Well, it’s hard to believe that a year has gone by so fast. Here is The Challenge 2011. Last year’s challenge was really my first big introduction as to the “correct way” to approach internet marketing. This year, I will take the information I have learned from last year’s challenge and build on it to “hopefully” get a single website to become profitable this year.
Ok. Here goes…….
O.k. I’ll concede the fact that, in business, as a sole proprietor, you really have to focus on your business 24 hours a day and 7 days aweek. One person can only do so much. Because of this, I would think that one should schedule time to work on their business at least 8 hours per day, 5 days per week and take the weekends off.Entrepreneurs don’t have that luxury, though. When an Entrepreneur launches a business project, they often have to manage every aspect ofthe business and must work a good 16 hours everyday to make sure things are operating as planned. They must also even work on the weekends and sleep only when they absolutely have to.
This is a hard road to travel for anyone. The decision to start yourown business has its challenges and they must be taken into consideration for the business to move forward and become a success.
When an Entrepreneur decides to start a business, they have to plan for the future of that business and then work toward the end goal of being successful and earning a good living from the business that they have grown.
So, how is a business grown? It is grown through consistent action towards meeting short-term goals with the plan to ultimately achieve the long-term goals of living off of the success of that business. Creating momentum through action is the key to success. Fulfilling one short-term goal does not earn the time off for relaxation. Rather, it frees you up to accomplish the next short-term goal.
By losing focus on your main objective, you will quickly realize that you were a real magician and did not know it. Losing your focus will not make you an illusionist. You will really, really perform magic by making your business disappear before your very eyes as if it neverreally existed in the first place.
I decided to really get some practice using Market Samurai to find micro-niches that meet the Challenge Criteria. My initial goal was to find at least 10 micro-niches during this past week and I think I have mastered the first week’s training. Thank goodness there was a week in between training modules for me to be able to do this. So often, learning is crammed into a short time when full mastery of the topics are not possible.
After finding 14 micro-niches that meet the criteria and have good commercial viability, I think I’ll just stop there and see what next week has in store for me. In the mean time, I will just review all of the micro-niches I have found so far and make a determination as to which ones seem to me to be better candidates for testing.
I will be looking for which ones have the highest PBR and SEOT and the lowest SEOC. I think those would be the most important factors to weigh in determining where I should concentrate my initial efforts. The other important thing is commercial viability. If the above criteria match, I will also weigh the factors of how well the commercial factors are and choose the best prospects from that data.
One of the things I really liked about the subject of assessing market competition was was the anecdote about the 2 Internet Marketers in a jungle about to be chased by a Lion. One Internet marketer immediately sat down a put on a pair of tennis shoes he had in his backpack. The other Internet marketer exclaimed, “What are you doing? You can’t outrun a Lion!” The reply was, “I don’t need to outrun the Lion, I just need to outrun you.”
Although I’ve heard this before, I realize it is probably one of the most profound ideas of Internet marketing that you have to do only a little bit better than your competition in order to give yourself a better position in your market. As you are competing for a good position in the search engines for your theme and category keywords, you have to be thinking about what you can do to outrun your competition just a little in order to succeed. When one competitor comes up with something new, you have to also think about what you can do better.
So, in searching for a theme and category keywords, the object is to find a theme keyword that has the best traffic according to the traffic criteria of more than 80 searches per day, a phrase to broad match ratio of greater than 15%, and having less than 30,000 websites globally that are mentioning the same keyword phrase in their websites. Using this traffic criteria, this narrows the competition down to make it easier to find weaker competitors within that niche.
Finally, by analyzing the competition within that niche, you try to find a weak competitor. A weak competitor is one that has a Google page rank of less than 3, does not have a listing in the Yahoo directory, has a small number of external back-links pointing to a page, and is does not have the keyword in the title tag or the url tag.
Finding at least one website within a miro-niche that meets both the traffic and SEO competition criteria identifies a weak competitor in which you have strong possibilities to outrank in Google (or outrun). Finding more than one weak competitor within a micro-niche is even better and it is preferable to exploit the weaknesses within a particular micro-niche based on those factors.
The exercise of identifying 3 Markets and paring them down to identify 3 Micro-Niche keywords that meet the criteria for a possible successful website is a challenge for many while it comes easy for others.
In the previous exercise, the idea was to let yourself go and go through a kind of controlled brainstorming session to find only 7 Market Niche ideas and today, these 7 get analyzed to weed them out and discover only 3 micro-niches out of those 7.
So why is it so hard for so many people to accomplish this with any degree of certainty that they have grasped the concepts and will have reduced the paradox of working hard to build an unsuccessful business rather than a successful one.
For me, when I started researching niche ideas after finding the 30 Day Challenge training videos for last year, it took me weeks of searching and analyzing and re-thinking and analyzing again. Yes, I found a micro-niche that I thought would allow me to break into a particular market. I actually found two or three markets with so many profitable niche and market niches that I can see the amount of work in my future that seems overwhelming.
Well, from my experiences regarding this subject of finding markets and narrowing them down into micro-niches, the biggest reason to struggle and be frustrated in every turn is it’s a natural process. But to adapt and overcome the challenges of searching for and finding profitable niches you have to remove the chains from your thinking and keep on trying, experimenting, and even asking yourself the question, “What if I look at this keyword, the last keywords were promising, but not quite what I wanted to see?” If you don’t find what you are looking for under one rock, try another.
“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again”
Wait, I’ve heard that so many times before in my life, it’s like a broken record. But where did that saying come from? It’s ironic how some quotes and sayings fit so perfectly in our daily struggles.
“IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED, TRY, TRY AGAIN. Don’t give up too easily; persistence pays off in the end. The proverb has been traced back to ‘Teacher’s Manual’ (1840) by American educator Thomas H. Palmer and ‘The Children of the New Forest’ (1847) by English novelist Frederick Maryat (1792-1848). Originally a maxim used to encourage American schoolchildren to do their homework. Palmer (1782-1861) wrote in his ‘Teacher’s Manual’: ‘Tis a lesson you should heed, try, try again. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.’ The saying was popularized by Edward Hickson (1803-70) in his ‘Moral Song’ (1857) and is now applicable to any kind of activity.” From “Random House Dictionary of Popular Proverbs and Sayings” by Gregory Y. Titelman (Random House, New York, 1996, Page 154).
Exact Match, Phrase Match, and Broad Match keywords are important terms to get a complete grasp of. When looking at specific keywords based on the niche ideas, the concept is very similar to narrowing down a Market into a Micro-Niche.
In determining the competition for individual keywords, an exact match keyword is what you get when the specific keyword is entered into a search engine and clicking through to the #1 page on Google.
A phrase match keyword is one that is searched for in a browser that includes the exact match keyword as well as other keywords. The exact match keyword is still included in the phrase match keyword, but other words are mixed in like “best keyword phrase” or “keyword phrase tips”.
The broad match keyword has each of the individual words of your exact keyword, only that can be entered into a search engine in any order. An example would be “tips on phrase keyword”.
Each of the categories of keywords can expect to get more traffic as your website increases in popularity and importants. The exact phrase keywords will get less searches, and incidentally, the keywords a new website will initially rank for. As the website gets more back-links and traffic and importance, the website will then begin to get additional traffic with the phrase match keywords, those with other words mixed in with the exact keyword. Then, ultimately, the website will get even more traffic as time goes on from search engines where people are entering the keywords in any order or combination.
The methods and techniques for exploring niche ideas are varied. Actually, I think exploring niche ideas is a kind of art form. In ‘The Challenge’ , the methods revealed in the training were to go to the magazine subscription section of Amazon.com and browse through the topics that interest you.
I was familiar with this method before, but getting back to the basics, I found this time around to be extremely fruitful. The activity task for this training was to identify and write down 7 Niche Ideas. Browsing through the magazine section in various subjects that interested me, I actually found 11 that I could explore further.
What makes this an art form is that a person has to let go of any pre-conceived notions and let their mind wander into the realm of what they are interested in. Take the possibilities of profit out of the scenario for a moment and just write down what comes to your mind while browsing.
What a relief! Just the action of writing it down caused even more ideas to flow through my head.
Other methods to try:
I actually stepped out of my house the other day and went to the bookstore. It’s not often I pull myself away from my business activities (having no money causes one to keep trying harder to succeed). I went to the magazine section in the bookstore and walked down each isle grabbing a magazine from any subject that peeked my interest.
Then, I sat down with a stack of magazines and just flipped through the pages. I wrote down what I saw, mostly what was advertised inside the magazines and some of the subjects of the actual articles. I came out of that experience with several pages in my notebook chock full of niche ideas. Now all I have to do is open a page, close my eyes, and press my finger onto a spot on the page and can explore that niche idea further.
The point to take away from this exercise is to just let yourself go. Let your mind wander and write down ‘anything’ that comes to your mind. Later on, you can think about taking a niche idea and paring it down into a micro-niche that you can then start to build an online business around.
Thinking about narrowing down Markets into Niche Markets and then into Micro-Niche Markets, I imagined what the big picture would be like when the Micro-Niche websites achieved the #1 position in Google for the Micro-Niche Keyword and the site begins to rapidly increase in page rank indicating the authority of the site.
Since the Micro-Niche is easier to rank with less competition, these websites would be the perfect candidates to give one-way links to websites focused on the Niche Market one level up.
By feeding on the authority of the Micro-Niche sites, the Niche sites would then reach #1 in Google for the Niche Keyword and begin increasing in authority and page rank.
Then, ultimately, the Niche sites would be great candidates for sending one-way back-links to the main Market website (the money site) which will
As an Expert Internet Marketer says often, “It takes the same amount of time to build an unsuccessful business as it does to build a successful business.”
Building an Online Business starts with market research. A market is defined as a community of people who share a common interest in a particular subject or activity, often with their own language built from terms and acronyms.
A niche is defined as a subset of that market that relates to a specific topic. Within every market you will find multiple niches relating to specific topics within that market.
Micro-niches are defined as niches within niches.
The goal of our Target Practice is to aim directly at the micro-niche level of a particular model.
Keywords, the words or phrases that people use to search online, are the critical factor when it comes to choosing niches and micro niches. They vary wildly in terms of the number of times the keywords are searched for every day, and the competition for those keywords or phrases.
The biggest factors in your success or failure online is the markets you choose and the keywords you target. The key to success in any Online Business is to research markets carefully, identify profitable areas, target specific keywords, and follow a proven plan.
