You can still help yourself along, however, by learning the demographics of your audience. This short video shows you a few websites you can use to do some online demographic research.

For dozens more sales and marketing video tips go to http://youtube.com/TitansofSalesmanship

If you want follow-up information on the formula or how to use it for niche keywords then leave me a comment.

Read on to learn how recent research performed by Woopra, a Web analytics company, can supercharge your social media marketing effectiveness by working smarter and not harder.

In June, 2010 Woopra segmented 100,000 web sites into different categories to determine which social media sites were the best traffic drivers. Some of the results were surprising.

The original article appears on ReadWriteWeb and goes into greater detail, but staying faithful to Pareto’s Rule you can see from the charts that although there may be 1,000s of social media sites that only a handful are really important.

I would like to see the same kind of analysis applied to article directories. If I come across one I will post it here.

The original article also had a section on search engines, and more than a little quibbling in the comments section about different aspects of Google’s numbers. I have yet to see a single worthwhile article about how optimizing (SEO) for Google is any different than optimizing for any of the other search engines. I have seen a lot of words on the topic – just nothing particularly useful.

One thing is abundantly clear – whether you call it Promoting your Web 2.0 Content or something else, video and social media

must

be an integral part of your business promotion.

But what do you do now?

You will find dozens of blogs and many affiliate support sites that tell you that your job as an affiliate is to presell the product or service.

How do you presell something? What does that even mean?

We can make some sense of it when we look at it this way. Nightclubs that provide live entertainment have a warmup act that performs right before the featured artist. The purpose of the warmup act is to get the crowd’s attention and put them in the right mood before the feature act goes on stage.

That is how you should presell. Many people make the mistake of just copying and pasting whole paragraphs from the merchant’s sales page. That is a mistake. If in your concert going days you paid big bucks for a Rolling Stones ticket you probably would not be too happy if the warmup band just played Stones songs and imitated the main act.

The purpose of this post is to provide you with a logical structure that you can use in your presell copy to get the crowd’s attention and put them in the right mood for the merchant’s sales page.

It’s an expansion of the emotional marketing post I did earlier, with a lot more meat on the bones this time around.

Here it is.

Get a pad of paper and a pencil. Divide the page into four columns. The four column headings are:

Open up the merchant’s sales page on your computer. Read through it quickly one time to get an overall familiarity. After you finish that, go to the top of the merchant’s sales page, at the headline, and start filling in the columns on your paper. Go through the entire sales page one sentence and one paragraph at a time.

Which of the 37 buying emotions (will open in a new window) are being targeted by the headline or the copy? If it is more than one emotion then write them all down.

What desire can you connect with each emotion that relates to the merchant’s product? Write it down.

What specific promise does the merchant make in its sales copy that would satisfy the prospect’s desire? Write it down.

This is important, so do not leave it out. What specific proof does the merchant provide for each and every promise? You may have to search the whole sales letter to find the proofs, but if it is well written the proofs are there. If the merchant sales copy is weak on its proofs, or if it does not provide a proof for each and every promise, then it is a weak sales letter and you may want to pass on the offer.

When you finish you should have 8 – 10 emotions and related desires on your sheet of paper. If you could not find a promise in the sales letter that relates directly to any particular emotion/desire then line through it. You do not want to raise an expectation in your presell copy that cannot be met in the merchant’s sales letter.

The proofs are more general. The same proof can apply to more than one promise.

That’s it. When you finish you will have a good deal of information about the product and about the customer that the merchant is targeting. Your presell copy headline should include what you think is the dominant emotion/desire. You may be right on target. You may be off. That’s why you must test – everything.

Use the information you just gathered to write your presell copy. Include every emotion/desire, promise and proof in your copy.

Make it easy reading and conversational. If you have Microsoft Word use Tools –> Spelling and Grammar to get the Readability Index for your copy. You want the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level for the entire document to be 7.5 or lower.

You are not selling the product so do not go into guarantees, etc. Your goal is to show the reader that there may be an emotional payoff by clicking thorough to the merchant’s sales page.

All of the same rules, customs, and procedures apply. The good news is that the masters of direct marketing have provided us with everything that we need to know to succeed in this new media. John Caples wrote Scientific Advertising 90 years ago, and almost every word that he wrote about advertising and salesmanship is as applicable and actionable today as it was the day he wrote it.

The background information is necessary to explain the nature of the query I made in the headline of this post. The masters didn’t do things willy niily. Every project for them was a strategically mapped campaign.

I am starting a new project, and before I put one pixel online I am going to write 50 on-topic articles, and produce 50 video articles. I know what I am going to do with the video articles, but am still undecided where I am going to place the majority of the written articles.

I have narrowed my written article choices down to HubPages and Ezinearticles.

Ezine articles was my default choice because of its high Alexa ranking (126), and because there is a good chance my articles will get picked up by ezine publishers and other webmasters. It is also not uncommon to see ezinearticles.com material on the first page of the Google SERPs.

On the other hand HubPages ranks 208 and provides the opportunity to use context links within my articles; video and graphics; and an easy ability to add to my articles or modify them whenever I want. You cannot do any of those things on ezinearticles.com. In addition, you can earn a little revenue on HubPages when somebody clicks on an ad on one of your pages. At ezinearticles.com all the revenue goes to them.

I am leaning more towards HubPages right now and wonder what you have to say about it. What is your opinion? Would you use HubPages or ezinearticles.com as the anchor for your written articles?

You will get real world experience writing to sell, and you have a much greater chance of getting your copy indexed in Google because of usfreeads.com high Alexa ranking (4,415), then you would would with a brand new website that takes a little promotion to break into the top 5,000,000.

I recommend that you get your products from Clickbank. There are tens of thousands of products to sell so you are sure to find several things that you would be comfortable selling.

The other benefits to you of promoting Clickbank early is that the commissions are good, about $20 average, and you get good tracking stats. That means that if you test 3 different headlines you can tag each one separately with the ad number (?tid=”27306″) so you know for sure which headline is getting the clicks and which advertisements are making the sales. All the copywriting masters tested everything. This is a really good habit to develop as early in your career as possible.

Speaking of testing headlines – John Caples of Scientific Advertising said that he tested headlines on one product advertisement, with nearly identical body copy, 2,000 times. He didn’t just write 2,000 headline variations and choose to test a few. That many ads with that many headlines variations were published in newspapers, magazines and sent by mail. Caples said that the difference in response rates was enormous.

Whenever you start to feel a little overworked you can get a little inspiration by looking back at the DRM pioneers. For them a prodigious effort was the normal workday.

Some people still promote this business model, and a few even do quite well with it, or so they say. The attractiveness is that you can start from scratch in the morning, and have a niche web site up and running by the afternoon.

The only real dollar cost is the domain name registration and the hosting costs. But even these are minimal. Domains cost less than $10 per year, and there are plenty of places where you can get hosting for dozens of domains for $10-$15 per month. That is not per domain, but for as many as you can put on a shared server.

The downside to this business model is that you need to have a basic skill set in search engine optimization (SEO), and you have to promote your new site. If you do not do both of these things with at least a minimal level of competence your site will for ever remain in total obscurity. Hardly anybody will ever find it, and you will be lucky to make your hosting costs.

If you just want to cut your teeth in affiliate marketing than I am proposing a better way to get started then setting-up individual web sites. I do not think this is the best business model, but it is a good way to start, if only because it emphasizes that affiliate marketing, or any other kind of marketing, is about developing salesmanship skills. Finding what people want, and finding them a way to get it.

Go to USfreeads and sign up for a premium account. You can also get a free account but the premium account is less than $10 a month, and it allows you to post an unlimited number of ads with HTML design, if you want it, and graphics. Don’t get scared off by the HTML. There is an easy to use editor. You can go deeper in design if you want.

USfreeads is one of the top 4,400 visited sites in the world. That means it is indexed often by the Google spider. You have a much better chance of getting a good Google listing for one of your ads on USfreeads than you do for any page on a brand new web site.

As a premium subscriber you also get site statistics, which means you can test headlines and compare the number of views. Also, web site visitors searching on USfreeads know they are on a sales site. You will still get lookers, but people also know that they are going to a sales page when they click your link.

If you write one or two or a dozen new classified ads every day you will sharpen your writing skills. There is no better way to learn than by doing. It is all about salesmanship.

What Went Wrong?

I empathize. I’ve been there. The correct answer is, ironically, that micronichefinder does such a good job of finding high volume, low competition keywords that it seduces you into thinking that your job is done. You know. Build a better mousetrap and people will come? Truth is that focusing only on niche keywords when finding a niche, or to build a niche business, is not a good niche marketing strategy.

Hours and Days of Keyword Research.

Micronichefinder is one of the few keyword tools I have bought over the years that I feel that I really can not do without. It would take you hours or maybe days to duplicate the keyword research you can do with MNF in a single session. That’s a given.

But, here’s the catch. Keywords don’t buy things. People do. If you are spending more time in TrafficTravis watching your keywords climb the rankings in the SERPS then you do changing, testing and measuring your sales message then you are focused on the wrong ball. You are acting like keywords buy things.

Use Micronichefinder Effectively

Use micronichefinder for what it does best – finding niche keywords you can exploit to drive traffic to your sales message. You can use these keywords to make your web pages SEO friendly, to write tags for social media and videos, and to write articles that get noticed and read.

But – and this is a big but – you cannot use keywords to sell your product or service. People buy from you because you have something they want that you have informed them will satisfy their emotional need. Once the customer gets to your site and into your sales funnel, nothing else matters.

You Can Rely on Micronichefinder

The Google Keywords Tool and the Microsoft AdCenter Tools are indispensable for niche research and for profiling your potential customers, but they cannot match the overwhelming efficiency of micronichefinder for finding keywords that you can count on to drive traffic to your site.

If you sell anything on the internet and do not use micronichefinder, then you are leaving money on the table for the people who do. Here’s why. Whether you buy traffic, or you get your traffic by putting your content in front of the search engines and social media sites, people only pay attention to the words that catch their attention, and the words that catch their attention are about topics that are constantly on their mind. You get those high value mind buzzers from micronichefinder, but you also get something else that is just as important.

You Can Bid For Position With Money or Knowledge

Here’s another way to look at. When you bid for PPC ads you are paying for position. You have a much greater chance of getting your sales message seen if your ad is #2 or #3 on the right side of a Google search page then if it were in position #32 and buried on the fourth page.

When you go the free traffic route with SEO or social media you are also bidding for position, but instead of paying with money you are paying with knowledge. When you know ahead of time which keyword phrases (topics) are going to have the better position simply because there are fewer bidders competing for that position, you have achieved the same result as the highest paying PPC advertisers.

That is the kind of knowledge you get with micronichefinder. It’s the best way I’ve come across to build up your knowledge currency. Exact Phrase Count tells you how much competition you really have; OCI tells you if the keyword phrase (topic) will appeal more to a looker or to a buyer; MOB tells you exactly who you are competing against and how much backlinking you need to beat them; SOC tells you how hard the fight for your buyer’s attention is going to be. And you get it all on one page. Amazing.

If somebody offered to fill up your PPC bank account would you tell them to start whenever they got around it, or would you tell them to start now? When you decide to start using micronichefinder is no different.

Here are the links to the sites in the video.
Google External Keyword Tool
Google Insights For Search
Microsoft AdCenter Demographic Tool
Microsoft AdCenter Search Funnel Tool

This second video is a correction to the procedure used on the Microsoft search funnel.

I would very much appreciate your comments on whether or not this video is useful. I have set up a FB page as the central repository for the 5-A-Day Challenge. You can comment there or here.

This was not the process I used for my first several websites. I did keyword research only. When I found a keyword phrase with high search volume and low competition, I built a website, HubPage or Squidoo Lens around it. That is probably the way that most people still find a niche. This technique is not “wrong” but I do believe it is limiting without also doing the kind of niche research outlined in this video series. By the time I got to number 30 I couldn’t even remember what number 1-5 were about, never mind find them.

I would very much appreciate your comments on whether or not this video is useful. I have set up a FB page as the central repository for the 5-A-Day Challenge. You can comment there or here.