted, I have had no end of SEO related sales calls, some of them totally discounting the value of PPC advertising. I think that is rather misguided. SEO alone is like having one leg on a stool. You need more legs if you want to stand securely!

Pay Per Click advertising gets you results fast, and it also helps you really drill down to find the money words, if you’re doing proper analysis. This can really help inform you when it comes to SEO, and choosing what keywords to optimize around. So I set out on a quest to find some tools to really help me do that proper analysis, and along the way I’ve discovered a couple great ones. If you’re into affilate or pay per click marketing, I highly recommend you seriously consider these.

Disclaimer: This is not a sales pitch, and even though my affiliate links are in here (you can only be an affiliate once you’ve purchased) I honestly do recommend these products. Evaluate them on their own merit.

Affiliate Radar

I’ve been looking for a way to quickly build campaigns that are trackable at the keyword level for a long time. I’m fairly handy with Excel so I’ve limped along with some homebrew solutions for quite a while, but when I found Affiliate Radar I knew I needed it. Their slogan is “Don’t Fly Blind” and it’s true. If you’re an affiliate marketer and you’re not tracking the performance of every keyword you’re advertising on, I can almost guarantee you’re both losing money (even if you’re making money) and at the same time leaving money on the table.

The great thing about AR is that I’m now able to easily implement keyword-level and ad-level tracking on pretty much any search engine I choose. I can send all the traffic to one page if I wish, and the software will handle it all for me. Later on, I simply go into my affiliate network, grab the relevant report, import it into AR along with my cost data and boom - it spits out a gigantic report that gives me cost / revenue data per keyword / ad across all my campaigns all at once! It takes seconds! From here I can quickly identify which keywords are winners and which are losers. This allows me to save a ton of time testing new affiliate offers, and means I’m much more likely to hit upon a profitable combination (even if I’m only running two keywords!).

Another interesting thing about the method of tracking AR uses is that it assigns a unique ID to every keyword - such as 7A000123 for example. The only place this has relevance is in their database, so the manager of your affiliate program will have no idea which keywords or tactics you’re using to drive sales. This effectively keeps your secrets safe.

Affiliate Radar is setup for simple report importing for most of the affiliate networks you can think of (and they’ll add more on request). CJ, Clickbank, Linkshare, CPA Networks, Azoogle, the list goes on and on. One of the coolest features is the ability to quickly export any given campaign to Google, Yahoo, or MSN. What I do is build a campaign in Adwords Editor (another FREE must have for anyone using Adwords), export the whole campaign into Affiliate Radar, add all the special keyword links, then export back to Adwords, adding Yahoo and MSN at the same time. This can really triple your efficiency when building new ad campaigns.

Speed PPC

I just got Speed PPC the other day, and I’ve yet to really take full advantage of its power. However, using these two systems in conjunction can provide some stunning results. Speed PPC allows you to manipulate keyword lists into massively long lists, broken down by category in order to provide maximum relevancy. For example you might have two lists, one of type of shoe (running shoe, tennis shoe, hiking shoe etc) and another of brand names (Nike, Reebok, Adidas, etc). Speed PPC can merge these together into every combination you can think of (Nike running shoe, Nike tennis shoe, Nike hiking shoe) and group them together. You can then do similar things building the ads themselves. The final screen lets you export all that data into Adwords Editor where you can have a campaign with hundreds of keywords broken down into dozens of adgroups live in about a minute.

Now take this data from Adwords Editor, send it over to Affiliate Radar, add keyword tracking, then export it back to the three main search engines and you’re well on your way. A competent user of both programs could have a fully fledged, optimized keyword and ad tracked campaign (with hundreds of keywords) setup from start to finish in just over 10 minutes. Where I come from that is pretty impressive.

Adwords Editor

I thought I should mention Adwords Editor in here as well. I know a while ago I was conned into buying a similar product that allowed me to edit my Google Adwords campaigns from a Windows client; however the software didn’t work that well and I ended up discarding it. Little did I know, probably at the same time, Google was releasing their free tool called Adwords Editor. By far the most impressive feature of this software is the ability to easily import / export bulk data. I can add hundreds of keywords to multiple campaigns from one screen, or change the max bid on all my keywords simultaneously. Did I mention it is free?

You know in the movies when they’ve always has this cool laptop with some program on there that seemingly lets him rule the world? You know, they can access whatever they want, hack into things and do cool-looking stuff. Well the little techno-control-geek in me has always wanted something like that, and I’ve got a built in sucker button for anything that looks remotely close.

Well I just got my very own blogosphere-ruling software. It’s called Woopra.

Woopra is the Chuck Norris of Site Analytics.

Woopra makes Google Analytics look like a old donkey pulling a wooden cart with square wheels.

Woopra is free. I am led to believe it is going to remain free as well.

So you’re asking yourself right now, what in the world could be so cool about blog analytics that elicits Chuck Norris-isms? Here’s a screenshot from the dashboard, and then I’ll explain a bit more.

What you see here is the live dashboard in Woopra. That’s right, I said live. You get to see who your visitors are, right then and there as they are reading your posts, in real time. You see IP, city, country, browser, OS, language, viewed pages, time spent on pages etc. You can tag visitors with nicknames, and you can even initiate chat with them! I tried this just now with a friend and it pops up a chat window in their browser. Very, very cool.

WARNING - If you’re reading this I might randomly start chatting with you!
Please be a good sport! =)

A couple more things about the screenshot above… As you can see at the time it was taken there were 21 people reading my blog, simultaneously. From the graphic under the 21 (to the right) you can see this all happened rather suddenly, and traffic was building at that point. In fact it ended up being about a 20 minute spike of around 45 people in total, nearly all from StumbleUpon. I’d like to know if I somehow made front page or something. So the graphic gives you yet another realtime measure of your traffic volume.

There is a ticker tape that runs along the bottom of the screen, displaying your current, once again, I’ll emphasize current, blog stats. It scrolls along quite happily, just like a stock ticker, giving you the key stats of the day, while also telling you if they are up on the day, or down, and by what percentage.

At the click of a mouse all sort of information is immediately available, and all in a very nice user interface. Popular pages, landing pages, exit pages, outgoing links, downloads, custom events and way more. Woopra even has a full screen mode, which brought out my little Mission Impossible wannabe ideas. It truly is fun to watch a full screen map of the world flickering with hundreds of dots (I’m optimistic) showing the locations of who is on your site, worldwide.

Woopra also has search functionality built into it, so you can search for pretty much any event or thing you can dream of that was recorded. With over 40 different statistics recorded in real time, this should be enough to keep you happy!

How To Install Woopra

Woopra is very easy to install. There is a tiny snippet of code, similar to the Google Analytics code we’re all so familiar with that needs to go into your Wordpress blog. To make it even easier, they have turned this into a plugin. So, install the plugin as you would any other, and configure it with your site ID. Now you need to install the Woopra software on your computer. They currently have beta versions for Windows, Mac and Linux, so no sad faces today!

Because the software runs locally on your computer it is very quick - no more logging in and then waiting for slow servers at Google to generate some report or other. Everything is instantly accessible, which adds to the fun.

The Way of the Future

I can only imagine the ways in which this revolutionary software is going to be used in the future. Webmasters can now respond to traffic spikes in real time. I know there must be many good uses out there, especially from a marketing perspective, to being able to initiate a chat with a visitor viewing a certain page. Plus, the sheer fun of being so in touch with your blog and your audience is much more stimulating, even for the average blogger!

If you’ve got a Wordpress blog - why not sign up at Woopra.com? It’s free!

If you liked this post, please Digg it, or leave a comment!

To succeed in business on the internet, you need to pick a niche and specialize. There simply isn’t a lot of room for more eBays and Amazons out there. There will always be a few of these uber-players in the game; ingowever the vast majority of successful businesses on the internet are specializing in a niche.

I’m going to assume that I don’t need to convince you of the merits of choosing a niche; it is one of the most talked about things in internet marketing. Instead, I wanted to focus on some concrete ways that you can go about identifying a market niche that is going to work for you. This process is well suited to those who are looking to develop a product of their own, though it will work equally well if you’re planning on building a site promoting affiliate products.

Researching a Market Niche

1. Brainstorm. Take a piece of paper and start writing any market idea that comes to mind. The conventional brainstorming wisdom applies - don’t discard any idea - just write it down! Even if you don’t think it is any good, write it down!

Think of your own hobbies or those of your friends. Think of a common problem in people’s lives - is there information out there, or a product, that can solve it? If you absolutely can’t think of anything, go to the public library or a good sized bookstore and have a look at their magazine section. Magazines represent topics people are interested in; topics that people are willing to pay money for more information on. Once you’ve got 25-30 topic ideas on paper you can move on to the next step.

2. Research Keywords. You don’t have to come up with an exhaustive and comprehensive list at this point of every keyword you’ll ever use in the niche. Rather, use this step to get a feel for the highest traffic keywords in your niche. Try to pick around 5. Go to SEOBook.com and use their free keyword tool. Type in what you think is the main keyword for the niche, and see what you can find out. There are likely other common variations or sub-niches you haven’t thought about.

3. Assess the Niche Potential. Ultimately, you want to be able to deeply penetrate your chosen niche. Go through your list and consider whether each niche has the potential for additional products. Would it be possible to create a home study course around it? A membership site? Something you could upsell your customers on after the initial product? How about a monthly newsletter? Is there sufficient depth that people are likely to pay for additional products? Is there a good selection of affiliate products available for that niche? Checkout the usual culprits for this: Clickbank, PayDotCom, CJ, LinkShare, etc. You might need to search around in your niche market to find some good products, then google those products + “affiliate” to see if there are affiliate programs available.

4. Understand the Niche. Now that you’ve hopefully narrowed down your list somewhat, take it to the library and see what kinds of magazines and books exist on your subject. What topics are they writing about? Are there sub-topics that have product potential? Keep your eyes open for complementary niches as well. Once you’ve developed a list of customers, people who have purchased your main product, you’ll want to be able to continue to use that list to sell your customers other related products in the future.

Another idea is to go to Amazon.com and type in your top 5 niche keywords from step 2. See what products come up. Amazon can show you a ton of useful information about your target niche. You can see what people thought of competing products (ie what they liked and disliked), as well as additional products that they purchased. Try to get a feel for the price points as well.

5. Check for a Community of Interest. Go to Google and type in your niche keywords and the word “forum” and see what comes up. Click on a bunch of the results. Are people talking about your niche market, or is it dead? If forums exist on the topic, check them out and see how many active users there are on the relevant threads. Try to get a feel for the topics they are discussing, and the level of participation. Take note of the best forums, as you’ll want to come back to these later on to participate and promote your own product.

Another idea is to go to blogsearch.google.com and search for your niche in there. See if blogs come up on the topic, if so, check them out for content and try to get a feel for their traffic volumes. Are people actively commenting on the posts? Identify the best forums and blogs, as you’ll want to come back to these later to participate and promote your own product. You can also look for article directories.

6. Check out the Competition. Run searches on the main keywords for your niche and see what paid ads come up on Google and Yahoo. What products are being promoted? What are they doing well that you can emulate, and what are they doing poorly that you can do better? Checkout the organic listings as well. Read their squeeze pages and sales letters. Do they have newsletters available? Sign up for them; see what they’re talking about. Keep your eyes open for products you could partner with in the future.

7. Don’t Slack Off! This might seem like a lot of work, and it is. Choosing a niche market is possibly the hardest part of the whole process, and arguably the most important. Put your head down and slog through it. Once you’re established later on you’ll be happy you did.

Recently I’ve come across a few cool SEO oriented plugins for Firefox. Honestly, until recently I naively didn’t even know plugins existed for Firefox, so this was a pleasant surprise, and since then I’ve been trending away from IE7 towards Firefox. Anyways, I thought I would share these three SEO plugins with you as I’ve found them useful.

SearchStatus Plugin

* Google PageRank
* Google Category
* Alexa popularity ranking
* Compete.com ranking
* Alexa incoming links
* Alexa related links
* backward links from Google, Yahoo! and MSN

SEO For FireFox (seobook.com)

This plugin has a big long list of cool things, including PR, Age, Links, .edu links, .gov links, del.ici.us, Technorati, Alexa, DMOZ, Bloglines, WhoIs, and more.

Rank Checker (seobook.com)

Checks your sites for rankings on user-specified keywords on Google, Yahoo and MSN. You can customize this to a certain degree as well. There is a detailed how-to on the page.

In my ongoing quest to achieve SEO for this blog I’ve started looking at the number of inbound links I have. The more inbound links you have, especially one way links, the better your ranking on the search engines. That’s the theory anyways. Ideally, you want inbound links from sites/pages with high PR as well.

This inbound links tool shows all the inbound links to your site registered by the Big Three: Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Punch in your site and try it out. When you click on the button it will bring you to the SEOChat website where your results will be displayed.

Alternatively, you can have a look at the Google Webmaster Tools for your site, or go to alltheweb.com and punch in link:www.yoursitename.com to see the results.

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