Terrapin Marketing

KEYWORD RESEARCH OVERVIEW

Keep in mind that looking for a hot product to sell online is the #1 mistake made by people new to internet marketing – and the reason so many internet businesses fail!

Too often a website is created based on an idea to sell something first. But the decision what to sell is made before they research what people are looking for. I would call this the build it and they will come mentality. It will not matter how good your solution is, if few people want to solve the problem you are offering to fix. Or just as bad, is to enter a market that is too saturated. You are generally better off dominating a smaller market than to try to get a small slice of big market. For example “golf” has 550,000,000 competing websites. It will be very hard to rank for such a phrase as there are 550 million websites that you will be competing with. Even if you can out-rank 100 million of those sites you would still have another 450 million outranking you. You will not get a small piece of that large pie. As it just does not work like that. The top sites ranking for Golf will gobble up the lion’s share of the traffic due to their online clout. These top ranking sites will have invested massive resources to get them to the top. Basically, they have resources you will not be able to compete with.

Build it and they will come is not how we need to think online. People search for specific things online. So before you create your solution you need to first understand what people are searching for. You also need to consider what the competition is like for your market. A good market has a higher ratio of demand VS competition.

OFFLINE VS ONLINE MARKETING

Offline marketing is based on things like billboards or radio ads which work with no possible form of discrimination. These ads are blasted out to wide audiences with little controls to ensure the right people hear them. A billboard ad for baby seats is only going to possibly work for a small number of people who pass by and see it. (A parent with a young child, who does not own a baby seat). Or take a TV ad for say “banking”, this ad is only going to grab the attention of people who are looking for a new bank. For all those who are satisfied with their current bank this ad will again fall on deaf ears.

In offline marketing we broadcast our message out to our broad and untargeted audience hoping they will come to us. This marketing approach is like shotgun blasting our message out to a massive audience of unknown listeners, many of which who are not even listening or even care what we have to say.

In offline advertising, companies may rely on creative strategies in order to obtain the consumer’s attention and provoke shoppers to purchase or use a specific product. Advertisers use different ways of thinking to create catchy slogans that capture consumer’s attention. Creative strategies promote publicity, public relations, personal selling and sales promotion. Quite often there is not way to capture the audience’s attention, other than by producing an ad with a clever hook to get people to pay attention to what they are offering. This because the advertisers know their message is going out to a very broad and usually untargeted audience. Hence they write these clever ads to desperately grab your attention.

A common problem is that people carry this attitude with them when they attempt to market online. This is a fatal error that ruins many people’s efforts to make a living online.

Online Marketing is totally different animal. I have a friend who is new to the internet and he calls Google the “ANSWERING MACHINE”. He marveled at how he could find answers to almost any subject. It really hit me when he said that. He is right, it is the answering machine. Not the kind for phone calls. It is the mother of all answering machines for people asking questions and seeking solutions to their problems. I was blown away how I had lazily forgotten this brilliant point. It is true that most people don’t go online to buy something. They go online to search for solutions to their problems. Think about how often you surf the web by starting at Google and searching for a solution to a question.

Also considered how targeted this information is. When someone searches “teach my dog to sit”, they telling us exactly what they want. With online marketing we able to tune into what people are requesting. We don’t need to broadcast our message, we need to listen to what they are asking for and provide them just that. If I have a headache would I search for Tylenol? Probably not….. If I wanted Tylenol I would just go to the store. But I might search for “what causes a headache”. Do you see how this process is now reversed?

Online – People are seeking the solutions.

Offline – The solutions are seeking people.

Let us take the phrase “teach my dog to sit”. In the online world we should be able to get 1% (maybe even higher) of the traffic that comes to our site to make a purchase. If we could get a 1000 people a day to come we could make 10 sales per day, give or take of course. The reason this 1% conversion is so high, is because we are targeting an audience that we know is in need of this solution as they told us so when they searched in the first place.

Now compare this with running a newspaper ad, telling people we can show them how to “teach their dog to sit”. The newspaper will not be able to come even close to converting 1%.

For those that do get the paper:

-half the people may not even have a dog

-an even smaller number will have dogs that can’t sit on command

-people read the paper for the news and not the ads, to some the ads are merely annoying filler and are skipped intentionally

-this ad would likely have to go to thousands and thousands of homes to come close to making sale

-people just will not listen in that medium

-we don’t even know if this is best medium to pick? (radio,magazine,tv,billboard)

Offline/Online Summary. Do not first build a solution and then try to find the audience. Find an audience you know is hungry and is not being serviced properly and then create the solution. So to succeed we must first focus on what solutions people search for online.

Who people search and the Internet Search Cycle

The first step is recognizing the natural search cycle a searcher goes through when looking for information on the internet. Let us examine how people tend to search for a solution to a problem.

Step 1. Searcher goes to a search engine like www.google.com.

Step 2. They type in “key words” or “key phrases” related to what they are searching for. An example this might be “train my dog”.

Step 3.The search engine returns relevant results and the searcher scrolls through them looking for the titles and descriptions of websites that they think might help them find what they are looking for.

Step 4.If the searcher does not find any relevant search results they go back to step 1 and use another slightly different keyword than the first one they used. After realizing that maybe their search was not specific enough they might search more closely to the problem at hand, “train my dog to sit”. Out of all of these steps a searcher takes, the one that is most relevant to online marketing is step 4. If you understand the concept of how a searcher uses different variations of search terms to find what they are looking for, you will better understand how your website can be found in these search results.

Internet Search Cycle Summary. To understand your market we look for the clearest of intention phrases so that we learn exactly what we need to do to satisfy their needs.

Niche Markets

1. Focus down to find a narrow “niche market”

The term “niche market” is one that you’ll hear about often when discussing marketing — online or offline. But it’s important to note that everyone thinks of niche markets a little differently… Traditionally marketers may define a niche market as a large group of people sharing several characteristics (for example, men aged 30 to 40 earning between $50,000 and $75,000 per year). However, when you’re selling online, you need to narrow your focus A LOT more that that! That’s why we define a niche market as: “A group of people who are searching the Internet for a solution to a problem — and not finding many relevant search results.” Identifying a niche market is one of the biggest challenges on the road to choosing a product. Many people have difficulty being as tightly focused as they should be — and they end up trying to go after niche markets that actually aren’t really niches at all, but huge general markets in which they couldn’t hope to compete.

For example, all of the following might seem like good niche markets…

• Golfers

• People on a diet

• People over 65

• Pet owners

… but the truth is that all of these markets are WAY too big! Try entering the word “golf “, into a search engine. You’ll get about 550 million results! Do you really want to try to compete in that market? To be successful as a small business on the Internet, you’ll need to narrow your focus a lot more than that! With a good keyword tool and an easy to follow process you can determine exactly what people are searching for.

Narrowing your focus to a small niche market gives many advantages:

• There’s WAY less competition

• Small markets are much easier to dominate — so you can easily position yourself as the “go-to” source for your product or service online

• Niche markets are often close-knit groups of people, so your reputation can spread by word of mouth and offer you an ever-growing base of potential customers

• You can easily gain the loyalty of your customers — affording you lots of opportunities to expand your business with related products and follow-up offers!

2. Look for a problem that people are actively trying to solve. If you’ve been communicating with your potential customers online in sites such as blogs and forums, you’ve probably noticed that the same questions tend to get asked again and again. These questions represent a need that’s not being satisfied. These problems are your opportunities. If enough people share this same need, you may have found the niche market you’re looking for! Remember, people don’t go online looking to buy a product or service — they go online to find information and solutions to their problems. Your task is to think like your potential customers — determine what problems they’re actively trying to solve and what you could offer as a solution.

3. Confirm that this problem is shared by a significant number of people. Before you get too far in your product planning, you need to confirm that the problem you’re trying to solve is shared by a significant number of people. You have to make sure there’s a big enough market to support your business!

In order to confirm that a large group of people are searching for a solution to the problem you’ve identified, you need to answer the following questions:

• How big a hassle is the problem for them?

• Is it a minor nuisance, or would they be willing to pay for a solution to it?

• How much is the solution worth to them?

• Does your keyword research reflect there is demand for these problems?

Are customers in your market more interested in a product or a service? There may already be a lot of products available to your niche market. However, people may be looking for services that will help them use those products — or ones that will teach them how those products differ from each other so they can choose the one that best suits their needs.

For example, there may be a lot of software solutions to a problem your target market has. But maybe it’s hard for people to figure out how best to use those software programs. In that case, an ideal product to create would be a “how-to” guide that tells people exactly how that software programs works.

What is the general price range of other products or services in your area of interest? This will give you a good idea of how much your future customers are willing to pay. Can you offer a product at a lower price than what’s currently available? If all of your competitors are struggling and constantly having to cut their prices to get new customers, it could be dangerous ground to tread on. Most important, what motivates them to buy? This is the kind of information you could discover by running an online survey. What does your keyword research reflect? You could also visit discussion boards where your target market hangs out and ask them questions about their buying habits. Understand their motivation, and you’ll be able to appeal to what really makes them buy! Once you have completed this research, you should have a good idea of whether or not you’ve discovered a potentially viable market. If there seems to be too much competition or too small a market, you’ll have to go back to the drawing board. But don’t get discouraged! Any research you do is worthwhile, even if it doesn’t result in a product idea. The information you’ve gathered, the skills you’ve developed, and the contacts you’ve established over the course of your research will continue to help you down the road. If you HAVE discovered a decent-sized market that hasn’t already been saturated with competition, congratulations! You’ve probably just found your future customers!

4. Check out the competition to see if a solution is already available. Once you think you’ve identified a possible niche market, you need to confirm that there aren’t a lot of products or services that already address that market’s needs. You need find a balance of the demand for a solution against the amount of competition that’s already offering a solution. If you find a lot of sites that seem to address the problem, chances are the market is already saturated. However, if there are only a small number of sites offering possible solutions, this market probably has space for you! As you explore your competitors’ sites, carefully study the products or services they offer and the way they present them to their market. Consider how well they address the problem and whether or not there is room for improvement. If you can identify ways in which their products or services aren’t perfectly meeting the market’s needs, then you might be able to come up with one that does a better job!

5. Generate ideas for products or services to solve this problem. Okay, so you’re sure you’ve found a great niche market that’s actively looking for a problem they need solved… Now, how do you come up with a product that addresses that problem? Start by brainstorming a list of potential solutions. Don’t second-guess your ideas or worry about the logistics of developing them at this stage of the game; the purpose is to get your creative juices flowing and write your ideas down on paper. Anything goes! And remember to make sure you consider services as well as products.

For inspiration, go back to the list of products your competitors offer and ask yourself where they fall short. Are there some aspects of your market’s problem they just don’t address? Are they too expensive, perhaps, or too difficult for beginners to use or comprehend? Maybe they’re too specialized, or perhaps they’re not specialized enough. Or maybe the solutions are being offered by people who aren’t experts in their industry and don’t really know what they’re doing. (It happens!) The important thing to keep asking yourself is, “What can I offer that no one else is offering? How can I make sure my solution is different from anything else that’s currently out there?”

6. Make sure you can sell the product easily over the Internet. Here’s something we’ve seen a lot of people fail to consider. A product that would be highly successful in a brick-and-mortar storefront may face obstacles when offered online. For instance, will shipping costs be an issue? If your product is very large or heavy, your customers may be unwilling to pay the high shipping cost you’d need to charge to maintain your profit margin. Shipping time is another consideration. There are some products that people buy to address immediate concerns, and they simply won’t wait the four to seven business days it might take for a product bought online to arrive. You’ll need to make sure your product doesn’t fit into this category. And if your product (or something similar) is readily available in common offline locations, you’ll need to offer a special advantage to your customers for choosing yours instead. By far the most profitable thing to sell online is an electronic product, because it can be delivered immediately with no shipping or production costs (other than the time you spend creating it). The money you make on an electronic product is virtually pure profit. Ultimately, you’ll have to make sure your product is something people are willing to buy over the Internet. It needs to be something people are comfortable having delivered to them — whether it’s sent electronically or shipped to their front door.

7. Niche Summary. The key to marketing online is discovering an easily targeted market a “niche” that’s interested in buying what you have to offer. A niche is a group of people or audience that is searching the internet for a solution to their problem but not finding many relevant results. Or put another way we are looking for an audience that displays demand to a solution but this solution/problem is not being properly serviced. The reason we look for a niche is that we will be better off dominating a smaller market than trying to get a small slice of a big pie. As you go through this process you will start to see why this statement is true. This concept is particularly important if you are new to internet marketing. Trying to get into large markets is going to require massive efforts that are simply too daunting even for some who have experience in marketing. But as your skills and knowledge grow you will learn what markets will be suitable for your skills and the resources that you are able to invest. Identifying a niche market and generating product ideas that can solve that market’s problems are two of the most challenging experiences you’ll face while developing your business. However, they’re also the two of the most rewarding! The fact is any successful online business has to be based on two things: a viable market and an effective, in-demand product or service. When you have discovered a market that needs something you can offer them, and a product or service that will fulfill that need, you’ll be well on your way to establishing a profitable business!

Action Plan: Brainstorm potential target markets with a problem that needs solving. For each market come up with 10 common problems you think you audience might have.

What is a search engine?

A Web search engine is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. Information may consist of web pages, images and other types of files. Web search engines like Google work by storing information about web pages, which they retrieve from the WWW itself. One of the main things that search engines really pay attention to is the KEYWORDS on a site. As this is main way for the search engines to know what a site is about. These pages are retrieved by a Web crawler (sometimes also known as a spider) which follows every link it sees on web pages. The contents (text/keywords) of each page are then analyzed to determine how it should be indexed or ranked. Data about web pages are stored in a database for use in when someone does a search on a search engine.

When a user enters a query into a search engine (by using key words), the engine examines its database and provides a listing of best-matching web pages according to its criteria, usually with a short summary containing the document’s title and sometimes parts of the text. Now since all the interaction between the search engine, your web page and your potential visitors is all based on keywords, you are best served to understand what words, phrases and problems people are searching. Then structure you entire online presence around these keyword.

KEYWORDS are the glue that binds the process of:

• people searching for a solution on a search engine
• the search engines being able to recommend your site (ranking)
• you creating sites that allow your visitors to find you via the 2 previous steps

Let us take moment to talk about how this process usually works.

1) First we have a person searching for an answer to a problem by typing there query into the search engine. I.E. HOW TO CURE A HEADACHE

2) Google takes the phrase “HOW TO CURE A HEADACHE” and searches for websites that contain those keywords in its database. In theory only pages that have those keywords will rank in Google for that term. There are exceptions to this rule but most often this concept is true.

3) The user will then survey the results and usually clicks on the first site that identifies their problem.

Given these three step above we would be well served to find out what people want and give them that exact solution.

What is keyword research?

Keyword research looks at the particular words and phrases users enter to search for solutions to problem, products and services … this research for keywords related to your interest will also include the analysis of which ones yield the highest return on investment. Ultimately we want to find the phrases that have the best combination of:

• Demand – higher is better
• Competition – lower is better
• A clear intention tightly related to your market or potential solution

This includes researching the number of times a keyword or keyword phrase or it’s derivatives (plurals, etc) is searched for and the competitiveness of it. These best keywords, or search terms are targeted for a website’s search engine rankings. During this process you will record and analyze your results.

Why it’s important to your business:

• You can find the problem within your broad interest areas
• You can analyze these problems to learn what trends of problem exist
• Determine if your discovered problems indicate potential niche markets
• The ability to build a website on what people truly are looking for from the ground on up

Good keyword research is how we find these markets. So rather than trying to hunt down a hot product, you’ll be much better off looking for a market or a group of people with a common problem they’re actively trying to solve. After you identify a group of people with a common problem, you can start to think about a product or service that will solve their problem(s). Remember finding the product is usually the easy part. So now that theory is out of the way, let’s get started on the process we call keyword research.

Find out what people want and give them that exact solution.

Read that again, and make sure it sticks!

Identifying a niche market and generating product ideas that can solve that market’s problems are two of the most challenging experiences you’ll face while developing your business. However, they’re also the two of the most rewarding! The fact is, any successful online business has to be based on two things: a viable market and an effective, in-demand product or service. When you have discovered a market that needs something you can offer them, and a product or service that easily fulfill that need, you’ll be well on your way to establishing a profitable business! Of course none of this means anything if the competition is saturated. Demand is only half the problem, as competition is the other half. Keep in mind you need to find a market that is not being serviced properly or at least has room for you. We will talk more about competition later in this guide.

What is a keyword tool?

A keyword tool is a database of what people have searched for in the past and helps to determine what keywords people search with and the frequency that they search these keywords. These keyword tools can contain billions of phrases. You then can the query your chosen keyword tool to find the ALL the relevant keywords that relate to your biz or interests.

What tools can you use to do keyword research?

Google Adwords tool – This is a GREAT tool that is free to use from Google. This video details why this tool is so great.

Defining Your Interests

What Problems can you Solve? Before moving ahead into the actual research phase you need to brainstorm about what you know a lot about, or what your good at. What types of problems are you good at solving or could offer advice on? At this point, you will want to list 5-10 passions, interests, or things you know a lot about and we’ll start with the first one on your list. If you’re having trouble thinking of topics you are interested in, use this list to help you:

Think of topics and areas you:

• You love doing?
• You are passionate about?
• Subjects or topics you have a lot of knowledge about?
• What would I enjoy learning more about?
• What are people always coming to me for advice about?

The reason I suggest choosing something based on your interests is that you are more likely to enjoy and stick with it and you will be credible in your field.

Here is an example of a list of interests. Note that each topic of interest is expressed as a single word:

• kitchens
• dogs
• cats
• sailing
• hiking
• gardening

Use only one word to describe your topic at this point (if you can). In the example above our interest might be golf clubs, but this topic is part of the larger topic of golf. Of course you can start with something more specific but consider allowing the research to show you all your options rather than settling on an idea right out of the gate.

Getting started with your interest and how

PHASE 1 –using how

For the sake of an example that most people can relate to, we will use the topic “dog”. Open your keyword tool of choice and enter your topic word plus the word “how”.

Example: dog how

When I search for how dog, I am asking the keyword tool to give me back the phrases in its database that contain dog and contain how.

In this example below all the phrases contain “how” and contain “dog”.

how much does it cost to own a dog

how much to feed dog

how smart is your dog

how to buy a dog

how to care for your dog

how to dog train

how to find dog

how to handle a dog

how to identify dog

how to measure dog

how to raise a jewish dog

how to read a dog

how to sell a dog

how to stop dog shedding

how to take care of your dog

how to train a boxer dog

how to train a dog

how to train a dog for free

how to train a mean dog

how to train a timid dog

Another example is say I want “dog training” phrase. I then search dog training in my keyword tool and the results would look similar to this. As you can see all these phrases contain dog and train.

crate train dog

crate training a dog

crate training dogs

dog board and train

dog obedience train

dog toilet training

dog train video

dog training aggressive

dog training leash

dog training treats

dogs potty training

easy train dog

free dog training

house train a dog

house train dog

how do u train a dog

Here is a very bad example to search:

How to train my dog to sit

This is asking for all phrases that contain the following words:

how AND to AND train AND my AND dog AND to AND sit

TIP: Always use the least the amount of words possible that still produces relevant results.

Good Examples:

Train dog

Training dog

Bad Example:

How do I train my dog to sit down

What is the best way to teach your dog tricks

Our full list of results from the query “how dog” look like this.

This data is just canned data for the sake of explanation.

1) Keyword – this is actual keyword being searched by people on search engines

2) Monthly – amount of times this phrase is predicted to be searched in the next 30 days. Depending on the tool you use this might be measured by the day, month or year.

Just look at all these problems being searched for. I know that was a long list but I wanted you to see all the problems that people are searching for.

Remember that tree I was talking about before. In this data in can see the following trends of problems. So dog was the trunk of the tree and some branches or markets segments of this tree are:

Build/make – items for dogs (dog house, dog sweaters)

Business – how to make money from a business servicing the dog market

Draw – how to draw dogs

Pregnant – care issues around a pregnant dog

Train – how to train your dog to do or not do various actions

Treats/food – how to make food or treats for your best friend

I bet this list of problems is bigger than you thought it could be. But as you can see it is almost endless with all the possible problems that people are having. These problems are your opportunities.

The reason I searched HOW + SUBJECT is that how almost always infers a question.

People with questions have problems. People with problems want solutions. People who want solutions are easier to sell to than happy people who have no problems.

Also when people search with “how” the results that come back usually have a clearer intention, again because they are asking a question.

Let us talk a little about intention again. Dog is a very high demand phrase that is searched very often. But the problem is when someone searches “dog” we don’t really know what causes them to search in the first. Even the phrase, ”train a dog” is a little vague as we still don’t know what they want to train their dog to do. But if we look at a phrase like “how to train a dog to stop from jumping on people” we can clearly understand the problem at hand. The clearer the intention of the phrase is, the clearer you will be able understand and address your markets problems via: Web pages, Salescopy and Products. If you don’t have a clear vision of what your audience is asking for then you might be heading for troubled waters. Remember these keywords will shape everything we do online. Also consider how this tree of data will shape your current and future products. This tree can also be used to plan the structure of your site.

NOTE: If you type in “how + topic” and you get very few (or no results at all), it could be an indication that there are not many people searching around your topic of interest and looking for a solution to a problem! You can try other words than “how” but start with that until you get comfortable.

Copy and paste your results into excel or some form of spreadsheet.

I have pasted these results in to my Worksheet called STEP 1 – How DOG. Viewing in Excel is easier on the eyes.

Clustering 101

What is Clustering?

You’re probably asking yourself “what is clustering”? Well, to put it a simple as possible it is a group of keywords you have identified where the searchers are looking for the same solution! A cluster is a group of keyword phrases that are organized by the same intention. Your data is like a like bowl of jelly beans.

Each topic (or intention) in this data is like one color of a jelly bean. If I asked you how many of each color there is in the bowl could you tell me?

What you would do to count them is lay the jelly beans out and put all the reds in one pile and blue in another and so on. This would be the only realistic way to know how many you have of each. So you can do this with your data.

The reason we do this is to tell what trends of demand are in the data.

Here is an example of a cluster:

These phrases above all have the same intention/solution and that is to build a place to keep your dog.

Even though all the questions are slightly different they still have the same intention. Below is another example of a cluster.

Below is my how dog data organized by intention (clusters).

Take note at how at the start there was a bunch of keywords sampled from our keyword results. With a bit of organizing we have now identified potential markets where people need solutions to problems! I can now better see what the TREE of DATA for dog looks like. I organized this data using Excel filtering. Filtering will be explained in another document. If you are using Bebiz there is a tool that helps to automate some of the tasks involved in clustering. I started with something very broad like dog and now I have broken it up into various trends of demand. This technique allows me to be open to a wide range of possible ideas. Also keep in mind these clusters could be even more organized using more defined clusters. You will see how I did that later in the guide.

These clusters can also be viewed in the Excel worksheet:

STEP 2 – HOW DOG CLUSTERED

I now know more about what is important to people and I know what solution(s) they are seeking. This is the key to being effective online. Find out what people want and then give them that exact solution. These clusters will help to validate whether you are in a good market. You’ll then want to compare your clusters, i.e. which are most promising and which ones line up with you skills. Essentially what we have is taken a survey of common questions people ask about dogs when searching online. But we are not done yet as we have just begun our keyword journey.

From these clusters consider:

Is there a trend emerging from the clusters regarding demand?

Do you understand the intention of the cluster(s)?

Do you see a cluster(s) that is something you would be interested in pursuing.

If you see nothing appealing you can start over with a new subject.

If you do see something appealing we can now go deeper into our subject.

Remember the reason we do keyword research is to determine:

1) What phrases or words do they use when searching?

2) What are people searching or seeking solutions to when they go to a search engine?

3) What clusters or trends of problems can we identify?

4) What is the level of demand for these problems?

5) How much completion is there for a given cluster (we will examine this point later in more detail).

These phrases or words that you discover in your research will be the foundation of your business.

• They will shape your product.
• They will shape your sales letter, since what could be better than knowing exactly what your audience is searching solutions to.
• They will shape how you plan to deal with the search engines.
• They will shape the possible structure of your site (Tree of Data)
• They will shape or affect all that you do regarding your online business.

Find out what people want solutions to and are not being serviced properly, and give them that exact solution. This is the quickest and easiest route to successful marketing.

At this point I am just using the results to guide or show me my options at this point. As we saw there was a lot of paths of problems I could follow or dig deeper on. From my original clustering, I see that there is demand around dog training or people who want their dogs to do or not do certain things. Also this is a subject that I like personally so in the next phase I will dig hard and deep into “Dog training”. I could have just picked this from the start but it was nice to know the bulk of the other problems regarding dogs.

We started wide and now we are going to get more specific. I see from my clusters from above that DOG TRAINING has decent demand. Perhaps it also fits my list of skills better than the other clusters. So for this example the above is true.

So far we have brainstormed some ideas to pursue, but we still have more work to do. Because I want even more information on dog training I am going to dig a little deeper. The subject I chose from my clusters was Dog Training. Now the first problem I have with “dog training” is that it is too large. Also if I want to get into the market of “dog training” I would be competing with 2.9 million pages on the internet. Try it yourself and type into Google DOG TRAINING. You will see on the top right side how many pages Google lists for that search. Due to the large number of competing sites I will look to see what else I can pursue within this field. What can I find that is not so competitive within this market?

I would be better served to dominate a small market than get a tiny slice of a big market. This is a very important point if you are new to Internet Marketing. As getting a small slice from a large market is near impossible from a competition point of view. Build it and they will come is not going to work online.

The second problem with dog training is that it is still a very broad phrase. When I say too broad I mean too unfocused. What makes people want to search for this in the first place? I want to know all their problems. As you can see there are many problems just in my dog training cluster and I have not even searched for that data yet. People who search for dog training could be looking for something more specific. I need to know what is the intention of someone searching for dog training. I know they want training for their dog but what makes them actually resort to searching online. What is the underlying problem(s) with this topic?

The might want things like:

• teach my dog to sit
• train my dog to fetch
• dog training tools
• training for old dogs
• training for new dogs

Here is a list of the top dog training searches:

• dog training collars
• dog obedience training
• dog agility training
• dog training schools
• dog training equipment
• dog training career
• hunting dog training
• dog training treats
• dog potty training
• attack dog training

This top dog data shows me just how varied the problems are and this is just the top 10 results returned of potentially 1000’s. As we can see it is almost endless as to what they could want. What are their exact problems and what are their exact intentions. This is my problem at hand. If I knew this I would have a fighting chance. As you can see there are many different intentions that people associate with dog training. So by searching for just dog training I realize that I am only scratching the surface. And that it is hard to understand the intention of the searcher. Many people do not consider this very point. It is not safe to assume that we understand vague phrases. This point is another great reason to use problem statements. So this time around we are going to get all the relevant dog training phrases that we can. When someone searches for dog training, what is the problem they have that they need to find an answer to. What are all the problems?

If I can break this data down like a tree I can learn where on the tree I can compete. As we travel up the tree the demand becomes lower and so does the competition. If you are new to internet marketing set goals that you can easily achieve. This will allow you to easily see achievable progress. As your skills grow you can raise your goals. But in the beginning we may have to climb the higher branches of the tree. As the heavy weights of your market will be lurking at the trunk of the tree. To be successful in my research I must determine all the different things people might be searching for regarding this topic.

PHASE 2 – Digging Deeper

This takes me to the worksheet:

STEP 3 – ACTION WORDS

Here I will build list action words. Actions words are words we use to describe an action someone wants to take with a subject. For a car, some actions words might be:

• fix
• repair
• build
• painting

For a garden, some actions words might be:

• plant
• prepare
• planting
• grow
• weeding

Every subject will have its own unique set of actions words that are maybe only relevant to that subject.

But there are some actions words common to a lot of subjects like:

• guide
• e book
• report
• technique
• improve
• better

STEP 3 – ACTIONWORDS is where I keep track of all the ways people might say training or something related to training. I could simply enter the word “dog training” but this would only be scratching the surface. Some people want their dogs to STOP doing things, while other people might want to teach their dogs to do TRICKS. etc etc …. So now what I have done it on worksheet STEP 3 – ACTION WORDS is removed all clusters other than ones that relate to training. In this case I have the training cluster and the aggressive cluster. I am now going to go through these to see what action words I can find in the how dog data that was returned.

Note: when I see a word like teach I also decided to include that various versions of teach.

• teach
• teaching
• teacher

So here are the actions words I got from training data that came from my original “how dog” query.

Action Words:

Do you need this many? Most likely you will not need to go this hard. But I am trying to show you how far you can take it, for those who are not satisfied with just doing the basics. If I had the time and I was serious I would have dug even harder. But for the sake of example this is more than enough. If you are not sure just cream top of the actions words that you see with some higher frequency. Remember we are trying to find out what problems people search for online. To do this we need to build a list of action words to associate with our subject or interest. To uncover your potential niche market, we’ll need to create a list of action words THEY could be using to search for the solution YOU’LL be selling!

SEEDWORDS

A seedword is the phrase that we put into your keyword tool. Just like when we used “how dog,

how dog is the seedword. So now I am going to combine dog and puppy such with the list above. Dog and puppy are the two words generally used to describe a dog. I could have the synonyms- doggy, canine and or breeds, like black lab, german sheppard etc, etc…. etc. But for the sake of example I used dog and puppy. But be sure you use the most common synonyms in your research.

The final result was this list of seedwords:

I then plug these words into my tool. Each tool has its own special way of plugging in these terms. If you are using Bebiz you can watch the help videos for that specific process. Bebiz has done a great job of making this part very easy. I could have used more synonyms but I found most people use puppy and dog.

Now my list is a bit extreme as I wanted to show you how hard you can dig on a subject like Dog Training.

SUPER IMPORTANT: by keeping track of what seedwords I searched for I know exactly what I have searched. You will never be able to remember this in your head so always keep track of what you have searched. This will reduce the chances of you searching in circles or going off track. Also when seeking advice on IEC, this data will help the IEC team to see how you are approaching your research.

TIP: Use the least amount of words possible in a Seedword that still produces relevant results.

A bad example is “how to train my dog to sit down”.

When using a phrase like this I am asking the keyword tool to give me back all phrases that contain:

how AND to AND train AND my AND dog AND to AND sit AND down

In fact when I tried using a phrase like this I got back zero results. I would alter this phrase “how to train my dog to sit down” to something like this:

sit dog

This will produce much more data and should still return meaningful and relevant data. When I say meaningful I mean we can understand the intention of the searcher and the results returned are still on topic. If you cannot understand what the intentions of the search is, that search phrase will not be as useful as one where the intention is crystal clear. When you start you may find yourself picking poor action words that return off topic or poor demand results. But with a little practice you will so grow a seasoned eye for what is going to work. Also avoid conjunctions like as, a, the, at, etc etc, since these word will only reduce your possible results. Sometimes you may need conjunctions to infer an action. But most of the time you can avoid using conjunctions. Also consider all the ways people can say one word like:

info

informing

information

informational

informed

After submitting all my seedwords to my keyword tool I then clustered all the data and removed the irrelevant data. So this list below is the final clustered results from those seedwords. Keep in mind there is more than one right way to do this. No two people will cluster the same way. As you can see there are 3 columns. First is the keyword, second is the cluster and the last column is the sub-cluster. You don’t have to use sub-clusters if you don’t want to. If you don’t want to sub cluster then make more clusters that are more detailed. In a nutshell you need to be able to clearly identify the trends of your market. I find that sub-clusters help me to do this. Take the time to examine how I clustered this data and make sure you understand my logic behind this. If you don’t understand this then come to me in the forum and I will cheerfully explain it.

Now if we really want to dig even deeper we could go through all this data above and look for new actions words that have made themselves present and perhaps could not be seen before. We could keep repeating this process until we have exhausted all the data available.