Key Word Research, Site plan & Costing

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Everyone celebrates events; all people of all markets, locations, cultures celebrate events of some kind or the other. Events are a part of life. Everything big or small is an event and when we die those who attend our wake to remember us do so by reflecting on, in the most parts big events in our lives so the generic form of this topic reaches as wide an audience as we could want. Events need attendees, entertainers, planners, caterers, guests, invitations, RSVP management, ticketing and the list goes on - this means I could target any one of these doorways for long-tail keywords representing commercial intent and I would find myself with pages in front of thousands of people who are likely candidates for the right event related product and ready to spend money every single day.

Now that I have a clear understanding of what the opportunity is I need to determine just what the product is going to be. I will usually take 4 keyword phrases from my list and dig off of these words using my work research tool and build more targeted lists of words and phrases geared around my newly defined events based business opportunity that i am now looking to define. I then sort this list into categories and string the most searched phrases into a list under each category heading. My categories in this instance Invitations, Marketing, Entertainment, Catering etc.

Next to each keyword phrase in my lists I add a column, in this column I list proposed content or a particular product or service that I feel would solve the searchers problems. Now, at this stage I have just built myself a list of content based on key word phrases people are currently searching, likely product types and services that are going to satisfy these peoples needs and or wants within a specific niche market that I know has high internet usage volume with an increasing trend of people turning to the internet for solutions and its a niche I am interested in. Phew.

This list is gold, my friends, and it is all you need to design a website’s content pages, products and services to succeed online. Building it and driving traffic to it is another story altogether.

Now, the Event Listed application’s functionality and blogging content has been derived from this exact process, which makes it easy for me because I know I am not going to have to struggle to find traffic blindly after I have invested in the site / product. You can be confident that if you know how to build a good website & how to drive traffic to it, then you can spend the right money on it. If raising capital, you can imagine how much easier it is going to be if you want to show investors the process you have followed in determining the opportunity.

How Much Money will it take?

The first thing I do when calculating costs for a site is sketch out all of the pages I think I am going to require for the site. I do this from the list and I add the keywords as the title of each page.

I take my list of pages and categories then map out my site structure into tables starting with my index page at the top, branching down to the first level of major category pages off the index onto the 2nd and third level of pages. Now we do have a lot of SEO considerations here that i will go into more detail on in another post. Once I have my tree layout done I list my pages under each of the major pages and I branch off each page listings as much functionality I think each page requires at this early stage.

I use mind mapping software to draw the site layout tree. I then sketch out a rough power point presentation that articulates the page layout I want for each of my sites pages, I highlight the links to all of the functionality within my pages onto each page layout. My naming convention for each page is key word phrase specific so starting with my index page I can work through the power point slides and follow the pages I am looking at in my site overview layout tree on my mind map so that I can see where each page sits within the site.

The way I cost a site at such an early stage is to go into sites like Rent a Coder, Freelance.com, Elance.com and search their database by sellers. I find the most popular sellers and I look through their past work to find sites that are similar to the site that I believe we are going to require.

I will even go so far as to contact site owners or webmasters to ask them what they paid for the site to be developed and if they did it themselves how many man hours it took. My view is that the good developers are always busy through existing clients. By posting your jobs on these kind of trade sites you are asking to become swamped by developers who are bidding because they need work. These providers need work for a reason and these reasons are more than likely not to ones that should fill buyers with confidence.

I always shop for providers in these sites and will always approach the best. I never post jobs to the mercy of the masses and hope a good developer bids and that I choose the right bid. The odds of getting this right are long odds & getting it wrong means wasted time and money which can lead to the end of an opportunity before it begins.

With an estimate on the site design costs, I need to forecast the cost of marketing the site to get it in front of my market using the internet as my delivery platform. I start with a rough outline of the blogs & articles I want to be posting daily to ensure the domain hosts recent and relevant content each day by the search engines. I search Elance, Feelance.com and craigslist.com at absolutely zero cost to find a data base of talent from all over the world. I approach the contractors my research has confirmed deliver the best quality work and I send them a brief asking for quotes.

With my site costs estimated in and the cost of writers quoted, it’s now a matter of calculating the cost of traffic. The quickest traffic you can get to a site is pay per click (PPC) advertising and the daddy of them all in this space is Google. So again, this isn’t rocket science; I set up a Google Adwords campaign and add all of my list categories with variations and let them run. I will run $1000 or more though Adwords sending people to other people’s sites in my target niche with the sole aim of collecting live market data.

Now some might determine that paying out $1000 in pay per click advertising to send people to competitors web pages is a sure fire way not to succeed. Like a lot of things in life its a simple case of changing your own outlook to see riches that have always sat before you.

At the end of this process that will have cost me some time and $1000 I will have, 1- my list of keyword phrases my target market are searching for, 2- the problems the market have that represent these searches, 3- the solutions I need to offer to solve their problems , 4- the number of estimated searches each phrase is being searched per day, 5- the maximum cost per visitor it is going to cost me to get traffic to my site, if I only apply PPC; and 6- a confirmed number of times in a day that ads targeting these keyword phrases are being pressed into web pages and shown to the people searching them. I even know what kind of click through rate I can expect for each phrase.

Now these results are by no means a dead accurate forecast on what the business is going to cost you to market but you show me a market research company who will do your diligence on any new business opportunity and deliver this kind of information for $1000. I add these estimates in cost per visitor against the keyword phrases I already have listed in my spreadsheet. As I start picking and choosing the web pages that I feel the site is going to need to make money I am fully aware of the maximum cost per visitor to each page as I am choosing them for the site.

What we now have is factual data on the simplest & most immediate technique, as well as the volume of visitors we can expect to a page daily by executing the most immediate, least cost effective strategy for driving traffic, in a way that any newbie can do. We use good old fashion excel to do our forecasting. With this kind of data now at our fingertips it’s simply a matter of estimating the site design, the products or services we will be selling off our pages then forecasting the sites traffic conversions and sales conversions to forecast revenue over time.

In our profit and loss sheet we include entries for revenue then deduct the cost of traffic through our page impressions, click through rates and costs per click. It’s not hard to do, anyone with excel skills can do it - I usually break these forecasts down to the lowest common denominator so that I have the income and cost variables per key word phrase in my lists which enables me to play with my variables and keyword combinations to see what the most profitable combination of pages and products are going to bring relevant to traffic and volume.

What this shows me is an estimate on the margins I can expect to earn versus the volume of sales we are going to require in order to be profitable if paying an absolute premium per visitor to the site. Knowing I can cut the cost of traffic per visitor by hundreds of percentage points from the cost of paying Google per click I have enough data to work with to complete the design of my new website knowing how I am going to monetize it, with good estimates on gross margins and my most expensive cost base per sale. The aim is to introduce dynamics into your research that will drive you into choosing a profitable niche & designing a profitable website based on information that is available to you, information that represents what is currently happening and will continue to grow in volume.


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