As I was doing keyword research for my new tutoring business, I came across an interesting discovery.

People search online 10 times as often for “homework help” as they do for “tutor”.

This was true across the board…”math homework help” searched 10 times as often as “math tutor”, etc.

Glenn Nicholas over at OM4Business.com even wrote in to confirm this fact for me and point out that I needed to do something about it ASAP.

I had always been a little skeptical of the keyword “homework help”…you see, someone who types “math tutor in Houston, TX” into Google is almost certainly a good prospect. Someone who would purchase tutoring. But someone who types “homework help” into a search engine could be a kid (instead of a parent) or just someone looking to find the answer to a problem who would never hire a tutor.

Then again, I told my self, given that the keyword was searched 10 TIMES as often, I really couldn’t afford not to test it out. After all, even if 75% of those searches never turned into customers….the remaining 25% would represent a 250% increase over the current customers I was getting from tutoring related keywords. What did I have to lose?

To further seal the deal, Glenn sent me a link about something called “problem marketing” which gave me a new perspective. When people have back pain they type “back pain” into a search engine, because that is their problem. They don’t know to type in “ergonomic chair” or “sciatic nerve therapy” or whatever, because those are SOLUTIONS.

Similarly, tutoring was the solution and homework help was the problem…so maybe, just maybe, I was marketing the wrong keyword.

Anyway, the results of this little experiment remains to be seen (and I will post them on the blog), but the point of this article is that I wanted to show you how easy it was to put up a new professional looking website to test out this idea.

The site I created is called HomeworkHelpBlog.com and it is a free resource (a blog) for students who needs help on their homework.

Saavy readers might notice that I used a domain with the keyword in it, to help it rank in search engines. The idea will be to offer free advice and tips on this site for students (my tutors can help me generate the content eventually) and build a list of subscribers who may eventually turn into tutoring customers.

The entire site from start to finish took 4 hours and $6.95 to create.

• I already pay for hosting at 1and1 and adding a new domain was free.

• I had to register the domain at GoDaddy, hence the $6.95
• To build the entire site I used WordPress (again free) so there was no programming involved
• The slick looking design was created by someone else and given away free (just google “best wordpress themes”). I installed it, again, with no programming to give it a custom look and feel.
• From start to finish it took me about 4 hours doing it entirely myself

One of the bonuses that comes with Breaking Free is a book on how to use Wordpress for exactly this reason.

It makes it very simple and easy to put up a business website ANY TIME you have an idea like this.

Conclusion
I think the main points to take away from this article are…

• There is a quick and inexpensive way to test out any business idea you have: starting a business website. I’ve shown how easy it is here, so really there is no excuse not to put together one of these when you have a good idea (or pay someone to do it). Maybe 1 out of 10 will really work out and you’ll have a business on your hand that can allow you to quit your job.
• You need to understand keyword research. If I hadn’t done the research I never would have known that “homework help” was so much more popular than tutoring keywords. That information could turn out to be priceless if it doubles or triples my business.

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong

Hey Folks,

I’ve had some good success lately with Jeff Johnson’s video distribution techniques.

A few days ago I made this little 2 minute video demonstrating my new site:

Then I targeted my most competitive keyword (”austin tutors”) by putting this in the title and tags of the video.

Then I went to put it online. Normally I just upload my videos to YouTube since this is the most popular site. But taking Jeff’s advice, I uploaded it to Tube Mogul instead, which automatically uploads it to about 10 different video sharing sites (including YouTube).

This in and of itself is pretty valuable because it takes the exact same amount of time to upload it to TubeMogul as it does to YouTube, except uploading it to TubeMogul gets you maybe 5x the distribution for the same amount of effort. It would take me about 30 minutes per site to do it individually.

Heres the proof, it uploaded the same video to Yahoo, MySpace, MetaCafe, Google, Revver, AOL, DailyMotion, Blip, Veoh, and HowCast.

Within 24 hours I was seeing some of these video pages show up in Google search results for “austin tutors” (most on the 2nd and 3rd pages). Obviously Google likes these video sharing sites because normally my webpages would take 2 weeks to get updated by Google, but these were getting picked up within 24 hours.

One of them (the AOL video) got on the first page for a bit for my main keyword, then went back to page 2.

The next step was social bookmarking…
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Just wanted to alert you to this brilliant piece of viral marketing: Carmen Has A Crush On You.

Without ruining the surprise too much, it asks you to put the name, phone number, and picture of a friend of yours into a simple webpage with the lure of playing a joke on your friend.

It then uses a clever bit of technology to instantly create a youtube video where Carmen Electra spills the beans on her new relationship with your friend, including his name tattooed on her, a picture of him that she keeps in her wallet, and a follow up phone call.

The reason this is going to be so effective is several reasons:

• The technology is new enough that is still has the shock value. Most people have never seen anything like it and will wonder how its possible.
• By including someone you know in the video, it is much more likely to be forwarded to your circle of friends. The joke is personalized for everyone.

You notice that the one thing she couldn’t do on the film was actually say the person’s name. The technology for text-to-speech is getting much better but isn’t quite there yet. They seemed to get around it though.

Kudos to whoever made this. It is one of the most innovative viral marketing pieces I’ve seen in a long time.

You might have noticed a new widget I added to the blog which looks like this:

This is a great little tool developed by internet marketing guru John Reese who I’ve talked about before. When I first read about it I thought it sounded pretty simple and ineffective, but it’s actually more powerful than I originally thought.

What it does it post related articles from other blogs around the internet on to your site, and likewise your articles start appearing on other blogs who use the widget. But the beauty of it is that it contains a “referral system” which will really help it go viral. Essentially, whenever someone clicks the widget on your site to add their own blog to the system, you earn a referral credit. This actually goes 10 levels deep…meaning that the people you refer count toward yours, etc. And the more referral credits you have the more likely your articles are to appear.

Anyway, you can watch a great little video about how it works and see it action by going here: http://www.startbreakingfree.com/blogrush/.

It takes a few minutes to install on your blog, so get in as early as you can.

The program is called BlogRush…and I think it will really shake things up in the blogging world. Check it out now: http://www.startbreakingfree.com/blogrush/

It’s time for a follow up to see how effective my sales page redesign was from a few weeks ago.

First lets take a snap shot of the two weeks prior to changing the sales page, July 11th through July 25th.

• 685 Unique Views of the sales page
• 21 Books Sold
• 3.1% Conversion Rate

I’ll skip the 26th since that was the day I made all the changes. So let’s look at July 27th through August 9th (almost a full two weeks) as the next snap shot:

• 314 Unique Views of the new sales page
• 8 Books Sold
• 2.5% Conversion Rate

Most people will jump to an incorrect conclusion when seeings numbers such as these.

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This is the conclusion of my 30 day marketing challenge where I’ll share with you some of the results; both what worked and what didn’t.

All the graphs below show a two months range: the month before the marketing challenge started, and the month of the marketing challenge.

Here are the page views for the last two months. As you can see, thing picked up substantially (and fluctuated) after the marketing challenge was started, with the biggest day being early on with 2,191 views in a day. This was due to lots of people linking to my LifeHack.org article on power napping.

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This is day 30 of my 30 day marketing challenge, to demonstrate that blogging can be a profitable and inexpensive business to start.

By the way, please continue to Digg this article on how to generate good business ideas. It’s starting to get some attention!

My three tasks for the day are…

1. I added the site to Illumirate

2. I added the site to Mavicanet

3. I added the site to http://www.athomedirectory.com/

These are all just other website directories that are less well known than Yahoo or DMOZ. To be honest, it is day 30 and I have been having a hard time finding new marketing ideas!

In retrospect, I think 30 days is enough time to spend getting a bunch of SEO and link building done to the point where I can now focus on just posting good content to this website.

The foundation has been built. Tomorrow I will make a post concluding this experiment and showing some of the results.

This is day 29 of my 30 day marketing challenge to bring in new traffic to this website. It’s been a long journey and it’s almost done demonstrating that blogging can be a profitable and inexpensive business to start!

Here are my three tasks for the day…

1. Contributed to “Entrepreneurship Resource” Directories

I started off today by doing a google search for “entrepreneurship resources”. One of the best results I found was this page on Ryan Allis’ Zero Million site. So I submitted a few articles that I’ve written.

By the way Ryan is a master of building website traffic as you can see by his outstanding rankings in Google. He wrote a free eBook on the subject, and while I think his strategy worked for him (basically email website owners and asking for links, on a mass scale), it’s probably not as effective today. Website owners have seen too many link request emails like and consider it spam at this point.

Try typing “[your industry] resources” into Google and see where people are looking for good content.

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This is day 28 of my 30 day marketing challenge to bring in new visitors to this website. I also want to demonstrate that starting a blog can be a profitable and inexpensive business to start.

My three tasks for the day are…

1. Updated Information On Amazon.com

My book on how to start a home based business finally appeared on Amazon.com today.

The images didn’t show up however, and the formatting of the text could use some work, so I spent some time correcting it. The text hasn’t updated yet, but the new images are there.

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This is day 27 of my 30 day marketing challenge to bring in new readers to this blog, and demonstrate that blogging can be a profitable and inexpensive business to start.

I skipped two days in the challenge because I decided to go a seminar on real estate investing for the weekend. It was all day both days and I was just too tired to do anything else by the time I got home. The seminar was awesome and I’ll be posting some more about it in the future. To be honest, I’ve been having trouble thinking about anything except what I learned over the past few days, and have already started taking action.

Another interesting note: I am now #12 on Google for the keyword “home based business”. Just last week I was #14 (and it fluctuated after that, going as high as #16). First page (top ten) here I come!

Here are my three tasks for the day…

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