Do Your Research!

Research Is The Key!

You have an awesome sales page and a world class product but that doesn’t mean squat if you haven’t done your research before hand.

In this weeks newsletter I am going to show you, from my own experiences how doing your research properly can mean the difference between $100 per month and $1000 per month!

Take a look at the two screen shot’s below, they are my own screens taken from two different affiliate programs that I promote. One of the products I took my time and researched, the other product was one that I threw together without doing the research – can you guess which is which? (Both show earnings for a 1 month period)

As you can see from the shots above, I wasn’t joking when I said research can make the difference between $100 and $1000 per month! I can’t stress enough how important it is to do some proper research before creating a new product, or website. The same goes for an affiliate program, there is no point promoting a product as an affiliate if nobody is looking to buy!

So with that out of the way, I am going to show you exactly how I do my research before I start a new project.

1. Get some feedback

Before you create a new website/product get some feedback first. Just because you think you have the next big thing it doesn’t mean other people will agree with you. The way I do this is by putting out some “feelers”. You can see an example by clicking here, this was one of my newsletters a few weeks ago. You will notice that I included a poll giving people a vague idea about the product and then I asked them to vote.

Another easy way is to post a brief description of your idea in some relevant forums (without spamming!) or by sending questions to your mailing list or existing website visitors.

2. Look at the competition

Chances are that you will have some competition already out there selling a similar product/service. What I always do is take a look at the competitions Alexa rank and see how much traffic they are getting, very low traffic means that there may not be a huge demand for the product, a good traffic ranking probably means you are onto something worthwhile!

3. Keyword Research

This is my personal favourite, before I even consider creating the site/product I like to see if there is any chance of me getting some search engine traffic. I think of a related keyword for my product/service that I will be promoting and then run it through Keyword Elite:

If you haven’t yet invested in Keyword Elite then you can use the free Keyword Suggestion Tool from the SEO Book to get a basic idea of how many searches that word/phrase will get each month:

http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/

A lot of searches and low competition means you are onto a winner, no searches and lots of competition means……try another keyword or move onto something else!

Taking those three simple steps BEFORE you start creating your product/website can mean the difference between success and failure.

I’m sure a lot of you have loads of other research methods that you use before starting a new project, if you do then please feel free to leave a comment and share them with us 🙂

Thanks for reading,
Dan

Do You Have A Contingency Plan?

Greetings readers, I hope you have had a nice Easter Break. Mine was perfect until I decided to watch England Vs Australia in the cricket. England might have a decent chance of winning the world cup if half the team weren’t scared of hitting a cricket ball!

But enough about cricket, I would like to welcome the new readers to this weeks newsletter. Most weeks I will publish a free newsletter on my blog on a number of different subjects, you can view my archived newsletters and navigate the site via the links on the right of the page.

This week I am going to look at an important part of any online or offline business – a contingency plan!

Put simply, have you got measures in place for when something goes wrong?

The reason for me writing about this subject is due to something that happened to me just before the Easter break. I woke up one morning to discover that I had no broadband connection, so I couldn’t check my emails, access websites and respond to customer queries.

After a chat with my ISP they assured me that my line was fine and it wasn’t a problem at their end either. After a lot of searching around I found out that the problem was actually my router, so off to the local store I went. £70 and one new router later I was back online, however all of the searching around for the problem had cost me two days of working time, not to mention the backlog of emails.

So that was 2 days without an Internet connection, what could I have done to avoid this?

The answer was staring at me in the face; I should have had a contingency plan in place! In this case my contingency plan would be to have a dial up connection to fall back on if my broadband decided to kick up a fuss again. So the very first thing I did when I was back online was find a dial up solution.

I found this emergency dial up number that you can use (UK only) but I’m sure if you look on Google you will be able to find your countries equivalent service – if you can’t find one maybe there is a gap in the market 😉

http://emergencyinternet.com/ (not an affiliate link!)

Having a dial up connection in place before my Broadband crash would have meant I could still answer emails and customer queries, all be it a bit slower than before but they would still be answered and I wouldn’t have faced the back log that I did.

So contingency plan 1:

Always have a dial up connection to fall back on if your Broadband fails. (and never buy a Belkin router, they break way too easily!)

Number 2 isn’t something that has happened to me yet, touch wood but I’m sure you will all be aware of a massive problem that could cause you no end of headaches.

What would you do if your hard drive crashed and you lost all of your data? Every website you ever created, every e-book you ever downloaded, every letter you ever composed; every picture you saved would be gone for good.

This may sound a little bit far fetched, but trust me it isn’t. A hard drive can go at any time, what’s to say you won’t get a computer virus tomorrow and have to reformat everything?

I can’t stress how important it is to have a contingency plan in place for this, you need to make sure that you make backs of all your important data on a regular basis. There are loads of ways to back up:

– Copy all files to an external drive
– Copy files to a DVD/CD
– Upload important files to your server
– Use an automated online back up system

I personally use an automated online back up system, every time I create or change a file/folder the software automatically makes an off site backup for me. I use:

www.carbonite.com (again, it’s not an affiliate link)

So contingency Plan 2:

Always back up your important files and folders, you never know when you hard drive will decide to call it a day 🙂

Those are the two main points that I wanted to make today, there are other contingency plans that you also need to consider but I felt that those were the two main one’s for now.

Others to consider would be:

– A back up hosting account if your current host goes belly up

– Details of all your business accounts, paypal passwords if something were to happen to you. Hey, I know it’s morbid but it’s something you need to consider, if something were to happen to you then you need a plan in place that would give your loved one’s the information they need.

That’s it for this week’s newsletter, I normally end by asking you to leave me any comments you may have on the article, but this week I will be ending on a rather sombre note.

A long time marketer by the name of Gary Halbert has sadly passed away. I was a long time subscriber to Gary’s newsletter as I’m sure a lot of you were as well. I’m sure you will join me in sending out our thoughts and prayers to Gary’s family.

Thanks for reading,

Regards,
Dan

2007 Free Easter JV Giveaway is Live

This year promises to be bigger and better than last time with
thousands of free products to be downloaded, the doors have just
opened and will close again at the end of April so you will need
to be quick.

http://auction-arses.com/recs/easter_giveaway.php

My advice would be to set up a new email account with either hotmail
or gmail and then download as many gifts as you can throughout the
month.

The site will be incredibly busy for the next few days so you may
need to copy/paste the link into your browsers address bar if it
doesn’t load first time.

http://auction-arses.com/recs/easter_giveaway.php

Also, one quick tip from me. Last year I downloaded so much software
that I lost most of it on my PC, make sure you keep each item that
you download in it’s own individual folder so you don’t lose it!

Everything is 100% free of charge so you have nothing to lose.