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.

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8 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

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9 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

Do you get caught in the “OCD Loop?”

Do you sit there and hit the send and receive for your email inbox repeatedly, anxiously waiting and looking for “something”… not sure what but “something”? Do you log into your ClickBank or AdSense account 25 times a day, in hopes that something magical has happened? Do you find yourself automatically going to a website, even though you were just there 5 minutes ago and nothing possibly could have changed yet? Do you stop what you are doing everytime the phone rings, even though we know it will take us 20 minutes just to get back into the grove of where we just were… destroying all our momentum.

It is like watching TV (not sure if this is mainly a guy thing here) and constantly flicking to the next channel… we are not sure why we do this, perhaps something is telling us that the most amazing show in the world is on and we are missing it. Regardless of why, the fact is we do and the end result is by the time we shut the TV off, we have not really watched anything.

The same is true for growing your business. You are constantly doing things but at the end of the day nothing is done.

You see the OCD Loop involves a phenomenon among many in the “MMO” field where they exhibit a form of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) in the way that they are obsessive about following a specific sequence of actions repeatedly throughout the day, even if they make no sense. If you were paying a person by the hour and saw them doing those activities, you would fire them… or re educate them anyway.

If you’re really honest with yourself, you need to ask yourself how often you actually allow yourself to fall into this OCD Loop, and fail to stay focused on doing the things that bring money into your business. Pinpoint your tendency for falling into this trap, and start thinking of ways to snap out of it when you feel yourself getting sucked into this loop, because it can waste a lot of your time.

STOP THE MADNESS

If at the end of the day you feel exhausted, stressed out and anxious because you know you were busy but are not sure what you have to show for it…. then maybe it is time to do things different.

How… Tell me please.. How?

Well, if there is one thing we have learned is there is no perfect answer for everyone. What works for us might not work for you but what we do recommend you try however, is to ask yourself these two questions…

1. Is what we are doing right now making us or going to make us significant money for our business?

2. If we were paying someone to do what we are doing right now, would we feel good that the money is being well spent?

These two questions might not do it for you, but we hope you see our point here. Busy work does not mean quality work. Focus on your ROI (Return on Investment) and treat your business like a business.

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12 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post