Six Ninja Marketing Techniques and How Just One Got The Top Three Results In Google

Listen Like A Ninja – How To Make A Website Useful By Listening

(I honestly did not even know that gaining the top three results was possible in Google, especially with a website that only has nine pages!)

This is the second part in a case study where I am showing you step-by-step how you can start to build passive online income from useful niche authority sites. It will make up an important part of the six figures I plan to earn again.

In this post, I will explain how to define markets and the importance of doing so.  I have also been gathering some really awesome tools to help me listen like a ninja. From this market intelligence I have started creating new content and I want to share some some startling results – like the top 3 results for a search in Google I targeted.  

We often hear business success stories where someone listens and they make subtle yet profound changes.

Here is what the founder and CEO of Starbucks once said about listening:

“Listen with empathy and overcommunicate with transparency” ― Howard Schultz

In the online world, listening is arguably even more important to cut through the noise, and intuitively we all know that money flows when we create value from listening. 

Many of the tools I am about to share can be used when you are planning the content for a new site and also when you are growing a new site.

However before we start listening, we need to know who to listen to.

Who do we listen to?

Like Tim Ferriss, I am a big believer in the 80/20 rule (or Pareto principle) that says you should only focus on the tasks that contribute to the majority of the benefit.

I learned this the hard way working as a recruitment consultant in London. After months and months of struggling to make any money, I realized I was spending 80% of my day trying to help people that for one reason or another I could not assist with gaining employment. Meanwhile my business suffered and the 20% of those people I could help were finding employment through other means. As soon as I worked out what was going on my business took off and I went from almost losing my job to running a team of six as well as becoming the company top biller.

When marketing online it is REALLY easy to get sidetracked and focus on completely the wrong things. I find it much easier if I am clear about who my target market is. So when I find myself getting side-tracked I simply ask myself – “Is this benefiting my target market?”

Who are the 5 – 20% of people who are going to spend money in your niche?

For example, for my online training website that I outlined in the first post in this series I started with a simple list of potential prospects:

1. There are people who are learning about what courses they should do
2. There are people who are buying….. want to find the “best rsa course” or my EMD – “rsa courses online”
3. There are people who are doing the course

If possible, it makes a lot of sense to go after the low hanging fruit – first and usually forever. In my example above this is the people that are buying.

Now that we have defined the subset of customers we can help, let’s start listening.

Tools of Ninja Marketing

1) Twitter

I have found this to be pretty powerful in gaining insights into my market that I would have not otherwise thought of.

Every few days I simply type “rsa courses”, “rsa course” and “rsa training” into twitter and see what people are talking about. As you will see, this one method has already yielded some incredible results.

For example, I noticed a couple of tweets who were asking friends about finding the “cheapest rsa course”. This term had never occurred to me since I was focused on the highest quality courses and a reasonable cost. Cheap – is not what I wanted to target, but my market was.

I immediately knew I had to write a post, especially when I did a search and found the top results were not highly competitive.

Booyah!

Is it just me or is that seriously ninja? – Click to tweet how to listen like a ninja

Out of interest I am not actually targeting the Google.com market I am actually targeting the .com.au market, but it is just a matter of time.

2) Google Alerts

Kudos for this technique goes to Matt Woodward who guest posted in great detail how he uses Google alerts at Search Engine Journal. Lots of people talk a pretty good show about internet marketing but Matt makes it look easy.

Using Google alerts is free and easy to set up and is extremely good at providing insight into your market.

Here is the essence of how Google alerts works. In my case I am targeting “rsa courses”. All you need to do for your niche is substitute the “rsa courses” part to create new alerts for your target market.

Simply create alerts for each of these six questions people often ask.

1. How * rsa courses
2. Is * rsa courses
3. Can * rsa courses
4. When * rsa courses
5. Why * rsa courses
6. Will * rsa courses

The *, or wildcard, is a great feature that can be very powerful. If you include * within a query, it tells Google to try to treat the star as a placeholder for any unknown term(s) and then find the best matches.

I then repeated the above for “rsa course” and “rsa training” – based on keyword research this will yield the biggest results for me.

This technique has uncovered some excellent insight on my competition. Every day, I can see who is adding information to the online world.

In other niches, lots of news, forums and blog results will be revealed by this method. These can be used to discover new people and whole new networks that you can participate in and make your website that much more useful.

3) Feedback to posts/pages

Asking for specific “calls to action” at the end of each page is not only a good idea but you have just missed out on a wonderful opportunity if you do not “help” a visitor who has just read a page you created from start to finish.

For example on my RSA website, my calls to action are more about making a sale, but on cubicle free where I expect the sales funnel to be much longer I have been prompting feedback.

The trick, is not to say “please leave feedback…”, but to ask questions that actually prompt the visitor to think about the feedback they might want to give to you. For example, “What do you think about….?” Sounds obvious but you would be surprised at how many people forget to do this in their posts.

4) Forums

It is possible to do well online simply by helping people. Most of my traffic for this blog comes from just one forum (trafficplanet.com) that I have decided to target. So far I only go on there on average once per day. The real benefit however is not only do you get some direct traffic from forums but you also learn a great deal about what people want to know about and also how you can help them.

5) Blog Searches

5A) Google Blog search and Boardreader are really great ways to uncover blogs in your niche. Getting on a blogger’s radar can be very powerful especially if they have a large following and you have a complimentary offering. You can do this by commenting on new posts and adding value to their posts.

5B) To make the most of this opportunity, you need to set up some kind of RSS reader and subscribe to the feeds from blogs that you like. “Reeder” is the program I use for Mac, but “Google Reader”, is a great cloud based free version that enables you to manage your feeds.

5C) To pimp this ninja tip out even more, I also use IFTTT.com (If This Then That) which is a service that enables you create real-time alerts for all kinds of things. For example, there are a handful of guys that I have identified as “influencers” in my niche. Whenever one of these guys publishes a new blog post I have set it up so that a text gets sent to my cell phone. This enables me to be one of the first to add a comment (more traffic) and actually get on the radar of the blogger I am networking with.

6) Email List Question

I have yet to implement this one but I can easily see how it will work wonders.

Pat Flynn and Derek Halpern both do it.

It is very simple, but if used correctly – it’s so ninja. Basically the first email these guys send out when someone joins their newsletter is simply, “What are you struggling with?”

They then use this feedback to:

A) Actually help people and turn followers into fanatics.
B) They learn what a whole bunch of other people want to know about.

All these tools make up the listening part of my Ninja Marketing Strategy. Next you simply find ways to create solutions to really help people. Solutions do not need to be complex either, often a simple page of information is all that is required. If you want to take it even further a video, an info-graphic, product review can also be very powerful and make all the difference to you visitors and in turn your sales.

Now time to have some fun and make some money – ninja style – click to tweet how to listen like a ninja

==> 1) Building a new website from scratch?

If you are building a niche from scratch, try a few of these ninja strategies and begin to learn about your target market by writing down a whole bunch of topics. You will start to notice patterns and may even unearth some gold as well. From these topics you can start building a content strategy that is custom built to be profitable and be useful!

==> 2) Already have a clearly defined market?

Try one or two of these ninja strategies and see what you can learn from your market. Then see what your competition is doing. I am sure you will come up with some new ideas. If you want to take it a step further, write down a few ideas and then check your competition using a program like Market Samurai.

I am using all of these tools to build my next niche website and improve my existing ones. The structure of the website and the initial content I will be publishing will be perfectly aimed at the people I think are most likely to spend money. Not only that, but growing will be much easier because I will have a feedback loop that enables me to always adapt to the needs of my target visitors.

Thanks for reading! 

If  you liked this post, I think you will also get a lot of value from joining my mailing list. Apart from my regular updates, I will immediately send you another ninja tactic I use which has helped me to stay cubicle free for years.

What other tools or techniques are you using?

What have you learned about your markets?