It’s almost spring, and this means that soon people everywhere will need to stat cleaning up backyards, pruning trees, cutting down dead branches, etc. So, let’s see if we can help them and profit at the same time. Today we are going to research chainsaws.
Top 10 Highest Paying Keywords (from the Google keyword tool)
electric chainsaw sharpeners $3.72
used chainsaws for sale $2.73
makita chainsaws $2.38
husky chainsaw $2.25
chainsaw sawmill $1.95
husqvarna chainsaw parts $1.73
concrete chainsaw $1.67
husqvarna chainsaws for sale $1.58
husqvarna chainsaws $1.50
makita electric chainsaw $1.47
Top 10 Most Searched Keywords (all phrases are exact matches in Google)
stihl chainsaws 27,100
husqvarna chainsaws 6,600
chainsaw reviews 5,400
poulan chainsaw parts 5,400
homelite chainsaw parts 4,400
echo chainsaw 3,600
jonsered chainsaws 2,900
chainsaw sharpener 1,900
how to sharpen a chainsaw 1,900
dolmar chainsaw 1,600
Resources
One of the best places to research this will be garden/home maintenance forums, but there are also magazines, manufactures documentation and friends/neighbors who operate one of these chainsaws.
Possible Affiliate Programs
There are lots of merchants at CJ & SAS, but don’t forget Amazon .
Monetization Suggestions
If you like writing , a content site would be excellent: AdSense pays well.
Don’t just do content though: do some in-depth reviews and link to your merchants with an affiliate link.
Here are some .com domains available for this niche now:
mychainsawreview.com
Here are some .org domains available:
mychainsawreview.org
mychainsawreviews.org
thebestchainsaw.org
And some .net ones:
bestchainsaws.net
mychainsawreview.net
mychainsawreviews.net
thebestchainsaw.net
P.S. Check out these guides to learn how to create lots of traffic for your new site/s:
Split testing is the practice of continually improving your website incrementally over time.
The way it works is you create two or more versions of the page you want to test, each one slightly different than the other. You “split” your traffic between these two versions and see which one performs better.
For example, if you’re selling a dog leash you might split test two different images: One of a dog on a leash, another of a pet owner who’s smiling.
After testing the images, you might find that surprisingly the pet owner smiling brings in more sales than the dog on a leash picture.
Instead of just creating a site and hoping that it sells, split testing allows you to increase your conversions over time.
Types of Split Testing: A/B Tests and Multi-Variable Tests
There are primarily two different types of tests you can conduct: A/B tests and multi-variable tests.
A/B tests are the tests we talked about above, where you test two different sites and see which performs better. It’s called A/B because there are two sites, one called A and the other called B.
The other type of test is called multi-variable testing. It’s a type of testing where you test many variables at once and use software to mathematically figure out the best combination of variables.
For example, you might test the headline, the layout, the picture, the price and the order button – All at the same time. The software will tell you which is the best combination of all the data.
Multi-variable testing is generally used only once you have a lot of traffic.
For our purposes, we’ll go over how to run A/B tests in this report.
What Should You Split Test?
There are a few things that affect conversions more than anything else. Start by testing these factors, then test less important factors later.
The Price
The price will often affect your conversions more than anything else. Should you charge $20, $40, $80 or $100? The only way to really know is to test it.
Be careful when testing prices. Generally you want to test it only for a limited time, or else you’ll be sending mixed messages to your market about what your price is.
If someone buys a product and later realizes someone else paid less, always refund the difference for them.
Headline
Next to the price, the headline is often the highest impact factor to test.
The headline’s main job is to capture the reader’s attention and get them to keep reading. It’s their first impression to your website.
If you spend 50% of your copywriting time on your headline, that’s time well spent. Split testing your headline can have very, very dramatic results.
The Layout/Design
The layout speaks to your users emotionally, non-verbally. By layout/design, I mean things like: font color, font size, width of the page, background color, etc.
Studies have shown that certain layouts can increase conversions quite drastically in certain markets, while reducing conversions in others.
For example, red headlines tend to work great in markets that aren’t heavily marketed to.
In markets like marketing, weight loss and dating tips however, people are so sick of seeing red headlines that a red headline actually reduces conversions. Instead, a deep blue headline which builds trust actually tends to convert best in these low-trust high-competition markets.
Each market is different. After you’ve tested your price and headline, start testing your layout to see what converts best.
Shopping Cart Dropout Rate
One thing marketers often forget to split test is the shopping cart’s drop out rate. In other words, once someone clicks “buy” what percentage of them actually completes the transaction?
Online, the drop off rate can be as high as 50% or more. With split testing, marketers have been able to cut down their shopping cart drop off rate by as much as half, effectively doubling their income.
The main things to split test in this area are:
1) Making sure the shopping cart page looks like the rest of the site, so a buyer doesn’t feel like they left your site when they hand over their credit card.
2) Safety. This is perhaps the #1 factor to lowering shopping cart dropoff. If you can help your customers feel safe giving you their credit card, they’re much more likely to be willing to pay.
3) Symbols like the “BBB Certified” symbol, “128 Bit Encryption” symbol and the “Hacker Safe” symbol have all been proven to increase conversion.
What is “Statistically Significant” Data?
One word that you’ll often hear in conjunction with split testing is “statistically significant data.” What does that mean?
It basically means you have enough data to know that if the test continued indefinitely, the results will be similar.
For example, if you flipped a coin 5 times and you got 4 heads and 1 tails, it would not be accurate to say that you’ll get tails 1/5 times by flipping a coin if you did it 1,000 times.
You just haven’t flipped the coin enough times to get statistically significant data.
On the other hand, if you run an A/B split test and find that out of 5,000 impressions one made 100 sales and another made 20, you have enough data to know that #1 will outperform #2 if you gave it a million impressions.
Any time you’re split testing, you want to make sure you have enough data that you’re getting statistically significant data. Meaning you have enough results to know that the data will stay constant when it’s scaled up.
by Adriana | Comments Off on What Is Split Testing and Why Is It ImportantWebsite Traffic
There are a lot of different software out there to choose from, but Google’s is the most common and it’s also free. So, let’s start off by learning how to use Google Analytics to track visitor behavior.
If you don’t already have a Google account, sign up for one now. If you already have one (through Gmail or Blogger,) sign into your account.
If it’s your first time, Google will present you with a brief tutorial of their system. Go through the system the tutorial to get a feel for how the system works.
Once you’re at the main analytics page, click “Add a Website” to get started.
Follow the on screen instructions to install analytics. After giving it the domain you want to track, Analytics will give you a snippet of code that needs to be placed on your website.
If you’re building the site yourself in Dreameaver, XSitePro or through another editor, just paste that snippet of code before the </body> tag at the bottom of the page.
Make sure you put the code on the bottom of every single page of your site, not just on the home page. This will allow you to get data for your entire site rather than just one page.
Once you’ve setup the code, go back to Google Analytics. Click “edit” next to your newly setup site profile.
At the top of the page, Analytics will say “Tracking Not Installed.” Next to it will be a refresh button. Click the refresh button.
If Analytics now tells you that tracking is installed, that means everything is working properly and Analytics is now gathering data.
If it still tells you it’s not installed, wait a couple hours and try again. If it’s still not working, any number of things could have gone wrong:
– Was the domain typed correctly throughout the whole process?
– Was the code copied in its entirety?
– Was the edited HTML file uploaded, not just edited?
Back trace your steps and make sure you did everything right. If all else fails, try just re-uploading your files and hit refresh again.
The Basics of Using Google Analytics
When you get to the Google Analytics results screen, you have quite a lot of options to choose from.
Date Range Selector
One of the most important things to learn is how to use the date range selector. This tells Google what period of time to look in when it gives you data.
If you want to see all the data from all the traffic you’ve ever gotten, you can do that. If you want to just see last week’s data, you can do that too. Just select the dates.
Main Data Screen
The main data screen is the data that’s centered, taking up the most space. Analytics separates its data into different modules that you can easily take in.
The Left Sidebar
On the left sidebar is where you choose what kind of data you want to see. You’re presented with options like Visitors, Traffic Sources, Dashboard, etc.
Each link should be pretty self-explanatory. Just click your way through and see what you can learn about your visitors in each of the subsections.
Once Analytics is setup, all you really need to do is come back to Analytics and find whatever data you want, whenever you want. It’s generally a good idea to check your stats at least once a week.
Tracking With Piwik
If you’d rather not use Google Analytics, another great choice is Piwik.
Piwik is free and open source. Rather than being web hosted, you download the software and install it on your own server.
Piwik offers about the same functionality as Google Analytics, with the downside that it’s harder to setup and the upside of not having your data on anyone else’s systems. The choice of which to use is yours.
by Adriana | Comments Off on How to Set Up Tracking SoftwareWebsite Traffic
Testing and tracking are two skills any online marketer or business owner needs to learn if they want to succeed.
What Tracking is and Why It’s Important
Tracking can be put simply as “understanding how your visitors behave.”
By properly tracking your user behavior, you can learn a lot about how people interact with your site. You’ll learn things like …
How many people come to your website
Which pages people read carefully and which pages they just leave
Where people come to your website from
How many of them buy, how many of them click through
Which of your newsletter sign-up boxes actually work
Etc.
If you want to build a great website that generates real money, understanding how your customers behave is crucial. That’s what tracking allows you to do.
What Should You Be Tracking?
There are a lot of things you should be tracking. Here are some of the most important factors, what they are and why they’re important.
Website Traffic– This is the most basic metric that every webmaster should know. How many people are coming to your website? Ideally, this number should be going up over time.
Page views – How many page views do you have? This number is less important than your visitor number, but, if you plan on using advertising as a way to make money, you want to work on increasing your page count.
Simple tactics like splitting your articles into 3 pages where they click “next” to continue can double your page count and thereby double your revenue.
Traffic Sources – Do people type in your URL in their domain bar and land on your site? Or do they find you via search engines? Does most of your traffic come from Google, Yahoo or MSN? Perhaps most people really just come from 3 referring sites?
The data may surprise you. For example, if you’ve built a brand for yourself from speaking, most people may actually already know about you by the time they land. Your SEO strategy may not be nearly as important as your public speaking strategy.
Or, you might find that 90% of your traffic comes from Yahoo. Sure, they have ten times less traffic less than Google, but if you’re ranked top 3 in Yahoo and on page 4 in Google, it only makes sense that Yahoo will bring you most of your traffic.
By knowing where most of your traffic comes from, you’ll be able to better spend your time on increasing things that are already working rather than spin your wheels trying to get things that aren’t working to work.
What People Type In to Get To Your Site – Often time’s your site will be ranked for keywords that you would have never expected. The keywords people type in to get to your site may be completely different than keywords you were optimizing for.
Most tracking software will be able to tell you what people actually typed into search engines to get to your site. You should review this list periodically to see if you can find any “gems” of keywords to intentionally target in the future
Opt In Rates – Out of every 100 people who land on your website, how many sign up?
Your newsletter is one of the most important assets to your business. Most people won’t buy the first time they land on your site. Instead, they buy as they build more and more trust for you over time. Having a newsletter allows you to stay in touch with your visitors over the course of weeks, months and years rather than just the one time they land on your site.
Tracking and optimizing your opt in rates can help you exponentially grow your business.
Conversion Rates – Out of every 100 visitors, how many people actually pull out their credit cards and buy?
Naturally this is a number you want to test and improve as much as possible. If you can get a 1% conversion to a 2% conversion, you’ve doubled your income without having to double your traffic.
What Country Your Visitors Are From – You might be surprised. Often times traffic comes from a combination of the U.S. and Europe, though occasionally you’ll have a website where most of your traffic comes from other countries.
For example, a PDF Search site was originally built for random internet users who wanted to find documents. Its site owner discovered however, that the site was being used primarily by students in India to find sources for research papers.
Once he knew that, he was able to cater his site even more for his audience and improve his income.
Once your product is created you’re going to spend the majority of your time marketing it. If you enjoy your topic then marketing it will be fun. If you’re not interested in your topic then marketing will be tough. Many people have the wrong idea about marketing. It’s not a hard sell. Marketing is sharing your love for your product and topic with others. If you like to write and talk about your niche topic then marketing will be a breeze. Make a marketing plan first. Here are some things to include in your plans.
Website/Blog
In order to market and sell your information product you’re going to need a website. Your website can be a single page site with a sales page and that’s it. It can also be a content rich website packed with information. The choice is yours.
The benefit to a content rich site is that people will come back to your site again and again. You can sell a number of information products. You can benefit from affiliate sales and advertising income.
The foundation of a website or blog is content. This means writing a lot of articles or blog posts. You can also create audio or video content. When you’re creating your business plan decide what type of website you want to create. While you may be turned off by the content creation aspect of a blog or multi page website remember that you don’t have to create it all yourself. You can outsource it and use PLR.
Content
Apart from your blog or website content you can use content to market your business. For example articles can be written and published on article directories. This content will generate links to your website and website visitors. You can also publish content in a newsletter. Additionally, content written and published n your website will help you get listed on the search engines.
Whenever someone is looking for information on your topic your website will show up in the results. You get visitors and potential customers. For many information publishers content both on their website and on article directories is a primary marketing tactic.
Social Networking
Social networking has become a mainstream pastime. Savvy business owners have caught on. As a social networker you can post links to content on your site. Mingle promotions with interactions to establish a genuine presence and following. You can also create a business profile on a social networking site. Facebook Fan pages have become significant marketing tools for many business owners.
Email
Email marketing has been a long time success strategy. As an information publisher you’d likely motivate people to sign up for your email list by giving away free information. For example, you might give away a report on the top ten garage organization mistakes. You now have permission to send your subscriber more valuable information and promotions. You can market your book to them through strategic email marketing messages.
Email is a great way to build a relationship with your customers and prospects. They may turn to you repeatedly for information and become lifelong customers.
Advertising
Of all of the marketing tactics discussed, advertising is the only one that really can cost a lot. However, with a strategic plan and control over your budget advertising can generate a good return on investment. There are different types of advertising: Pay Per Click, banner ads, Facebook, etc. Before you advertise make sure your ad is targeted. Maintain tight control over your budget. Test and track your ads to make sure they’re effective.
Affiliates/Partnerships and More
As your business grows you may look into affiliate programs. In this case you’d pay people a commission to promote your information products. You may also establish partnerships with other relevant companies. Partnerships work well to cross promote and to build an email list. For example, you might partner with a home organization retailer and promote their products. In exchange they would promote your book.
