Strategic Marketing At Warp Speed

 {Edit} All graphics for this post were lost.

In my last post we talked about utilizing Yahoo Groups to conduct some initial market research. While there are tons of options available to assess markets and look for hungry people wanting solutions to problems, let’s shift our focus a bit and utilize a source I love personally to conduct some PRODUCT research.

Kaboodle is one of those sources that are one in a rare few. When I first started scanning their site and assessing products and reviews it kind of reminded me a little bit like Amazon and Ebay in one. However, the social interaction aspect of Kaboodle is a heck of a lot cooler than either of those two in my opinion. It’s because Kaboodle was built on the foundation that it was initially a social networking site. However it has evolved into a system that allows users to create lists of products, articles, websites/webpages and share them among the Kaboodle community. A hidden gem among this is optimizing each product you list within your targeted theme lists with proper on-page SEO and you can snag some great Search Rankings as well.

I am going to cover Kaboodle in depth this week (maybe like a series) but for now let’s look at it on how we can go there right now and get ideas on what type of products we as affiliate marketers may want to promote.

The first thing you need to do is sign up to become a user. I am not telling you to do this for the hell of it. I am going to show you an image of my account right now and hopefully you will see why the inside of your profile is truly a gem for product research. There are hundreds of features to utilize on Kaboodle, but let’s look at the goodies that are presented to us right off the bat after joining.

Widely known but heavily under-utilized. Yahoo Groups are one of the best ways to conduct market research online. This resource is nothing new, in fact it’s been used for a long time now. However not a lot people really talk about it. Well, let’s dare to be different.

Yahoo Groups is vast. It is worldwide. As a matter of fact here are the countries they cover along with the US:

Yahoo! Groups Worldwide: Asia • Argentina • Australia & NZ • Brazil • Canada • France • French Canada • Germany • Hong Kong • India • Italy • Japan • Mexico • Spain • Yahoo! Telemundo Groups • Taiwan • UK & Ireland

There are thousands of established groups already covering nearly every topic on the planet. For all the digital information sellers this is a potential goldmine for you. This is like the biggest forum ever covering everything from questions, discussions, problems, and answers in one easy to manage place. There are niches I have never even thought about in there. Let’s look inside some of the health groups:

To effectively utilize Yahoo Groups you really need to look at groups with a large member base (obviously) as well as the amount of recent activity going on within the group. As an example I have picked out Healthy Recipes For Diabetic Friends. Now before we jump right into market analysis I want you to think about why I chose this group.

1. First I chose it because the headline “Healthy Recipes For Diabetic Friends” told me right off the bat that a potential niche for diabetics could be formed here. Not only are there going to be a large number of diabetics involved in the discussion here, but there are also a large number of diabetics that already have TONS of problems identified for us, and will give us the easiest of easy answers of what they are eating.

I am really not into stuff like this but the fact that Ximmy is now up and running and the fact that I see tremendous growth potential should warrant at least a mention about them.

Basically the whole idea of Ximmy is to pay you for sharing top sites, videos, stories and pictures from around the web. Upon reading their rewards page they say this:

We are the first company to reward you for your contributions to our community through points that you can redeem for cash. Just registerfor an account. (It’s free!) You will earn points for submitting stories and posting comments. When your story is published to the home page, you will receive 15 points. Once you hit a points bracket, you can redeem the points for cash at any time. Payments are made via PayPal.
Points Earn: 1 point – Story Submitted 1 point – Comment 15 points – Popular (homepage)	Points Rewards 1,000 $10 1,800 $20 3,200 $40 6,000 $80 12,000 $160 20,000 $300
Bonus: Once you hit any of the points bracket, you’ll receive an extra $20 bonus during payout.(Expires 6/01/08)

Upon seeking a little bit more clarity on this their FAQ’s page was basically a model of what we already read. At least they have a contact page.

The bareness and lack of professionalism is a total turnoff. However they also go on to tell you about their Affiliate program. They pay you $5 for joining up and $0.50 for every referral. Peanuts if you ask me but I thought I would pass this along in case anyone has a list or blog readers that might be interested in it.

This is pretty basic and is used often by many spammers bulk emailers. It was actually a godsend back in my heavy Myspace spamming commenting days. The whole idea to most people is simply to redirect their traffic thru their own domains and servers. Most CPA networks actually encourage this. Do you know why? Yea, you guessed…spammola. Now I won’t say that CPA networks DONT want to know where your traffic is coming from because most of the time this is untrue. However, sometimes YOU may not want certain people knowing where your traffic is coming from.

Case in point…

Have you ever seen a CPA Network that has some kind of bullshit sentence like "Affiliates caught promoting on Myspace or Facebook will be banned"? Your probably thinking to yourself that the network just told you NOT to promote on these sites. This in most cases and with a lot of networks is actually FAR from the truth. They are in it to make money people and behind the scenes I can tell you personally that it is sometimes a VERY fugly business. It actually says "if your caught", it does not say to NOT promote there.

So I won’t get into specifics here, nor will I name any specific networks (hell, that may incriminate me), but reading between the lines and knowing how and what to do can actually keep you making money somewhere where you thought your glory days had ended.

Another case in point is with Yahoo Answers. Have you posted a link from a CPA Network and been banned? I know of affiliates that got the hammer from Maxbounty for posting links on Yahoo Answers. Answers explicitly prohibits any commercial traffic in their terms of service and Maxbounty will have none of it. Keep what I am about to tell you in mind, it will save your tail in the long run (or at least allow you to concoct some bullshit to tell your AM).

I thought I would share my personal method of using videos online to drive traffic to a few sites I own. I also use this simply to drive traffic to domains I redirect to affiliate programs but I much rather send my visitors to a squeeze page. It’s the thing these days you know! Actually, it always has been but it seems the effort it takes to make a squeeze, put in an optin box and write up a well thought out email series is just to much these days for white and blackhat marketers. So since I want to see you succeed I am going to give you the traffic building part of your marketing campaign a FREE massive kickstart in acquiring visitors. Maybe if traffic building was easier (or people were better at it) then maybe making money online wouldn’t be as hard it seems. In any case, I am going to reveal a 4 step strategy to get visitors to your site using online video.

There is nothing really secret about this. I use 4 programs (hence the 4 step process). If I am not mistaken then all of them offer a free trial. Now, on the basis of truly believing in these programs and to give you an unbiased opinion and details of these programs and how to use them to your fullest advantage, I have included ALL outgoing links in this post as NON-AFFILIATE links.

HaHa,

TechCrunch is widely known for taking huge dumps on breaking stories. Well, here’s one in case you haven’t heard already. Tom’s brithday is coming up and turns out he wasn’t this hip, younger gentleman that wanted to be your friend.

Obviously, who cares now right? They are pulling the cheese but I bet things might have went a little bit differently had people known his true age.

So here’s the poll:

I was checking out StumbleUpon’s Ad Campaign Service today and was actually starting to take quite an interest in it. There are many benefits to a service like this, and if you have a blog that is extremely popular you have the potential to pull some really good traffic numbers. I would say that your blog topic and writing style are going to have huge effects on the nature of such a campaign. Is it worth or not? I really do not know as I am just gearing up to run a campaign on one of my Video Blogs (Vlogs).

Here are a few site testimonials from a couple of large sites:

“By advertising on StumbleUpon, Farecast has been able to reach an audience that is actively looking to find new and innovative websites like ours. An added bonus is the ability to target based on a user’s geographic location or interest in a specific category. This has allowed us to land users on highly targeted and relevant landing pages, resulting in positive Stumbles.”
- Farecast.com

“StumbleUpon proved to be a wonderful channel to drive targeted, cost effective traffic to our website. Furthermore, their vocal community helped us to further understand how to better position our product.”
- Sixapart.com

 

“We are a new site that needed some promotion and found Stumbleupon to give us almost instantaneous results.”
- SimplyExplained.com

Pretty lame testimonials if you ask me, but it is an ad service intended on bringing blogs traffic. I don’t know for sure but it is in my opinion that StumbleUpon users are very finicky and particular as to what they like in a blog. I have always found that the “bizarre” tag when submitting a page to StumbleUpon always seems to bring the most traffic. I guess trying to cater to that would be an effective weapon, but if your blog is not catered to that, then I guess your only going to get a fraction of the StumbleUpon traffic. At least that traffic will be better targeted right?