TDC Day 25: Day 25 Introduction Video (TDC, Video, PDF)

1. Today is D-Day – you’ve got to make a decision.
2. Testing and Measuring is the secret to success – not holding onto dud niche keywords.
3. If your keyword doesn’t cut it, then let go of it and try a new one. You will be able to do all the actions of testing a new keyword in much shorter time (even 2 hours) because now you know how to do it.

TDC Day 25a: Time To Make A Decision (TDC, Video, PDF)

1. You must assess whether to do forward with the niche or to drop it.
2. But don’t worry about wasting your time with your work on your last niche – you’ve still got an asset which you can still use (more tomorrow).
3. Remember that when you do your next niche, you will be able to do these steps, much much faster.
4. 1st Decision Point – TRAFFIC:
   1. You need at least 200 people coming to your blog in a relatively short time frame. So 200/day is good but if you get 200 over 5-10 days then you’ll need to reassess it.
   2. You also need to be in the at least the top 3-4 for your broad match to be able to assess whether it is a worthwhile niche or not. If you are on page 20 and getting very little traffic then that doesn’t mean the niche gets very little traffic – it just means you are ranked badly and may need to do more work (and it may mean there’s too much competition in that niche) .
5. 2nd Decision Point – Affiliate Click Through:
   1. If you get 200 people going to your blog and less than 10% are clicking on your affiliate offer then you should consider changing to your second product. There could be nothing wrong with your niche or even your blog – it’s just a dud product. You need to identify exactly what is the problem to properly make a decision.
6. 3rd Decision Point – Conversion:
   1. If you are making a sale in once in every 200 visits to your affiliate then this is a good signal that you can keep continuing or “building out”.
   2. If you are getting your 200 visitors but not getting a sale per 200 visitors then you need to reassess. (Note that you must be getting 200 people to your affiliate offer page too, not just 200 people to your blog to make this assessment).
7. If you aren’t getting the sales (with at least 200 people visiting your affiliate offer page) then Ed suggests to:
8. Try another affiliate offer.
9. Move on and pick a new niche (you can still monetise the blog with techniques taught tomorrow).
10. Target more keywords. Create content for these new keywords and see where you rank.
11. Do you like the market? Is it something interests you? Can you spend a lot of time on it? Remember you will be working on it a lot. It’s too easy to be distracted when you’re not interested in a subject and then it won’t be your best work.
12. Ask yourself “Would you be fine going on Oprah to talk about the product that you are going to build your business in?” Ed tells a story of someone who built and headache site but wasn’t comfortable with that area so it wasn’t successful. He sold it to someone who took it onto Oprah and did very well.
13. Ed tells us that marketing on the Internet is NOT about: 1. Markets 2. Niches 3. People 4. Products / Services or 5. Small furry animals. He says it is about PHRASES – what your market types into Google. When they want something they rarely type in a really broad phrase like “golf”, they are more likely to type in “golf courses in Atlanta” or similar. Marketers try to identify those phrases and market to those markets searching for those phrases by what is called “building out” (you will learn how to build out this week).
14. Our goal is to dominate every phrase that people in our market type into Google, Yahoo and others. But for the time being we are concentrating on Google (it is the biggest). If you have an existing business or you are an artist, you can look at competitors. Ed gives the example of a musician who is in the same genre as John Mayer should use Market Samurai to identify and dominate all phrases that people use when searching for John Mayer.
15. In an ideal world, you would have the following for every phrase that has traffic in the niche:
    1. Yourphrase.com – the domain
    2. Your phrase blog
    3. Your phrase articles
    4. Your phrase Web 2.0 sites, like Squidoo, HubPages and Weebly
    5. Everything bookmarked. Every time you create a new piece of content, you socially bookmark it with a tool like Social Marker.
16. This is building out or expanding your phrases. You want the business to give you a steady stream of cashflow that you can reinvest into more domains, AdWords etc.
17. Set the goal to make a decision on your chosen niche keyword now. If you choose another market then set the goal to make this same decision again at this point. Now you have done it once, it is so much easier (and quicker), the second time round. And remember you don’t need to waste the work you’ve done on the keywords you’ve cut (more tomorrow).

Because our Summary was over 25,000 words and was taking forever to load – we’ve split it up and posted them according to the date they were originally allocated to – ie over August 2008 – it’s easiest to access all of them from the Thirty Day Challenge 2008 Summary page.

Note the quick links to the originating Thirty Day Challenge page (TDC), the relevant YouTube video (Video) and the transcript (PDF) for your convenience to help you access the study materials.