Niche-shaping can optimize your web site or business quickly and efficiently. If your web site consists of a few static pages, here is a process where you can grow your web presence cost-effectively.

Search engines find your web site by matching queries on keywords from your web pages. For example, if you sell “childrens clothes” or your blog is about “Celebrity Gossip” then these keywords, and the ranking of your site are critical to people finding you when they search in Google.

The Internet is now so complex and interrelated it has become like a living ecosystem. As such, the laws of ecology are beginning to apply to survival on the web. One of these ecological laws, is that species must constantly evolve to optimize their performance in a natural domain or niche, or they will be out-competed by more dynamic species and eventually become extinct. The theory from niche modeling can be used to develop your business or blog.

The hits on the keywords currently on your site represent your current or realized niche. Your potential is a function of the overall numberf of searches on keywords related to your web site. The process of consistently introducing new but related keywords with original content will optimize your niche, increase the chances of people finding your site, and increase your traffic or revenue.

Imagine, increasing hits on novel keywords both shift and increase from A to B by posting quality content.
The process of introducing quality content with new but related keywords to both shift and increase your web presence. If your site is already centered on the natural market niche, then adding content would increase the depth and frequency of traffic.

If you have had experience with other ways of increasing traffic to your site you know that while traffic may increase temporarily, it fades back to almost the original level when the campaign ends. As this process produces a permanent body of high quality content on your web site, the increase in hits is also permanent. While results take longer to achieve, they last longer too. Overall, the process is highly cost competitive with advertising, as visits from natural search are essentially free.

The strategy of introducing high quality content to your site is consistent with the image of high quality sites. Thus it is possible to both refine your market niche and simultaneously build traffic. You do not need to resort to risky “black hat” SEO techniques, tacky advertising methods, tiresome click programs or any of the numerous dubious ways of increasing traffic.

For example, imagine your have an aShop selling a line of products and want to expand. We start a blog on your site about your existing products. Based on the feedback that we get on possible new terms, you publish an increasing variety of posts on related products, while simultaneously adding these products to your product line. Over time, you will overtake your opposition in the search engine rankings as more and more users come back to your site for information, and you increase profits from the additional purchases.

A number of things need to be done right to make this equation work for you. Any one of them if done incorrectly could lead to poor results and waste time. Among them are:

1. Ensuring your site has the usual search engine optimizations to be compeditive.
2. Choosing the related keywords and topics to grow your business into. Part of the secret is a recent breakthrough process called HitTailing (http://hittail.com) which identifies those searches that led to your site despite turning up relatively low on the list of results.
3. Another part of the equation is cost-effective supply of creative posts based on the topics identified by HitTailing.
4. Another part of the equation is the installation and maintenance of a blog on your site.
5. Finally your site is monitored for effectiveness of the process.

Of course, the first part of the equation is getting started. It should be clear that you can no longer expect to be found on the web with a few static web pages. Now is the time to upgrade your web strategy before your competitors do to see your business grow and your advertising costs wither.

Eviews is one of the popular econometrics packages being used by the research community and academicians. It is a GUI (Graphical User Interface) based program compatible with Windows and Macintosh operating systems. Other popular econometrics packages include SHAZAM (shazam.econ.ubc.ca), LIMDEP (www.limdep.com), SAS (www.sas.com), GAUSS (www.aptech.com) and R (cran.r-project.org). Eviews is one of the most popular packages for analyzing time series data. Eviews, produced by Quantitative Micro Software (QMS) from Irvine, California, comes with very comprehensive user guide and reference manuals: The Users Guide and The Command and Programming Reference (www.eviews.com). If you are familiar with programs like C++ and Gauss you will be able to use your programming skills to run your own customized protocols in Eviews. Let us view some examples of Eviews code here.

The recent version, Eviews 6 is a marriage between modern spreadsheet and Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) technology with conventional statistical tools. Through Eviews, you can do general statistical analyses, cross section or panel data analysis, time series data estimation and forecasting, presentation of graphics, simple data management and large-scale simulation of data.

Market researchers use Eviews in order to analyze the characteristics of actual purchases and transactions called revealed preference data. Quantitative statistical models such as the standard Linear Regression model, Binomial Logit model, Multinomial Logit model, Nested Logit model, Proportional Hazard model and Censored Regression model are used extensively for this sort of analysis using Eviews.

Examples of Eviews Code and Batch Programming

The Eviews program is command driven in both interactive and batch programming modes. But, you can also construct commands through dialogue boxes and menus. Batch programming is executing a collection of commands automatically. Through batch programming, you can have access to a number of features, which are normally not available to the ordinary user, such as conditional branching and loops.

Running Regression Models in Eviews

Now assume that you have data on returns from the Microsoft stock and returns from S&P 500. Also, assume that Microsoft stock return is a dependent variable and S&P 500 is the explanatory variable. We call this regression model eq1. The model, which is called a Market Model, can be described in Eviews as below.

eq1.ls microsoft_ret c sp500_ret

Once you run the regression, you can opt for a Chow Test for structural breaks. You can do this test in the regression window in the menu, VIEWS - STABILITY TESTS - CHOW BREAKPOINT TEST. You can use the following command to test for stability in batch programming. This command will test whether there was a structural break at observation 5000 or not.

eq1. chow 5000

In Eviews, besides different views, objects allow you to call upon t-statistics, residual sum of squares and Durbin-Watson statistics. Let us try to get adjusted R2 data. The R2 data is stored in a scalar called r2bar.

scalar r2bar
r2bar = eq1.@rbar2

You will be able to access the t-statistic for the individual parameters through the command

eq1.@tstats(i)

and the standard errors for the parameter estimates through

eq1.@stderrs(i).

You can get all the available data members from the Eviews programming manual.

These examples of Eviews code will help you get to know the basics of Eviews programming. Once you go through the programming manual, you will be able to do complex statistical modeling with ease.

Here is an expert strategy straight out of the natural world for rapidly increasing traffic to your blog or website. We know that a great deal of traffic these days comes from search engines, based on keywords. This traffic is free, relevant, and never dies. It is also well known that blog posts with quality content are the key to attracting free traffic from web searches. It is less well known that posting on events well ahead of time is a very effective strategy for generating new traffic.

Many organisms live by exploiting ephemeral niches. Because most food resources appear seasonally, where they can predict ahead, organisms prepare themselves to exploit it. A herd of caribou starts to migrate to pastures before spring arrives. Ants build nests before the summer rains.

The same pre-emptive strategy is very effective on the web. Of course, retailers have always used the strategy of stocking up on in-demand article ahead of time. Who is interested in buying Christmas decorations the day after Christmas? Similarly, a post after the event is less effective than a post before the event when interest is high.

Here is the expert strategy for capturing ephemeral web traffic: Prepare an article or blog post ahead of time for scheduled occasions, or events that you know are coming up. Then place it on your site well in advance, to give the search engines time to index it. When the time comes, your article is ready for all those eager web surfers searching for information.

Here are some examples of using the strategy:

* Write articles before seasonal holidays. For example, if your web site is about flowers, write an article on Christmas flowers, New Year flowers, and so on.
* Write on the coming of summer, autumn, winter and spring
* Use a year number, say 2008 in your article titles before the end of the 2007 year.
* Write posts ahead of forthcoming events of importance (for example, US elections)
* Write posts using keywords from Google Zeitgeist that are increasing in popularity.

Here are some other strategies that can be helpful in exploiting ephemeral niches.

It is important to know the Google indexing schedule you are on. I know I am on a weekly cycle, and my site is indexed on the weekend, because searches using keywords from new posts added during the week begin to appear on the following Monday. Make sure you put your topical post up before it is scheduled to be crawled.

Another piece of advice is not to overdo your coverage of ephemeral events. It is better to have a good post on a number of different events, than multiple posts on the same topic. Each single post will then rank highly for each ephemeral event.

Use lots of specific keywords to describe the events, using proper nouns featuring places and people in the body of the text. These words will be picked up in searches in preference to generic terms that are used in many other posts on unrelated topics.

Most importantly, plan to write your articles well ahead of the event. That gives them time to indexed by the search engine, and puts you one step ahead of your competitors.