Business Builder Report

A popular path to help yourself to Internet income is to be an affiliate and sell products.  Alternatively, if you are developing your own product then the following steps are essential market research where you will discover information about how competitors operate. Whether you are selling someone else’s product or your own you will need to find a market entry point that earns profit derived from your income less costs of sales. In this case, we’ll have a look at preparing for PPC advertising.

The desired action is to discover keywords that are effective and of good value. As long as you are getting paid more for a sale than you pay for clicks to make that sale then your ad is profitable. In PPC advertising, the price of a bid is a determining factor and competitive bidding on a keyword is also a way to discover a boundary that can help to set a budget. Since media buying is another topic lets look at some things you can do before you plan a budget.

1. Build a keyword list that shows the historical number of searches. The market is represented most often by one or two keywords that describe where a variety of products can be sold. The next two and three word phrases, or keyword phrases, describe a niche in a market.  More than three words in a keyword phrase, or long-tail keyword, can be considered as a product description.

The first keyword list should be long enough that you can shorten the list to about 10 keywords that include a market keyword, the top 4-5 keyword phrases that describe a niche, and the top 4-5 searched long-tail phrases describing products in the niche. Since searches indicate a history of demand in a market, and results of a search shows the supply, the most current competition needs to be mapped next.

2. Map the market by searching on the single or market keyword in your browser. Take a screenshot of the page that includes the search results and sponsored link ads. Do the same for the rest of your top 5 most searched on keyword phrases and long-tail key phrases.

3. Map the niche by printing out the screenshots and comparing the organic listings taking note of web sites that are repeated on each of the pages. The more often a web site shows up is a general indicator of how competitive that site is in the niche. Rank the top 5 niche sites by frequency they appear.

4. Map the product competition by comparing the sponsored ad links taking note which appear most frequently. Again, rank the top 5 advertisers.

5. Identify the top competitors by opening browser window tabs and loading the top 5 niche sites. In a new browser window search on any keyword from your short list to load the sponsored links and click on the top ranked advertiser you determined in Step 4. If it takes you to a sales page that has a product promoted by one of the top competing niche sites then you have identified a product that is selling well enough to get affiliates to advertise.

6. To learn more about how this competitor operates sign up for the affiliate program. This will tell you what the payout on a sale is and if there are some marketing resources like ad copy and conversion stats. Some marketers sell through agencies like ClickBank or Commission Junction.

At this point you will have done a basic market research that gives you an idea of the current state of market, the niche your product fits in, and product competition. The screen shots are in effect a swipe file for the top performing ads. Connections between the top advertisers and top niche sites indicate the hot selling products, their competition and possible opportunity to get detailed affiliate information. If all the above indicators prove positive then your short keyword list indicates a good base to continue to the next stage.

The next stage of proving ad keyword effectiveness is to test for the best PPC channel to advertise in. If you want to accelerate your business advertising, then drop by http://waymoreAds.com and sign up for the http://waymore.WebProsperity.com program.

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Links to your site, and in particular one way or back links, are an important part of building traffic. Traffic comes in two ways, paid or free. Organic or free traffic is derived from links to your site from other sites and what is displayed on search result pages. So the popular logic is that the more links you get to point to your pages, the more traffic will come your way.

Search engines track links, keywords and content relevance to profile your page and produce data used in Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Search engines spider your web pages to get data that is then used to help Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising customers target their ads. Since links are an important part of your site profile, they also can be used to research your competition.

If you visit Yahoo and type in ‘linkdomain:’ followed by a web site domain name, Yahoo will return a list of pages linking to your site. Google uses the term ‘link:’ to generate a link list. The important thing to recognize here is that each search engine will return a different amount of links.

For example, if you do a Yahoo search like – linkdomain:www.google.com Yahoo will return 822,400,084 results and then on Google – link:google.com, Google will return 1,700,000. The 820+ million link result difference is one indicator how Google limits or skews data it delivers for free.

One other popular source of link data is Amazon’s Alexa.com. If you look up Google.com there, Alexa will return about 656,011 sites linking in. Therefore, link research for competitive analysis boils down to comparing results from a variety of sources to get a more relevant idea of link competition.

By finding out the top sites that are linking to your competitors it will help you to choose the ones that can provide the most valuable one way links back to your site to help improve your own page rank and hopefully increase free traffic. Furthermore, there are some top ranking sites like YouTube and Amazon where you can set up a video or store that has links back to your site.

However, the objective is to have more one-way links back to your site than reciprocal links. A reciprocal link or link exchange is most effective with sites of similar and relevant content. For example if you have a video posted on YouTube and you link to it from your site then it is like a reciprocal link exchange.

Alternatively, if you post a video on YouTube with a link back to your site, don’t link to it from your site, and comment on other relevant YouTube videos with a link pointing to your video, then anyone who bookmarks and links back to your site after linking through your video becomes another one way organic link.
The original idea of bookmarking has expanded from just a browser function to include a variety of direct and indirect social networking. Examples include article marketing, blog commenting, forums, press releases and other aggregators where your signature can include a link back to your stie.

Another source of back links include social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, Fark, Kaboodle, and many more where you can build link relations by networking on those sites. A secondary source of page rank from these sites is derived from search engines that spider the social networks. This has in turn created growth in bookmark submitters like socialmarker and social poster.

The bottom line is that the value of any link back to your site is qualified by the keywords and content relevance of your site. Whatever tact you may use to invite visitors to your site be sure it is consistent with what your site has to offer.

Filed under: Online Business | Click title for copyright chain of custody.