I delved into it a bit using the Google keyword tool – Market Samurai isn’t (yet) available on the iPod/iPhone/iPad – and Google Insights using the Google Trends method first exposed in the 30 Day Challenge of a few years ago.

I was stunned to see the amount of traffic and competition – basically nobody is targeting it. See the screenshot from Market Samurai (which I just did on my PC):

Don’t believe anyone who tells you all the good niches are gone. Now, I don’t expect this to convert massively, but it should convert something. And the average order size is €276, so that multiplied out over the year is going to add a few K to the bottom line, thank you very much.

At the time I wrote some content (on my iPod) and ranked in the top 10, although it has dropped back to the third page now. So yesterday I bought to new domains relating to the top and bottom listed keyword phrases above. I’m now ranking at #5 for the bottom result – 595 searches per day and 7,750 competition, yet a SEOV of $252.40!!!

See how profitable sport in TV can be?

By the way the 30 Day Challenge has been renamed The Challenge – it starts today, takes less time each day but more days to complete. Check it out to learn more cool internet marketing stuff.

It’s interesting to compare with what Ed Dale is currently teaching and Dan even talks about chunking time down into blocks of 25 minutes just like Ed does – the pomodoro technique, or – as Ed calls it – Critical Focus Time.

Read “Plan B Week 5: Sourcing & Creating News” on SEO Fast Start – and make sure you check out the precious lessons if you’ve missed them so far.

Market Samurai is a tool designed for internet marketers, which helps cut down the time spent on keyword research through automation, as well as automate tasks such as compare SEO factors for competing websites.

It was written by a team of programmers in Melbourne, Australia and since its release in July 2008 has taken the internet marketing community by storm.

Before its limited release to Immediate Edge members there were keyword tools available. However, none got close to providing the level of detail given by Market Samurai and it has taken what was quite an arduous task and made it simple.

What does Market Samurai do?

Since its release new features are being added constantly, such as the monetisation and domain modules, so below I’ll give a run down of what each module does:

Rank Tracker

Here you can check how your web sites rank for specific keyword phrases and build up a picture over time of how they are doing. Also tracks PR and number of backlinks.

Keyword Research

I’d consider this to be the core module – enter a keyword phrase and get the search numbers from Google and compare the number of competing web pages for related search phrases. You can change the default global setting for regional and language specific markets too.

SEO Competition

How strong are the websites in the top 10? By looking various SEO factors you can work out why they are there are start improving your onpage factors and build backlinks to out rank them. You can find out how many backlinks they have, what PR they have, where those links are and what the anchor text is – are really useful stuff to know.

Domains

Want to by a domain that already has PR rather than starting from scratch – you can do it here.

Monetization

Here you can find affiliate products related to your keyword on ClickBank, Amazon, Commission Junction and PayDotCom AND THEN write ads to promote them and upload to your Wordpress site. Simple!

Find Content

If you need content published by one of the ezine directories this is where you go. Will also help you with YouTube videos and Flickr images.

Publish Content

Rather than writing content in Wordpress, you can write that content in Market Samurai and upload it when you’re done editing. Basically once you’ve added your blog’s details in Market Samurai you don’t need to login to it again – you can manage all content from a single tool!

Promotion

Need backlinks? Yes, I’m sure you do. Here you can find related blogs on a variety of platforms related to your keyword and go and make a comment. Play nice here – no comment spamming, go and read what that author has written and if you have something to say then write it.

Adwords

To good to be true. Well, yes actually – it’s not available yet, but is sure to be released at some point soon.

So… what do I think of Market Samurai?

Simple. It is the best software I have ever used, period. Running on Adobe Air, it is cross platform and works equally well on a Mac or PC (and I guess Linux) – the only drawback I can think of is that it won’t run on an iPhone or iPad.

Customer support is second to none – a big shout out to Brent Hodgson as that is his baby.

Conclusion? If you are an internet marketer and using another keyword tool then check out Market Samurai.

Click to test drive Market Samurai risk free

The concept was well understood, the problem was getting reliable data with which to work. One of the main sources of search data was the Overture search tool, which provided results from what later became the Yahoo paid search.

The problem was that the numbers bore little relation to the real numbers from a top 10 ranking in Google. And furthermore the words were often in the wrong order and numbers given combined the singular and plural variations.

So, the keyword research on my first website was done using a combination of Overture and then manually checking Google for the number of competing pages. And it took absolutely hours.

Fast forward to 2008, when the genius programmers at Nobel Samurai put together a ground breaking keyword tool. Google started providing search figures from its own database in 2007, which meant that internet marketers at last had access to reliable data. But what these programmers did was to automate the whole process.

Starting with a seed keyword an entire list of related words would be generated with the the number of searches either globally, or in specific countries or languages; and in addition to that the number of competing pages.

Suddenly a dream had come true for internet marketers, as the tool didn’t stop there; it also looks at the strength of the top 10 competing web pages, tracks the rank of your web pages for specific keywords, allows you to find affiliate offers and even write adverts.

In case you didn’t already know, the tool is Market Samurai and as it’s available as a risk free trial version you’ve got absolutely nothing to lose.

Click here to test drive Market Samurai now!

At the tail end of last year, before setting of the Ed’s Manchester conference I went through the 30DC process and got it down to six hours spread over a week.

So here is how I’ve got on so far with the 5 CFT Challenge, with each CFT consisting of a uninterrupted period of 25 minutes where you really go for it – Critical Focus Time, if you really want to know.

27th May – CFT 1

• Pick a market
• Find a keyword that works (but don’t be fussy due to lack of time)
• Pick some category keywords
• Register a domain
• Write the classic beginner draft

1 x 25 mins
1 x 15 mins

OK, so that took quarter of an hour longer than it should have. Bummer.

28th May – CFT 2

• Write a 5 minute articles for spinning
• Create WPD blog with plain template
• Edit yesterday’s article and put on blog
• Index the article (Twitter, Propeller, Digg, Stumbleupon)

1 x 25 mins
1 x 20 mins

And that took 20 mins longer than it should have…

31st May – CFT 3/4

• Edit AMA article and submit (Article Marketing Automation)
• Set up Google Reader to monitor the niche
• Draft article for AMA next week (CFT 6)

1 x 25 mins to edit and submit AMA article… still need to set up Google Reader and write draft article for AMA. I only signed up last week and it is a really good service. I’m not that easily impressed, but despite the sales page which didn’t really do it for me the product itself is excellent.

So, I spent 25 minutes there and I have 25 minutes to set up Google reader (2 mins) and the rest to write a draft article. Shouldn’t be a problem.It does show how fast you can research, set up and promote a website though and while 6 hours was pretty good, this should be down to around three in the end.

Posted via email from davidleigh’s posterous

Posted via email from davidleigh’s posterous

Being a generous kind of chap you can copy and paste it from here:

<script language="JavaScript">
buttoncode = "<iframe src='http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=";
url=location.href;
buttoncode = buttoncode + url + "&amp;layout=standard&amp;show_faces=true&amp;width=250&amp;action=like&amp;colorscheme=light' scrolling='no' frameborder='0' allowtransparency='true' style='border:none; overflow:hidden; width:250px; height:px'></iframe>";
document.write(buttoncode);
</script>

Hopefully that will work, I’m not much of a coder so if it doesn’t work I probably can’t fix it

Just to show that maybe Dan Raine does know what he’s talking about and techniques from Immediate Edge might work take a look at the screen shot above for the search term “edge blueprint”.

Somehow I don’t think Dan will let that result stand for long though.

Posted via email from davidleigh’s posterous

In my previous post on Link Wheels I gave an overview of how to set up a link wheel, but without providing a list of Web 2.0 properties you can use or how I go about it.

So here is a list of Web 2.0 properties to get you started, but you can also use anything else such as Wordpress MU blogs.

Just a work of warning – some of your spokes will be deleted by the site administrators. When that happens simply use the content on a different Web 2.0 property and make sure the link wheel remains intact.

To start your first link wheel you first need to decide whether the link wheel will link directly to a page on your website, or to another Web 2.0 property which will act as a buffer – typically hosted on a Squidoo lens, Hubpages or Blogger.

Once you’ve made that decision you need to write some content related the page you want to promote and decide how many “spokes” your link wheel is going to consist of. You can simply add that content to each spoke in the link wheel, write slightly different content for each, or spin the article to create unique content.

Now you simply pick a Web 2.0 property at random, add the content and include a link to the page you are promoting, and use a social bookmarking tool such as Traffic Bug to make sure the search engine find your content – see the first article in the link wheel series for more details.

Next, pick another Web 2.0 property; add content; add one link to the page you are promoting; add a second link to your previous spoke; add to Traffic Bug.

Rinse and repeat so you have 4 to 7 spokes in your link wheel, then edit the first Web 2.0 property and add a link to the last so that the wheel is completed and Pagerank spread evenly though the wheel.

The process is relatively straightforward to outsource and can be done much cheaper than the link wheel services being currently advertised.