1. Start with an idea for a new website.
2. Find all the relevant themes within that site’s niche.
3. Click a button to discard the only-slightly-relevant themes.
4. Click a button to discard the themes that don’t bring in good traffic.
5. Click a button to discard the themes that have too many competitors.
6. Click a button to discard the themes that are relevant, have good traffic, and have acceptable competition – but don’t have enough monetary or commercial value to you.
7. Click a button to see how strong the top 10 competitors are for any particular theme that’s left in your filtered list, so you can determine which of the remaining themes are the best to target.
8. Click a button to find an excellent domain name for this niche.
9. Click a button to find products you can promote within this niche.
10. Click a button to research and find the authorities in the niche and the subtopics that are popular within the niche.
11. Click a button to compose and publish content on your new site.
12. Click a button to find promotion and backlink opportunities for the content you create.
13. Click a button to track and analyze the rankings increases you receive over time.
14. Repeat a similar quick and easy process to find and use additional long tail keywords to augment and enhance your site’s content.

I’m an old SEO who has been doing this for years, so over time, I’ve come up with my own ways to handle most of the processes above. It all takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, and frequently ends in me forgetting some vital tasks. When I forget something, the site I worked so hard on, ends up with the rest of the failed sites on the ‘net.

Now, I’ve known that a tool existed for about a year now that claimed to do all of the above. I even tested it a while back (for about 5 minutes, and then something distracted me, and I forgot to test it further). I may even be the last internet marketing person on the planet to have really latched on to the awesomeness of this tool. Still, just because I’m late to the game, doesn’t mean I shouldn’t rave about it. Just in case there’s anyone out there who doesn’t already use it, ya know. I know my tedious process has been forever changed for the better, since I bought this product. Maybe yours will too.

So what is this amazing product, and does it really live up to its claims? It’s called Market Samurai, and yes, it does. Ah, see? I knew most of you had already heard of it!

So for the few who haven’t tried it yet, you should know why I think Market Samurai is currently the best tool on the market to ensure that you don’t waste time creating sites that bring no traffic and make no money.

Yes, I’ve created sites that made no money. And I may still do that occasionally, but I bet it won’t be nearly as often anymore. Market Samurai finally gives me all the info I need and all the tools to implement the info in one place.

Let’s look at a summary of the modules that Market Samurai includes.

Keyword Research

This module goes beyond just spitting out a list of relevant phrases. Clicking the Analyze Keywords button will check various factors about each, such as SEO competition, and you can then filter the results based on whatever thresholds you set. This is a powerful way to quickly find the sweet spot of phrases to target. Want to know how much traffic you can expect if you rank #1 for a phrase? The tool gives an estimate of that as well, and much more.

SEO Competiton

One of the things I love is the color-coded competition chart. At a glance, you can see which keywords are the easiest or hardest to rank for, so it’s the perfect next step after keyword research. It gives a ton of info such as anchor text distribution, number of backlinks, PR, cache info, and domain age.

Domain Tool

If you’re researching a new niche, you’ll want to use the domain tool that’s provided. It not only helps find domain names related to a keyword, but it also shows aged, expiring and for-sale domains that are already ranking well for the phrase! That’s sweet! (A free account at domainface is all you need for the aged domains list. If you want extra info on the aged domains, you’ll need to have a paid domainface account. But since the free version of domainface does provide the aged names, it’s still a great feature).

Monetization Tool

Ok, so you know what phrases to target, you now have a perfect domain to build on, so what’s next? How to monetize it? Yep! Fill in your various affiliate details (such as username for cj, amazon, clickbank, etc), and the tool finds products related to a keyword that you can promote. In addition, it will generate dynamic ads for you, such as Google’s contextual Adsense ads or Amazon content-relevant ads. Need a landing page or sidebar ad? No problem. The tool will create them for you by displaying relevant images, headlines and sales copy from the affiliate sites. Just drag and drop the headlines and sentences you like most into a blog post, sidebar, or banner generator. The ad can also use your short url account (like your bit.ly account) to generate a short link to the product. Any ads you generate, dynamic or affiliate, can easily be published to your self-hosted WordPress blog with the click of a button. If you don’t have a WP blog, you can simply copy/paste the content or ad code into your site as you normally would. This module of Market Samurai is unique. I’ve never seen this done in another tool of its kind.

Find and Publish Content

Although you’ll be creating your own content, Market Samurai makes it easy to find the most popular content related to a keyword, so you can determine what types of content your visitors will love. The tool does a great job of letting you find specific types of content (blog posts, videos, etc.) to help you research the niche. Once your research is done, you can use the Publish feature to easily compose and add content to WordPress blogs right from the tool. (And yes, you can choose to easily publish articles from article directories too).

Promotion

This section helps you find backlink opportunities and niche authorities, letting you filter by type (blogs, forums, q&a, etc), and then analyzing each (just use the Analyze All button) to determine the best ones to promote to. You can then choose to participate in those conversations, and promote your site to them, which can generate traffic and backlinks, or you can reference sites by adding links to other relevant sites that except pingbacks to blog posts you’ve previously published right from the tool, which will ping those sites, notifying them that you linked to them. Any pingbacks created are backlinks to your site.

Rank Tracking

Again, this goes beyond the standard tracker that merely shows where a phrase ranks; it also lists the particular page url that ranks for the phrase, what it’s PR is, and gives the number of backlinks that page has. Because it keeps this history, you can always see a graph of how well your efforts are paying off over time.

More Info

Price: Forget monthly fees. Pay one price, one time and get use of the product for life. If you work it right, you can get 35% off as well. Just try the free trial of Market Samurai to get that opportunity.

Cross-Platform: Runs on PC, Mac, and Linux. Double-sweet!

The only drawbacks for me are:

• Managing multiple projects isn’t as smooth as it could be, but I wouldn’t doubt that this is a feature they’ll improve upon at some point.
• I’d also love to be able to print a nice report that shows me a basic to-do list based on all the information gathered. It would be very cool to have a tree diagram showing the main theme keyword at top, category keywords next, and long tail keywords last. From there, a content research and creation plan could be listed so that I can easily build the site using the plan as a guide. The various modules do have a .csv export feature, but I’d love to see a nice human-oriented report that sums it all up for me.
• Some parts are slow. Startup, for instance, can take a couple of minutes. While you stare at a blank gray window, you might think the program has died, but it hasn’t. I use these slower bits of time to grab a diet coke or a snack.

Summary – Marketing Samurai answers the following questions:

• What keywords should I target? (most profitable / least competition)
• How hard will it be to rank for the phrase(s) and what will I need to do to compete?
• Who are the authorities in this niche?
• What type of content do visitors in this niche prefer?
• What products can I promote?
• How can I create compelling ads for those products?
• How can I create and manage targeted content?
• Where can I find backlink opportunities?
• How well are my efforts working?

Try it. You can actually use it for free for a while. After the trial period is up, guess what? You can still use the keyword research module freely forever! For that reason alone, you should try it. They don’t snag your credit card info or paypal info just to try it. Really. You won’t have to worry about some stupid automatic charge that you didn’t remember to cancel. Nothing like that will happen. Just try it for free. No risk, no hassle.

By the way, I strongly recommend using the free tutorials offered. While the product isn’t overly complex, the tutorials will ensure that you don’t miss some important steps that can make a huge difference in your success rate. For example, the first tutorial looks at the relevancy of your keywords, and why it’s so important, how to filter out the useless keywords guaranteed to cost you time and money, and how to slash the number of people who leave your site because they can’t find what they’re looking for. Missing out on any of that because you decided to just “wing it” would be a mistake I don’t recommend. Even if you quit using the product, watching the tutorials will be an education into smart internet marketing!

Try it for free. Actually watch the training videos. Really. Don’t skip that step. Actually USE the free version after watching the videos. Don’t make the “5 minute test and move on to something else” mistake that I did. Give it a real solid test. I think you’ll be glad I bugged you to do so. Even if you still can’t part with the cash to get this product, you’ll have learned how to go through the process and can do what I’ve done all these years – putting all this into practice using various free tools and lots of manual labor. Either way, you’re probably better off than before.

Just try it for free to find out:

• What markets are worth targeting;
• What markets are worth avoiding;
• Which keywords you should focus on for fast results;
• Which keywords should be avoided;
• Which markets have weak competition;
• Which markets show impossible levels of competition;
• What are the chances of achieving front-page rankings for a keyword;
• What topics you should write articles on for your website;
• Where to find quality backlinks;
• How many backlinks you need;
• What quality backlinks you need;
• How to determine the quality of a page for a backlink;
• …and so much more!

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Keyword research, Marketing, Search engine optimization
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Gather Relevant Special Search Phrases

The first thing I would do is run a search on your own site for any of the one-word holiday-related words you may have already used in your content. Start with the obvious: Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. If you don’t have your own search form on your site, you can always just go to Google and search for:

halloween site:www.yoursite.com

Promote The Strongest Pages

That Google search will give you a list of all your pages that have the word “halloween” in them. Choose one or two of the strongest pages and do a little promotion for them. Throw some social love at them, get a link or two to them, and just do some general marketing for them that goes beyond what you might normally do for a page of content. While you’re doing this, of course, you’re going to want to try to tie the holiday or special event into your niche in some way. This may be as simple as getting a link with the anchor text of “My Niche Loves Halloween”. Example? Let’s say your niche is golf. If you did some promotion to one of your golf-related content pages that mentions Halloween, you could promote it by saying “Golfers Love Halloween”. You didn’t have to do much to come up with that tie-in, did you?

Buy Why?

The key here is grabbing new traffic that you might not get otherwise. People are doing special searches at this time of year, and they are including the holiday and special event phrases within them. There’s much less competition for the longer-tail phrases that include your niche and the holiday, so be one of the few that dares to compete for it. If you already have some content that uses the phrase (and very likely you do, even if you only wished everyone a Merry Christmas last year), then most of the work is already done. You just have to do a little extra work to get it a little more attention, which gives it a better chance of ranking.

But, I Don’t Have That Kind of Content!

If you’ve never written any content that includes some special holiday wording, now’s the time to create some. This takes a little more work, but it also allows you to get much more creative. You don’t have to adjust to what you’ve already written. You can go in any direction now! Let’s take some examples for our fictional niche of golf. Create content that refers to:

Halloween costume ideas for golfers
Haunted hotels with nearby or onsite golf courses
Using a turkey calculator to make sure you don’t miss tee off time.
Placing Christmas wallpaper on your golfing hubby’s computer so he remembers to shop!

Creativity, People, Creativity!

If you’ve followed me over the years, you know that I love getting creative. I even have an entire Creativity Exercises category here, if you don’t believe me. My point, in all of these posts, is to help you expand your thought process outwards. Don’t limit yourself. Find connections that will inspire you to create new content, or make creative use of old content, to attract more search traffic. This kind of idea can be expanded upon, but this should be enough to get you started. Take this thread of creative thinking and follow it. Let it lead you to more and more ideas. Run with it and capture your share of the traffic that is buzzing at this time of year.

Final Word of Advice

Make sure that once you’ve successfully piggybacked off of the holiday search traffic, that you’ve got something in store for your new visitors to appreciate. When they get to your page, make sure to hit them with something useful. Make that visit count. Convert if at all possible. Now, go! These three months will be gone very soon. Don’t miss out.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2010. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Christmas, Holiday, Irish culture, niche marketing
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Blogirific Blog Directory has a stated mission that differs from most.

A huge part of blogging is engaging with your readers/visitors. We at Blogirific.com want to be a facilitator in this. We aren’t interested in creating our own community, we want our visitors to engage with you, the blogger. Besides, once a community like Twitter, Squidoo or a site like BUMPzee.com gets too big, spammers tend to move in…and boy oh boy do they ever move in! Spammers won’t be a problem here at Blogirific as we have decided we want people to engage with you and other people on your blog(s) rather than here. Therefore, we have closed commenting, registering and other things that may keep traffic here and not on your blog.

To make sure Blogirific only lists great blogs, we intend to only “let in” original blogs. Not everyone will get in. If your blog gets accepted into Blogirific.com, you will be part of an exclusive club.

This goal of sending traffic and conversation back to your blog, rather than trying to keep it on their site is the first thing that gives Blogirific extra value. But it doesn’t end there.

Your profile page goes far beyond the URL/Title/Description of most directories. Your page can include links to your social network profile pages, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Frienfeed, etc.

In addition, you can list 4 125×125 banner ads to affiliate products – using YOUR affiliate code – and display Adsense ads, again using your Adsense ID.

In effect, your profile page is designed to engage visitors directly with YOU, and give you Adsense and affiliate revenue on top of that.

I’ve had some conversations with Rick, one of the owners of Blogirific, and I can tell you that he’s a really nice guy who truly wants to help bloggers. So instead of basing his revenue model on hoarding traffic so he can earn from the traffic, he prefers to turn the model around. Instead he charges a ridiculously low submission fee (how does lifetime inclusion for less than $5 sound?). In return, Blogirific works hard to direct the traffic and traffic revenue back to you! Wow. I love that revenue model!

Below is a screenshot of my profile page, but you can also just go see it for yourself.

Blogirific’s mission of directing traffic to you and making it, in effect, all about YOU rather than them, is one that impresses me more than I can describe. It’s not often I get so impressed by something that I take the time to really dig into it. Who has that kind of time these days, right? But this one was special enough to do just that. I spent time really digging into the site, and came away thinking that this was something I just had to tell you about. I hope you tell others about it as well. We need sites like this who are eager to give back to us, so let’s support them when we find them.

One other thing: This is also a great way to find other bloggers within and related to your niche. Interacting with these bloggers goes a long, long way in creating mutual and beneficial partnerships. So after you submit your site, be sure to spend time (I’d say at least once a week) looking for bloggers and discussions that you can interact and converse with. Each time you make the effort, the value to you adds up. Just sayin’.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blog directory, Blogirific
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1. Do your research. Know your topic. Know what traffic levels are possible.
2. Plan ahead. Outline in broad strokes what the posts will cover over time.
3. Understand the basics of social networking.
4. Attack from all sides. Get traffic from many sources.

5. Be unique
6. Be yourself. Have a voice. Have an opinion.
7. Have a pleasing site design.
8. Post on weekends because most don’t.
9. Post about breaking news before anyone else.
10. Have a noticeable, visible RSS feed icon.
11. Use video or audio occasionally or frequently.

12. Ask questions at end of posts to encourage commenting.
13. Ask your friends to spread the word about your blog or posts.
14. Email commenters, thank them for commenting, and then ask them to return or subscribe.
15. Guest blog on other blogs and invite guest bloggers to blog on yours.
16. Interview other bloggers. They’ll let others know about the interview.
17. Advertise.
18. Use socializer plugins to encourage sharing.
19. Remind people to subscribe at the end of every post.
20. Provide unique content for subscribers only
21. Run polls and ask everyone to take the poll and spread the word.

22. Comment on other blogs and network in social communities
23. Participate in blog carnivals
24. Link to your blog in forum post signatures, if allowed.
25. Link out freely to other bloggers within your posts.
26. Get listed in blog directories
27. Run article series, covering a topic over several posts.
28. Use Feedburner’s promotional widgets.
29. Use social proof by showing subscriber count or traffic numbers in sidebar.

30. Hold a blog contest with subscribing as a requirement. Give away a nice prize.
31. Create widgets that supply others with something cool to display on their blog.

32. Go where they are. You have to find relevant communities.
33. Form friendship pockets to strengthen ties.
34. Join blogging communities so your avatar becomes familiar.
35. Partner up so you can cross-promote with others.

Note: A reader contacted me wanting know how to increase his blog popularity and traffic. I told him that I would write a post about it so that everyone could benefit from the answer to his question. The problem with writing this post, of course, is that it’s been written many times by others. Writing it myself feels like just a rehash of what others have said elsewhere. Nevertheless, some of you may not have seen the various other permutations across the web, so I think it’ll be okay for me to put my version out there. Hope it helps a few.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2008. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: social networking
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.

A savvy blogger might take advantage of an upcoming holiday such as Easter, for example, and design a clever little contest, in which she hides Easter eggs throughout her blog. She then invites visitors to find the hidden eggs within her blog to win a cool prize – which just happens to be a product that the blogger is going to be launching soon.

Now let’s analyze this clever contest strategy.

1. The contest is centered around a theme – in this case a holiday that many people celebrate
3. The activity is fun and involves the reader in a game that may evoke fond memories of childhood
4. The prize is unique and useful to the readers
5. What a great way to introduce a new product
6. What a neat way to get users to explore your site

This kind of creative thinking works for both the reader and the blogger, and it’s just that kind of creativity that can make you a winner – either as a contestant or as a blogger.

P.S. I’m mainly writing this post so you can learn about an effective and creative strategy, but you might as well enter the contest yourself. The prize would be a good one for anyone interested in making a living online. You have until Tuesday, 3/25/08 to enter this fun little contest. If you need a hint, I found an egg on the 101 CSS Galleries for Backlinks and Traffic post.

Oh, and hope everyone who celebrates Easter has a great one. If you don’t celebrate Easter, then Happy Spring!

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2008. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Easter
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© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2007. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blog traffic, case study, lesson, video
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1. Organic search engine traffic – This is the granddaddy of all traffic. Visitors who arrive at your site from a search they’ve conducted are extremely targeted. This is what SEOs live for – high search engine rankings for popular phrases related to your niche. Bonus points if the great rankings are on Google, as that sends far more traffic than others. Don’t make the mistake of concentrating solely on search engine traffic however. If you lose your rankings, and you have no other sources of traffic, your site’s traffic will be devastated.
2. Sponsored search engine traffic (PPC) – Second best is the traffic obtained from visitors clicking on sponsored listings from those same search engines. Essentially, you get all the same benefits as above, but there’s one difference. You have to pay for this traffic. The major search engines have made it a bit more complicated to play the PPC (pay per click) game. No longer is it as simple as “the biggest spenders get the top listings”. You can be very successful with this method, and the fact that you have more control over placement is a big draw. Keep in mind, however, that without experience, you may end up spending a bundle of cash on PPC systems such as Google’s Adwords without reaping any profits.
3. Referrals from other sites – This could come in several forms. Other sites may simply link to you because they like your site, or you may have chosen to purchase advertising (either as a link or a banner ad) on others’ sites. Either way, if a highly-trafficked sites in your niche recommend your site, there’s a good chance that you’ll receive nicely targeted traffic from those sites.
4. Participation in forums/communities – If you participate in forums and communities related to your niche, you can build up an element of trust. That trust helps send others community participants to your site via any links that you’ve listed in your signatures or profile pages. This may not send large quantities of traffic, but it will probably be traffic that has a strong bond with you. Those visitors may then go on to either link to your site or recommend your site in other ways.
5. Guest blogging – Like the community participation above, guest blogging helps build up others’ trust in you, and your name becomes well known. This in turn builds up your personal brand, and you become more recognizable. At some point, people will know who you are, and that almost always translates into more site traffic. Obviously, you should be creating quality posts on others’ blogs if you hope to succeed with this method of traffic generation and increase blog traffic.
6. Social networking – Traffic from social networks such as Digg and Stumbleupon, or social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, or popular video sites such as Youtube, can be huge. However, the traffic comes in spikes, usually only lasts for a few hours or at most a few days, and the visitors rarely stick around. These visitors may not be very targeted, or they may just not be all that interested in what you have to offer. Nevertheless, you may get some much-needed attention (buzz) or a few nice links, so social networking traffic is worth getting. It’s just not worth as much as the factors mentioned above, in my opinion.
7. Article marketing / Directory submissions – Submitting your site to directories or writing articles that will be syndicated via article marketing sites are both useful for obtaining a few links to your sites, and perhaps a handful of visitors. You won’t see much direct traffic from these sources, so put this a bit lower on your list of things to do. It’s not a bad idea, and it can be useful for link building purposes, but it’s just not highly useful.
8. Purchasing traffic packages and traffic exchange programs – In general, you should avoid these, and I only include this in the list so that I can warn you about them. If you are tempted to “buy millions of visitors for only $99″ or whatever the offer is, ask yourself if you enjoy throwing money away. These types of programs may or may not send you traffic, but the traffic they do send will likely either be fake or it will consist of visitors who have absolutely no interest whatsoever in your site. You will be wasting money. Likewise, traffic exchange packages usually consist of webmasters visiting each others sites, just to obtain more traffic for their own sites. Again, they aren’t interested in your site at all. They only want to increase their own traffic, which won’t be useful traffic for them either.

I’m sure there are other traffic sources, but those are the ones that I receive the most traffic from. If you know of any other great sources, please share in the comments below.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2007. | Permalink | 26 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: article marketing, directory submissions, forums, Google, guest blogging, high search engine rankings, Organic search engine traffic, search engine, search engine traffic, search engines, SEOs, social networking, social networking traffic, social networks, sources of site traffic, traffic exchange, Youtube
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.

Even one highly successful post can consistently bring you a substantial amount of traffic. The key is to make sure you have at least one of those, and the best way I’ve found is to work hard at creating at least one resource collection. What is a resource collection? It is a collection of “things”, related to your niche, that others want. For example, let’s say your niche is horses. Your visitors are horse-lovers. What collection of things would a horse lover be interested in? A series of high-quality pictures of horses? A collection of videos of a particular race horse? The “family trees” of each of the Kentucky Derby winners from the last 20 years?

My point is that while you are posting daily about your niche, you are creating interesting snippets of content, but not necessarily long-lasting resource collections. If you can create that one outstanding resource collection for your particular niche, I predict that you will have created a traffic attraction to your site that far exceeds your expectations. You’ll always need the daily content snippets, but try to create at least one unique resource collection as well. For another 101 tips, check out Mavis’ attraction marketing post.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2007. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Derby
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