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Pivot Point 1 – Niche & Keyword Selection

We've always been about working in the big “evergreen” niches: Finance, Health/Medicine, Real Estate, Legal, Education/Training, etc. We do this because they have a lot of traffic, and support 'sub-niches' with plenty of traffic, and relatively moderate competition.

Just as our keyword research 'powered' our success in Version 2, so it also plays a crucial part in our success now - though in a somewhat different role.

Version 3 provides additional choices for building successful Adsense sites, but all of them begin with Niche & Keyword Selection. Our 'Classic Blueprint' model - an updated version of the original website model - targets 'secondary' niches, developing a 'keyword phrase group' for the chosen niche, then getting the website ranked for each of the keywords in the 'keyword phrase group'.

Alternately, we'll also show you how you can successfully target those “don't even try” niche

keywords using our 'Authority Blueprint'.

If you prefer a “wide” approach rather than a “direct & targeted” approach, we'll show you how to harness the huge pools of secondary, "long tail" traffic – which is also very targeted traffic that provides very high Click-Through Rates – with our 'Long-tail Blueprint'.

We'll also show you how to leverage “area of interest” niches using our 'Topical Revenue- Share' model, and in the process build a successful Adsense business – without having to build any websites!

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[Sean] Excellent, there’s even one more thing you can do with this now. You could take those 30 questions and a training session every week for 30 weeks, and have a 30 week group coaching program. Where, every week for 30 weeks, you do an intense training on one of those question, and open the call for questions and answers. Now you have a 30 week coaching program. How does that sound?

[Carl] Yeah, it does. It sounds like a very simple way to get one together, obviously, you are answering genuine problems that you know people have got.

[Sean] Absolutely, you’re answering genuine problems, and then what do you do after the 30 weeks? What is that? 7 months? So you do a monthly coaching program after 7 months, surely you’ll have a few more questions that have come in somewhere. You just keep teaching a new question every single week, and you have an ongoing, lifetime, monthly coaching program, and you’ve done it all from a single ask page.
[Carl] Nice. Brilliant. Okay Sean, so. To bring the interview back to the sales page, to emails, and things like that. How would you … how would you integrate that with your email communication. You’ve said everything about the sales page really, but what about the integrating that into your communication email wise. Do you have a formula for that? Would you write 1 email, or would you write a series of emails, would you still use your talking to a friend type talk, and would you still continue to probe people for their problems?

[Sean] Here’s the thing Carl, and I think this is probably going to be to deep to go into to really give it in this interview. This is something I’ve probably taught on for 25 hours of all of those nuances on the email campaign. But, the general theory would be that every email is written to a friend. Every email is written as if it’s to somebody we know. Then every email has the purpose. Every email has a purpose. The purpose is, obviously, let’s just say that this is content marketing. You have a content marketing email campaign. Let’s say that there’s 25 different ways to generate traffic through content marketing. I could write 25 emails queued up every other week for a year. Every 2 weeks there’s 1 email about a different type of content marketing traffic. The purpose of that is just building credibility. I’m just teaching for free. Now maybe I have a content marketing training program. If I’m in the content marketing niche, I’ve got content marketing training program. Maybe if somebody reads one of those articles, I call them articles, but it’s an email. And I get to the end, and I say, by the way, if you really want to learn a lot more about content marketing, take a look at my content marketing training program. For example.

I could write emails, so I just gave you the example of writing 25 and spacing them out over a year, you could write 25 and space them out over 25 days. Every day, somebody gets, you could even, this could be the giveaway. Join my list, and you’ll get 25 content marketing letters. 25 different content marketing sources. And, every day, they get content marketing source 1, content marketing source 2, and at the end of every email it says, hey, if you want to learn more about content marketing, check out my content marketing training program. It’s totally friendly, I used the formula I shared with you earlier, it’s totally friendly. Remember, if they found me from an article, they found me from Google, they from my book, they found me from an interview like this. The already know and trust me a little bit. Now they read a few of emails, where I’m freely giving them information, I don’t hold anything back in an email. I’m just freely giving them information. Whey they finally get to my sales letter, which is written using this friendly coffee shop type formula, when they read my sales letter, they’re just going to bond deeper, and if they would like to learn much more about all those content marketing sources, they buy my content marketing training program and I teach it to them.

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What if you're just starting out, and you have no idea about your back end? You don't even have a product, you're just trying to get 500 subscribers on your list so that you can send them some emails and find out what kind of product you should make…

Maybe you pay $2 / subscriber, so it'll cost you $1k to get 500 subscribers, and you're not going to make any money on these individuals right away. You're going to have to create your product. It might take you 2 weeks to create your product the way that I teach to create a product. So you'll get a percentage of those people to buy, and maybe you'll break even on your ad. But you're not going to have anything to sell them the first 2 weeks.

When you build that first part of the list, you simply have to look at it as an investment. Once you've done this 25 times, you should know over time how much you make on average per subscriber. Why don't I give you a quick formula?

Let's just say that you get 1k new subscribers every single month. And you generate $20k every single month. You're averaging $20 / subscriber.

Another way to look at this would be to look at an actual basket of subscribers. Let's say you get 1k subscribers. Then you track THOSE 1k subscribers separately from everybody else for a year, and those 1k subscribers generate $20k. That's another way to do it.

I find that just using the monthly new subscribers, divided into the total number of revenue that you have, gives you a nice average.

Now, if one month you generate 100 subscribers because you don't do much of anything, and the next month you spend $5k and get 2k subscribers, and the next month you only get 100 subscribers, then you have to take a rolling average of the number of subscribers each month and divide that into a rolling average of your revenue because your revenue is going to be driven by the number of new subscribers, but it's not going to correlate month to month. The reason for this is because people don't make all of their expenditures the first month they get on your list. I think that's enough depth on that.

It's just a quick process: how many subscribers are you getting, how much money are you making, that's your $/subscriber. Once you know that, then you can think about how much can I pay per subscriber.
Normally when you buy your solo ad, you can negotiate to pay per subscriber. Paying per click is more common. Obviously, per click becomes a little bit tricky, because you don't know what your subscriber cost is going to be, especially for the first few solo ads that you run. Let's just imagine that you have an opt-in page that has a 25% conversion rate. You want to be at $2 / subscriber. Then you're going to have to get 4 visitors, or 4 clicks, to get one subscriber. So you're going to want to pay 50¢/click to get to $2 / subscriber.

You may be talking with someone they'll only sell you something that's $1/click. You have to ask yourself, is this list going to be strong enough that I can monetize $4 / subscriber? Again, if it's your first list, set $1k aside and just use that as your seed money, as your investment money, to build that first list of 500 or 1k individuals.

Your pricing is just going to be a negotiation.

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[Sean] Okay. Not sure exactly where to start. What I do is probably different than what most people will do. So, I’m going to tell you what I do and then I’ll relate it to what most people do.

For me, I’ve done live campaigns for 6 years, every week a new campaign. When you do that, after time you find certain 5 day campaigns convert better for people that were in their first week than other campaigns. So, you have a campaign, I’ve run a live campaign before, and a strong percentage of people that have only been on the campaign for one week purchase that item. So what I do is I take that 5 day campaign and I put it into my automated campaign for week 1. Now, everybody who comes into week 1 gets that campaign. Then, I don’t do any of the manual campaigns for those people until after they’ve expired the 7 day period.

Then I went into the campaign, and I say what’s the 2nd best? Okay, great, I’ll put that in the 2nd week. What’s the 3rd best, I put that in the 3rd week. What’s the 4th best, I’ll put that in the 4th week. Okay, and then after about the 4th week, generally it’s whatever the live campaign is. I’ll tell you, in theory, the automation forever and ever works, there’s not many people that can pull it off. Most people cannot. I’ve had a hard time pulling off total automation after the 4 week mark. And, most other people that are kind of my colleagues experience about the same thing. It’s very, very difficult to automate after that first 4 weeks.
There’s 2 components though, in designing the campaign. I actually use 2 different delivery lists. So that I can keep them separate. When somebody joins my list, they’re actually added to the equivalent of 2 lists. One list has my content in it. So, my content is 30 days, and it’s not every day, it’s about every 2 out of 3 days. They’re going to get content emails, and for me there’s a 9am and a 9pm email. So, day 1 they get a 9am email, day 2 they get the 9pm email, day 3 they get a 9am email, day 4 they get a 9pm email. Now you ask, what’s the significance of a 9am or a 9pm email. The only significance is, that it has to be a different time than I send out the sales emails. So, to protect my own sanity, I just know that all emails in my content campaign go out at either 9am or 9pm, every other day. Okay, so why different times? I don’t want people to become conditioned to getting something at a certain time.

Now, obviously, the best way to do this would be to randomize it every day, but since I’m merging it with another campaign, it’s easier to have the same time, for me, but, because I want to vary the time, I use AM and PM. Could we do a time-frame? 7-9am and then vary the times it goes out, have some go out at 7:15, some at 8:15. Yeah, you could do that as well.

But, that’s what I do in my content campaign. Now, simultaneously with the content campaign, what I’ve discovered in my niche is that Tue, Wed, Thu, is an ideal setup for a 3 day sale. Tue, Wed, Thu. So, you introduce the sale on Tue, you do Q&A on Wed, and you do final chance on Thu. So, what I do is I queue the sales campaign up for the 1st Tue after somebody joins the list, and they get the 1st day of the 3 day campaign. So they’ll probably get 2 emails on Tue, one introducing whatever it is I’m selling, and then another explanation email. Wed they’ll get 1 email. Then Thu they’re going to get a final, this is your final day to get this.

What it does after that is I say, the following week, the next Tue that rolls around, then they’re going to get sequence 2, and then the next Tue that rolls around, they’re going to get sequence 3. Does that make sense?

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When you’re offering the $997, are you comfortable offering just the same price split between 3 payments?

[Sean] Yes, I’m completely comfortable with that, I’m completely comfortable with that. I do recognize I’m not going to get every single payment. I’m going to get most payments, but I’m not going to get every single payment. It just happens that way, people. You’ve got to understand, if somebody takes your payment option, the reason they didn’t pay you the full $997, is usually because they don’t have $997 on their credit card. Okay, that’s the biggest reason. Sometimes it’s because they don’t trust you enough, but if you do the kind of marketing that I do with trust at the front end, and they buy a product and have 7 - 10 days to consume it, they like it, they trust you. In my opinion, the biggest reason that they take a payment option is because they simply do not have $997 in the bank. But they do have $335. Okay, now, if they don’t have $997 in the bank, then they’re pretty much spending what they take in every month. Okay, economically, that’s what’s happening to that person.

They full well intend to make payment #2 and payment #3. Let’s say month 2 comes along and they barely have enough money to pay you, but the payment’s coming through, they’ll make it happen. Month #3 comes along, they’ve already scrunched in month #2 to try to make sure the money’s there, and when the month 3 comes along it’s just not there. The payment’s going to fail.

Okay, now, a lot of times, if you write that person and say, hey, I noticed that the payment failed, how’s things going with the product? They tell you that things are going well, and they’re really sorry they couldn’t make that payment. You just ask the, you say let me ask you this, John, it’s $335, what if I split that into 4 payments, we’ll do $87 / month for the next 4 months, would that be okay with you?

You know, what I’ve found is most people will say, yeah, that’ll be great. Thanks for working with me. It’s not that they don’t want you to get paid, it’s that the reason that they took payments in the first place, is because they have a finance challenge. If you make it now more affordable for them to make the last payment, they’ll make it for you. Now, I’ve done that before, repeatedly in the past. Where I’ve refinanced my financing with somebody, because something happens. You simply have to recognize this. Sometimes that won’t work. They just don’t have the money. Something happened, they thought they were going to have the money, they don’t have it. So, you aren’t going to make quite as much on your payments.

But, remember this! They weren’t going to buy in the first place. So, whatever payments they make, is additional revenue for you, because it’s a digital product, it doesn’t cost you anything else to allow one additional person to purchase that product. Right?

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The bottom line is, what you've got to do is find out 2 things. Number 1, are there people in your interest area that have needs that are being unmet? And then 2, are the people who have needs that are unmet, are they willing to invest money with you?

You've got to find out both of those things.

Folks have talked about in the past, and it's a fallacy, that you can just go online, do some quick research, find out how many people have needs, find out how much money they're willing to spend, and well, voila, you have your answer. I don't know that it EVER worked, but, if it ever worked, it doesn't work anymore.

One of the old methods, and I think at one point I even taught an iteration of this, one of the old methods, when the internet was young. You would go online, and you would look for something that had lots of searches online, and it didn't have too many advertisers. But, it had some. The theory was, if there were some advertisers, well some people must be making money. People don't pay advertising if it's not working in the long run. You might start out advertising, but after a few weeks, or a few months of not making money, they tend to quit. It just works that way.

We could look at some old formulas, and we could say, hey, if people are advertising, and lots of people are asking the question, well then, somebody is making some money, so maybe there's room for one more entrant.

Another thing we could look at. We used to create these fancy algorithms to say if there's 100k searches, but there's only 5 advertisers, or whatever the case is, then we would say, well, now, that's a competitive niche, that's ultra-competitive, maybe stay out of it. All of these different types of things.

The truth of the matter is, that today, number 1, it's much more difficult to get that search information. And, by the way, if you think you're getting that search information today, double check. There's a strong possibility that wherever you're buying it from, is selling you information that's really 3 years old. But, they're recalibrating it so that it looks like new information. The reason I say that is, to the best of my knowledge, for the most part, the providers of that information are no longer providing it anymore. The raw data is no longer there.

Now, there's a huge industry around selling that information. But, the information doesn't really exist anymore. Certainly not, to my understanding, they way that it used to. If that's the way they used to look at it, but it doesn't work anymore. What else do we do? We'll talk about that in the next post!