Affordable Online Business Strategies
Archive for May, 2009
Two Free Market Research Tools You Need To Know About
May 29th
I want to talk about keyword research and market research. Keywords are talked about a lot. There are countless articles and guides about keyword research. There are free keyword tools. There are paid keyword tools. And there are keyword memberships that offer a suite of tools.
Market research is important as well. In fact, it should come before keyword research. The reason for this is that it’s easier to come up with a list of keywords when you know which markets are popular and full of people buying products. And buying customers are what we are all interested in.
Doing market research can give you a lot of ideas and markets that you may not have considered before. And it’s not that hard to do it.
I want to let you know about a couple of free tools you can use to easily get started in your market research.
The first one is Hot Trends from Google.
Go to http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends. Here you’ll see the top 100 searches in the last hour or so. A lot of these results are searches on current events or people in the news. But sometimes you’ll come across a hot topic for a market that you may decide to enter. Each of the 100 listings is a link. When you click on a link, you’ll go to a page where you’ll see what’s called a hotness index. along with a list of related searches. There’s also a graph of the last few hours of search activity.
Below that is a list of the top news articles, top blogs, and related web sites, with links to each entry. Another nice feature of this site is that you can access data from the past. You can look at hot trends for the day before, the week before, the month before. This allows you to see if there is a pattern where a search term that you’re interested in has a lot of historical interest.
The other site is also from Goolge. It’s called Google Insights For Search. Go to http://www.google.com/insights/search
Here you can enter a keyword and get results from 2004 to the present time. You can choose a shorter time range as well. For example you can see the results for the past 7 days, 30 days, 90 days, the past year, or select a year from the list. You’ll see a graph that shows search interest for the time frame you select. There’s a list of the top 10 regions or countries where these searches came from. There’s a list of the top 10 related search terms to your primary keyword.
There’s a filter you can use to customize you results. You can do a web search, product search, news search or image search. You can search worldwide, or by country, and by regions in the country. And you can search by categories. You can click on any of the related keywords and get data for that keyword.
You can get a lot of good ideas and information for free from these two sites.
Once you’ve got a list of seed keywords and you want to do some deep digging to find all of the keywords you need to dominate your market, go to Nichebot X. There you’ll get access to premium keyword tools. Try it out for 14 days to see for yourself what Nichebot X can do. It will only cost you $1 for 14 days. Try it before you buy it. Click here for Nichebot X.
A Bonus I Wish I Could Refuse
May 14th
I love getting bonuses as much as the next guy. Sometimes, I decide to order a product because the bonuses are so good.
There are other times when the bonuses are not worth bothering with, such as old ebooks and PLR content that has been given away on countless sites already. In that case, if I decide to buy the product, it’s because the main product seems worth getting.
In either case, I don’t have to get the bonuses if I don’t want them. No one is going to make me download something that I don’t want.
What I don’t like is what’s been happening in recent months. You’ve probably heard that the way to make some really good money online is to have a continuity program in place. In other words, offering a product that people sign up for and pay for on a monthly basis – a membership site or information that is mailed to your house such as a printed newsletter and/or CD or DVD.
The part I don’t like is that there is a trend where you get free trial access to a membership or monthly newsletter as a bonus for purchasing a product. You get to try it out for a month for free, and if you want to keep getting the monthly content, they’ll keep billing you.
In the past I’ve purchased products that have these “bonuses” attached. The problem is that in many cases, it was next to impossible to find any contact information that would make it easy for me to cancel before the 30 days were over. Sometimes my cancellation request was ignored and not responded to. That’s not always the case, and there are times when I don’t cancel because the info is worth what I’m paying for each month.
What I’d like to see is a way to purchase a product that has one of these “bonuses” attached to it where I could decline the bonus. If I don’t want a free trial to a continuity program, let me say so and not participate. Just let me purchase the product.
Unfortunately, that’s not the case. If you order the product, you’re stuck with the free trial. And since they have your credit card number, they will start charging your account unless you cancel.
I’d like the option to say no to the continuity bonus. With other products that have downloadable bonuses, I have a choice on whether or not I want what is offered. Not so with the continuity bonus. You either accept the bonus, or you don’t buy the product. I’d rather have the option of just buying the product and passing up on the bonus. But that will probably never happen. Oh well…
Wouldn’t it be great if you could try out an awesome keyword research site before you payed for a membership? Now you can. Spend $1 to try out Nichebot X for two weeks – 14 days – and see for yourself what you’ve been missing. Click here for more…
