Finding Niches & Conducting Keyword Research
“A winning effort begins with preparation.” – Joe Gibbs
This is the beginning stage of all blogs you will
build. It is the brainstorming portion of the system – and
after backlinks, is arguably the second most important
factor in your success. Do not skip this part. If you skip
this or don’t bother to learn how to do it properly, you
will fail. Guaranteed. If you skip your keyword research
and then fail, don’t blame me.
I know I sound a bit mean when I say that (sorry!),
but it’s for your own good. I am stressing this point so
that you understand the fact that this chapter is extremely
important. Read it carefully, and more importantly –
implement it carefully.
Keyword Research Tool
There is a spectacular keyword research tool that I
use. It is none other than the Google Keyword Tool (and
it’s free). It tells you so many things in so little time. It’s
awesome, and you will need it if you want to make
money online. The web address for the Google Keyword
Tool is at the end of this chapter in the “Web Resources” box.
Remember, your blogs are only as good as your
ideas. Also remember, not all blogs are going to be a
success. That’s normal. Even if you did all the research
and it checked out from every angle, it could still bomb
and not make a dime. It happens sometimes, and it’s
usually not your fault. Don’t sweat it. Take the
monetization method off it, turn it into a 1st or 2nd tier
blog, and move on. Failures and successes are part of
everything in life, and this is no exception.
Finding Niches
In order to get the wheels spinning in your head, it’s
often helpful to consider a few different approaches
when brainstorming niche topics. These are all methods I
used before and still use now. They haven’t failed me yet.
1.) The interest-based approach
This one is excellent for those of you starting out and who are still
learning the ropes. Choose niches you take an
interest in (that also comply with our keyword
standards that will be explained shortly) such as car
modification, make-up tips, toy trains, or whatever
it is you are passionate about. This helps to make
the learning curve less steep and allows you to
focus on your strategies rather than yawning
through boring blog posts that you are forcing
yourself to write. Take on the stuff that bores you
but you know is profitable later, after you learn how
this all works. Give yourself the least amount of
obstacles as possible when starting out so that you
don’t get discouraged.
2.) The how-to approach
Anything that you can explain to someone step-by-step or show them how
to do – especially very specific things (for example,
“how to modify the exhaust on a WRX” or “how to
make homemade lasagna”), make excellent blogs.
These will typically be long-term blogs that have
relatively low, but steady amounts of Google
searches. They don’t completely dry out like the
blogs in #3 below…
3.) The trendy approach
As soon as you come across a topic that you’re sure will get a lot of searches
because it was on TV or the news or whatever…
must be done right away. These can sometimes
make good short-term blogs that will make a lot of
money in a short time before the interest in it dies
down (Susan Boyle, Jon & Kate Plus 8, etc).
4.) The economic approach
Ride the wave of the economy. What’s on peoples’ minds currently?
What are people scared of? What are they doing to
combat those fears? What kind of questions might
they have regarding the things on their minds? What
kinds of things might they buy in relation to those
fears? Make blogs that help answer their questions
or help solve their dilemmas. Our economy has
plenty of problems as I write this (August 2009), so
this method is sure to bring you tons of ideas.
5.) The buy-it approach
Think of topics that people might look up and that might, in turn, lead them to
buy something (one of your monetization products
*hint* *hint*). For example, if someone is looking
up “common Xbox problems and fixes”, maybe
there is an instructional e-book (with an affiliate
program that gives you a percent of the sales) that
would spark their interest. The buy-it approach
tends to work really well with topics related to
teenagers and people in their early 20s (especially
women… I would know hahaha!) as they can often
be more compulsive buyers. Beauty-related
products and how-to guides work especially well from my experience!
6.) The common sense approach
Often times, you will just “know” what will make a profitable blog.
The more experience you get building your blog
network, the better you will get at this approach.
Conducting Keyword Research
Keyword research allows you to get a feel for the
competition and the search volume by running whatever
ideas you come up with through the Google Keyword Tool.
I have an exact system I use for determining which niches
and keywords from my brainstorming session (that I
outlined above) to use. It will tell us what is worth chasing,
what is best to leave alone, and so on. Keyword research
makes our niche hunting more efficient and profitable.
Finding good keywords is no accident, as I will show you.
Some topics that you “know” have potential or that
must be acted upon immediately (trendy topics) don’t
necessarily need to be run through the Google Keyword
Tool. However, if you put Adsense on them, make sure to
run them by the Google Keyword Tool first. It’s a complete
waste of time to build up a whole blog and then get $0.05
or $0.10 per click for all your hard work. Don’t cheat
yourself like that. If the keywords don’t have a high CPC
(cost per click), then they don’t. Nothing you can do about
it. Do your homework (your keyword research – that is)
and you will have much more of a chance for success!
Don’t worry, we’ll go into excruciating detail about
Adsense in the monetization chapter, but keep this
information I just went over in the back of your mind for
now. Let it start to simmer on the back burner of your brain
and the light bulb will go off the next time I mention it. I
promise I will drill it into your head.
Most of the methods you use to find niches will be
ran through keyword research tools or software to allow
you to make sure the niche is even worth your time and
effort. (Yep, I’m repeating myself again. I’m glad you
noticed. This means you’re paying attention and
understand.) Sometimes common sense will do you just
fine, but at other times it’s best to run the idea by the
keyword tool and check the PR of the top 10 competitors to
know what is realistic. This is the filtering process that we
must not skip if we want to make as much money as
possible in as short of a time as possible. Let us begin…
Keyword Research System
I religiously use the following system to find out
which of my niche ideas from my brainstorming section
have the ability to turn into a profitable niche blog. There is
no accident to any of this; it’s a very simple procedure that
you can easily memorize. The more you do it, the more it
will come naturally to you – like anything else.
Start out by choosing one of your niche ideas from
your brainstorming session. It can be any of them. Choose
the one you’re most interested in or that you think has the
most potential. It doesn’t matter… just choose one. This is
probably your first time doing this, so let’s go through the
motions first and foremost before perfecting anything.
Next, go to the Google Keyword Tool and type in the
most basic one, two, or three words that go with the niche
idea. To demonstrate, I have included screenshots of me
researching the keyword “Nikon digital cameras” in the
Google Keyword Tool. I encourage you to take a practice
run with one of your own niche ideas. It’s easy – just
mimic how I did it with my example keyword phrase. Read
through how I do it and stop to take a few moments to try it
on your own. It’s best if you do it right now and don’t put it off until later.
The next few pages show screenshots of me conducting keyword research. Please study them carefully.
Here I have typed in our keyword “Nikon digital
cameras”, entered the alphanumeric code for security
purposes, and have moved on to the second page, as shown below:
Next, I have chosen the option from the “Choose
columns to display” drop-down menu to “Hide Advertiser
Competition”. We don’t need to see that and getting rid of
it clears up the page a bit for us. The drop-down menu choice is shown below:
In the next screenshot I have chosen “Exact” from
the “Match Type” drop-down menu. We need to see the
results of keywords with the exact wording of the keyword
we are researching (Nikon digital cameras). This makes the
search volume number go down a bit to its real figure. That
is what we need. [Note: Leaving it on the “Broad” setting
can drastically inflate the search traffic figure and mislead
you into thinking you found a good keyword. Make double
sure every time you conduct your keyword research that
you don’t have it on “Broad!!] How I did this is shown below:
Now we need to choose “Show Estimated Avg CPC”
from the “Choose columns to display” drop-down menu.
CPC means “cost per click”. This shows the amount
advertisers are paying per click for traffic. In my
experience, we as Adsense publishers get anywhere from
1/5 to ¼ of the CPC. We need to divide the CPC by 4 or 5
to get an idea of how lucrative a keyword is. For example,
if a CPC is shown to be $2.00, we would get $0.40 to $0.50
per click. If a CPC is less than $1.00 I don’t pursue it.
Ever. Period. Why do all this work for only pennies per
click? That’s so tedious, even my check writing
grandmother wouldn’t do it. Focus your efforts on better
keywords. Don’t compromise – move on.
To be honest, nowadays, I don’t even pursue CPCs
that are less than $2.00 or $3.00, depending on what it is.
By now, I have an idea of which niches are profitable and
always brainstorm around those niches. You will know
what these are when you get more experienced, too. I’ll
leave that for you to discover yourself. It’s easy – don’t
worry. Below shows the screenshot of the CPC column:
Here I have chosen “Hide Local Search Volume”
from the “Choose columns to display” drop-down menu.
Local search volume is the search numbers for the previous
month. I don’t really need to see it because I’ll leave the
“Global Monthly Search Volume” displayed since it
represents the average typical search volume for each
keyword. Take a look below:
In this last screenshot, I circled all the keywords that
passed my preliminary test and crossed out those that did
not. To pass my test, the following criteria must be met:
· At least 1000 searches (2000 or 3000 as you become more advanced and resourceful with your backlinks)
· At least a $1.00 CPC (at least $2.00 later on!!!)
You may be wondering why I’m being so picky with
keywords. A keyword is a keyword, right? Wrong. We
don’t want to waste our time with keywords that get little
monthly search volume. We want maximum results with
least amount of effort. (“Wow Janet, you repeat yourself a
lot!” said a friend. “I hope they get it,” said I.) That way,
we also don’t confuse or discourage ourselves because
we’re chasing way too many keywords at once. Choose a
few good ones that get a high amount of traffic so that we
will be working more efficiently as well as more profitably.
It’s quite possible you can hit a gold mine with just one
keyword and celebrate your first success. And you don’t
need the highly competitive keywords like “shoes”, “make
money online”, and so on to be able to celebrate.
Long tail keywords (usually with three, four, or more
words) from an untapped niche can be even more profitable
than the obvious competitive keywords that you would
have to compete with high profile retailers or news sites
for. And they’re much easier to rank on page one. Easier and better – who knew?
We especially don’t want to earn peanuts on our
Adsense clicks, so the keywords that also have a CPC of at
least $1.00 are what we want. We are interested in the
keywords that fit both of our standards. Remember that 200
clicks at $2.00 per click is a lot better than 2000 clicks at
$0.05 per click. We go for the quality of each click – the
$2.00. Choose your keywords wisely.
Please note that you will have to look through a ton
of keywords for each niche blog topic to find the right ones.
It’s worth it though, trust me. This saves you agony in the
long run – and gets you making money faster.
It is quite possible that for every 100 or 200
keywords you look through, you might find less than 5
green keywords. That’s a bit frustrating, but it’s reality.
And anyway, 4 or 5 green keywords are more than enough
to start with. So use those 5 and stop looking for more
keywords until you rank on page one for the original 5 keywords.
Spreadsheets
What I found to be easiest is to send the entire list of
keywords to an Excel spreadsheet file. At the bottom of the
keyword list, there is an option to download the list as a
few different file types. I always do the .csv (for excel) one.
For the keywords that pass the test, make a code to
go by on the spreadsheet. For example, if a keyword fails a
test, you can highlight it red, totally delete it, or whatever
works for you. Just make sure to stick with your code
consistently throughout. I like to totally delete the bad ones
(the ones with less than $1.00 CPCs or less than 1000
searches per month), and use a stoplight system for the rest
where I highlight the temporarily unobtainable keywords in
red, the medium “to get around to” keywords in yellow,
and the easy/profitable/immediate keywords in green.
How do we know if they are unobtainable, medium,
or easy? First, we need to download a free, but very handy
SEO Firefox plug-in to help us out. You will need to be
using the Firefox browser to do this. Click the SEO for
Firefox link to take you to the plug-in download page. If
you don’t already have a free account with them, you will
need to sign up for it first. It only takes a minute and is
required to download the plug-in, which will be crucial to your success.
Okay, so why do we need this plug-in? This is where
PR comes into play. We need to type in each keyword that
passes our test so far (>1000 searches, >$1.00 CPC) into
Google to analyze the top 10 competitors for that keyword.
Look at the screenshot below where I looked up one
of the keywords that passes our test (so far) – “Nikon
coolpix digital cameras”:
Skip the sponsored links, which I crossed out. At the
bottom of result 1 it shows: “#1 | PR ?”
Click on the ? and it will show you the PR for that
page. Do this for the entire first page of results for each of
your keywords. You will know it is a good easily
obtainable keyword that you can immediately go after if all
the PRs are 3 or less. Those are going to be your green
keywords. If there are several PR 4 or 5, possibly (or not)
mixed with some PR 3, then those will be your yellow
keywords. The red keywords are the ones that have a whole
search result page full of strong PR 5, 6, 7 or above. Stay
away from those for now until you are better equipped to
compete with them. Start with green keywords!
Sometimes if a couple PR 4 pages are in the results
and the rest are weak PR 0, 1, 2, or 3 then you might still be
able to go after it – as long as the page that is a PR 4 is not
that blog’s homepage or a page with your keyword as its
title. It could be that the blog was not necessarily trying to
rank for your keyword, but did so because of its relative
strength with a related keyword. These are easier PR 4’s to
beat than a true PR 4 and you can probably knock it off the
first page with a few extra backlinks. Backlinks will be
covered in depth in the appropriate chapter, so hang in there until then.
Once again, the keywords that you highlight in green
are the ones you should start with. Try 1 or 2 at first and
build upon them. After you rank near the top of page 1 for a
keyword, then try for your next one. Small steps at a time
are what you need in the beginning and will allow for bigger successes later.
Yet another Overview of the System
Essentially, you are making an intertwined network
of blogs – some that support, some that support the
“supporters”, and some that are basically a “storefront”
that makes you money. The support (2nd tier) blogs direct
traffic to your money sites (3rd tiers) in the form of a
backlink. The farms (1st tiers) provide an extra burst of
energy to the 2nd tiers. The money sites/blogs are about
specific niches that get a direct boost of “link love” (oneway
backlinks) from the supporting 2nd tiers. Here I am repeating the system again.
The backlinks are the heart and soul of your moneymaking
blog system and are the most important concept
to master. No exceptions. You will learn about these
beloved backlinks in the chapter about backlinks, black
hat SEO, 1st tiers, and 2nd tiers.
The following will pictorially demonstrate the blog system to those of you who are visual learners:
Please keep in mind that the above picture is only a
rough idea of the supporting cast needed for each 3rd tier
blog. It does not represent the exact number of 1st tier, 2nd
tier, backlinks, or anything else that you need to make the
3rd tier a success. Even I do not know the exact number of
anything you will need – because it’s always different for
every situation. Use the picture as a guideline.
