W-Shadow.com

If you’re familiar with this years Thirty Day Challenge, you’ll have heard about the awesome “GTrends” technique that can help you find promising keyword phrases (& niche markets) to make some money of. Typically it goes something like this :

1. Get an idea.
2. Go to Wordtracker’s GTrends tool and type in a phrase that describes the idea, e.g. ‘”speed reading”.
3. For every single keyword (up to 100 keywords), click the “Niche summary” button and see if the keyword matches your criteria. You could check the suggested keywords that seem “interesting” but you risk missing some unobvious niches then. Oh, and about 1/4 through the list you’re likely to hit the “your session has timed out” message anyway.
4. Found anything good? If not, go to Step 1. Otherwise remember to write down the details and go back to Step 1. because you probably got a new idea while browsing the suggestion list 🙂

The Wordtracker GTrends tool is great, but it’s simply annoying to examine every keyword separately, especially because 90% of them are usually worthless. This is a mechanical and uninteresting task; I’d rather go explore my other ideas instead of analyzing every keyword separately. It’s also rather slow.

One of the aspects of my existance is that of the programmer, so I tend to view problems like this from a certain perspective – “Hmm, I wonder how I could automate this task?”. So I wrote a program, or – more accurately – two programs. Now the process looks like this :

1. Get an idea.
2. Go to Wordtracker’s GTrends tool and type in a phrase that describes the idea, e.g. ‘”speed reading”.
3. Click one button to start analyzing all the keywords Wordtracker returned.
4. Continue exploring new ideas while the keywords are researched in the background.
5. When done with that, switch from the browser to the keyword research software and…

So what can you do with the software? Here are some of the main features :

• Instantly see which keywords are potentially profitable (highlighted);
• Sort the keyword list any way you like;
• Export the list to Excel;
• Do in-depth research on interesting keywords;
• Add new keywords to analyze on-the-fly (copy & paste work!).

I call this GTrends – The Second Edition 😉 It’s a Windows application that does keyword research using the GTrends technique + a Firefox plugin that can grab the keywords from a Wordtracker page and pass them to the Windows program.

I bet you’re expecting a “You can have all this just for $XX!!” line now. Hmm, nope, it’s not for sale. Yet.(Update : It is now.) The truth is while I have the software mostly completed and tested, I’ve heard rumors that products like this should be released with “prelaunch” events, “joint ventures”, “mailouts” (or whatever they’re called), one-time-offers, upsells, downsells, sellouts and an enticing sales page (did I forget anything? Mm, yeah, an autoresponder! Oh, and maybe some kind of membership system?).

I’ve got none of those things and, frankly, I’m not striving to get them. I want to keep it as simple as I can. Sure, I do intend to sell the software (for, say, $10), but currently I’m torn between either putting up a huge “This one is good! Buy it now!” sign on an empty page and hoping or somehow producing something akin to the “typical” hypey sales page (an idea that I don’t feel so good about). It shall become available when I figure something out.

Update : Okay, I’ve got the GTrends SE website up and running (also featuring fragments of this post), go and check it out! And please don’t be alarmed by the complete lack of huge, red headlines and black-on-yellow action words. Everything is fine.