Noble Samurai

Published: June 5th, 2009

Hi Team,

Market Research creates Market Understanding.

Market Understanding creates Market Leaders.

Market Leaders create opportunities in their markets – including the opportunity to choose the direction of your market, and the opportunity to make the greatest profits in a market.

But it all stems from Market Research.

If you’ve been reading Ed Dale’s blog recently, you’ll know that I’ve borrowed the “Market Research; Market Understanding; Market Leadership” mantra from him.

But today, I want to start making it “real” for you.

I want to show you a recently-added feature inside Market Samurai, and share with you some specific strategies for how to get the most value out of something that is so deceptively simple that practically everyone will overlook it…

…That is, everyone except you – because you’re reading this blog post right now.

So let’s open up Market Samurai, and open up some opportunities for Market Leadership…

Getting a Deeper Market Understanding

These new arrows appeared in the latest versions of Market Samurai.

Many of you have noticed them already (you’ll see them inside the SEO Competition and Keyword Research modules) – and their function is very simple…

Click them, and they will open up the raw data sources for you in a web-browser.

This means if you click on the Adwords Advertiser (AWA) numbers in the Keyword Research module, you’ll see the Adwords Advertisers for that keyword.

If you click on the Page Backlinks (BLP) you’ll be taken to a list of the external backlinks pointing to that page.

If you click on the SEO Competition (SEOC) counts in the Keyword Research module, you’ll see all of the web pages that mention the keyword phrase on their sites (all of your SEO competitors)

…And so on!

Simple, yes.

Important? Very.

The value of Digging Deeper

I’ll go into some specific examples of how to use this feature in a moment.

However, as I’ve mentioned already, the real value of going through this raw data manually is to become immersed in your market.

(Obviously this is for people who have already chosen a market – because if you did this for every market that potentially interested you, you could spend forever learning from other sites!)

By working out where, and how, your competitors are getting their links;

By working out what they are selling, how they’re marketing it, and what their price points are;

By working out what value your competitors are delivering to potential customers…

…You will understand the market better, and equip yourself to be the market leader.

And market leadership may be one of the few more valuable opportunities to you in your internet marketing.

What To Do Next

Open up Market Samurai, and start by clicking on the SEOC or AWA results in the Keyword Research module.

Use the results to “dig deeper” into your market and find out what you can discover about your competitors:

• What products do they sell, what price points are they selling at, and how are they pitching their products?
• Are there opportunities to improve your marketing strategy, and use some of their good ideas?
• Are there opportunities to get links from their sites? (Blogs, forums, links pages, etc)
• Are there opportunities to work together with the people who are already making money in the market?

Analyze the top 10 competitors in the SEO competition module too:

• What sites are they getting their backlinks from? Can you get backlinks from those sites too?
• Do they have any Government / Educational backlinks (.gov/.edu)? Can you also get links from the same places?

And analyze the content on the top sites in your market:

• What great information do they have, that you should also be talking about on your site?
• How are they communicating with their market / customers on an ongoing basis? (Feeding the flock)
• What value are they delivering to their market? How are they delivering it?
• With all this in mind, how can you deliver the greatest value to your customers? (Search engine rankings favor the value-makers)

This is how to cross over from using Market Samurai for SEO, to using Market Samurai for Market Understanding and Market Leadership.

So open up Market Samurai now, and play with this tiny new feature.

What do you discover about your market?

Brent