WHEW – building an on online affiliate store is a lot of work – that is if you go about it the right way. The key is research followed by more research and so on but at some point, the rubber needs to hit the road - or in our case - the boots need to hit the trail.

In the building of Sandboxspots.com, we’ve been doing our due diligence on keyword research and studying the terms and phrases that people are actually
searching for concerning sporting goods and sports apparel.

We’ve been using some pretty sophisticated keyword research tools that are beyond the scope of this post to expound on. In future posts we’ll be discussing what some of these metrics are that are driving our strategy.

The important note here is that we’re going where the market is vs. creating a business model and then trying to bring the market to us. We don’t have that type of advertising budget! Once the site is set up, we’ll collect opt-in data that we’ll eventually use to further satiate the appetite of our hungry, athletic customers. This is where our real marketing muscle will come into play.

For now, we’ve established a few themes that will be set up as directories on the new site and then further subdivided into appropriate categories. For example, one of our themes will be related to the hiking niche.

According to the Keyword Selector Tool at Overture, “hiking” specifically, is a keyword term that was searched for 21715 times last month alone. The rule of thumb is to triple that number of queries to account for the exact same keyword searches conducted on other search engines including Google and MSN.

We’re actually using software that gives us far more accurate data than this simple rule of thumb approach but nonetheless, the Overture approach provides us with a quick snap shot of a given niche and whether the niche warrants further investigative research.

We’re continuing to build out the themes that we’ll be getting started with at sandboxsports.com but we’ve already started the creation of content for sports that will be featured for certain. These will include hiking, golf, scuba diving, skiing, fishing as well as certain fitness themes such as yoga and massage.

We are also setting up our affiliate/merchant agreements with world class distributors through Commission Junction (and direct) and we will of course match our content to products that include powerhouse brand names such as Adidas, Oakley and North Face to name a few.

So these are some of the broad strokes of what we’ve been up to and the marketing trail we’re following. There are lots and lots of details to sort through and the possibilities are amazing. Stick with us, and we’ll keep you posted on the evolution of our little affiliate store that could.

The affiliate store system that we’ve posted about before is making the execution of these logistics manageable and achievable. There may still be some systems available so it’s worth opting in and vetting their sales letter if you haven’t already.
Happy marketing!

Tapping into the level of frustration and difficulty that your customers and prospects are experiencing in a given market is their problem and your opportunity. They have a thorn in their paw and your business proposition is just the solution that will effectively relieve their angst.

When you can discover issues that are your target audiences’ most pressing problems – issues that are not being satisfied anywhere else - you can position your business offering as the go to solution. Your customers will shout “Hey, they’ve got exactly what I’ve been looking for - and I couldn’t find it anywhere else!”

The best approach to unearthing pressing customer concerns is to survey them. And to discover the potential nuggets of gold from within your survey data, you’ll want to focus on the distinction between Point Of Difference Benefits vs. Price of Entry Benefits.

“Most people that take the time to survey their market really haven’t a clue how to use the information they gather and in fact, they allow their surveys to throw them way off the mark.” So says marketing research expert, Dr. Glenn Livingston.

Dr. Livingston is a certified psychologist who earns a nice living as a quantitative marketing research expert. He has completed highly successful studies for an impressive list of corporate brand names such as Bausch & Lomb, Whirlpool, and Nabisco. His cutting edge information is now available to small business marketers as well.

Too often, the data results of a survey can mislead a marketer because they interpret the frequency of a given response to be essentially the same thing as the importance of response. But these concepts are not created equally.

“For example” says Dr. Livingston, “if you do a survey of guinea pig searchers online, you’ll find people very frequently ask about how long a guinea pig lives. In fact, this will probably be the most common question you’ll get.

Now if you go out and design a product all about how long guinea pigs live, you’re gonna be out of luck pretty quickly because what you’ve discovered is not a purchase motivating benefit – it’s a ‘price of entry’ benefit.”

A price of entry benefit is a benefit that all products in a given market must have in order to even be considered by a purchaser. A point of difference benefit is something that “consumers perceive as hard to find answers to their pressing problems - these are where the real market gaps are - where you’ll find the best opportunities to shine” according to Livingston.

Continuing with the guinea pig market example, a more important question for someone marketing a book on guinea pigs might be how to determine the gender of a guinea pig before its two weeks old.

This information may not be seen as often in your survey responses, but its marked as a lot harder to find. The objective is to put enough of these tidbits together and you wind up being THE source to solve your clients’ most difficult problems. Solutions that they can’t find anywhere else.

And getting some Real Marketing Muscle might just be the solution to your own businesses’ most pressing problems. Solutions that your competitors don’t know about yet!

PricewaterhouseCoopers’ (PwC’s) has recently released its’ tenth annual Global CEO Survey. The findings reveal that the majority of the 1,100 CEOs surveyed are bullish about the prospects for revenue growth concerning their respective companies.

The CEOs represent businesses from 50 different countries with more than 90 percent of them expressing an expectation of business expansion that will be fuelled by improved market penetration, increased geographic expansion and more merger and acquisition activity - often across borders.

Among concerns, 73 percent of the respondents’ site over-regulation as the primary threat to conducting business followed closely with 72 percent seeing a lack of skilled labour as a challenge. 66 percent see low-cost competition as a threat to earnings.

65 percent see active engagement in social issues as a key factor in the recruitment and retention of employees. Surprisingly, 59 percent of respondents fail to see a threat of global warming or climate change as a major concern for business prospects.

Roughly 75 percent of these world CEOs agree that continued and sustainable globalization is beneficial for both developed and emerging markets. To download the report, go to 10th Annual Global CEO Survey.

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In the latest Idaho Business Review there is an intriguing article on ‘The Cheesecake Factory’ and their effective word-of-mouth marketing campaign and the success that followed. The company has been around for a staggering 28 years and has never formally advertised (television, radio, or print) while relying on only word-of-mouth advertising generated from high-quality experiences with memorable visits. The passionate customers who crave the company’s delicious cheesecake are all the marketing that Vice President of Business Development, Howard Gordon, needs to keep them coming back.

The Keller Fay Group, a new marketing research group, wants to find out what, where, how, when and why people talk about brands amongst their friends and family. This isn’t online ‘cookie’ tracking but the real deal of what people talk about face to face with one another. The research firm took a represenative sample of the population and have participants keep conversation diaries for sixth months. There were 18,000 people in the study and the firm is now ready to sell the data to companies.

It’s interesting to note that Kelly Fay discovered that people are discussing Wal-Mart, iPods, and other brand names. It’s interesting that brands in themselves and the actions or events they incur are the direct result of start up conversations amongst individuals.

A recent survey by Weber Shandwick reveals that consumer’s on-demand mindset is changing the way many marketing firms develop their strategies. The study reveals that firms should be focusing more on a company’s marketing strategy to achieve success. “Eight of of ten (CEOs) said there’s a tighter collaboration between product development and marketing” reveals the study. Consumers will benefit from the industry wide move by having more control over what products and services companies will offer.

A new survey by CTR Market Research revealed that teenagers in China’s metropolitan cities represent a large pool of emerging consumers whose habits should be closely monitored.Â� According to the new market survey, an estimated 44% of all teenagers in these Chinese cities have bank accounts and monthly income in excess of 200 yuan or $25 U.S. dollars.

The survey used a represenative population size of 8,000 students in 8 big cities. The survey revelaed the untapped consumer potential of this market used 62.5% of their monthly income on food and beverage items while spending nearly 50% of their monthly income on online games. The untapped market of online American made videogames in the Chinese market should be huge it was concluded. The technologically savvy Chinese teenagers also spent a large amount of their income on MP3 players, digital camera, and mobile celluar devices.

The purchasing habits that were revealed from this study should lead to the development of better targeted products in the country and countries of the European Union and North American states enter the Chinese market I can only assume. Read

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A growing trend amongst consumers is to avoid market researchers telephone questionnairres at all costs. It is as if most individuals interpert a market researcher as a telemarketer. The American Advertising Federation has developed guidelines for ethical market research tactics that include never attempting to smuggle in a sales pitch attached to a market research call or inquiry. The problem of marketing research has grown so immensely that a roundtable discussion was held at the Research Industry Summit on September 28th.

The most important issues at hand for the meeting included low response rates amongst market research surveys (under 10%), surveying the same individuals time and time again, the issue of cost, and varying results. During their meeting, the global heads of market research companies and top research executives found that the majority of nonrespondents to market surveys tended to be black, male, hispanic, and young. The majority of younger people (under 25) rely on cell phones only making it impossible to reach them by phone. Of the most obvious solutions developed, the marketing research team decided to follow in the footsteps of Nielsen Media Research which has actually been able to raise respondent rates over the past five years. Nielsen Media Research actually pays respondents for their time over a two year commitment period.� Some participants of the meeting also suggested making surveys shorter and less cumbersome.