30DC 2008 - My Marketing Strategy For This Year
In last year’s Thirty Day Challenge I never made any money and with a little hindsight I can now see why. So this year I want to learn from my previous mistakes and approach things a little differently.
Market Research - A Curse & A Gift
95% of marketing mistakes are made at the research stage. What this means is that people attempt to do things that have very poor profit potential and with the correct tools and research these problems could have been foreseen before any work got started. Here are some examples of typical mistakes made:
- Creating products that people do not want
- Creating products in a market that does not buy
- Marketing in a market that does not have traffic
So, market research is essential and yet for me, it was also one of my biggest stumbling blocks. You see, I took it too far and spent months hunting for the perfect niche and I just never really got going! At some point you have to just get on with it!
Profitability Is Not A Yes / No Affair
One thing I figured out last year is that every niche has some potential, it’s just a matter of how much - and how much work we want to do. I posted about grading potential niches and came up with 3 grades, with the lowest being such low potential that the niche was only really good for AdSense.
So, seeing as every niche has at least some potential, I am not going to let the lack of a ‘perfect’ niche stop me from continuing. Right now I am on day 4 of the challenge and I’ve done quite a bit of research and have 3 possible niches. I’ll do some more in-depth research on those three and then simply pick the best one to continue with.
However, this year’s Thirty Day Challenge is using a very cool tool called Market Samurai (free to use for all 30DC members for 40 days) and this thing is just bloody marvellous! I am doing in half an hour what was taking me half a day last year! It’s an absolute joy to use. So, because I can do research so much faster I’m just going to keep researching every day throughout the challenge.
Each day I’ll pick one new niche and see if I can come up with something better than I have. Now I’m not saying that I will necessarily switch part way through the challenge as I don’t want to get behind but I will keep all these ideas on file as this is something I want to continue with for a few months.
Another difference this year is that I am removing my emotions from the equation during my market research. Last year I researched all the topics I was personally interested in and became disheartened when I found very little profitability in them. This year, I don’t care. I’m just looking at the numbers and I will investigate any niche, even if it isn’t something I would naturally be inclined towards. I can always outsource content production if I really can’t standthe idea of doing it myself.
AdSense Based Sites
Last year I didn’t know too much about AdSense and indeed I still don’t but I know people that do… and I know people who are making a LOT of money with small sites monetized primarily with AdSense. After publishing that post in November I went ahead and created a small site, slapped some AdSense on it and left it. It has made me around $20-$30 ever since which is a pittance but I no longer work on that site so the revenue, no matter how small, is truly residual.
Another very, very cool feature of Market Samurai which simply was not available to me last year was the ability to research the AdWords cost per click on keywords. You can do this to some extent with a tool called SpyFu though that doesn’t return me back results on some of the phrases I have used. What this means is that using these tools I can get an idea of the profit potential of making the site into an AdSense based one.
What is interesting is that I have run my existing niche site through Market Samurai and some of the keywords I am targetting are as low as $0.22 per click but one of them is $1.88! Now something else to mention here is that this is the cost per click to the advertiser, it does not mean that I will earn that much! Typically the AdSense cut will be less than 50% of that and if your account is smart priced then it can be drastically lower.
Smart pricing is another topic entirely… but this all gives me food for thought. As I work through this year’s challenge I am going to be making note of the AdSense potential of all these niches as well as their potential for creating products and after the challenge is over I am going to build at least half a dozen niche sites geared entirely towards AdSense.
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Patrick Dierschke
August 5, 2008
This is great advice. My perspective is working with my existing website clients to explain how marketing and messaging is just as important on the web as in print/TV to attract potential clients.
Some just do not see the correlation, which boggles the mind! They will gladly pay $10K for a print campaign, but scoff at the notion of $200 for SEO optimization.
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