The single biggest mistake many people make when starting a business is they'll create a product... usually based on something they just enjoy doing, which in and of itself isn't bad, BUT... after they spend months creating this product, it's finally time to start making money selling it. This is where many people run into MAJOR problems. They have no idea where to find the people that want to buy what they have to offer. They end up spinning their wheels and finally realize that nobody wants to buy their latest and greatest product that they've spent months of their life creating. Not only can this be extremely frustrating, but it ends up being a complete waste of time and money! What people should be doing is finding the "market" FIRST and THEN create the product based on what the market wants. That is so much easier than creating the product and then "finding" the market, which might not exist in the first place. Ok, now you might be saying to yourself... "Brad, this is nothing new... we all know this already." If that's you, great... but I wanted to start this lesson with those few, very important points, before we get to the meat of the lesson. In this lesson I'll be showing you 1 very good way to find profitable markets. Once you find these markets you could either create Adsense websites based on the topics OR you could create entire products around the topic... OR better yet, you could do both! So, let's begin... We'll start off by doing some Keyword Research. We need to find out what words people are search for online. The more times someone searches for a word, the more popular that word is. Makes sense, right? :-) There are many different ways to find out roughly how many times, per month, people are searching for various keywords. The free way of doing this is to use the Overture search term suggestion tool. I use Keyword Elite to gather this data, but if you want to go the slower, cheaper route, use Overture. So, we'll go to http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ and we'll start our keyword research. In this example, let's start off with the main topic "gardening". You can see down the left hand side are numbers. These numbers represent the number of times that the keyword has been search during the previous month, within the overture.com search engine. Typically, you can multiply that number by about 7, to come up with the number of times that word has been searched in Google. We'll call the numbers under the "count column", "Searches". So the keyword: organic gardening was searched for 17,246 times last month. Next, we need to see how much competition there is for each of these keywords. By competition, I mean how many other websites there are that seem to be promoting something related to each keyword. ... and here's how we can do this. We'll go to Google and enter the keyword "organic gardening". When we do this, you can see that there are 17,000,000 websites in Google that are listed for the search term "organic gardening". That sure is a lot of competition. Now, here's a little trick that you should do to REALLY find out which websites are actually promoting something related to "organic gardening". There's a little search command you can enter into Google and Google will only display websites that contain the keyword in the Title of their web page only. Think about it... If the website doesn't have the keyword in the title of their site, chances are... they probably aren't promoting the product, but maybe just mention the word once or twice on the page. So, by using this special search command, we'll be able to get a MUCH better estimate on the actual number of sites promoting something related to this keyword. Let's go back to Google and enter this special search command: allintitle:organic gardening You can see when we do this, the number of websites decreases all the way to 140,000! That's a much more reasonable amount... Don't you think? Alright, we'll call this number (140,000) "Results" Once we have these 2 numbers, we can use them to calculate something called an R/S ratio, which is basically a ratio used to determine how much demand there is for a product/keyword. R = Results S = Searches From our example above, we've said that the keyword "organic gardening" was searched 17,246 times last month, so S would be 17,246. We've also found that their were 140,000 websites advertising this keyword, so R would be 140,000 Now, let's divide the 2 numbers 140,000/17,246 = 8.12 Our R/S ratio for this keyword is 8.12. I know from experience that this isn't a very good R/S ratio. Typically the lower the number is, the more profitable the keyword will be for you, should you decide to create a website based on the keyword. What you'll need to do is go through each of the keywords in your list and come up with R/S ratios for all of them. Then, pick the keyword(s) that have a low R/S ratio and yet have quite a few searches the previous month. I know what you're saying... This is hard frickin' work! You're right... I hate doing it. So, let me show you a much easier way to do this, using Keyword Elite. This is a cool new tool that saves me a heck of a lot of time and I figure, what the heck... I might as well show you an easier way to do this... but remember, you don't have to do it the quick way. You CAN do this manually if you want. Using Keyword Elite to find a profitable keyword market in a couple minutes! I'm going to use Keyword Elite on the keyword "gardening" and I'll find a profitable keyword for you right away. I've not started with this keyword before, but I can pretty much guarantee Keyword Elite will find a profitable keyword based off of the keyword gardening. So let's begin. Step 1 Open up Keyword Elite and run project #1. Enter The keyword "gardening" into step 2. Select the Overture checkbox and slide the slider up to 400 results. Click ok. Step 2 Select all the keywords that Keyword Elite has generated for you. (Keep in mind when you used the Overture search tool earlier, it only gave you 100 keywords. Keyword Elite has just given us 400... and we could have selected even more by sliding that slider up further.) Right-Click on the mouse and select "copy keywords to project 2" Step 3 Select only the Google checkbox under step 3. Select only "top bids" under step 4. Under step 5 choose only Google broad match and click ok. Step 4 Click on the column heading titled "Searches" to sort the keywords in descending order, with the keyword being searched the most at the top. Alright, now all we need to do is scroll down and look at the R/S ratio, which has automatically been calculated for us for EVERY single keyword. We'll look for keywords that have been searched for quite often and have a low R/S ratio... As we scroll down I've already found a potentially profitable keyword: gardening tool You can see from the edxample above that the keyword "gardening tool" was searched for 7,588 times last month and has 14,700 competing websites... which gives us an R/S ratio of only 1.94! This appears to be a starving crowd. With that many searches each month, you could pretty easily create a websites based on all sorts of Gardening Tools. You could either sell actual gardening tools OR you could write articles related to different gardening tools and then ad some Adsense to those pages... Get search engine traffic and with a top ranking, you could easily make quite a bit of money with that many searches each month. Given that there are only 14,700 competing sites, it makes your chances of ranking well, MUCH easier. We could easily do this with other keywords that Keyword Elite has found for us. As we scroll down further, you can see other keywords like: gardening tip This only has an R/S ratio of .10! That's incredible. Create a website based on gardening tips and with only 880 competing sites, don't you think you could beat these other jokers? :-) ... and more keywords like: raised bed gardening don't even know what that is... but I betcha it's a profitable keyword! You can do all sorts of things with this information. Click on any column in Keyword Elite to sort the rows. If you click on the R/S column, you can show the lowest R/S ratios at the top and work your way down. I use this 1 feature every time I want to find a new market to exploit. It's essential for me. Well that wraps up this lesson. I hope you've already started to put into practice some of the things you've learned so far. If not, make it a point to start today!
