Wealthy affiliate way back when lol

by1joeknight

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8 years ago

~~Just thought some of you new~~ members would like to take a bit of a peak of what WA looked like 10 years ago!

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8 Week Action Plan -> Week 3Home Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 Week 5 Week 6 Week 7 Week 8

Action Plan Week 3
Marketing & ResearchThis week's lessons are will teach you the importance of research, and how proper research is key to becoming a successful Internet Marketer. We'll tell you all about research, how to perform research, and show you some of the great research tools that we have available for you here at Wealthy Affiliate. A marketer who doesn't perform research is like a fisherman in the middle of a fish farm without a fishing rod! Knowing who your potential customers are, and who your competitors are, is very important.So, let's get to it shall we?

Understanding the importance of market & keyword research

Using keyword tools

How to leverage your competition

Understanding market research

Hyper-Targeting consumers (understanding the WHY)

Relevancy = Success (broad marketing vs. targeted marketing)

Understanding the Importance of ResearchResearch, research, and more research! Research is one of the most important aspects of any successful Internet marketing campaign, and if there is one thing that you are going to master and spend some time working on, it should be research.As with any business, a successful Internet marketing campaign starts with research. This research includes audience, keyword, industry, consumer habits, and competition. Research will allow you to predefine whether or not the opportunity to make money within a particular industry is viable, thus determining whether or not you should spend the time to create a campaign.Many people fail to understand the importance of research and consequently never perform adequate research before setting up a campaign. You may have done this in the past as well. You find an industry to promote, quickly gather a product and then put together a campaign with a bunch of keywords that are “kind of” relevant to the product. This is exactly how to create a failing campaign!. If you think creating a successful campaign can be done at the click of a button and set-up within minutes, then you have been mistaken (probably by some of the scam resources you have read in the past).

Research does require work, but those who spend the time to research are the ones that are successful online. Research will allow you to uncover who your exact audience is, why they are in need of something, their demographics, the products and services within that industry, and the best ways to deliver a sales message to these individuals. These are all variables that will be different from industry to industry, and niche to niche.This week we are going to dive into some the best methods you can use for research. After completing this week’s lessons you are going to have more than your share of work to do as you will be knowledgeable in the area of research and be able to predict a campaigns success without having to outlay your financial resources beforehand.
Using Keyword Tools – Best Techniques for Keyword Research?Many people are too fixated on the fact that they need the next best Keyword Tool in order to succeed online. This is simply is not the case. Keyword tools are great for finding keywords that are popular within the search engines, but they are typically limited to broad search terms and quite often will not find the highest converting keyword or reveal new searches (of products that are hot or have just been released).Because of this, we do not recommend that you focus the basis of your campaigns on keyword research done using a keyword tool. The most powerful keyword tool in the world is…YOUR BRAIN. Researching keywords is not as systematic as typing in a single keyword into a tool, gathering the results, and then promoting these keywords. If you use your brain for your keyword research, you will reveal many keywords that a keyword tool would not be able to come up with. To do this, we suggest that you think like a consumer and better yet, research your consumers first. Find out what they are searching for, what questions they ask, and which problems they are looking to resolve. For example, if you were promoting an acne product and you typed the keyword “acne” into a keyword tool, you are going to get the same keywords that Mary, Joe, and Frank are using to promote acne products. However, if you spend some time doing some of your own research and thinking up keywords that people would likely type in if they had an acne problem, you will come up with terms that the keyword tool would have never revealed to you. What about “remove acne and scarring from chest” or “do pimple zappers really work”. Do you really think a keyword tool would have found these keywords for you without the prior research? Probably not.We are not saying that you shouldn't use keyword tools altogether as they can be very helpful in giving you ideas. For this reason we have created several keyword tools that you can use here at Wealthy Affiliate. If you have not already visited the “Research Center” we suggest that you take some time and familiarize yourself with the tools. The Research Center will allow you to perform all of your keyword, industry, and competition research and analysis directly within Wealthy Affiliate. These keyword tools are ALL YOU NEED, and this means that you do not have to pay money for some expensive keyword tool outside of WA!

Keyword Research Tool

Top Listings Research Tool
When performing keyword research with a tool, we suggest that you start very broad and work your way down to more targeted search terms. You can easily refine your search using the “dig” function within the keyword research tool. This will bring up a new, refined search targeting the search phrase that you select.Google Keyword Tool is KINGThe Google Keyword tool is still the best keyword tool for doing research as Google will give you very current results and wider variations of a keyword than any other tool can give you (even ours). This is because all keyword tools get their data from Google and other search engines and this information that they give out is not as current or as comprehensive as their own internal keyword results. For this reason we suggest that you also use the Google Keyword tool right within your Adwords account to perform research.

Google also has an external keyword tool which is a bit more limited (does not included traffic & CPC estimate), but also provides very good data.

Google Keyword Tool ExternalSpying on Your CompetitionWe have created a tool for you at Wealthy Affiliate that will allow you to spy on ads within Google. This “Top Listings” tool allows you to track what keywords other advertisers are using within Google, and you can see if your competition is remaining under specific search terms. This is often times referred to the “Sticky Ad Technique” and is something that we have been using religiously for years. If an advertiser remains under any search term for a certain period of time (more than 3-4 weeks), chances are good that those keywords are profitable. You can then determine what the affiliate is doing by taking a look at their web pages and duplicate their success through the creation of your own campaign.
Use the following link to check out the Top Listings Tool:

Top Listings Research Tool

Top Listings Research Tool VideoAbove we have also listed a video showing you how to properly use the Top Listings Tool. You should take advantage of this tool when you are performing research on an industry to keep tabs on what your competition is doing. This can add extreme value to your campaign by having a good idea of the keywords which are performing for fellow advertisers (competition).Note on Checking Top Listings Campaigns:Check your top listing campaigns regularly to see if people are still promoting the industry. If most of the advertisers are still in their positions, it is a good sign that they are earning some degree of profits from their campaign. You need to always remember that 80% of all advertisers’ keywords are either break-even or losing keywords and 20% of their keywords are bringing in 80% of their revenue. This means that you should perform some of your own testing with keywords as the competition ”Sticky Ad Technique” is not always 100% effective.
Our Keyword ListsWe will forewarn you right now that you cannot just add the keywords from one of our lists to a single ad group, create an ad, and expect to make money online. As with any campaign, in order to be successful you need to create campaigns of quality and elaborate on our keyword lists with your own research. There are many keywords that you will be able to derive from our lists and if you do decide to use them, they should be broken down into ad groups that contain 5-10 keywords with a maximum of 25 keywords (75 when using broad, phrase, and exact match types in Adwords). For information on how to take full advantage of our keyword lists, please view our tutorial at:

WA Keyword Lists TutorialTo access our keyword lists which range across multiple industries and niches, please visit our Keyword List System here:

Access Keyword Lists Here
Researching Markets and IndustriesLast week we outlined how you should go about choosing an industry to promote, and this week we are going elaborate on techniques and strategies you can use to research these industries.Again, there is money to be made in every single industry online. If you learn how to research an industry and truly grasp a full understanding of your audience before you promote to them, you will become a very successful Internet marketer. Research is an essential component to a successful campaign and there are some ways that you can simplify this process and use the “best” techniques for doing so.We think we have answered the question “How do I find a profitable industry promote?” already, and now we are going to show you how to make the industry you are promoting a profitable campaign. Researching an industry really entails the research of the consumers within the industry. These are the people that are making the purchases online and ultimately the ones that will earn us money as Internet marketers. So, where do you go to find information on industry specific consumers and how do you gather information on who they are, what they are purchasing, and why they are purchasing? We are going to outline several effective techniques (which we always use) to do this below.Using forumsForums are great because people have uninhibited conversations about many different topics. These conversations will give you (as an Internet marketer) an unbiased, uncensored understanding of the many different markets, and more importantly the consumers.

Consumers reveal a lot of information in forums when looking for information prior to purchasing, and in many cases offer information after purchasing. You should definitely include forums as part of your day-to-day campaign research.Finding QuestionsThere are a couple of great places you can go to find question and answer sessions within a particular industry. We suggest that you go to answers.yahoo.com, or answers.com. These two website's will reveal a lot of industry specific questions that people are asking, and will lead to a better understanding of your audience. Remember, that in order to setup a successful campaign, you need to know all about your customers and what they are looking for.

Yahoo! Answers

Answers.comWhat Are Other Affiliates Doing?You should always keep an idea on your competition when doing research. You can learn a lot from not only the top affiliates, but you can learn what not to do from a lot of other affiliates.When performing market research, you need to understand that if no affiliates are promoting products within that industry, chances are you have just struck “gold” with a great niche. Conversely, if there are no affiliates advertising the niche, it could be that there is no money to be made. If you take a look at an industry like web hosting, you will notice that it is full of affiliates and they are even advertising under “broad” search terms like ‘web hosting’. This is a good indicator that there is money to be made within this industry. You can also gain some good insight into other keywords that affiliates would be promoting by examining their pages. If they have a navigation menu on their site, chances are they are promoting under search terms related to the links or promoting those related industries. If an affiliate is making money within one industry they are quite likely making money within other industries as well. Keep an eye out for links to other web pages from affiliate sites that you come across. This will often times lead you into finding new promotion ideas that you would not have originally come up with!

On a side note: Make sure that you have signed up for your free web hosting here at WA. If you are a member of Wealthy Affiliate you get access to our WA hosting for no cost…you should not be paying for hosting any longer!
Surf & RecordIf you did not already consider having a pen and piece of paper handy for your other research (which you should have), you will definitely need to have some way of recording your findings when searching for sub-niches or cross-promotion ideas within an industry.Finding information about industries and sub-industries will require you to “surf” the Internet. This is not overly technical or complicated as all you will be doing is basically putting yourself in the “shoes” of a consumer. Just visit pages, follow links, read the content and take notes of what you find. Anything that you deem important you should record. This could be an affiliate program you find, a web page that will be a valuable resource, keywords, and ideas of sub niches. You will be surprised how many promotional ideas you will get from just “surfing”!Again, we always suggest that you should track your research. When performing any research online you should take notes of the website's you visit, the keywords you research (including the search volume and CPC), related affiliate programs you find, and affiliate website's that you find useful and/or effective.
Putting your research on paper allows you to revisit the opportunities that you have collected. If you do not write them down, they will be lost and you will never take advantage of the research that you have done. You will find that you will not explore further opportunities in many of your research areas, but there will be many campaigns that you create due to your research. Quality research will allow you to become a quality marketer, thus earning very healthy profits.We have created the “MY WA” section here at Wealthy Affiliate where you can track your progress through goal and task setting. You can prioritize your goals here and revisit them on a regular basis. You can also take notes of all your research and create tasks based on this. We suggest that you take full advantage of the MY WA section as you will be able to closely monitor your goals, thus increasing your organization and success.Now we're going to get into the "nitty gritty", and tie all of this "Research" stuff together.
Understanding the “WHY” of MarketingWhen people come to us (Kyle & Carson) saying that they are having a really difficult time promoting to an industry it is usually because they are NOT putting their marketing efforts into perspective for their consumers.Ask yourself this one simple question:

WHY DO PEOPLE WANT TO…

Obviously this question is not complete, but that is the point! This is because this question will differ slightly for every industry that it is applied to, therefore we left it “wide open”. Now we will try applying this question to a few different industries.

Why do people want to lose weight?

Why do people want Voice Over IP?

Why do people want to make a lot of money?

Why do people want to quit smoking?

Why do people want a better education?

Why do people want to train their dog?

Why do people want to be Internet marketers?

Why do people want to get a loan?If you can answer the "WHY" within any industry, you will be able to put together a targeted campaign that will be consumer focused. You will also find that there are several answers within any particular industry, and this is where you can start catering to smaller audiences or niche markets.

Let's just take a look at a couple of the above examples and further research the item based off of the WHY question.
Why do people want to lose weight?The obvious answer is to look and feel better, but if you do some research you will find out that the WHY will vary from person to person and there are some definite niches within this industry that are not as obvious as just one would think.

After doing a little research (by simply browsing the web and using the research techniques we described this week), here is a small list of “WHY” answers that we came up with for the weight loss industry.

To fit into a bikini for the summer
Want to have tight abs
Trying to become a model
Going on vacation
Because they have just been dumped and are on the rebound
New Years resolution
Having back problems
Getting married and need to drop weight for the wedding dress
Special event coming up that they need to look good for
Want to feel better about themselves
Partner is forcing them lose weight
Health problems / Diabetes
Someone has passed in their family because of being overweight
Bet going on with co-workers to see who can lose the most weight
Becoming very tired and feel generally unhealthy

If you read into an industry like weight loss, things that do not seem so apparent at first will become obvious very quickly. In less than a few minutes we came up with 15 different WHY’s that you could target with your advertising campaigns. If you created a campaign based off of the broad market “weight loss” do you think you would be successful? Not likely. But if you target a specific sub-category like “lose weight for wedding” and present your audience with a relevant offer then you will have much greater success.
Why do people want to make money online?

Well, the obvious would be so that they can have more freedom, more stuff...this is true, but you are not answering the real question here.Why do people want to make money online?

They have just lost their job
Want to get out of debt
Hate their existing job
Don't want to work forever
Want to make money when they retire and cannot afford to depend strictly on social security
Want to make money to help with tuition fees or for extra money while they go to school

If you promote the term "make money" in Google, you are not triggering an audience...you are triggering a market. You want to target a specific audience if you plan on making money from them. People typing in "make money" do not know which audience they are part of and will determine this after they do a few more searches.A college student might type in "easy way to pay tuition bills" or "earn money while going to school". If you can deliver a targeted site for college students, you could really tap into this niche...Most people have great difficulty creating a successful campaign for the simple reason that they are not considering the “WHY” before they promote to their audience! If you cannot figure this out, then chances are that you will not be able to deliver the right info to the right people. If this is the case, pick-up and move to the next industry!Before you go ahead and start you research, answer the WHY question. Add your industry that you are looking to promote to complete the question, and then record all of your ideas.Why do people want to ________________?lf you can do this you will be well on your way to creating successful campaigns!
Relevance Really Does Equal MONEYWe emphasize relevance over and over again. If you think that we are starting to sound like parrots, there is probably good reason. There is NO BETTER WAY to succeed online than to create campaigns that are based off relevance.Why is this? You have to think of the person who is your potential consumer. When someone goes to a search engine like Google looking for information, they are looking for the most relevant results. This is why people type in longer tailed search terms (3+ keywords). If you deliver a page to them that is very broad and is not what they are looking for, guess what happens? They leave your page and you have just wasted your time and money on the visitor. This is why we always suggest that you keep things as relevant as possible. This means having the EXACT keywords in your ad and on your landing pages.Below we have provided you with a diagram that outlines the flow of relevance:PAID: Keyword -> Ad -> Landing Page -> Product

FREE: Keyword -> Article -> Landing Page (optional) -> Product

The flow of relevance should start with the keyword (whether through article marketing, SEO, or PPC). If you are involved in a paid search marketing campaign such as one with Google Adwords, the next point of relevance is your ad. An ad should include a relevant title along with a description that includes as many keywords within the ad group as possible. Ideally, you would be able to include ALL of your keywords in your ad. If you cannot do this then your ad group may be a little too diverse and you should break it up into a few different ad groups.The most important aspect of relevance is your landing pages. If you are writing an article, you have obviously already optimized it for certain keywords so you are probably going to already have a targeted landing page. However, when using paid advertising you can send any keyword to any page which can lead to untargeted, irrelevant campaigns.You should always have the EXACT keywords you are promoting under on your landing page. This is going to be discussed in further detail next week. Essentially you want the person visiting your page to find that your page is very relevant and want to stay on your page to read what you have to say.There is no better way to succeed online than being relevant. Put yourself in the position of the consumer when creating your pages and ask yourself if your page would be relevant if you searched _______. This will give you a good idea if you are doing an adequate job. Would you buy from your page, or would you find it helpful if looking for ________? Asking yourself questions like this will help you build “relevant”, and successful, campaigns that make you money.

Use “Top Listings” tool to watch specific keywords across 3 different industries.

Write 3 articles this week using the research techniques you have learned this week

If you are using PPC, create 3 highly targeted ad groups keeping "relevance" in mind

Research a new industry and record your findings

Find out more information about your potential consumers

Read and use the suggested guides, tutorials, and tools

Keyword Research Tool

Top Listings Research Tool

Google Keyword External Tool