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.

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10 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

Was Twittering and noticed a reference from “Problogger” about this new tool he was checking out called Skribit. The concept of the tool is to help bloggers (like us) figure out what to write about based on readers (like you) requests and votes.

Like any “Social / Web 2.0″ tool, the effectiveness of this will be directly related to the involvement from its users, but personally, we really like the idea!

No matter what your business is, it is always wise to listen to your readers, customers, listeners and so on. Now for bloggers, Skribit makes it very fast and easy…. or so it seems.

So is this tool worth while?

Dont know yet, we just installed it about 45 minutes ago and need to give it a bit to see if any of you actually send in suggestions

Check it out and let us know what you want us to moo about. To use the tool, simple locate the “Skribit” box in our sidebar, directly under the sponsor banners and click in the “What should we write about?” section. Next enter the topic you would like us to write about.

OR

If you like a suggestion already there, then vote for it.

It looks like when a suggestion is answered it disappears… need to figure that out for sure though.

Thats pretty much all there is to it that we can see right now. We will update everyone on our opinion after a few days of use.

Interested to know if any of you have any previous experience with this and any feedback about it? Also, if you have not tried it, what is your initial opinion of it?

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12 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

Okay, so we know we need backlinks and we need to be commenting on other blogs. We know it is not all about the search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN anymore… by the way who the heck searches with MSN anyway… seriously?

Whoaaa… Hold on Cow, what do you mean it is not about the search engines anymore?

Good, we had hoped you would ask that question.

Take a look at the social communities from Alexa’s top 500 sites (yes, we know that Alexa stats are debatable but they still give you an idea). There are sites such as: Facebook, YouTube, Friendster, Flicker, hi5, Myspace and more… just to name a few. These sites are all getting traffic that is very comparable to Google and the wonderful thing is these sites are begging you to give them content. The other thing is there are hundreds of these type sites being added daily and many of them get stampedes of traffic very quickly.

You see, we can spend hours of our days, banging our horns against our keyboards, or in some cases throwing them across the room to do everything we can to keep that traffic coming into our sites but the fact (or at least we think it is a fact) is that we are at times our own worse enemy when it comes to this. We read something or hear that something works and so we do it, but the problem is…

That Is ALL We Do!

We get excited and see that it works and so we stick to that only and do the the same thing over and over again… and at first it works but then it plateau’s and eventually starts to droop like a saggy utter.

Think about any new traffic tool that comes out. People will often slam them right out of the gate, saying…

“we are NOT using that, we are sticking to what we know works”

…but the problem is they are not seeing the big picture. These tools are never intended to be the end all be all of traffic and neither should any one source be the end all be all of your traffic. If it is, then you run a huge risk that if they change something, it could destroy your existence on the web. We should all be constantly looking for different ways to increase our grazing areas. When these new tools come out, test them out, see how they fit into your business. If they work, then use them, if not then drop them.

This is true for relying on any one source of traffic such as Google, Stumbleupon or any other one site. The trick is that you need to be as diversified as possible and always look for new opportunities. Yes of course you want to provide excellent content and reasons for your readers to return but what about grabbing new readers? Are you constantly looking out for new opportunities of places to get more readers… more traffic… more mooney?

Do You Like Sloppy Seconds?

Over here we are not totally keen on the idea of getting sloppy seconds. And waiting until everyone is using or recommending something is just like that. You get in after the spammers have ruined it for you. The fantastic thing is there are 1000’s of these type sites popping up all the time. Some of them are new and some have been around a while but the spammers have not exploited them yet.

A great example of a site we started using not too long ago is feedbite.com (hence the title of this post). Now we are not telling you this site sends a flood of traffic, but it does send some, and the effort to set it up was literally minutes, so the return on time investment is worth it. Now by sharing this site, it will probably start to get abused… but who cares, we will find others to use.

What we really like about this site is that it uses your rss feed and so once you set it up, you are done. It is not like Stumbleupon and Digg, were you have to have the content submitted each time manually, of course it does not get the traffic those send either.

The links do not have a nofollow tag.. which is a bonus and people can vote up or down you content so it gets on the front page. Google Also seems to respond good to it.

So breaking it down, feedbite.com may not roll in the traffic like crazy, but it does bring in traffic and any extra traffic is great… especially when it is so easy so easy to set up.

Now back up for a second. Our point here is not to promote feedbite, this is not a paid review or anything like that. Instead it is simply a process for you to consider implementing, a process that expands your pastures and also grows your backlinks to your blog. Lets call it the…

Cow Traffic Diversification Process

…and it goes like this…

• Once a week go to http://www.go2web20.net/ and look at the tags “Bookmarking”, “Blogging”, and “RSS” (need to do that separately)
• Check out some of the new “Web 2.0″ sites and look for ones that you can post public accessible content on.
• Submit your rss feed (if allowed), content, pictures, videos or whatever else they allow BUT (and a big one at that) make sure that if you are adding content such as a post, that you add a link back to your blog with a call to action (read the post “Using Content to get Traffic” for more on that).
• Check your stats in a week…. Look to see if that site sent traffic to your site. If it sends traffic, keep it and expand your use of it… if it doesn’t then drop it and move on.

This is powerful because it helps expand your reach and the side benefit is Google loves the variety in backlinks to your blog. You also do not have to update the content here regularly like your own blog…. Unless of course you see loads of traffic from it then you will want to take advantage of that (we would anyway).

Go try it out and let us know how it goes.

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12 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

Using content to get subscribers, prospects, build reputations and get traffic to your blogs can be very powerful… but ONLY if done right!

We are not talking about content on your own blogs here, but rather posts and content that you use on other sites to promote yours.

In school, we are all taught to always finish a story with a closing paragraph and so when we start writing to promote ourselves online, we do just that, complete with a close. Let us ask you this (actually quoted from a good Australian friend of ours named Dean)…

“If you close your content, wouldn’t that satisfy the reader’s appetite in such a way that that there was no need for them to go any further.”

In other words, why would they need to take action on anything and search for further information about the topic if you already gave it to them?

We thought about this a lot and the more we did, the more it made sense. Your content needs to be crafted in such a way that if a reader wants a closing paragraph, then why shouldn’t we link to it so the reader has to take the action we want (such as visit our site).

Some of our favorite movies are those which don’t finish with a happy ending. No, we are not masochists but they finish in such a way that leaves us wondering whether there’s going to be a next installment. It’s like you’ve built to a crescendo and the hero appears to have won but the last scene reveals something sinister brewing beneath the surface. Then the end credits roll and we all think…

“What the…????”

We want to know what happens; we want to know more but we’re going to have to wait until version 2 hits the big screen. With your content, the reader doesn’t need to wait because there are a couple of live links in our content with specific call to action instructions they can click on to find out more. And that’s exactly what we want them to do… isn’t it?

We are not saying you should finish your content in such a way that it doesn’t make sense but instead do it in a way to entice the reader to take a look out of curiosity at what we have got to offer.

There is a fine line between readers just reading content as opposed to reading and clicking through and that fine line in our opinion is the closing paragraph. Yes, the entire content itself needs to be interesting enough for them to continue reading but if they get to the end then you can be rest assured they were interested. What a shame if you gave them that dreaded closing paragraph such as…

“And that folks is what you need to do when grooming a Norwegian Humpback. We hope you’ve enjoyed this post and thank you very much for reading it.”

Would we want to click on the link in the content with a finish like that. We know we wouldn’t. Maybe an ending like this would have been more appropriate…

“Want to know how to finish grooming the healthiest Norwegian Humpback in your neighborhood? Subscribe to our RSS Feed at “Insert Link Here” and we guarantee your Humpback will be the envy of everyone in your street! “

The end of your content needs to catch their attention…. or they are just not going to do what you want them to!

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14 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

So here’s an interesting concept: Is Twitter more effective than RSS subscribers for your branding? We believe the answer is yes. Twitter is a quick and easy ‘hack’ to get your name out there. While you still get your opinion through to people, it doesn’t require the reader to go through a ton of posts on your blog, it’ll only take them 2 seconds to read your 140 characters on a twitter notification. Twitter is instant delivery and very dynamic. All you need to do is make sure that your short twitter blurb is catchy enough for someone to go and read your post, same as it is with the headlines of your blog posts. Ever messed up a headline, published your post, only to have to go into feedburner and resync your feed, hoping nobody has pulled the feed yet so they won’t notice your crappy headline? With Twitter you can instantly retweet yourself with a better line without any hassle.

Following someone on twitter is very simple, you click follow and you’re done, while with RSS you often have to go through 2 or 3 more steps, like picking your reader of choice, confirming your subscription, verification etc. Like we said, its way more dynamic. Our twitter client of choice would be Twhirl, it works on everything, running on Adobe’s AIR platform, and it is constantly getting improved with new features.

The following doesn’t really have an relevance to the comparison of Twitter Vs RSS, but it show that Twitter is definitely something you should be using as a tool to market yourself in the blogosphere.
Using Twitter the right way will generate some great traffic to your site. Here’s an example: Jason Calacanis has a huge following on twitter (no idea why, he seems to have a 99:1 Mahalo spam:interesting stuff ratio) and whenever he links somewhere, there are 20,000 potential new visitors involved. BeBizzy posted about Calacanis and the power of Twitter, Jason then picked up on it (probably has Google Alerts on his name, hi Jason!) and sent out one twitter message, linking back to the article. We went right in and left a first comment. We instantly received 40 visitors from BeBizzy, so we’re pretty sure BeBizzy must have received at least 400 visitors in a matter of minutes.

Twitter has gone mainstream, and not having a twitter account these days is like not having an email address! You can follow us at http://www.twitter.com/johncow, and for the latest updates, check our sidebar widget. We use twitter to announce stuff like when we’re going on live video stream again and such, so you can schedule your lunch breaks around our broadcasting time

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11 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post