• Categories
• Comments
• Archives

A little online market research can go a long way when you need to track moving trends: Latest fashions, must-have lifestyle gear, best-priced jewelry, designer and knockoff shoe brands. Here are some look-out posts, social media lurking sites, and top deals listings.

Look Out Post #1: Search Trends by Keyword, Brand Name, Category.

Go to http://www.toptenwholesaletrends.com, select a time period from the drop-down box, then enter words for the merchandise you are stalking: womens handbags … mens leather … plus size denim jeans … urban and hip hop clothing … fashion watches … backpacks for adults. Alternatively, plug in search terms for the brand name of your choosing.

A click of the search button gives you a graphic line chart showing how popular – or not – your searched merchandise is. This Trends charting from TopTenWholesale dips a toe into a wholesale search database that draws from over 20,000 buy/sell search actions a week. You are pulling popularity stats – totaled search results — from manufacturers seeking resellers, power auction resellers searching for product sources, and wholesalers stalking the best off-price and returned merchandise lots.

Lurking Post #2: Hang Out in Social Media to do Buzz Checks.

Surveyors of online user behavior — Pew Internet and American Life Project – recently published results of the Internet’s influence on politics and social participation, especially among youth. Key was the UNFILTERED and NO-SPIN nature of information exchanged at social media sites; sharing the latest and greatest without going through middlemen like newscasters, publisher’s editors, advertisers or other folks with an agenda. Unfiltered and uncensored opinion.

The Pew Project simply supports what we already know: Lurking and listening at the right social media and social networking web sites can provide up-to-the-minute trend and marketing info.

· Youth Hangouts (Ages 18 to 29): Facebook, MySpace and Most-Viewed Videos at You Tube.
· Boomer Lifestyle Sites (Ages 45 to 60+): Second Life, Gather.com.

Daily Deals Lists #3: Check Top Deals Lists to Learn What Moves.

Go to main category pages at eBay, such as Fashion & Apparel or Electronics. You’ll often find a list of most active products at auction, by product or brand name, for a quick merchandise pulse check.

TopTenWholesale offers a Top Ten Daily Deals list that draws from patterns of buyer and seller search activities in over 20,000 wholesale searches on our industry network. (TopTenWholesale, OffPriceNetwork, WholesaleU, Wholezilla) See http://www.toptenwholesale.com/daily-deals.html for lists and links to the day’s hottest merchandise. Sample Top Ten Daily Deals include the latest fashion watch that tells time and holds a portable Flash drive, the most text-friendly cell phones, backpacks for grown ups from makers of the Swiss Army knife, and Lifestyle Gear (the latest healthy food dehydrators; right-priced adjustable training weights).

If you are trying to start a small business,my advice is go with the low-hanging fruit,which simply means pretend you are a monkey. Do you want to climb all the way to the top of the tree to find a banana? Maybe, but that’s only because some smarter monkey already grabbed the bananas on the lower part of the tree, barely had to even stretch their arms to get a great breakfast. Everybody has some low-hanging fruit and you would be crazy not to reach for it first.

This exercise is called “Who Do You Know?” and it works.

You aren’t seriously going to tell me you don’t know anyone who needs to buy a product you could supply are you? Basically, you review a guided list and discover how extensive your personal network really is. Do you know anyone who matches these relationships or occupations?

Family Members - These people are probably your closest connections,not only do these relationships and roles vreate product needs, these close contacts also have their own businesses and interests that quickly expand into a new web of potential connections

• Father
  Mother
  Grandmother
  Grandfather
  Brothers
  Sisters
  Aunts
  Uncles
  Cousins
  Girlfriend
  Boyfriend

Hobbies and Interests - This is a powerful motivating force forpurchases and specialty items, and even better almost everyone you know has a high level of expertise in some hobby or interest,unless they just watch TV all day. There are a lot more than this, but this is a great start.

1. Aerobics
2. Antiques
3. Art
4. BibleSchool
5. Bicycles
6. Books
7. Boys Club
8. Cameras
9. Camping
10. Fisherman
11. Girls Clubs
12. Girls Clubs
13. Golfing
14. Gymnastics
15. Handicapped
16. Hunting
17. Helath Club
18. Karate
19. Miniture Golf
20. Music
21. Painting
22. Pets
23. Photography
24. Religion
25. Scuba Diving
26. Sewing
27. Skiing
28. Soccer
29. Softball
30. Volunteers
31. Wine
32. Woodworking

Professions and Jobs - Most everybody has one unless they just sit around watching TV all day.

Accouting
Acting
Advertising
Air Force
Airline
Alarm Systems
Architect
Army
Auctoneer
Babysitter
Banking
Barber
Beauty Salon
Bookkeeping
Brooadcasting
Brokers
Builders
Buses
Cable TV
Credit Union
Day Care
Dentists
Dermatologists
Designers
Detectives
Diet Industry
Direct Mail
Disc Jockey
Doctors
Dry Cleaners
Electrician
Engineering
Entertainment
Eye Care
Farming
Film & Video
Fireman
Florists
Food Service
Furniture
Gardens
Gift Shops
Government
Grocery Stores
Hair Care
Handyman
Helath Insurance
Hospitals
Hotel
Income Tax
Insurance
Investments
Janitor
Jewelry
Lawn care
Leasing
Libraries
Loans
Lumber
Management
Manufacturing
Mechanics
Mobile Homes
Mortgages
Motels
Movie Theaters
Museums
Navy
Newspapers
Nurses
Nutrition
Office Machines
Office Furniture
Optometrists
Orthodontists
Pediatricians
Pedicures
Perfume
Pest Cintrol
Pharmacies
Phones
Pizza
Plumbing
Police
Pools
Preschool
Printing
Property Management
Psychiatrists
Publishers
Radio
Railroads
Real Estate
Rehabilitation
Rental Agents
Reporters
Resorts
Restaurants
Roofing
Sales
Satellites
Secretaries
Security
Shoe repair
Signage
Social Services
Sporting Goods
Steam Cleaning
Surgeons
T-Shirts
Teachers
Telemarketing
Therapists
TitleCompanies
Towing
Training
Transmissions
Trucking
Unions
Universities
Vending
Weddings

Yep,these are long lists but this kind of data mining of yourown big juicy brain can really pay off. Find out who you know explore those connections and see if it doesn’t give you an idea you can use.

I thought this was a nice time to tell you AGAIN about the Firefox Search plugin I made. Yep, I’m one of those irritating guys, that did something once and tells you about it for the next twenty years. But, if you click on the link below, you get a happy new addition to your Firefox search box, and you can find wholesale products, even quicker and easier.

Top Ten Wholesale Firefox and IE 7 Search Plugin

OK, so there you go, put it in your browser. I swear (and you can believe me, my brother was an Eagle Scout) that it won’t do anything funny to your computer…except FILL IT TO THE BRIM WITH VALUE!!!

Also…Hey! Chumpy! You, over there, with the e-commerce website! Does that web site have a search function? Yeah, you never use it, but I bet it does. It takes like 5 minutes to make a Firefox search plugin at Searchplugins.net — yep that’s right, I’m still bragging about making that thing, even though all I had to do was fill out a form.  Do you think there would be any harm to offering your customers a way to use Your site in a way that directly aligns with Their Needs? I think it would be a good thing to do. 5 minutes, I’m serious…what’s the worst thing that could happen? Nobody would use it? OH, what a tragedy, your valuable time wasted, just think in 5 minutes, you could…almost make a sandwich. Don’t be a Negative Nancy Nincompoop, TRY to reach your customers. You can do it. You want to know what I have really learned about the web, my big secret? It’s this…if you try 10 things, 1 thing will work. As you try more things and learn more things, you’ll start to improve the strike rate, once you have 2 or 3 things working out of every 10, then you are the Web equivalent of a fresh El Camino rolling kilo-g.

But, you can’t really ever stop trying.

This post is about increasing traffic to your blogs. I’m surprised about how lame and lousy answers you get from searching Google about this crap. You will get much better advice at bloggerunleashed.com but that guy is drunk all the time, he’s like the Boris Yeltsin of SEO.

Sharp-eyed reader Justin P. left a comment:

I’ve been dying to learn more about effective blogging and link building…what’s the deal?

I’m happy to disclose that Justin is a member of the Top Ten Wholesale team, but this is not a plant. I’m pretty sure he does want to know about this stuff, and I didn’t solicit this question in any way. And, I consider publicly answering your readers question part of the best practices for effective blogging. The great thing is even though that’s a pretty expansive question, blogging and link building go hand in hand. In that, posting to your blog is an outstanding way to build links.

1) RSS Feeds - If you use your RSS Feed right you can gain links. The audience of people subscribing to feeds are hard core information consumers. I have my own linkblog just of posts I read that I share. Lots of bloggers, marketers, and web publishers. But, all those people are making websites designed to go out to a general audience and they always need content. It’s very nice when they reference your content and provide a link. In fact that’s great when they do that. Sometimes, they may not do that, sometimes they may not send a link back and just republish your work. People get really upset about these guys and start talking about how they hate “content thieves” with lots of capital letters and exclamation points, but I don’t waste time with getting mad at invisible people and their web sites. I try to do what I can to make it work better for me. One of the keys to maximizing the links you get from your content is to use a footer on your posts with your links in it. I use a wordpress plugin called Feed Footer, and there is another good one called RSS Footer. RSS footer is super simple and very effective. Feed Footer offers granular control of what you do with your footer and is a very powerful tool in the hands of the right person. It’s entirely appropriate in my opinion to add other related sites to your footer. If you are writing great posts, this will really help you generate more links.

2. Blog Directories

When you are starting the marketing process for a new blog. Blog directories like BlogCatalog are a tempting prospect, but getting backlinks with a wordpress blog is cake, so what’s the point of it? Meaning is there traffic for you? I think there is if you are targeting them precisely. Trackbacks are going to get heavily discounted based on the pagerank value of the referring site soon, so I wouldn’t bother too much with them. I think you have to write comments on big blogs, and get them past moderation. At this point I say avoid the larger directories like mybloglog and bumpzee. I get a little bit of seo traffic so sphinn does ok.

3. “SEO 2.0 is about link love” — Dofollow=Groovy

So you gotta give me a dofollow..

That means install the dofollow plugin. Try to enjoy it while it lasts. What will kill it is organized rings of dofollowers, who start to moderate there posts ruthlessly throwing out people from the wrong side of the tracks like me. Those guys will grow like mold in pligg sites, or BloggingZoom, which you should not run on your blog! It is unsafe, I had it checked out by the somber titans of the toptenwholesale.com technical staff. By the way if you don’t pay attention to your programmer’s technical review of your easy-to-install plug-ins, you are an idiot, begging to be fired.

Posts I Like But Aren’t Super Related to this Because Who The Hell Writes Posts Like This One?:

A Valuable Tip - Use Pligg sites to get good longlasting backlinks.

Digital marketing service provider Coremetrics has just released Coremetrics 2008, a product designed to help marketers with their contextual marketing. The product allows businesses to accurately target the most invaluable customer segments using a variety of techniques rather than just using behavioral targeting which doesn’t give the whole picture.

Brian Tomz, director of product strategy at Coremetrics said, “The strategy here is to allow businesses to increase conversions by more accurately targeting the most valuable customer sectors with the most appropriate offer–both in the marketing creative and once on site–at the optimal time.”

Contextual marketing goes a step further than behavioral targeting which is heavily dependent on group and lifetime customer behaviors. The new product by Coremetrics will allow marketers to segment customers based on other criteria, like participation in social media activities.

Tomz also said, “Previously, most sites that engaged in any type of targeting have focused on only single events (e.g. a user abandons a red blouse or a loan application form; then the site follows-up with a promotional offer for that same product). Contextual marketing includes additional information such as an individual’s attributes and historical behavior in an attempt to derive the most appropriate recommendation set.”

Many companies are already using this product, including PayScale and Rodale, the publisher of such magazines as Men’s health, Prevention and Mountain Bike.

Just last year North American advertisers spent $9.4 billion USD on search engine marketing (SEM), a 62% increase over the 2005 year and a 750% increase over the 2002 year.  It would appear that search marketing has officially hit the mainstream, and it’s only getting bigger; the industry is expected to double by 2011 with the US and Canada projecting an 11.6 billion dollar spend in organic and paid search that same year. 

Search marketing has become an essential part of every business’ marketing agenda.  It’s absolutely imperative that every marketing specialist keep up with the trends if they wish to stay afloat in this industry.  The problem in the beginning was the lack of circulating industry information; the group of search marketers was relatively small and mostly unknown to the masses.  Five short years ago a group of savvy marketers realized the need for an organization which could promote the search marketing industry as well as provide educational resources to members and consumers alike.  And so SEMPO was born.

SEMPO, short for Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, is a global non-profit organization whose mission is to “provide a foundation for industry growth through building stronger relationships, fostering awareness, providing education, promoting the industry, generating research, and creating a better understanding of search and its role in marketing.” 

SEMPO’s primary goals are fostering the education of SEM professionals and promoting awareness of the industry.  They have just recently launched SEMPO Institute, a group tapping into SEMPO’s great knowledge bank by offering myriad training courses.  Some are challenging enough to meet the needs of seasoned search marketing professionals and others are designed as introductory courses for search marketing novices and marketing generalists.  Their classes are authored by over thirty-five industry leaders and have thousands of members from over twenty different countries. 

There are many benefits to joining SEMPO:

• It represents over 500 companies globally through initiatives supporting a general mission of outreach and education to expand and influence the growing SEM industry.
• It provides free information as a public service such as research, case studies, “webinars” and learning materials for SEM.
• It recently launched the new SEMPO Institute for SEM training courses.
• It’s a great way to get involved with other members of the SEM community worldwide while furthering the mission of the maturing SEM industry.
• Its Research, Education, Global Working Groups, and Metrics/Standards Committees are open to all members and are currently working on a large number of activities and issues.
• SEMPO’s Annual State of the Search Market Survey is widely referenced by press and industry analysts and is one of the largest research benchmarking studies of SEM in the North American market.  2007 will mark the 3rd year of the survey.  Surveys will also be deployed in Japan and Europe this year.

For more information on SEMPO, please visit sempo.org.  You can join SEMPO today by clicking here.