If you're new here, you may want to check out this cool new contest. You could win almost$3000 in Prizes!

Got some questions for you…

• Want to learn first hand how to “truly” make money online?
• Want to see from start to finish how we plan, research, build and market a blog to dominate and grow viral buzz?
• Want to see a real life case study from start to finish?
• Want a chance to WIN over $2300 almost $3000 in prizes?
• Want it all for FREE?

>>>Click Here Now<<< to visit our “Official” Cowpetition page and learn exactly how you can enter to Win!!!

Did You Register for the "COWpetition"? If You Want To Learn How to Kill Your Competition and be Entered to Win Over $3000 in Great Prizes All for FREE? Then DO Yourself a Favor and Click Here to Learn How NOW!

9 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

SHOW ME THE MONEY!”

In the movie Jerry Maguire, the character Rod Tidwell (played by Cuba Gooding Jr) gets Jerry (played by Tom Cruise) to repeat the phrase “Show Me the Money”. The scene that this took place in was very energetic and fun. The basis of what was happening in the movie was the character played by Cuba Gooding Jr, was making it very clear to Jerry McGuire that he did not care about any of the (uhn hmm… pardon the french here) Bullshit, that Jerry was throwing at him… what mattered to him was the money. Dont fancy talk me, dont tell me how great it will or could be… SHOW ME THE MOONEY!

When we are doing market research, this principal should be front and center. All the fancy numbers and calculations that most of the keyword tools out there tell us, are completely meaningless… We want to see the money!

What we mean by that is, before we invest any time or effort into creating a blog, we want to see that people are spending money and more important of all… people are making money in the market that we are targeting. We are not talking about the actual affiliate product here… we already know people are making some money selling that, what we are referring to here are the keywords.

How to Find the “Show Me the Mooney” Keywords

There are three tools that we absolutely love, when it comes to keyword research and we are going to explain about each one and why we like them. We really wish we could tell you that the only tools you need are free ones but that is just not true, we want to show you exactly how we do this to earn some kick ass affiliate revenue and this is how we do it… with these tools.

As we go through the remaining lessons, we hope you will fully understand why we not only recommend these tools but we use them.

1. Google Adwords Toolbox –> In our opinion this is the most powerful tool of them all. If we had to choose only one tool out of them all, we would honestly stick with the free Google tools. The data that Google provides is absolutely incredible and once you understand it, you can uncover beautiful words… and we are going to show you exactly how we do it.

We do recommend that you do not use the publicly accessible tools, but instead create an Adwords account to access the tools from the Adwords control panel. To register for Adwords, you will have to set up a mock adwords campaign but you can pause it right away and then access all the tools.

2. Traffic Travis –> We love this tool and we bet that a lot of you (if not most of you) have never heard of this one. A good friend of ours named Mark Ling, who is a very successful internet marketing in the non IM field, created this. Personally we think the name is terrible and the interface is kind of cheesy looking but once you understand what is under the hood of this bad boy, you will absolutely love it and as we get further into the training you will see why.

3. Affiliate Elite –> This is a fantastic tool that should be part of every affiliate marketers arsenal… in our opinion of course. We absolutely love the spy tool and to be honest with you, is the only part of this software we really use. Not to downplay the rest of the functionality but this is what helps us identify the winners from the losers.

Other Tools…. there are lots of other fantastic tools available, such as WordTracker, Keyword Discovery, SpyFu and more. We have used them all and still use some but the above three are our favorites and in our opinion are all that are needed for very effective keyword research and are what we will be sharing with you in the following lessons.

Now before you go out and buy these tools, you may want to follow along and judge for yourself… you may even already own some tools that you can use in place of them.

Lets Get To It - Enough talk, lets get our Hoofs Dirty!

The remainder of this lesson is going to focus on the initial step of digging out the words with Google. In the next lesson we will show you how to take those words… expand of them and then use TrafficTravis and Affiliate Elite to filter out the crap and focus in on the money makers.

Step 1: Log into your account at https://adwords.google.com/select/Login and then select “Tools” and “Keyword Tool”

Step 2: Check the “Website content” box and enter the true URL of the site you are going to promote and select “Get Keyword Ideas”

Click To Enlarge Image

Step 3: Google will now list all the keywords that they feel are directly related to that site. They also organize the info into “Groups”. Click on the “Avg Search Volume” to sort in order of highest to lowest.

Step 4: Open a notepad file and copy down the top keyword from each group.

Click to Enlarge

Step 5: Now we are going to look where the discussions are happening. Go to Google.com and now search for…

“Keyword Phrase” Forum

…for each of the keywords that you listed from step 4, such as…

This is a very powerful step, because this is where the people in the market actual go and talk. This is where the problems are discussed, the resources are discussed and more.

Step 6: Click on the top forum that shows up and you want to browse through the forum and look for keywords that are not in your list and are not phrase matches to your list words. For example, since the example list has “day trading”, we would not use a word such as “forex day trading” since my keyword already covers that… instead I want to look for words that are completely different. You want to look for words used by experienced members in the forum as well and in discussions that have a lot of responses… that shows interest in the subject.

For example, we found the word “EuroBund Daily Notes”, there is a good discussion on this and it is not something we have on our list… so we added it.

Make sure you do not waste too much time here though… you can get into analysis paralysis here. Just browse around, find popular discussions and look for hot topics and the words being used.

Not every keyword will have a quality forum associated with them, but a lot of them do.

Step 7: Now go to google.com (the search engine part) and enter each keyword from your entire list, one at a time and copy down the urls of all the adsense ads on page one of the results only. Repeat this for every keyword that you copied down from the previous steps.

Note –> The reason we are doing this is to focus on keywords from sites that “PAY” for traffic… they are the ones that know which keywords to focus on (did a light come on yet?)

Step 8: Once you have a list of all the URL’s, go back to your AdWords tool and now enter each URL, one at a time into the “Keyword Tool” –> “Website Content”. Click on the “Add all…” under each group to add all the words to the right side of the screen.

Step 7: Repeat this with every URL that you found from step 7. You will find that there are a few of words that are shared but there are lots more that are new.

By the time you have finished this you will have found a lot of great keywords… but the important thing here is to realize these are not keywords related to just anything… they are keywords related to sites paying to use those words. That is powerful because that shows the words are worth something.

Once you have compeleted this step, export the keywords in text format and save them to your computer.

Thats is it for today!

In the next lessons, we will show you how to take these words and filter them to find the hidden diamonds.

Check out the other lessons in this series…

1. Lesson 1 - Keyword Research: What are you Basing it On?
2. Lesson 2 - Keyword Research: the Cart before the Cow
3. Lesson 3 - Keyword research: What for may we ask?

PS –> We truly hope you are enjoying these lessons and would love to get feedback from you on them… so leave a moo below about the lesson.

>> Remember to subscribe for our RSS Feed to stay up to date on the next lesson we post!<<

Did You Register for the "COWpetition"? If You Want To Learn How to Kill Your Competition and be Entered to Win Over $3000 in Great Prizes All for FREE? Then DO Yourself a Favor and Click Here to Learn How NOW!

10 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

Before we start searching for keywords, we prefer to have a goal in mind and that means that we want to already have the product or service we are going to promote selected. We have been down the path of general market research to uncover a niche (pronounced neesh) and in our opinion it takes way too long and is way too complicated.

Instead we prefer to find a product or service that is already selling or at least starting to sell and then we figure out who is buying it and what words they are using to buy it. Once we know that, then we can figure out how to make a better offer. This does not mean we actually build a competing product (which is a possibility down the road) but instead we figure out a unique selling position (USP) that makes our offer better then the rest so people buy through us. But before we get into that, we need to find a product.

Finding the Right Affiliate Product

There are different ways this can be done and just today we were asked by a friend of ours, Sheena Brown, how do you find good products to sell. We asked her why and she mentioned that she came across a really cool gaming product, called the Razer gaming keyboard, that has an affiliate program and she was considering selling it.

Our response to her was… “that’s the first step.. look for products that you yourself would buy.”

This is extremely important because this shows through in your marketing efforts. People tend to be able to smell cow dung from a mile away and you may be able to fool a few people some of the time but you cant fool all the people all the time, so if you try promoting a product that you yourself would have no interest in buying, this often will show in your message.

OK, thats great if you already know a product you want to promote but what if you don’t… where would you find these type of products or services?

In our opinion the easiest place to start is with the main affiliate networks such as ClickBank, Commission Junction, Link Share and so on. These networks take a lot of the hard work out of the process because they act as the middle man between the sellers and affiliates. They manage the tracking, finances and all that good stuff and make it very easy to search through and find products to sell.

List of Top Affiliate Networks…

• ClickBank
• Commission Junction
• LinkShare
• Regnow
• Shareasale
• Performics

The other option is, if you know the product you want to sell then you can see what stores have affiliate programs available. To do that simply type in the keyword or product name and include “Affiliate Program” in the search such as…

razer keyboard “affiliate program”

Click Here to Enlarge

Or, if you know the site that sells the product and you cant see if they have an affilaite program, simply search using the google site filter such as…

site:www.thedomain.com affiliate

Click Here to Enlarge

This however does not really solve the problem of helping you find the right product to choose and the reason is, if you don’t already have something in mind then where in the world do you even start?

So, we need to back up a little… and for those of you that already think you know what you want to promote, don’t worry about it. We will get back to you momentarily.

So Where to Start?

If you are just starting out and do not already have a certain market you are involved in, this can actually be a stressful time for you. We can get so riled up over this that we actually give ourselves anxiety. Some of us just grab the first thing that crosses or path or we see some guru promoting and decide that is where to start, only to fail because the competition is so fierce. Others over analyze each product to the point where no product could ever satisfy them.

The best place to be here is in the middle, you want to look for products that are being promoted… but not by every person under the sun and you also need to understand that there is no perfect product out there but you want a product that is not a piece of junk.

The very best place to start for anyone just beginning is with ClickBank. Yes, we know you have probably heard this before and maybe even tried to promote ClickBank products before, but trust us… if you do it right, ClickBank can be a goldmine. The reason we like ClickBank the best for starting out is once you are registered, you can then promote absolutely any product in their database. Unlike other programs, where you still have to apply for certain products and unless you already have a presence online, your chances of getting approved are pretty small.

The downside to ClickBank is it is 100% digital products (ebooks, software, videos and so on) and there is a lot of crap products in there. On the bright side however, there are also many solid products also.

Finding The Right Product

If you do not already have a ClickBank account, sign up for one now at ClickBank, the process is extremely easy.

Once you have signed up, to find products simply go to the ClickBank marketplace at http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm

Once there, the first step is to pick a market that you have somewhat of an interest in or perhaps you already have a site on. Don’t get too hung up on this however, if you really are not interested in anything or have no real care in the world as to what market to start in then just pick a the first category to start with and work your way down.

It is nice to start with a market you are knowledgeable with but this is also a cause for analysis paralysis because we try to find the perfect fit. Over analysis is the enemy.. remember that!

Lets for example just pick a random market… we will start with the the first category “Business to Business” and the first subcategory “Education”. Keep the settings with “Sortby” at Popularity and the “results per page” to 20.

Click Here to Enlarge

Now ClickBank will list for you in order of popularity, the most popular products in their database but they also give you some other fantastic information. What we personally like to do is scroll down the page and look at the titles but we also look at the “$sale” number that ClickBank provides. This is the estimated revenue you can expect to make per sale from that product after refunds, chargebacks and clickbank fees are taken into account.

This number is very important because you want to make sure that the product you are promoting makes at the very least $15 per sale. This is the absolute lowest we will go and the reason is, we want to spend our energy where the money is, so why spend time researching and promoting something that makes you $5 compared to the same effort that can make you $25.

So we scroll down the list and a few products stick out to us right away. The first is the “Instant Forex Profit System“, this pays out over $40 per sale, which is excellent.

The next number we look at is the “%refd”, this tells me the amount of sales that are made by affiliates. In my opinion the higher the number the better here because if no affilaites were making any of the sales there would be a cause for concern. This particular product as over 90% of the sales coming from affiliates.. which is a good thing.

Now we look at the gravity. This is basically a representation of the amont of affiliates promoting this product. Now it is not a direct 1 to 1 relationship, clickbank takes things like time since last sale and more into account for the calculation but personally we like it when this number is not too high because it tells us there are not a lot of competitors to fight against. There is no magic number here because there are so many variables that you have to take into account. For example, if the product is brand new then this number would be very low… personally we like between 10 and 50 but we have promoted products lower then that and higher then that.. but that is the average we look for.

So for this product the $sale is good, the %ref is good and the gravity is not too high… this is looking like a potentially good product. Now is the time to check out the sales page itself. To do that, click on the “create hoplink” in the directory.

Next, enter your ClickBank ID and click create. Now copy the URL they provide and paste it into your browser. This is important because you want to see exactly how the page appears to the end user and you also want to test the links on the page. The first things we look for are…

1. A nice clear headline: We want people to get their attention grabbed right away and be sure that it is compelling.
2. Clean design and nice graphics: Is the page professional looking or like a mid 90s college student page.
3. Social proof (testimonials, screenshots): Prove to me the solution works.
4. Up to date (no old copyright date or 3 year old screen shots): You will be amazed how many people click off a site just because of an outdated copyright date.
5. Clear call to action: Do they do a good job of showing the visitor how to buy the product.

Once we have looked at these elements we then will click on the buy now link to ensure that our affiliate ID is correctly used. Simply click on the “Buy Now” and then scroll down to the bottom of the page and make sure you see [affiliate = YourAffiliateID]

One thing to watch for as well is an opt in form. These can be very beneficial to you but make sure you opt in and see what the message is they send you. Some people can be real scumbags and will actually put a different affiliate link in the email message so when you click on it, it overwrites your cookie with theirs and you lose the sale. Make sure they link directly to the page and your affiliate ID still shows up on the bottom of the order form.

IMPORTANT THOUGHT –> Should you buy the product before you promote it? In our opinion, Yes, but not yet. Until we are sure this is the right product and the keywords look good, there is no sense in buying it. This is not a mandatory step for everything you promote but it is wise, as you can then do videos about the product and really explain in details the advantages to the end user. You can also contact the vendor after all your research is done and ask for a review copy… most will be more then happy to oblige if they see you are serious.

We personally feel that too much time is spent on over analyzing products. If the initial data looks good and the sales page looks good then chances are you can make a couple bucks from that product.

What about non ClickBank products? … how do we decide if we should move forward with those?

Not all, in fact very few, affiliate programs give you details like ClickBank does. The biggest thing we look at for non Clickbank products is the % commission we can make. If we cant make $15 per sale at the bare minimum, then we don’t bother. Also, we check out the sales page, the same as we do with ClickBank. So with the initial example of the Razer keyboard, we would look at the commission rate and the price of the product. If we could make at least $15 per sale, then we would consider looking more into it. If not, then we move on.

Time to Contradict Ourselves –> We would not always not move forward with something if it is less then $15 but we would already have to have a related site set up that we could just write up a promotion for. But for full blown market research, it must be $15 or more per sale made.

Once we have the product or service that we want to move forward with, the secret is now to find out how others are making money with it…. so it is time to start digging for keywords!

That my friends is going to be in the next lesson.

Lesson 1: Keyword Research - What are You Basing it On?

Lesson 2: Keyword Research - the Cart before the cow

Lesson 4: Keyword Research - Show me the Money… Words that is

>> Remember to sign up for our RSS Feed to stay up to date on the next lesson we post!<<

What is your feedback on this lesson…other then the fact that this is freaking long!

Did You Register for the "COWpetition"? If You Want To Learn How to Kill Your Competition and be Entered to Win Over $3000 in Great Prizes All for FREE? Then DO Yourself a Favor and Click Here to Learn How NOW!

21 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

One of the toughest parts of creating a new blog or some other type of website, is knowing what niche to start in and what angle to take in that niche. We can spend countless hours banging our heads against the wall trying to figure out what market to start in. We actually become perfectionists before we even know what we are doing!

The process that we are going to walk you through is targeted at building a blog or website that focuses on promoting affiliate products. The reason is, it is our feeling this is by far the easiest and fastest way to get started and you do not have to worry about customer service, technical support, shipping, credit card processing or any other of these business headaches. You simply promote the product or service and get paid a share of any sales that happen. Its beautiful!

The challenge with this however is it always comes back to the question… Where do we start?

• Do you research potential markets and then search for affiliate programs that fit?
• Do you find the programs already running and figure out what keywords to use to promote them?
• What type of affiliate programs do you start with?
• …and the list can probably go on and on.

The way we look at it is, why reinvent the wheel?

We do not want to spend countless hours looking at different markets and then having to try and find appropriate affiliate programs to match up with them. What we recommend is to actually put the “cart” before the “cow”.

START OF COW RANT —> Please understand that there are many different ways you can do market research. We will probably get some anal retentive person in here arguing about this process but the bottom line is…

Show me the Money!

We have tried many different methods and this process is the one that worked the best for us. This is important to know as well because it all comes down to understanding facts and not theories. If all you do is read and research but never put things into practice, then what are you doing thats tangible?

We strongly believe that you need to make your own plans and strategies, but use what you learn from others and work it into your plans and strategies. Every time you screw up, remember what you did and improve on it… and every time you succeed do the same… remember what you did and improve on it. When you have something that works for you, do not let some theory munger come in and say you shouldn’t do that… YES YOU SHOULD!

If it is working for you, then it works! <– END OF COW RANT

Ok, so why the cart before the cow?

In the 1970’s, the Japenanse car manufacturers were the joke of the world. They were tin cans that no one took seriously… but in the 80s this changed and in a HUGE way.

What happened was instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, the Japanese realized they needed to change the focus of their energy and instead of trying to invent things, why not instead take what is already working and simply make it better. It was this mindset change that skyrocketed Japan into becoming an automative giant in the world.

They figured out how to make a better mousetrap and the results were more reliable vehicles that they could make more effeciently and they were even able to charge a premium for it which exploded their profits.

So now let us ask you this.

Do you want to reinvent the wheel and try to uncover new territory or would you rather take what is already working and use that to your advantage?

Both have there pros and cons but the big difference is time commitments and chance of success.

Here is how we see it…

Option #1 –> If you want to break new ground, then great, good luck with that. You are going to need to spend your time finding potential keywords, then figure out what people are looking for with those keywords, then try to find products that people are buying and see if there are affiliate programs available, then hopefully after a while some of your words will be profitable and after a few months you can have a site making some money.

This option can be incredibly profitable, but it takes a lot more work and there is a lot less chance of success.

OR

Option #2 –> Look at what is already making a few people some money, find out what they are doing to make money (spy on them.. bwa hahahaha), easily uncover the keywords that people are actually using to buy the products and then offer a better reason to buy through you (your unique selling position).

This option takes the view point of look at what the customers already are saying they want and give it to them. After all isn’t it easier to give people what they want instead of convincing them they need something new.

OK, I know, I am not covering the whole big picture with these options, but we feel we are covering the main points and it really comes down to how to best spend your time and effort… always focus on ROI. Is what you are doing now giving you the best return on investment.

In tomorrows post we are going to get into finding profitable affiliate products to start this process with. Once we have the product, the rest of the research is VERY easy!

Whats your opinions on options 1 or 2?

If your interested in learning more, then subscribe to our RSS Feed and follow along as we lay out this step by step process with the exact tools and techniques we use.

Lesson 1: Keyword Research - What Are You Basing it On?

Lesson 3: Keyword research - What for may we ask

Lesson 4: Keyword Research - Show me the Money… Words that is

Did You Register for the "COWpetition"? If You Want To Learn How to Kill Your Competition and be Entered to Win Over $3000 in Great Prizes All for FREE? Then DO Yourself a Favor and Click Here to Learn How NOW!

9 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

We have a question for you and we want you to really think about this.

What are the most important metrics that you use when doing keyword research?

1. Traffic

2. Competition

3. KEI

4. ___________ (Fill in the blank)

There are lots of fantastic tools online today and each one has their good points and bad points… but one thing that 99% of all these tools have in common is they simply give you a calculated guess using their own custom algorithim, that simply tells you how many competitors there are and how much traffic you can expect. Some make up a fancy term to use, such as KEI, but the bottom line is it is simply a traffic and competition ratio.

Now this seems logical doesn’t it?

Of course we want to know the amount of traffic a keyword could expect and hopefully we can find those hidden golden nuggets that have virtually no competition and lots of traffic.

But why is it then, when we find these keywords, research and create good solid content, build back links and work our asses off to dominate the search engines, are we not making any money?

The traffic is great!

The rankings are fantastic!

The content is stellar!

What could be wrong???

This is where keyword research gets tricky and was our biggest discovery in transforming our affiliate marketing business. The discovery was that there is a gigantic difference between “traffic words” and “buyer words”

You need to understand that just because certain words get lots of traffic, this does not mean at all that the people searching with those terms are even remotely interested in purchasing anything.

A good example of the is the “dirt bike” industry. There are loads of traffic to be gained from this market but the demographics of this market tend to be generally teenagers who really cant afford to be spending a lot of money. Their searches are for interest… because they are fans of the market but few are spenders.

Does this mean there is no money to be made in this market?

Not saying that at all. There may be potential profits from AdSense and other revenue streams but not (in our experience anyway) a lot in the affiliate side of things. Now there are probably some of you out there making a killing in this industry online and if so.. good on ya! We are not debating whether a profit can be made but pointing out that depending on the revenue model you are going for, traffic and revenue do not always go hand to hand.

For those of you that have experience in PPC, you see this a lot. You can have two words that are almost identical yet one converts into sales like crazy and the other does next to nothing.

Why is this?

There are lots of guesses and theories as to why but honestly we don’t know all the reasons. What we do know however is that it is a fact that there are certain words that are more often used by money spenders then just general interest surfers. The challenge however is how do you uncover these keywords?

Well there are two ways this can be done.

1. Slow and Painful

Build lots of pages focused on lots of keywords, get lots of backlinks, record and track everything and wait months to figure out what is working.

2. Fast and Furious

Find out what is working for others and use that information to get your research time reduced to only days instead of months.

Come on now… you can’t be serious cow?!

Oh but we are!

Traditional keyword research is great. There are loads of tools to use and they tell us some fantastic information but the problem is they are only using “traffic” and “competition” to tell you what to focus on.

What about “Sales”, “Revenue”… PROFITS

Would you not rather focus on a keyword that only gets 20 visitors a day but converts 2% then 100 visitors an day that converts 0.01%?

But how now John Cow?

There are no keyword tools that know what kind of profits people are making, they don’t know what words are making sales and what ones are not… do they?

Yes and we are going to prove it to you over the next few days. We are going to walk you through step by step, the exact process we use to uncover “Killer” keywords, that not only have good traffic and little competition, but are also already proven by others to be fantastic money makers.

Lesson 2: Keyword Research - The Cart before the Cow

Lesson 3: Keyword Research - What for may we ask?

Lesson 4: Keyword Research - Show me the Money… Words that is

If your interested in learning more, then subscribe to our RSS Feed and follow along as we lay out this step by step process with the exact tools and techniques we use.

Did You Register for the "COWpetition"? If You Want To Learn How to Kill Your Competition and be Entered to Win Over $3000 in Great Prizes All for FREE? Then DO Yourself a Favor and Click Here to Learn How NOW!

10 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post