Launch Lessons Learned!
Okay, so while it’s definitely considered a best practice to create and promote your own products online, there are a number of things you learn along the way, many of them quite painful and some fortuitous! All in all, the process of launching Local Lead Machines this last month, and the upcoming launch of Mobile Divas, two products that I co-created, has been a very educational and gratifying experience.
This is not to say nothing has gone wrong. Nothing could be further from the truth! However, many of these calamities are of the one-off variety, and I won’t be re-visiting them again! Let me run down just a few things I’ve learned, in the hopes that you won’t make the same mistakes I did!
- I learned not to assume that my technical skills were sufficient to do all that was required in a major launch. Just because you’re proficient at putting up a blog here and there in no way prepares you for the challenges that lay ahead! Better to understand your limitations going in, and not have to hire help under the gun!
- I learned that I don’t care for Amazon EC2 hosting. While there are undeniable benefits in terms of uptime and storage, the fact that you need to have a developer help you every time you need to change anything is frustrating and expensive!
- I learned that there is a great deal to setting up the Clickbank flow!
- I learned that you need to plan out things like JV’s, marketing and promotional materials, and email MONTHS in advance!
- I learned what it takes to entice major players to mail for you. (in short, bribe or beg!)
All that said, I wouldn’t do it any other way now. Having your own products give you so much more leverage and helps craft your online reputation and start to build some authority.
Creating the products themselves was the easy part! It’s everything else that muddies the waters!
Local Lead Machines!
Are you intrigued by all the fuss about the local marketing opportunity?
Can you see how local businesses in your area need your help!
Don’t have any idea how this can work for you, but want to learn?
Check out Local Lead Machines, a huge e-course developed by myself, along with Russell DeCorte and Brandon Schoen. This comprehensive course is comprised of 70+videos, and over 40 PDFs and spreadsheets! We take you through just what it takes to sell local business services, and get you into the game!
Hot Damn! New WSO!
Take a moment to check out my new WSO on the Warrior Forum!
The Backlinks Book 2011 will help anyone get their backlinking more organized and effective!
Please take a look and then come back and leave a comment!
Thanks!
~Keith
Keyword Espionage! – How To Mine Keywords From Your Competitors!
Who has time to reinvent the wheel? Moreover, unlike Star Trek, I’m not sure I want to go where no man has gone before. I’d much rather trod a well worn path that leads to hungry markets, eager for what I happen to be selling! So how do we arm ourselves for this battle? It often starts with a bit of keyword espionage!
Spying on other site’s keywords is a time-honored tradition in Internet marketing (relatively speaking, of course!). Up until recently, however, it was an incredibly difficult exercise in frustration and patience, ferreting out the prize keywords your competition were using.
The basic technique goes as follows. Google makes it pretty easy by supplying you with not only the sites you need to go after but also a tool to help find the keywords they are using! Open two windows in your browser of choice, and then do a Google search for the main seed keyword you wish to go after. (You can drill down further later mining for long tails, but for now…) This will return you the top ten organic results for that keyword.
Then in the other window open up the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, and put each of the sites URLs in the “website” search option and hit search. You’ll come up with at least 100 keywords they are using, more if you are logged into your own Adwords account. Then harvest what applies or appeals to you!
You can do this for any number of keywords; all it takes is time. You can always staff this out or outsource the task. But hey, otherwise it’s free!
If you simply need to make this go faster, there are a number of tools, some also free, that make the task a great deal easier, and can help you with the site intelligence you need to target pages and posts on your sites with some sort of plan. Targeting keywords for SEO and marketing campaigns is essential, and if you know which of these are vulnerable, you’re that much further ahead.
Some of the free tools available that can give you a fairly good view of the keywords being targeted by your competition are Alexa, Compete.com, SpyFu, and SEMRush. While each of them in their free versions may not give you a totally accurate picture, you can cobble together a pretty good view by using several of these and comparing data. SpyFu has a very nice paid option. However, accomplishing this for free could work well if you are only working on a limited number of sites/keywords. Otherwise it could tend to get very tedious!
Some of the paid tools that deliver great results are SEO SpyGlass, Market Samurai, and KeywordSpy. All are very good at what they do, with varying prices and features. Once you have your data, you can make some important decisions about which keywords are worth targeting and which ones might be better left for a more long term view. In any case, this type of information is invaluable and should be part of your arsenal when trying to unseat those sites above you in the search engines!
