Free Internet Marketing 101: Will Your Target Market Bring You Profits?

In the previous post, we discussed the importance of knowing whether or not your market will make you money BEFORE you dive into it.

I told you the “what”, now’s the turn for the “how”.

So where do you find Visitor Values and Traffic Level data to help us work out the potential profits in a market?

Getting Traffic Data

Believe it or not, Google Keyword Tool will provide with all the data you need; you just need to know where to look for it.

Google Volume Search data gives us a very accurate indication of how much traffic (and therefore how many potential customers there are) in any market.

Step-by-step instructions on how to use the Google Keyword Tool to get traffic levels in your market:

1. Go to: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

2. Above the search box, you’ll see “Results are tailored to...” text. If you click “Edit“, you can specify the language and the country of your choice.

3. Type your keyword or keyword phrase in the search box.

4. Check “use synonyms”.

5. Click on “Filter my results” and check “Don’t show ideas for new keywords. I only want to see data about the keywords I entered” box.

6. Click on “Get keyword ideas“. You’ll probably have to enter the capcha (the funny-looking letters that appear in the picture) into the box provided as well.

7. The “Global Monthly Search Volume” box will give us our result: how many people search for this keyword on a monthly basis.

In the picture above, we see that the Dental Plan market has 246,000 average searches per month - that’s 246,000 potential visits to your web-site, or 246,000 potential buyers - each month!

So that’s our Traffic Level Data.

Now, let’s work on our Visitor Value Data.

Getting Visitor Value Data

Next, we need to find out what each visitor is worth.

In order to do that, we’ll take Cost Per Click (CPC) figures out of Google Adwords.

So if we find out how much we would have to pay in order to take #1 position in Google Adwords for our keyword, we will have a very good estimate as to the value of each visitor in a particular market.

How to get Cost per Click figures using the Google Keyword Tool:

1. After following the steps above (under “How to use the Google Keyword Tool to get traffic levels in your market“), you should see a drop-down box that says “Show/hide columns“.

2. Click the “Show/hide columns” box and select “Show Estimated Avg. CPC”

3. Once again, click the “Show/hide columns” box again and select “Show Estimated Ad Position“.

4. In the “Calculate estimates using a different maximum CPC bid:” box, select the currency you plan to sell your product in.

5. In the box next to your chosen currency, type 99 and click “Re-calculate“.

6. Make sure that the figure in the “Estimated Ad Position” column says “1-3“.

7. The “Estimated Avg. CPC” figure displayed here is the figure we’ll be using.

Now the good stuff: let’s finally find out if our “dental plan” market is worth our time.

Your Market Value Calculation

Once we have our numbers for Traffic Level and Visitor Values, we use a very simple formula to come up with the total market value.

TRAFFIC LEVEL x VISITOR VALUE = TOTAL MARKET VALUE

So simple, too bad I did not come up with it myself. The folks from Market Samurai did, but more on that later.

Our final number tells us the total monthly value of visitors searching for a particular keyword (or keywords) in a market.

Let’s go back to our “dental plan” example and quickly find out what this market is worth.

246,000 (our Traffic Level) X $3.51 (Visitor Value) = $863,460 – our Total “dental plan” Market Value

Wow, that’s $863,460 per month; 10,361,520 per year!

Before you run off on me creating dental plan websites, here’s something to cool you off.

Just because dental plan market is worth over $10M per year, it doesn’t mean that you’ll make that much!

Most likely, nowhere close to it…

Maybe, a tiny fraction of it!

Remember that this traffic is shared by thousands of web sites in the niche, and of course, those with the biggest ranking will have the biggest slice.

How big of a slice can you get?

Well, it all depends:

• It depends on how competitive your niche is;

• It depends on your product price;

• It depends on how well you convert your traffic into visitors;

• It depends on what your SEO skills are and how easily you can get top search engine rankings;

• It depends on how strong your competition is;

• It depends on how badly you want it and how hard you work;

• And it depends on a number of other factors that can influence your business…

But all things being equal - if you have two markets with similar levels of competition, where you sell a similarly priced product at similar profit margins - you can generally expect that the market with the higher value will be more profitable.

So, are you brain-dead yet? I hope you see how important it is to learn this very simple process and save yourself a lot of time, money, and frustration.

And if you don’t think it’s that important, then there is always an option of quitting (heh-heh, just kidding, I hope not).

Getting Market Value figures in Market Samurai

If you already own a copy of Market Samurai, like I do, the task of gathering all this info becomes even more of a breeze.

This data is gathered under you Keyword Analysis Data in Keyword Research tool.

Here are the numbers we are interested in:

• SEO Value (SEOV) - This is the maximum total value of traffic that the #1 ranked web page for this keyword (based on search results) is likely to receive - per month.

• Adwords Value (AWV) - This is the maximum total value of traffic that the #1 ranked advertiser (in Google Adwords) is likely to receive - per month.

In both cases, Market Samurai is taking the Market Value benchmark we calculated previously to the next step…

…by breaking down the Market Value number into how much #1 ranked web site will bring through organic SEO and Google Adwords respectively.

If you don’t have Market Samurai, I would recommend you get a copy - it will save you a lot of time doing market research and give you access to a lot of really powerful keyword research tools.

After trying many ways of doing keyword/market research, I decided Market Samurai was by far the best one. Yes, these are affiliate links I am pointing you to, but not because I want to make a buck (although, that’s always nice), but because this tool definitely deserves to be a part of your internet marketing arsenal.

Head over to Market Samurai and download their FREE TRIAL now.

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