TDC Day 2: Day 2 Introduction Video (TDC, Video, PDF)

1. Your objective at the end of Day 2 is to have 2 or 3 niches that meet the criteria.

TDC Day 2a: Unleashing Market Samurai (TDC, Video, PDF)

1. Sign up for the 40 day free trial of Market Samurai. When you enter your name and email and click on the Download Now button, you’ll be taken to a survey site. If you do the survey, you get a Thirty Day Challenge Niche Marketing Black Book and go into the draw for some prizes.
2. You will get a personal email link, click on this link.

TDC Day 2b: Keyword Research (TDC, Video, PDF)

1. Understand what markets are and its terminology.
2. A market is:
   • A segment of the population that have a common need or desire.
   • … That have the ability to buy (eg access to a credit card).
   • … Are motivated to acquire a commodity or service that meets their need or desire.
3. Often marketers talk about “niches”, a niche could also be described as “a segment of the market”. So within most markets, you will have niches and within those niches you’ll have more niches. To look at golf as an example:
   1. Market: People interested in golf
   2. Mega Niche: Golf Clubs
   3. Niche: Irons
   4. Micro Niche: Cavity Backed Irons
4. Realise that not all keywords are equal: some have more traffic than others, some have far more competition than others; some are far more commercial than others (eg keywords with “free” in them, as opposed to “buy” are unlikely to be big money earners).
5. Keywords can be placed in a hierarchy depending on their traffic and/or competition potential. We can use competition potential, that is the number of competing pages (in Google), to create a hierarchy:
   1. 1,000,000+ results in a Google search = market
   2. 100,000 - 1,000,000 results in a Google search = mega-niche
   3. 30,000 - 100,000 results in a Google search = niche
   4. < 30,000 results in a Google search = micro niche
6. There is often a difference in results between broad matches and phrase (or narrow) matches. A broad match is when you enter a keyword phrase not in quotes into the Google search, phrase matches are a result of putting your search terms in quotes (eg “golf clubs” including the quotes). Typing in ”golf clubs” will give you instances when golf and club are next to each other, typing in golf clubs without quotes will give you instances where golf and club are both on the page but not necessarily part of the same phrase.
7. Doing a search for the phrase match will give you an indication of how many of those pages are optimised for that particular phrase (thus this is the more relevant competition indicator).
8. For the 30DC, you should aim to find a keyword with less than 30,000 returned pages from a phrase based Google search. If you can’t find one, you can relax this to less than 50,000 results.
9. You should also be looking for keywords that have traffic of at least 80-100 hits per day for now.

TDC Day 2c: Keyword Research Case Study (TDC, Video, PDF)

1. Note that the Market Samurai tool is in development so you should expect some bugs. If there are any issues, submit a help ticket at directly to Noble Samurai Support. Do not send emails to TDC, they didn’t make it.
2. This case study is based on guitars, but you should use your own ideas that you generated on Day 1 (or before).
3. Market Samurai is project based, so open a previously made project or click on New Project.
4. In the new window, enter “guitar” into the keyword field. Put “Guitar” in the title field to name the folder and choose where you want to save it.
5. In the new window, click on the Keyword Research tool’s button (this functionality will always be free even if you don’t go with the paid product).
6. Leave options as they are (only “Google Synonym Tool” and “SEO Traffic Filter” should be checked). Google synonym tool will give you keywords that have linked meanings; SEO Traffic Filter will remove any keywords with no organic traffic; SEO accesses another database and will give you too much information for this stage. Hit “Generate Keywords”
7. Next we are going to analyse the keywords based on traffic only. Click on the “Analyze Keywords” button. You’ll note that the default is to get organic traffic data (this is from the Google External Keyword Tool). The traffic data returned can be sorted by clicking on the columns.
8. Looking at the Trends graph, you’ll see some keywords are cyclical and peak only at certain times in the year, others are more constant.
9. Pick a niche that has good constant traffic to drill down more into. In the example, we’ll choose “vintage guitars”.
10. When you’ve chosen one, click on the magnifying glass icon next to the keyword and it will open up a new tab just like the first one. Now do exactly the same process (click on “Generate Keywords” then “Analyze Keywords”.). In the Analyze Keywords search, again have the organic options selected - you can also put “80″ in the SEO Traffic (SEOT) filter to only search for keywords with 80 searches or higher each day. You can also put “50,000″ in the SEO Comp (SEOC) filter to filter out any keywords that have more than 50,000 competing pages.
11. You don’t need to worry so much about the other stats yet: there is data on how many clicks you might receive from Adwords per day (AWT), how much those clicks will cost per click (AWCPC); what is the click through rate (AWCTR) - click through rates above 2 percent indicate a reasonable amount of people who are interested in clicking on ads. OCI indicates how commercial the keyword is - the higher it is, the more likely someone using that term is wanting to buy something (as opposed to just collecting information).
12. Just as a tip, if you find that Market Samurai isn’t working - it can sometimes be solved by quiting it and then opening it again.

TDC Day 2d: Manual Keyword Research (TDC, Video, PDF)

1. If Market Samurai is not working or you just want to know how it works underneath, follow these instructions to do it manually.
2. Go to Google AdWords Keyword Tool which Google provides for free to advertisers to help them create their campaigns. But you don’t actually need to have an Adwords or even Google account.
3. Enter a keyword into the box (fill out the captcha or test that you are a human not a robot) and hit “Get keyword ideas”.
4. Google will then serve up keywords that you might be interested in and some info about them including: “Advertiser Competition” (for that keyword in Adwords) - irrelevant for this stage; “Approx Search Volume: [month]” which will be the searches in the previous month; “Approx Avg Search Volume” is the average monthly searches over the past 12 months.
5. To find out how many competing sites there are, you’ll need to do a PHRASE (ie in quotes) SEARCH in Google of your keyword phrase. The “Results” are the number of competing pages. It’s probable the first few you try will have numbers in excess of 50,000 competing pages.
6. Keep plugging in suggested keywords from Step 4 that have more than 80 searches a day and appeal to you until you find one that has below 30,000 - 50,000 competing pages.
7. While you are here, you might as well search for related keywords that fit the criteria, e.g. so if you chose “vintage electric guitars”, you could also choose “vintage acoustic guitars”. Keep these stored away, they will be useful later.

TDC Day 2e: Market Samurai Tutorials (TDC, Video, PDF)

1. Check out the Market Samurai tutorials in the Market Samurai Support section so you can become a true Samurai master. These videos are all downloadable.

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.