Hi all.... There you go.... a fresh thread for questions, comments, feedback etc now that I've uploaded part 2. Heh - just wait until you see the next one. It's almost ready! : ) Linda

Hi, Linda Is there an emoticon for tearing my hair out? lol For everyone else's benefit, I received two signups to my as-yet non-existent newsletter today, right in the middle of trying to answer some wonderful posts to my last last thread posted today. I haven't set up my autoresponder with even a 'Welcome' message. And I just started a Robert G. Allen real estate investing course that also has homework. Can anyone say workaholic? How about idiot? Why do I do this to myself?!! OK, Linda, here's my homework question for Web-Business Plan. When I did my keyword search in the last lesson, I identified several dozen keywords that are relevant to the four major areas in my site. I spent over four hours this morning exploring just five of them. How would you recommend going about this exercise for two groups: 1) Someone who hasn't yet started designing their website or hasn't firmed up the breadth of subject matter/product lines they want to offer. 2) Someone who, like me, already has the middle done (i.e., the website design and major products) and is trying to go back and pick up the pieces I didn't consider in the first place. In the case of person #2, how many hours would you put into it? The main thing I learned through these two exercises is I have an absolutely enormous market for any of the four areas, literally hundreds of thousands of hits. And for what I explored today, there's no one in the top ten spots on the searches that's approaching the subject matter in the same way. I didn't go further than top ten and sponsored links (which are all ads, so I quit looking at them) because of the enormity of the task. What does that actually tell me, though? In the market analysis 1.2 section, there's an essay question about comparing my market position to the competition. Trying to answer that question feels like comparing apples to oranges. Going into section 1.3, how do I know that my underlying data aren't flawed because of that? OK, that's more than one question. Anybody else having this difficulty, or am I creating the difficulty for myself? Wouldn't be the first time. Cheri

Hi Cheri; =========================================== Is there an emoticon for tearing my hair out? lol =========================================== Heh.... lol. It's been retired. I used it up trying to explain the storm pay issue in another thread. lol =========================================== Can anyone say workaholic? How about idiot? Why do I do this to myself?!! =========================================== I don't know, but if you figure it out, let me know. It might apply to me, too. lol =========================================== How would you recommend going about this exercise for two groups: 1) Someone who hasn't yet started designing their website or hasn't firmed up the breadth of subject matter/product lines they want to offer. 2) Someone who, like me, already has the middle done (i.e., the website design and major products) and is trying to go back and pick up the pieces I didn't consider in the first place. In the case of person #2, how many hours would you put into it? =========================================== Hmmm - as to how many hours, that depends on how obsessed you're feeling at the time. (that's just my personal forumula, of course lol) In both cases, what I tend to do is make a list in notepad. When you're finding keywords and phrases, there's two categories. There are the ones I call the low hanging fruit... and the ones that are the perfect specimens at the top. The perfect specimens are the ones that have a LOT of demand, but you know competition is going to be tough. Usually they have 10,000 plus searches/month. The low hanging fruit are the ones down at the bottom that most people ignore. They have maybe 1,000- 2,000 searches. Or less, even. The low hanging fruit often make great words and phrases to work into articles. The articles link to a primary page.... which is where you focus on the perfect specimens. Just as an example; There are 25,337 searches/month for money management 6,057 searches/month for money saving tip 6,766 searches/month for money manager 5,325 searches/month for money lender So, "money management" would be a good keyword/phrase to work into the main page of a money section. money saving tip, money manager and money lender would be good phrases to use on secondary pages IN a money area.... articles, ebook, etc. I tend to look at the "whole picture" of more dominant and lesser phrases whether I'm redoing an existing site or starting from scratch. When starting from scratch, it helps me determine words to work around... and if I have a partially done site, it helps me see what content would make good additions and what phrases to work in to supply what people are looking for. =========================================== What does that actually tell me, though? In the market analysis 1.2 section, there's an essay question about comparing my market position to the competition. Trying to answer that question feels like comparing apples to oranges. Going into section 1.3, how do I know that my underlying data aren't flawed because of that? =========================================== Honestly... the best answer is gut reaction. For example, in the essay part (1.2) most of us instinctively KNOW what we do different than the competition once we look at the competition. Things like we're better quality, or cheaper, or targeted to a different audience, or not as experienced, etc. We target the newbie, or the savvy. We target upper income or lower income. We know who we're reaching out to and what we're offering them. We know those things in our gut. (That's why "Foundations" started with our target customer... so we start with a basis of WHO we sell to, and then move on to what we sell them) And - while we know who we are targeting and what we're offering - we often fail to price according to how we KNOW we stack up to the competition or by who we sell to. Many of us shortchange ourselves and price too low. A common mistake is thinking we can be cheaper and better. Another common mistake is providing something that's really hard to come by and then underpricing. Another is getting into a highly saturated market and trying to price high without showing the value of that price. As for how does it relate... imagine that you have a money and finance site that targets average people trying to get out of debt. Money saving tip would be a great page to add, whether it's an article or an ebook, or whatever. But what if your finance site targets the six figure income crowd. You might prefer to use phrases more suited to the audience... perhaps "investment tips" instead of "money saving tips" ... that sort of thing. Was that about as clear as mud? =========================================== OK, that's more than one question. Anybody else having this difficulty, or am I creating the difficulty for myself? Wouldn't be the first time. =========================================== I could probably have added that "high and low hanging fruit" explanation in that part of the keyword research. It might help clarify.... : ) Linda

Linda, Thanks for the explanation. I was kind of stuck on the same thing. Wondering just how this fit together when you look at the big picture. Your "high and low hanging fruit" explanation helps to put it all in better perspective. Now I have to take another day to ponder on that! LOL. Sometimes it just doesn't pay to be too over-analytical! :-) It's amazing how we can make mountains out of mole hills for ourselves. For me the bottom line is getting a little more focused on where I want to fit into the big picture. It's easy to get sidetracked when doing this research. :-)

I'm with Winston, I'll have to process it a bit before it will be useful to me in the sense of 'what do I do now'. Processing, processing... My problem is that I need quite a bit more detail, such as you gave in your explanation Linda, to understand where you're going with the assignments. There was a time when I would have tried to analyze it and come up with the answer myself. Overload has made that impossible--I now need to be spoon-fed. On the other hand, you're writing a book for the masses, so to speak, and about 85% of them would be saying 'enough already' long before I was satisfied with the amount of explanation. I suspect Winston and I belong to the same cognitive demographic, the 15% who are dominated by left-brained activity. So, low-hanging fruit. I can see that. I'll go back to the spreadsheet where my keywords are saved and pick the most targeted for what my products actually are...right? Those will go in the metatags, or whatever the jargon de jour is, and the very general terms will go in my original content. I'll also look for them in any reprint articles I find for the site. Am I on the right track? If so, that answers my question about whether to use terms that my product isn't but that bear some relation to it, e.g., debt consolidation. Since I'll be writing about the relative merits of the roll-down method of debt reduction/elimination vs. debt consolidation, it will be a perfectly natural phrase to use, thereby capturing some of the traffic searching on that term. Right? That also means I would want to check the competition for the very targeted keywords, rather than the general ones. OK, back to the drawing board. That's going to make a lot more sense in section 1.3. Duh... Is the fact that my main products are marketed through MLM going to make any difference in the doing of this and future assignments? Or do I just focus on the products and not worry about the companies' marketing models, since I'm breaking away from that to focus on the products themselves? Cheri