Finch Sells | Affiliate Marketing Blog

More Lucrative Niches Exposed With Global Market Finder

Sep 22 2011

Thanks to James Agate for this tip from the comments in the last post (Shouldn’t We Just Build Websites in Chinese?).

I was not at all familiar with Google’s Global Market Finder tool, until about 7 minutes ago. Maybe that has something to do with my own rocky relationship with Google, but I’m sure there will be many readers in the same boat.

Global Market Finder takes your keywords, translates them in to different languages, and examines the popularity and cost of those matches in various countries around the world.

Leading on from my last post, I think this is something that should prove super relevant for detecting trends and opportunities in countries that haven’t yet been saturated by competition.

I would certainly hesitate before staking my balls on the accuracy of Google’s data, but as a guideline to be used in correlation with other trends, it serves up some interesting information.

Once you’ve picked a keyword to research, you can compare data using the nine filters: Africa, Americas, Asia, Emerging Markets, Europe, European Union, G20, Middle East and Oceania.

Compare for example, the data of the G20 nations for a keyword like “lose weight” (and it’s many foreign equivalents), against an emerging market nation. The difference in bid prices is obviously significant, but will presumably narrow over the coming months and years.

G20 nations

Good volume but high click prices (suggests tough competition)

Emerging market nations

Decent volume, low prices... although currently, much less valuable traffic

‘Lose weight’ as a keyword may, understandably, take some time to catch on in countries like Indonesia where there isn’t half the obesity problem that we have on our hands in the west.

The real shocker on that list is Russia. Is it really the slimmest nation on Earth, or do their beached whales simply not give a shit?

Forgetting about Adwords altogether, we can use this tool to establish the demand for products in cultures that we might not be familiar with. You could spend an entire afternoon translating your keywords and measuring the search volume. But Global Market Finder does the chore of translation and comparison for you.

The incentive of knowing 380,000 Brazilians are looking to lose weight (every month) may just be enough to convince an affiliate marketer to dust down his Portuguese and rebrand those trashy landing pages.

“Finally, the acai berry comes home to Brazil.”

What about those of you who own digital products like ebooks? The brilliant thing about ebooks is that the cost of delivery is always the same.

There are many rapidly growing economies with consumers looking to flex their newly discovered purchasing power. If you can sell the same content, in a different language, to a willing market – surely it’s worth exploring?

Recommended This Week

Are you signed up to the Stack That Money Forum? It offers coaching from two of the best CPA bloggers in the biz, Mr Green and Mr Stackthatmoney. You’ll find a bunch of follow along case studies and some very generous knowledge dumps which you’d have to be an absolute muppet not to take value from. More info here.
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Shouldn’t We Just Build Websites In Chinese?

Sep 20 2011

I have a question for any bilingual readers of this blog, particularly those skilled in the art of SEO.

Do you find it easier to rank a website by building it in a foreign language?

This is something that has played on my mind for a long time now. One of the things that has always deterred me from SEO has been the sheer competition from millions of other English-speaking webmasters. I hate brushing shoulders with the urchins of Digital Point. The thought ruins my morning coffee.

It makes sense to me that somebody who has a perfect grasp of French, Spanish or German, would find life much easier to generate traffic when there isn’t such a global demand for the hottest keywords.

You don’t have to be speaking English to spend money. And most of us believe in the gigantic advantage of being first mover in a market.

My foreign experiments so far have extended to building landing pages in different languages and using the cheaper Facebook clicks to play arbitrage. This is something that I actively preach, and is rapidly becoming the best way for an affiliate to turn over a healthy margin – certainly on Facebook.

However, designing a website from the ground up and focusing an SEO campaign on ranking for foreign keywords is something that I haven’t nailed down. Surely it makes sense to do so?

It doesn’t even have to be the traditional affiliate website. Entire western web concepts can be ported abroad and matched to new markets where there is little or no competition. In some regions, that lack of competition is justified. There’s no money to be made. In other growing economies? Stepping out of your comfort zone seems like a lucrative step, dare I say it, logical even.

It’s no secret that the American economy is well and truly spitroasted, and Europe is hardly faring much better. The emerging economies of the world offer new opportunities, new growth and new demand.

Now while there are many reasons why China may not be ready for your lose weight fast campaigns, that’s not to say there aren’t areas that affiliates shouldn’t be seriously looking at and asking “How can I get a slice of that pie?”

I’m going to be running a personal experiment over the next 60 days to learn a brand new language and develop a website that caters to one of these emerging markets.

It’s going to take me to epic places that I’ve never been before (the library), but I hope that by the end of these 60 days, I can proudly showcase a sparkling new website that lines my account with pesos. Or rupees. Or magic beans.

Stay tuned to see the calamity unfold.

Recommended This Week

Are you signed up to the Stack That Money Forum? It offers coaching from two of the best CPA bloggers in the biz, Mr Green and Mr Stackthatmoney. You’ll find a bunch of follow along case studies and some very generous knowledge dumps which you’d have to be an absolute muppet not to take value from. More info here.
Lots of Ads is the latest service to offer spying capabilities over Facebook’s most profitable ads. The great appeal for me is the ability to spy on International markets including France, Spain, Argentina, Brazil and many more. Save time on translations and tap in to the most lucrative markets on Facebook. Definitely a worthy addition to your toolkit. First 20 customers only who use code FINCH11 will receive 10% off their lifetime subscription. Enjoy!
If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter Love you long time. Thanks for reading.

Workaholism: How To Self Destruct Completely

Sep 19 2011

Maintaining a healthy balance between work and home life is something that you can only truly monitor through the reactions of those who have to deal with you every day.

If you’re being asked to repeat your name to your confused children, the alarm bells should be ringing. If your wife reacts violently to the latest admission that you’ll be spending a night in the office, maybe it’s not her that’s being unreasonable.

Maybe workaholism has you by the balls.

These are warning signs and nothing less. Entrepreneurs are often praised with the positive attributes of being passionate, determined and willing to go the extra mile. Our greatest fault is that somewhere in the thick of it, our personal identity becomes so intertwined with the projects we’re working on that to be separated fuels resentment and a shitty attitude towards those who remember the more care-free caricatures we used to be.

It doesn’t matter how many times you explain the stressful nature of your work, it will always seem like a weak argument.

Most people judge stress by the battle for oxygen on a cramped morning commute, or the constant uncertainty of how a moody boss is going to lash out at them.

To see us sitting in our home offices, Spotify blaring to the max, makes it very difficult to understand how we can’t afford ourselves a simple Off switch. The ability to snap and morph in to the infinitely cooler husband, father or friend who reaps the rewards of his split personality’s sheer grit, rather than drowns in the magnitude of how much is yet to be achieved.

This type of in-fighting can prove more than destructive to a small business. Just because your home office is lacking the small red button marked “Self Destruct Completely”, don’t assume the same effect can’t be achieved through negligence and tunnel-vision.

It can, and in my case, it almost has.

One of the buzz words you will often hear mentioned alongside running a business is accountability. Without accountability, it’s impossible to drive a business forward. You won’t find a single entrepreneur in the world who doesn’t advocate the importance of discipline.

Unfortunately, discipline and accountability are double-edged swords.

If you start holding yourself accountable for the failure to realise long term goals, on a short term basis, your private life is going to suffer a body blow as you take this frustration out on everybody else. Not directly, but by allowing the workaholic in you to prosper and grow. It becomes the dominant personality.

It’s a great balancing act to be able to hold yourself accountable for short term failures, while still appreciating that when you work your bollocks off and the lucky break doesn’t materialise, patience is in order.

Self-destruction is almost guaranteed if you can’t differentiate between those elements of blame. The workaholic will grab any opportunity to dominate your life, but it’s an attitude that will never subside – even in the face of great success. It has to be controlled.

You have to hold yourself accountable for keeping the workaholic on a leash, not just exercising it regularly. Anything less and you have a wild untamed beast on your hands. Unfortunately, that beast is yourself.

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