Narrowing Your Focus - Day 3 of Cowpetition

If you have been involved in making money online for more than a couple of years, you will remember that as recent as 2 years ago all that was needed for market research was to find a program that could generate mass amounts of keywords for you. You really did not care too much about anything except getting the biggest list possible.

Today, that is a risky and ineffective way to go. The search engines are getting smarter all the time and their goal is to serve their customers the absolute best search results they can. In order to achieve this, they have hired incredibly talented people to help them design complex algorithms that allow them to automatically filter out good sites from bad sites.

One of the more recent technologies that have been getting a lot of attention is called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). What this technology (algorithm) does is it tries to imitate the thinking process of a human visitor to do its best to determine if the results of their query are relevant to what the person would be searching for. So when looking at a web page, it would look at the content from a perspective of how a human conversation would take place.

The easiest way to understand it is to think of an example. If you are sitting in your buddy’s garage looking at his new car, do you just say:

“Wow, I love red cars. That is a nice red car; I would love to go for a ride in your red car. How much did your red car cost?”

No! Of course not, because that is not natural. Instead the conversation would probably go more like:

“Wow, I love the color red on vehicles. That is a really nice set of wheels; I would love to go for a ride. How much did your car cost?

See how the keyword “red cars” is not even used? That is because most conversations are not so direct or specific. The human language relies on a lot of assumptions and generalities. When you read the second phrase, you understand that there is a red car but you are not beat over the head with the keyword phrase itself.

Now if that was a 500 word article, I am sure you could actually fit the word “red cars” in there, but as the above example shows, you would use other terms as well. Those other terms are terms that are commonly used with the primary term or topic of the conversation, which means they are related.

Another example would be a forum conversation. If you spend any time in forums you will know that when a topic is started, it is not uncommon for it to head in an entirely different (although related) direction. So for example, a topic on “Scuba Diving Goggles” may be started and after a couple posts some one might comment about how they got this great set of diving goggles at a store when they were diving in Fiji. Another person would then refer to that and talk about an experience they had scuba diving in Fiji and some other locations they have visited. Another person might then relate to another location the previous person referenced and how they had a great scuba diving instructor there who recommended a certain type of goggles.

Now, the above example is just that, an example, but this is very much the same as how human conversation is. The mistake many niche bloggers make is they get content that is too focused on a specific keyword and only that keyword. What ends up happening is the content is useless from an end-user standpoint. This strategy has had its time and place, but in the last year alone, many improvements have occurred (especially in Google with LSI) and this strategy is becoming less and less effective.

Content needs to be focused on themes and created like a conversation. You need to not focus in on one single word, but instead focus on the theme for the topic and what conversations occur around that theme. With the use of LSI, Google is better able to determine the relevance of a website by quickly comparing its content to that of existing websites that Google considers trustworthy. So if your web page does not contain the verbiage that is frequently associated with the subject matter of related sites, then the new website will not be considered to be part of that theme or market, which is not good from a long term rankings perspective.

So when you start your market research you need to keep this in mind. We are not looking for those magic individual keywords, we are not doing keyword research but we are doing is Market Research. This will become very clear as we move on.

Where to Start? How About Selecting a Niche?

As the saying goes, the first step is always the hardest. This is very true for individuals starting out for the first time with market research. We can hear the cries now:

“Where Do We Begin?”

The question you first need to ask is what type of business are you creating?

1. Do you want to create a blog that is something you will personally author and become a known name for?
2. Do you want to create lots of small niche specific affiliate focused blogs?
3. Do you want an online store front for your current off line business?
4. Are you creating blogs to turn around and sell?
5. And the list goes on and on

You see, if you can not answer the question of “what you want to do”, then you really can not move to the next step effectively.

Question for You –> What type of business are you creating?

John Cow Answer –> For this contest we are creating a blog that we want to turn around and sell in 30 days. This means we want a market that has a potential for lots of traffic, has lots of passionate people, is already a proven market (we do not have time to test new markets), we know where to find contacts (because we know the market) and is something we are familiar with so we can ensure that the content is good for the time frame we have.

IMPORTANT –> Do not worry about boxing your self in to one type of business. For example, you might want to start a blog on a specific market that you want to be personally known as an authority for. This does not mean you can not later create small niche sites that promote affiliate products, but what it does mean is that can not be your main focus right now. You want to distinguish the two because it influences the decisions in the next step.

We Know the Business… Now What?

As you can see from our breakdown of reasoning, there are limitations to the type of market we can select because of the criteria for our business. We would not want to pick an emerging health niche that we have no interest in or knowledge about because the research and testing would be too time consuming. For us this next step was to brain storm all the markets we…

1. Already know there are markets in
2. We have knowledge about
3. We know how to find contacts in
4. We see similar “market related” sites selling at sitepoint.

The last 2 points are the most important in our opinion. First of all by us understanding the market, we know exactly where the people are that are influencial in this industry. Not that this can not be researched and found but we are very limited on time with this challenge and to create the absolutely best results we need to purely stick to what works… very little room for exploratory research. The second point was critical because we want to know that these types of sites are actually selling… which really is the end result we are after.

So we brainstormed all the possible markets and 4 immediately came up…

• Video Gaming
• Mountain Biking
• Karate / MMA
• Online Business

These are four markets we are knowledgeable in and are some what passionate about. So we now broke down this list and gave points to the specific ones that best met our criteria and we came up with the selection being “Video Gaming”

This market has lots of passionate people, we are knowledgeable about, know where contacts are easily found and appears to have related sites selling (or so it appears).

STOP –> You may have chosen to start with building a different business model such as niche specific blogs that are purely for promoting affiliate products and generating Adsense revenue. If that is you then you need to check out the “Market Research” series that we started a couple weeks back.

So Now We Have Our Market — What’s Next?

Now we need to map out our plan and time frame. We know the goal, we talked about that in the previous lesson, but now we need to map out how we are going to reach that goal in the needed time frame.

This is where we absolutely LOVE dry erase boards. Since starting full time online we have never been without a dry erase board and the reason is they are perfect for standing up and putting in front of you what you need to accomplish.

Obviously you do not need to go out and buy one… but it is what we use and so we are telling you about it

The first step is to list all the tasks that need to have done and we designate them into short term (Urgent Need), long term (Non Urgent but Important) and “Maybe” tasks:

Urgent Tasks: (Need to be done first above everything else)

• Decide on specific niche in the “Video Gaming” market to target
• Initial content decided on using LSI principals
• Domain set up with the blog installed
• Design and graphics started
• “Link Bait” Content ideas agreed upon
• List of sites to contact for joint ventures
• Plugins installed and set up
• Gmail account created
• Feedburner and aweber account set up
• Get legal documents in place (privacy and so on)

Non Urgent but Important Tasks:

• Niche specific content for blog and promotions research (will explain difference from initial needed content tomorrow) using LSI principals
• Social site accounts set up
• Videos planned for promotions
• Start Contacting potential JV partners
• Start viral marketing engine
• Maintenance plan

Maybe Tasks (these are ideas that came up that could potentially be scope creep and so we will look at as time allows). We are not posting any of these here, but if we have time to implement them we will share them. Some are ideas we have not seen tried before and since this is public to all.. sorry not sharing them yet.

The above is just a general summary of the tasks that are needed to accomplish our goal, yours very well may be the same. One thing to note is that because our end goal is to sell this, we have to keep this in mind for all services and accounts we create, they will need to be made available with the purchase.

Task For You –> Create a list of all the tasks you know need to get done and put them into three categories

• Urgent & Important
• Non Urgent and Important
• Maybe

Tomorrow we will walk you through each of the above tasks that we listed and how they were broken down and assigned.

Start of Cow Rant –> Garry Conn quit crying that we have not mentioned our niche yet… why have you not publicly mentioned yours yet? We have everything out in the public for everyone to see. Do you really think we give a care what market you are picking, that would only slow us down. Instead of complaining, do yourself a favor and actually read the training we are providing and maybe you can actually stand a chance…. awww who are we kidding, you are going to get killed here. <– End of Cow Rant

As always, please provide feedback on this post. We are exposing all to you readers here and we hope you appreciate it because we sure appreciate you all!

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