Chapter 2

Researching the Content

Using the tools available on the Internet, we can use it to our advantage, and all will be a lot easier.

Using Google for Research

You can use Google and using the example ‘Do it Your Self’ we can look for articles and features with the term Do it your self in them:

Type allinurl:Do it your self

Further search examples to get content include:
Use Google and type:

Allinurl:how to change engine oil
Allinurl:how to replace tire
Allinurl:how to design web site

Using Amazon To Give You Inspiration
Another great way to find ideas is to visit www.amazon.com and use the search inside feature.

From here you can clearly find the contents and an index to the page. The good thing about Amazon is that you can search for related pages.

Using the Amazon Concordance Feature for Material

Cool feature of Amazon is something called Concordance which is an alphabetized list of the most frequently occurring words in a page, excluding common words such as "of" and "it." The font size of a word is proportional to the number of times it occurs in the page. If you hover your mouse over a word to see how many times it occurs, or click on a word to see a list of page excerpts containing that word. This is a brilliant feature and can help you brainstorm any number of subjects in a real quick and intelligent way.

Amazon Statistically Improbable Phrases

We can get even further information for our research by looking at a feature called SIPS that Amazon provides. This is a fantastic feature, and allows you to further explore all the pages that contain those phrases. This will give you a huge pool of ideas to draw on for creating your page.

SearchStatus Toolbar

There is a very useful (and free) tool available from www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/ which is a toolbar for the Firefox browser, and it has some really cool features.

SearchStatus is a toolbar extension for Firefox and Mozilla that allows you to see how any and every website in the world is performing.

Designed for the highly specialized needs of search engine marketers, this toolbar provides extensive search-related information about a site, all conveniently displayed in one discreet and compact toolbar. This tool is one of the best ways to spy on your competitors. If you can tell what they are doing, you can copy and improve on their techniques.

For every site you visit using, SearchStatus lets you view its:
• Google PageRank
• Google Category
• Alexa popularity ranking
• Alexa incoming links
• Access to the whois database – find those joint venture partners!
• Alexa related links
• backward links from Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

This combined search related information means you can view not only the link importance of a site (according to Google), but also its traffic importance (according to Alexa), so providing a balanced view of site efficacy.

SearchStatus also gives access to the Google Trends tool that gives you a graph showing historical search graph according to the website that you visited or the search term that you entered, for instance the search term ‘internet marketing’:

You will notice that the key points in the trend have a news item against it, use this for even more keyword research options. When doing keyword research and you notice that the keyword search popularity is on downward slope according to the graph it is more than
likely not a very good idea not to write an page on that subject, unless of course the search volumes are very high anyway.

See What Other Internet Marketers are Doing

A website called www.gurudaq.com allows you to see exactly what the main Internet Marketers are doing. The website shows the movers and shakers within the Internet Marketing
sphere. The results are sourced from places like www.alexa.com. What you can do with these results is see who is the most active and using the links on Gurudaq allows you to visit the website of the Internet Marketers site to see their latest marketing campaign. Those at the top of the list are very likely the most active on the web at this time, and may have some on going campaign that they are doing. Visit the campaign and learn from the techniques they are using.

Look At Old Web Pages

Spy on your competitors, and see what they have been doing in the past. You can use the website at www.archive.org which saves a snapshot of website from the first time it was uploaded, and then at regular intervals up to current day. You can see what other marketers
were doing a couple of years ago, and how their campaigns have changed. For further information on domain names, and who owns them and a lot more information have a look at
www.whois.domaintools.com/. There is some very useful information here.

Using Clickbank for Research

A great way of finding page subjects that are known to sell is by visiting www.clickbank.com – if you visit Clickbank and look at the marketplace, you can see which are the hottest selling pages.
You can also use this list to view the sales pages for each particular page published under your specific search term. Using Clickbank is another excellent way to find out what people are interested in selling. The Clickbank Marketplace is a good place to bring affiliates and Epage writers together – this is the way which you will become rich! – But more on this later. We have to lay the foundations first!

There is an excellent resource called CB Mall and it is an easy way to see what is available on Clickbank, visit www.cbmall.com to get more information:

Other places to do research include:

• Public Libraries
• The local newsagent or news seller for monthly magazines
• Online Resources, including some of the websites that publish free articles such as www.ezinearticles.com
• www.overture.com – great for keyword research
• Friends and Families
• Technical reference guides that come with equipment
• Government produced documents and pamphlets

You can also use resources such as www.nichebot.com and www.wordtracker.com and search for phrases such as:

• How to
• Report on
• Help with
Or
• Hobbies, such as fishing, flying, camping etc