Progress Thread – 8 Months To Quit The Grind

[ableme]

It seems I have always been the person that’s been looking to walk off the sidewalk, cross over the slow lane, and then take a drive in the Fastlane! But at that time I just didn't know what they were all called? Thanks to The Millionaire Fastlane I’m now here and aiming to learn, help, and in general be around like-minded people.

I've probably purchased more so-called “guru†how-to ebooks than a wanna-be Buddhist! More crash courses than a blind driving Nun! But everything I seemed to do was either old news, bad news, or just outright wrong.

As an example, I tried the Google PPC to an affiliate product technique, and in one day made $220 which at the time was more than I’d ever done before, I thought I had made it! The next day, I was banned from Adwords by Google! Then I followed another ebook all about blogs and Google Adsense, but a couple of weeks after the website vanished from the rankings. Then I had somewhat of a good thing going with an affiliate E-commerce website I had setup, until they changed the State tax law and introduced that Amazon/affiliate tax bill, meaning all my out-of-state affiliate companies dropped me like a stone.

However it’s all been a great learning experience for me, and in that time I learned how to code and build websites, do my own website SEO, learned basic PHP, and just got a general idea of what not to do basically. But the biggest thing I learned was that everything I tried was of no real value to anyone but me! I was only in it for the money, and the dream that I could eventually quit my day job and fire my own boss.

After all these lessons learned I really want to create something of value and something that is just more than me, something I can be proud of. So I wanted to start a progress thread that would chart my own progress toward an E-commerce business (real products), and eventually the creations of my own products in that niche. I will also aim to earn enough from this business to be able to leave my current job and do this full-time/part-time/whatever time-I-want, in eight months or less!

I’m hoping to be as transparent as I can while I progress through this journey, but obviously keep certain things close to my chest for now. So…. some of the character names(products) have been changed, and the main title of the movie(niche) will also be adjusted a little, but whatever I use for examples they will be as close as possible to my real targets numbers.

I’ve been selling on Amazon FBA for the last year as a pro merchant, and mostly using retail arbitrage techniques to find and sell inventory. I also dabbled in a few products from Alibaba manufacturers that I also sold on Amazon, but unfortunately due again to my inexperience hardly made any profit on two of them, and the third product was sold at a loss! But the experience was worth so much more. And at least everything sold!

As many of you will know the “retail arbitrage†system of finding products and selling them at a profit is a great way to start, but hard to scale if you can only buy a couple of products at a time(depending on that stores stock). But with experience you can find some great sources, or at least enough inventory to keep the profits coming in.

I will fund this project at first using retail arbitrage and FBA for now, as well as my own funds when and if it’s needed. I’m going to try and cover every step I take, but if I miss something, please feel free to ask away, and please jump in with any tips and advice along the way. ## I apologize in advanced for my poor grammar and punctuation ##

So with all that being said, here is my plan of action….

1) Find and research a niche ( already may have an idea on this )
2) Establish/research product selections
3) Research comp
4) Find suppliers/manufacturers
5) Probability of creating my own product
6) Buy domain
7) Setup E-commerce store
8) Fill with products
9) Start creating my own product
10) Add it to my store

Some background costs to start…..

LLC already formed (2012) – Legal Zoom Express Gold - $800
Amazon FBA Pro Account - $39 pm – 1 year so far - $468

Some life targets to aim for...

1. Work less hours at day job 1-4 months
2. Not work at all at the day job 8 months

My starting balance for this thread: - $1200

 

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[ableme]

So my first step from my outline above was to find a niche, and at the time of writing it I already had an idea of one that I could possibly target. Here is how I decided what to do, and how I selected it.

One of the easiest ways I have found to find a niche idea is to just look around in everyday life, listen to conversations, and track trends that keep coming up while you are out and about. For example a few years ago a friend of mine started to talk about his daughters Worm Farm!? All I could picture at the time was a worm dressed in farmer’s gear ploughing fields and milking cows! Little did I know!

Apparently Worm Farms are all about “feeding organic waste to special breeds of worm that thrive in decomposing matter. The worm castings (worm poo) are harvested as a rich garden manure and organic liquid fertilizer (worm tea) can be harvested.” <-I got that from my first step of my niche research by Google'ing the next search…



Doing this gave me a list of Wikipedia or other quick wiki info that explains a bit about the subject you are researching. If you already know a lot about the subject you wont even need to do this step, but not all niche ideas will be that popular to you. So now I have a general idea of what worm farming is all about, but I still don't really know how popular it is yet? To get a general idea of how popular it is you can use the Google Keyword tool to tell you how many people are searching for the keyword "Worm Farm".

So I go online and pull up the Google Keyword Tool in my browser. I then enter the keyword "worm farm" into the search box, like this....



I then select the Broad/Exact/Phrase icons on the left side of the page to tell me if searchers are using this keyword in a different broad order -> "farm worm", or exactly as written -> "worm farm", or in order, but in a phrase -> "my worm farm smells like snakes" ...



Now I am given three different numbers of people searching for worm farms each month. Plus a bigger list of related terms and keywords that can also be pretty handy.



You wanna pay more attention to the exact and phrase columns in these numbers which will give you a better idea of popularity. 8000 exact and 33k phrase which are pretty good numbers, and mean that people are pretty interested in this topic, so I'm pretty sure this keyword/niche will have some traction. ## I am no SEO guru expert by any means, and much more goes into this stuff than I'll ever be able to explain here, but I just hope to give you a general idea. ##

Another thing you can do to gauge popularity is to visit a bookstore or magazine cart and try to find publications on the topic. Remember that you may not find an exact magazine for the topic, but you can look in a gardeners magazine or some kind of general topic related to your niche idea.

I will also enter worm farms in Amazon at this point to see how many(if any) products are already listed, and how many reviews they have. I'll also be looking for category rank, and recent reviews to make sure it's a current trend and not something that sold well back in caveman days(2009-2011



So now I have an idea of what worm farms are, a general idea of people searching for that term, and a bunch of worm farms already listed on Amazon with great reviews and doing very well in the categories. This looks like it could be a pretty good niche to go onto the next step with!

I actually came up with my own niche idea in a conversation with my Mother-In-Law. She was talking about a certain product she loves to buy in all shapes and sizes, but that had not really changed in a few years. So I went home and basically did what I outlined above. My numbers are 7k exact, and 135k phrase. I also really liked the idea of creating my own updated product in this niche. But I still have some checking to do first which will probably be in the next update.

 

[ableme]

Another way to get an accurate count on how much traffic a keyword gets is to try this old Google Adwords trick I used to do. You can even do this if you don't already have a website in that niche yet.

What I would do is setup a new Adwords campaign targeting the keyword(s) I was researching at that time. Google Adwords at the time gave you an idea of estimated traffic/costs, but I would just go ahead anyway and setup my ad and daily budget which was usually about $10-15. But rather than target the top 1-3 ads that run on the results page, I would usually target a 4th or 5th spot on the first page so that I would feature within the top page ads, but also not get that many clicks. I would then keep checking how many impressions my ads are getting on that first Google page to find out how many searches the keyword is getting.

Most of the time when I did this I would not even get close to my daily budget, but get a great idea on traffic numbers. When I did not have a website in that niche yet, I would pick out a relevant good quality website lower down the rankings and just start an ad campaign using someone else's website, knowing I would hardly spend a thing on clicks. Usually after a couple of hours you will start to get numbers back that you can look at and decide from there if this keyword/niche would be worth it or not. I also used this technique in Bing as well.

 

[ableme]

I've been working on finding product selections and taking a closer look at what competition I will be up against if I go ahead in this niche. It seems I would have lots of different products to pick from to fill my store, but I will have some pretty good competition ahead of me. The good thing is that the comp does not really seem to be using social media much, which could be to my advantage?

Today I've also been looking for suppliers and wholesalers to see what my options would be for purchasing products. I want to get a good list of at least 3-5 different options. I'm just using Google and playing around with searches to narrow down the results. For example(using worm farms again).....



This will narrow down the search to websites that contain both "wholesale" and "worm farms" within the text. You will still have to do some digging around because not all the results will be what you are looking for, but it's a good way to start. Here are the first six results from that search..



If you keep getting the same website show up in these searches that does not offer what you are looking for, just use it in a (-)negative search on the end of the term -> "wholesale" + "worm farms" -"website url or keyword" <- I'll get rid of that hubpages.com url from the previous results by doing this...



Now hubpages is gone. You can also use this method to filter out keywords you do not want to appear.

Other related searches to find wholesalers/suppliers in your niche...

"suppliers" + "worm farm"
"distributor" + "worm farm"
"distribution" + "worm farm"
"wholesale login" + "worm farm"
"wholesale account" + "worm farm"

Todays goal: 3-5 wholesale/supply options

 

[Arif.T]

thanks for being detailed about this, very appreciated by those of us who know absolutely nothing about how things work on the internet

 

[1step]

Great thread, this doesnt seem to have gotten a ton of notice yet but you have given a ton of information that will help a lot of people. Thanks, and I hope more people come to thank you for the value here

 

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[psaco131]

Thanks for this information, ableme. Another great strategy of many to find a niche.

 

[4runner]

Thanks for this valuable information! Looking forward to hearing updates!

 

[ableme]

Was able to find about four good sources for products, so emailed each one with a request for wholesale prices, MOQ, and shipping options. A couple of them are pretty close to my location which should keep shipping costs manageable when and if I start to place orders with them.

I did get a couple of replies already from two different companies, one of them is a manufacturer who emailed me wholesale prices and terms. The other is a distributor who wants $1500 on my account before I place any orders.

Accounts will be set up as credit or cash on account. If cash on account we will require a minimum of $1,500 on account to draw orders from. We do not charge per order.

As I'm starting this on a tight budget I cannot yet commit to that kind of investment right off the bat, but will keep it open as an option later on down the road.

I purchased a couple of niche related magazines after work today to try and learn a bit more about what I could be getting myself in to. And I also had the idea to try the iTunes store to see if I could track down any podcasts/podcasters that could eventually help me promote my website when it's ready.



Which got me here...



That first result is pretty popular so I'll click further into this podcast to try and get some contact details.



Now I have a podcast and the podcaster, I can now Google them to find the main website.



Bingo! Another contact that I can email and see if she would be interested in eventually promoting my website when it goes live, or maybe she would be up for some kind of a sponsored message at the start of each podcast?

Now I can go back to iTunes and add the other podcasters to a "need to contact" file.

I'm still not 100% sold on this niche yet! But I figured while I wait for the other suppliers to get back to me, I can at least do some groundwork on some marketing and promotion research for the future.

 

[ableme]

I've been looking at some of the wholesale prices I have received to get an idea on margins. I also located some of the products on Amazon to check prices, reviews, comp, and also category ranking. I may even make a couple of purchases of these products and then relist them under my own FBA account to see how fast they sell. Obviously i'd be taking a loss, but If I buy a few of them it should give me a better understanding on what my ROI would be, even if the margins are tighter?

 

[icey502]

Thanks for the detailed write-ups, very interesting to follow along.

 

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[FiveOone]

Lots of great info Ableme, so thankyou! Looking forward to your updates.

 

[ableme]

Lots of great info Ableme, so thankyou! Looking forward to your updates.

You are very welcome! Starting a progress thread really holds you accountable, and also helps keep everything in one post. I figured I'd be as detailed as I could on this journey so that I would have something to look back on to track what I did right, and what I did wrong...... it's a work in progress. :coolgleamA:

Glad it helps ya.

 

[stranger]

It seems I have always been the person that’s been looking to walk off the sidewalk, cross over the slow lane, and then take a drive in the Fastlane! But at that time I just didn't know what they were all called? Thanks to The Millionaire Fastlane I’m now here and aiming to learn, help, and in general be around like-minded people.

I've probably purchased more so-called “guru” how-to ebooks than a wanna-be Buddhist! More crash courses than a blind driving Nun! But everything I seemed to do was either old news, bad news, or just outright wrong.

As an example, I tried the Google PPC to an affiliate product technique, and in one day made $220 which at the time was more than I’d ever done before, I thought I had made it! The next day, I was banned from Adwords by Google! Then I followed another ebook all about blogs and Google Adsense, but a couple of weeks after the website vanished from the rankings. Then I had somewhat of a good thing going with an affiliate E-commerce website I had setup, until they changed the State tax law and introduced that Amazon/affiliate tax bill, meaning all my out-of-state affiliate companies dropped me like a stone.

However it’s all been a great learning experience for me, and in that time I learned how to code and build websites, do my own website SEO, learned basic PHP, and just got a general idea of what not to do basically. But the biggest thing I learned was that everything I tried was of no real value to anyone but me! I was only in it for the money, and the dream that I could eventually quit my day job and fire my own boss.

After all these lessons learned I really want to create something of value and something that is just more than me, something I can be proud of. So I wanted to start a progress thread that would chart my own progress toward an E-commerce business (real products), and eventually the creations of my own products in that niche. I will also aim to earn enough from this business to be able to leave my current job and do this full-time/part-time/whatever time-I-want, in eight months or less!

I’m hoping to be as transparent as I can while I progress through this journey, but obviously keep certain things close to my chest for now. So…. some of the character names(products) have been changed, and the main title of the movie(niche) will also be adjusted a little, but whatever I use for examples they will be as close as possible to my real targets numbers.

I’ve been selling on Amazon FBA for the last year as a pro merchant, and mostly using retail arbitrage techniques to find and sell inventory. I also dabbled in a few products from Alibaba manufacturers that I also sold on Amazon, but unfortunately due again to my inexperience hardly made any profit on two of them, and the third product was sold at a loss! But the experience was worth so much more. And at least everything sold!

As many of you will know the “retail arbitrage” system of finding products and selling them at a profit is a great way to start, but hard to scale if you can only buy a couple of products at a time(depending on that stores stock). But with experience you can find some great sources, or at least enough inventory to keep the profits coming in.

I will fund this project at first using retail arbitrage and FBA for now, as well as my own funds when and if it’s needed. I’m going to try and cover every step I take, but if I miss something, please feel free to ask away, and please jump in with any tips and advice along the way. ## I apologize in advanced for my poor grammar and punctuation ##

So with all that being said, here is my plan of action….

1) Find and research a niche ( already may have an idea on this )
2) Establish/research product selections
3) Research comp
4) Find suppliers/manufacturers
5) Probability of creating my own product
6) Buy domain
7) Setup E-commerce store
8) Fill with products
9) Start creating my own product
10) Add it to my store

Some background costs to start…..

LLC already formed (2012) – Legal Zoom Express Gold - $800
Amazon FBA Pro Account - $39 pm – 1 year so far - $468

Some life targets to aim for...

1. Work less hours at day job 1-4 months
2. Not work at all at the day job 8 months

My starting balance for this thread: - $1200

I didn't see how you would be going to promote your project/store in your list. It is easy to create a website, but it isn't easy to drive quality traffic to it. If you sell goods at ebay or amazon, you don't care about SEO much. You just need to put clear images and cool descriptions of your products at all. But running your own online store is another story.

 

[ableme]

I didn't see how you would be going to promote your project/store in your list. It is easy to create a website, but it isn't easy to drive quality traffic to it. If you sell goods at ebay or amazong, you don't care about SEO much. You just need to put clear images and cool descriptions of your products at all. But running your own online store is another store.

Oh sure! And thanks for pointing that out to me Stranger, I appreciate your reply and input.

I touched on one of the steps I would be taking by using podcasts to get the word out, but of course I will be looking at using other methods like Bing PPC, Facebook Ads, Magazine Ads, related blog posts, and also videos. I've setup many Wordpress sites in the past and also built my own websites using PHP, but I think for this one I'll be using BigCommerce or a similar platform? I've no real experience with Ecommerce platforms outside of Amazon Webstore, and my old affiliate marketing sites. So this will be new to me also, and one of the reasons I started this thread to get some advice and suggestions along the way.

Do you have any suggestions on self hosted cart solutions, Stranger?

 

[Eskil]

Nice..! This is a great thread with already lots of useful info for those people who are just wanting to get into the Fastlane.

Speed+ for action-taking and detailed posts.

 

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[Pete799p]

This thread is amazing so far and I would like to thank you/ encourage you to keep it coming. I attended an ecommerce seminar the other day and I can say that I have learned more in the 15min it took me to read this then in the three hours, don't worry it didn't cost thousands of dollars I had some free time and wanted to see what he had to say.

Again thanks.

 

[stranger]

Oh sure! And thanks for pointing that out to me Stranger, I appreciate your reply and input.

I touched on one of the steps I would be taking by using podcasts to get the word out, but of course I will be looking at using other methods like Bing PPC, Facebook Ads, Magazine Ads, related blog posts, and also videos. I've setup many Wordpress sites in the past and also built my own websites using PHP, but I think for this one I'll be using BigCommerce or a similar platform? I've no real experience with Ecommerce platforms outside of Amazon Webstore, and my old affiliate marketing sites. So this will be new to me also, and one of the reasons I started this thread to get some advice and suggestions along the way.

Do you have any suggestions on self hosted cart solutions, Stranger?

I use opencart. I find opencart isn't the stuff. But it is free and it was 1 of the best when i re-built our store 3 years. Also there are many options.
About hosting; hostgator is favoririte one. Trust me i tested many other hosting companies, and we lost our money and our customers with those crappy hosts.
I've never dealt with Bigcommerce yet. I see their ads around in the internet every day. They offer free trial 14 days. Sure, you may test this stuff. As for me, if a customer cannot visit your store with his/her mobile, your store is like from the 20 century. Seems BigCommerce has no this problem.

 

[ableme]

Nice..! This is a great thread with already lots of useful info for those people who are just wanting to get into the Fastlane.

Speed+ for action-taking and detailed posts.

Thanks Eskil! That means a lot coming from you!

This thread is amazing so far and I would like to thank you/ encourage you to keep it coming. I attended an ecommerce seminar the other day and I can say that I have learned more in the 15min it took me to read this then in the three hours, don't worry it didn't cost thousands of dollars I had some free time and wanted to see what he had to say.

Again thanks.

Thanks Pete! I'm glad you're getting some good info from it. I'll keep posting as much information as I can along the way and try to be as detailed as possible.

I use opencart. I find opencart isn't the stuff. But it is free and it was 1 of the best when i re-built our store 3 years. Also there are many options.
About hosting; hostgator is favoririte one. Trust me i tested many other hosting companies, and we lost our money and our customers with those crappy hosts.
I've never dealt with Bigcommerce yet. I see their ads around in the internet every day. They offer free trial 14 days. Sure, you may test this stuff. As for me, if a customer cannot visit your store with his/her mobile, your store is like from the 20 century. Seems BigCommerce has no this problem.

I've been using Hostgator for years as well, and they always seem to be available to help me out in times of need. But as with anything I'll always keep my options open of course.

 

[stranger]

So I go online and pull up the Google Keyword Tool in my browser. I then enter the keyword "worm farm" into the search box, like this....

View attachment 5067

I then select the Broad/Exact/Phrase icons on the left side of the page to tell me if searchers are using this keyword in a different broad order -> "farm worm", or exactly as written -> "worm farm", or in order, but in a phrase -> "my worm farm smells like snakes" ...

View attachment 5068

Now I am given three different numbers of people searching for worm farms each month. Plus a bigger list of related terms and keywords that can also be pretty handy.

View attachment 5069

You wanna pay more attention to the exact and phrase columns in these numbers which will give you a better idea of popularity. 8000 exact and 33k phrase which are pretty good numbers, and mean that people are pretty interested in this topic, so I'm pretty sure this keyword/niche will have some traction. ## I am no SEO guru expert by any means, and much more goes into this stuff than I'll ever be able to explain here, but I just hope to give you a general idea. ##

Sorry, i'm not a seo guru too. but Worm farm = About 5,080,000 results in google. So, it would be difficult to be in top 10 with this keyword phrase. I just thought i should say this.

 

[ableme]

Sorry, i'm not a seo guru too. but Worm farm = About 5,080,000 results in google. So, it would be difficult to be in top 10 with this keyword phrase. I just thought i should say this.

It maybe difficult, but don't let that stop you in your tracks. You have to take into account how well the comp is optimized, and also what they are doing with their websites. 5mill may seem like a lot, but it's actually not too bad if you compare it with other keywords. And don't just limit yourself to Google and getting in that top ten because it's not all about that anymore. You now have options for so many other traffic sources that some of the websites in the Google top ten are not even using yet.

Think of it like a book theme! The book might be about gardening(main niche) which has tons of competition, but it contains many different chapters(related smaller keywords) that people love to read about, but don't find in many gardening books, and this could be why they may have purchased the book in the first place.

Hope that makes sense?

 

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[Lewis187]

Sorry, i'm not a seo guru too. but Worm farm = About 5,080,000 results in google. So, it would be difficult to be in top 10 with this keyword phrase. I just thought i should say this.

Stranger - Sorry but this is NOT a good indicator to use. If we all were to use the number of results Google throws back none of us would enter any niche. As you say you are not an SEO guru, nor am I but I know SEO and what you say is just quoting what you have heard elsewhere. If you have tested your own SEO you would know this to be complete rubbish.

The real competition is the top 10 sites ranking on the first page, NON of the other results matter as they are not your competition - The top ten sites are.

Look at the #1 ranked site backlinks (I use OpenSiteExplorer from SEOMoz), are they relevant high PR links? How many do they have? What is the page rank of the #1 site? How old is the site, is the content good?

These are metrics that can help give a guide to the competition...not how many results Google give.

 

[stranger]

I agree with you total; 5M+ isn't a great number. My website was 4 and 5 in the top 10 among 20M. All is possible, but it takes a long time.

Stranger - Sorry but this is NOT a good indicator to use. If we all were to use the number of results Google throws back none of us would enter any niche. As you say you are not an SEO guru, nor am I but I know SEO and what you say is just quoting what you have heard elsewhere. If you have tested your own SEO you would know this to be complete rubbish.

The real competition is the top 10 sites ranking on the first page, NON of the other results matter as they are not your competition - The top ten sites are.

Look at the #1 ranked site backlinks (I use OpenSiteExplorer from SEOMoz), are they relevant high PR links? How many do they have? What is the page rank of the #1 site? How old is the site, is the content good?

These are metrics that can help give a guide to the competition...not how many results Google give.

 

[ableme]

The last couple of days have been spent emailing distributors and manufacturers and supplying them with the information they need to create an account. This is where my sales tax id # comes in handy because it limits the amount of other people that can sign up, so it gets rid of the sellers that do not have a State issued permit.

I'm also tracking a few products on Amazon in a spreadsheet to keep an eye on the rise and fall of them in the category rankings. This will give me a general idea over the next few days on how well an item is selling. So for example, the first result using a "worm farm" search on Amazon brings me to this product.



Uncle Jim's Blah Blah Blah.... First impressions are good because I do not see the Amazon Prime icon next to it, which means no current FBA sellers! Reviews look great with 401 and 5 1/2 stars, but I'd dig deeper into that in a bit. 6 other offers currently listed which means not a lot of seller competition. If I click on the product to get to the detail page I can find out a little more.



As soon as I hit the page I see a reason why the seller comp is low, and also why it does not yet have any FBA sellers! All because of the next two lines...



And...



So the product is produced by Uncle Jims Worm Farm, and also sold on Amazon by Uncle Jim's Worm Farm. So the chances of getting a better wholesale price than the actual manufacturer is very low, which is a shame because it has a great rank....



And by going down to the bottom of the comments and clicking on this link....



You can see that this product has a ton of recent reviews, even from today! So this along with the category rank tells me that the product is selling like hot cakes!



So I don't think this product would be a good choice for me on my Amazon FBA account, but might be a great product to carry on my own website if I can get a good price on it?

I'm checking into at least ten different products like the one above and will enter them into my spreadsheet. The reason I picked them was because they are listed on a couple of the wholesale sheets the suppliers sent me, and also have a pretty good wholesale price. Not all the products are as HOT as the one above which is why I'm tracking a broad range of selections. But having this spreadsheet and monitoring it over time can open my eyes to a rising star that may start to fly up the rankings.

I'm thinking that if I start with around 5-10 different products and sell them on Amazon while I build my website, I can get a good idea on what products to carry when I launch it.

My goal for this week:

1) At least two distributor/supplier accounts created
2) 3-5 product ideas to place a small first order
3) Research E-commerce platforms
4) Research possible domain name options

 

[ableme]

Late last night after work I spent some time planning promotion/marketing ideas that I could implement after my website goes live. I've used Press releases in the past with some good results, but sometimes they can be a little expensive if you are on a budget like me! So I put together a few targeted areas that I could possibly get the best results from if I do use a PR, by using Google Trends.

My thinking behind this is that if I can find specific areas to target, I wont just put out an aimless PR and hope for the best. But I could also find local newspapers, bloggers, radio shows, and magazines to target, which may not cost me near as much as a huge national release.





What you see above is search "interest over time" for "worm farm". It does not show real search numbers but just a representation on a scale of 0-100 with 100 being the higher of course. But it does allow you to see trends and seasonality on a nice visual display. The letters along this track (E, D, C, B, A) are news items that Google picks up along the way. (Mouse over each letter to view it)



You can see the exact news story related to your search term, and where it came from. If you click on some of them it will take you to the page so you can read the full article if it's still available online. I took notes on where the news came from, and took a look at the graph to see if it had any effect on the tracking of searches after it's release.

The next thing I did was change the time limit on my trend to "Past 12 Months" by using the Limit to field on the left of the screen. By default it's set to 2004-present, but I want to look at more recent trends.



Google Trends can also give you related search terms(keywords) as well as breakout & rising searches.



I added a couple of these extra terms to my worm farm search to see how they perform. You can do this simply by adding extra search terms in the box on the left.



Here is the results with new terms added, and date set to "Past 12 Months". So you can see that worm farm is still the better performer.



Notice the steady climb in the trend? But before I got too excited I realized the dip was pretty much over winter, which I guess the worms hate as much as I do! But that's great info to keep in mind when I see a dip in sales during Oct,Nov,Dec,Jan,Feb. At least I can plan on that now.

But I don't want to get too much into the keywords here, what I want to study is this next section!



Regional Interest!

Another nice map display showing you where the heavy searches are coming from by depth of color(darker blue being heavy searches). So right off the bat you can see that Australia and New Zealand seem to home the most crazed worm farm fans! This could be a bad sign being based in the US if most of your buyers are located in another part of the world. But if you click on the US you can break the popularity down by State.



Now I can see a birds-eye view of the locations/States most of the higher searches are coming from. If you mouse over the States you will be shown the State and the Search Engine Volume Index (0-100) of that particular State. So this would tell me that people in Washington are more interested in worm farms than people in New Mexico, which has zero(0) interest! ->



On some search terms you can even narrow this down by City, which is even better, but would probably mean much higher competition!

Now I have a great idea on where future possible customers are located, I'll print out my trend map as a reminder of the following things....

Interested Buyers (searchers)
Possible Local Press Releases
Local Bloggers
Targeted Google/Bing/Facebook/Craigslist Ads
Local TV
Local Related Events

I figure that a local newspaper press release will not cost as much as using a service like PR Web, but even if I do use PR Web I can now target my PR much better than before.

Another possible benefit of using this technique is that if I use drop shipping distribution, then I might want to start looking for companies based near or at least closer to my customers(Washington), which would keep shipping costs lower than using a company shipping from Maine.

Hope that helps!

 

[ableme]

First distributor account is now active!



I thought I'd go all covert and cover up some info like in a UFO document! I really could have just wrote it down, but what fun is that?:coolgleamA:

The only problem with this distributor is that they also sell to the public, and I just found them on Amazon as well. I really should have looked into this better before signing up, but it will be a good lesson for the future. I also went back to the other distributors I'm looking at to double check they are not doing the same thing. However looking over their wholesale prices and comparing them to the original manufacturer, they are only about 30-60cents higher.

Now some advice needed...

Some of the distributors offer drop-shipping options which I've had no real experience with in the past. I was thinking it would be better to get the products shipped to my location so I could use self-fulfillment, and also have the option to ship to my FBA account if I wanted.

What's your thoughts on drop shipping verses shipping to my location?

 

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[OzzieRob]

So right off the bat you can see that Australia and New Zealand seem to home the most crazed worm farm fans!

Yes, we are definately fans of at home worm farming. Our large hardware store Bunnings carry the black plastic tubs, cover mats and lime powder to keep the soil not too acidic.

 

[ableme]

Last week I only managed to get one distributor account setup, so I spent the weekend and yesterday sending follow up emails to my other prospects. One just replied to let me know I was approved and I should have full access to the product database in the next couple of days.

Today I spent the last couple of hours scouting for products to sell on Amazon to get me some more funds for this project! I found two really promising items that I added to my scouting watch list to track them over the last few days. I'm looking for higher margin products that can at least get me a $100 return minimum, as well as something I think can sell pretty quick.

Product #1:

Cat: Electronics
Price: $249.99
Amazon Price: $440
Fee: $41.95
Profit: $148!

- Newer product available but still seems to be getting regular reviews, which means this product is still selling pretty well.

Product #2:
Cat: Camera & Photo
Price: $799.99
Amazon Price: $1400
Fee: $113
Profit: $487!

- If I sell this product I'll bring in a $487 profit which would be awesome! But, with $1048 left in the project account it will leave me with $248.01 after I purchase it. Of course if all goes to plan and I sell this product I'll be left with a nice $1535! I'm looking at reaching $2000 by the end of this month to put back into a new ecommerce store for my niche.

I'll head out in the morning with product #2 as the main target!

 

[barbarian]

don't forget to keep actualiced the threat

 

[Amail]

don't forget to keep actualiced the threat

What?