In the last post we discussed mostly Niche Research, but we’re going to advance beyond the basics here to discuss other details for setting up new websites and a little bit on promoting them.

Important:

Stay focused if/when you work your way through these tutorials and videos linked to on this page.  Most of what you want to accomplish for niche research, setting up websites, and yes, even learning how to get traffic can be found out for free.  If you know that what you’re being told isn’t tripe, hype or B.S. then you can rely on freely given information to help your business.

So let me just say that the videos linked to below are good content, reviewed by me, and you don’t need to buy anything just yet.

Watch and learn, literally….

Moving forward, I assume you’ve done some homework/research, have decided on a niche and have a good keyword-rich domain name, so we’ll go in to some detail on:

• How to generate Keyword lists
• How to generate LSI-related KW lists
• Site planning, design and optimization
• Install WordPress
• Install Plugins
• Install Themes

Let’s Go…

#1- How to generate keyword lists, how to plan your site content, how to structure your site

This video is 67 minutes long and the first 20-30 minutes is introductory stuff, the rest is pretty good information. Click here to watch the video then come back here if you have any questions, no need for me to repeat what someone else is saying, right?  Especially if we’re both pretty much saying the same thing….

#2 – How to find LSI thematically relevant keywords

Here’s another golden nugget freebie.  This report (click here to get download it) will show you how to use a free tools to reverse engineer the top ranked sites and generate keyword lists that will help you rank easier and faster.  If/when you combine this with the information in the video linked to above, you’ll have a pretty clear understanding on how to rank well in the search engines.

#3 -Registering Domain Names, Getting Hosting

Video  – Register domain with NameCheap, it’s cheaper than GoDaddy, easier to work with, has coupons every month, easy funding of Namecheap account with PayPal.

Video – Get hosting account with Hostgator - you can bargain hunt to find a better deal possibly, but Hostgator has live chat, 24-hour support, does weekly backups of all your sites

Video – Transfer DNS from domain registrar (in this case it’s NameCheap) over to your web hosting.  You need to do this if you want your site to be live, and hosted by your web hosting.  I highly recommend against using domain registrars to host your websites, especially GoDaddy hosting.

NOTE: What this does is in newbie speak is it tells the world that your domain name is live and well and is hosted over here (in this case it’s Hostgator’s DNS servers.  If you absolutely need to know what DNS servers are, here’s a good explanation of it…

(1) Short for Domain Name System (or Service or Server), an Internet service that translates domain names into IP addresses

. Because domain names are alphabetic, they’re easier to remember. The Internet however, is really based on IP addresses. Every time you use a domain name, therefore, a DNS service must translate the name into the corresponding IP address. For example, the domain name www.example.com might translate to 198.105.232.4.  Source

#4 Installing WordPress, Installing and using Plugins, and Themes

NOTE: Why WordPress?  Because once it’s installed it’s the easiest way to publish content, manage that content, and create a good looking site (using freely available themes)

Video: How to install WordPress in 2-3 minutes in Hostgator cPanel using Fantastico Deluxe

Video: How to install WordPress – just a general video in case you don’t use Hostgator

Video: Install WordPress Plugins Automatically

List of free plugins I have on most of my sites: All of these are easily installed from within Admin Panel and no FTP is required

• 404 SEO Plugin – redirects dead links to keyword relevant post
• Akismet – Anti-SPAM plugin, comes installed with WordPress, you need to get a key for it via link provided in Admin Panel.  Use this in addition to Spam Karma
• AllInOneSEO or Platinum SEO – SEO Plugins that help optimize your posts for the search engines
• Comment Luv- encourages comments, comment management plugin
• Contact Form – make it easy for people to contact you privately
• Cross Linker – good for sales AND SEO… hyperlink certain words and link to posts on site or affiliate links
• FollowMe (Twitter) – sidebar graphic that encourages people to Follow you on Twitter
• Google XML Sitemaps- creates sitemap for your blog
• Post Teaser – displays “read more” or “continue reading” after XX # of words in a post
• Robots Meta – good SEO plugin for managing DoFollow, NoFollow attributes on site
• RSS footer – adds links to your RSS feed snippets, forcing RSS-scraping auto-bloggers to link back to your content when they scrape it.
• SpamKarma – advanced anti-Spam plugin
• Subscribe to Comments – emails commenters when additional replies/comments were made on something they subscribed to, good for keeping the conversation going and letting your commenters know when you’ve replied
• Targeted Subscribers – My first plugin, read about it and download it here
• TweetMeme (Twitter)- Essential for getting your content posted out to the Twitter-sphere
• What Would Seth Godin Do – Encourages RSS readership
• WordPress Automatic Upgrade -you need this to automate the constant WordPress version upgrades
• WP 125 (Manages Banner Ads)
• WP Super Cache – supposedly makes your blogs load faster
• Yet Another Related Posts – displays related content at end of posts

Plugin I don’t use but a lot of others use:

Feedburner – for building and managing your RSS readership

Video: How to Find and Install Free WordPress Themes to make your site look beautiful

#5- Basic site promotion techniques to get your site noticed, indexed, crawled etc…

Video: How to Add Your Site To Google Webmaster Tools

Video : How To Submit Your Website to Google, Yahoo and Bing Search Engines

Video: Submitting Your Website to DMOZ, the Open Directory

Video: How To Submit Articles to EzineArticles [ezinearticles.com]

So there you have a list of videos that will help you:

• Do in-depth keyword/niche research
• Generate keyword lists
• Register a domain
• Get web hosting
• Transfer DNS from registrar to web hosting
• Install WordPress, install plugins, find and install themes, and what plugins to install
• Some basic site promotion techniques

Any questions?  Let me know 

When people start on their quest to make money online, there’s almost always a period of time when I/you/we might find ourselves bouncing around from one thing to another, trying different tactics, methods, but rarely any strategies.

TACTICS are what make strategies work.

Without a strategy, no amount of tactics will work.

Some money-making strategies for internet marketing:

• Affiliate marketing- sell other’s products
• Sell your own products
• Provide a service ( writing, technical stuff like installing scripts, building websites, SEO services, etc…)

What most people are after though isn’t making their own products or providing services.

What most people want to do is create websites that make money and not have to deal with customer support or creating their own product/service.

Which brings us (finally) to niche research strategies, and finding good niches to set up shop in.

Doing niche research to find profitable markets:

Questions to ask if you don’t know where to start:

• Is there a problem here, and can I deliver a solution (via digital product, hard copy physical product or by way of offering a service) ?
• Is there enough traffic or interested buyers looking for this solution?  Offline concerns = researching solutions online research = traffic for particular keywords
• If there ARE hungry buyers in this niche, are they spending money or just curiosity clickers?
• Do I have an interest in this subject matter?  Helps if/when you decide you want to write good content

Exploring your niche ideas for profitability and traffic potential

TIP: When I do research into new niches, I usually have at least 3 tabs open on my browser, the reasons for which will be evident as you read further down

There are 2 free tools you can use here to get a good idea on potential traffic and potential profitability

Google Keyword tool -Tab 1 open in browser

As far a search volume is concerned this tool doesn’t provide truly accurate numbers because it also includes (potential traffic volume) numbers from their search partners, and this traffic is only available via other sites and pay per click advertising on those sites.

However, it does give you a good idea on what the most searched-for keywords are and what their potential profitability might be if you use the drop-down menu to Show CPC, which means Cost Per Click.  If the “CPC” is 40 cents or above there’s some potential here but “potential” is always a combination of traffic volume and profitability, therefore 40 cents a click is goo dif there’s 6,000 EXACT searches a month for a particular term, as opposed to something that gets 30 searches a month for the exact term.

Using Spyfu -Tab 2 open in browser

If/when you find something that looks profitable because it has high search volume and decent CPC, then your next step should be to see if there are any Pay Per click marketers advertising something for when these terms are searched for.

However, what you really want to know is not just whether or not there are other’s paying for clicks for this term, but how many others are paying for this term, which means you want to know how many advertisers there are for this term currently.  Any number above 8 advertisers means there’s potential and profitability for this particular term

NOTE: It’s helpful to remember that niche research is done by analyzing the big picture and how much traffic the most general terms are getting, plus knowing if there are currently solutions being searched for, plus knowing if this niche and its related keywords have already proven profitable as evinced by the CPC costs.

Analyzing your SEO competition:

The third Tab I have open in a browser in for my favorite domain name registrar Namecheap.

When analyzing your SEO competition here’s what you need to take into consideration

The top 15 websites ranking for your chosen keywords/phrases/terms

• Do they have keywords in their domain name?
• Are they authority sites like WikiPedia Amazon, YouTube videos?
• Do the highly-ranked URLS (not main sites) have any PageRank, which is merely indicative of that URL getting traffic nothing more.
• Do the highly-ranked URLs have backlinks pointing to them, if so how many and where from?

NOTE: What those highly-ranked websites (and URLs) are doing for monetization = good profitability options being handed to you here

Determining if you can rank well for the terms you’re going after

The answer to this lies not just in your level of SEO knowledge, but also in what available domain names there are that are a close or exact match to the keywords you’re going to target for a main traffic term. Domain names are still one of the most important elements for ranking well for certain terms.

NOTE: You can still rank well without using keyword-rich domain names, but it just makes life a lot easier if good domain names are available.

The strategy for getting domain names

What I like to do here is have a tab/window open for a domain name registrar while sorting through keywords that get traffic, have high CPC and most importantly of all, are relevant to what I am going to write about.

Since domain names are one of the most heavily weight on-page/on-site  SEO factors, I try to find a domain name that very closely resembles or exactly matches some of the high search terms.

In most cases the really good domain names that are exact matches for the top search terms are already taken so what you want to do here is look for domain names that include a combination of some of the top search terms.

For example:  The MLM Network Marketing Niche/Industry

I decided to build a network marketing related site last year and started off by doing some searches using “mlm”, and “network marketing” as my base terms.

I sorted the keywords list by most-to-least traffic volume.

Then I went over to my NameCheap browser tab and started searching for available domain names, starting with the most searched for terms which are usually already taken.

A lot of the high traffic terms were taken as exact domain name matches, so I got a domain name that had my main terms/keywords in its name and had some exact matches in it for other terms that got a good amount of searches.

Keep going > Read Part 2 Of Niche Research and Setting Up New Websites

There are a LOT of keyword research tools out there, but sometimes these tools give you inaccurate data or perceptions.

A lot of times with new websites you’re tempted to generate a keywords list based on the top related searches, then you head out to create site content and/or articles targeting those terms…

Sounds like a good plan, right?

Couple of things wrong with that plan, though

#1 – Inaccurate keyword research data leads to a lot of time wasted sometimes, especially if you are facing stiff competition in the search engines for those terms

#2 – The keyword research tools don’ t give you any proof that these terms are profitable, so even if you did manage to rank well for those terms in your keywords list, you still don’t know if these are to generic to convert well.

There are 2 ways to instantly tell if your keywords are worth targeting

The first way is to do a search for your keyword until you find an article published on an article directory like EzineArticles dot com..

If you type in a search term and this “EZA” article shows up, then you can go to that article and scroll down until you see how many views that page  received so far, and when it was published.

Free Keyword Research

So, if an article was published one month ago and got 30 page views, then that PAGE gets 1 visitor a day on average.  If the article was really highly ranked, like position 1-3 then you pretty much know how many daily searches there are for that keyword.

This is the reality of keyword research as it boils down to your main concern, which is,

“how many visitors a day will I receive by being highly ranked for this keyword?”

This method works well if your keyword search ends up displaying an article directory article on Page 1.

The second method for more accurately determining EXACTLY how many searches a day a certain keyword search gets on Google is to set up a PPC campaign.

• When you set this Pay Per click campaign up, you make sure your bid is high enough to get page 1 presence.
• Then you merely let that ride for a few days, preferably during the week when there are more searches.
• Since you’re paying for Page 1 displays for that keyword every time it gets searched for, you will see the number of impressions your PPC ad got.
• This doesn’t mean you’re paying for clicks,though since all you’re trying to do here is pay for Page 1 impressions, and you don’t have to be in the top positioned AD to get those impressions.
• So when someone searches for a particular term and your ad is page 1, its gets an impression every time its searched for on Google.

And that’s the most accurate way to tell exactly how many searches a certain term gets! 

ALSO: Doing niche research on your own manually without tools will also reveal to you related keywords your target audience is interested in.

3 Steps For Niche Affiliate Marketing Success – Niche Marketing Myths Uncovered

What is Niche Affiliate Marketing?

Niche Marketing is when you focus your attentions on a specific niche in order to ascertain and fulfil that niche audience’s needs. Some of the myths about Niche Affiliate Marketing are as follows:

1- Focus on what you love to do

2- Sell digital products

3- Build your own websites

Those 3 items above are actually decent niche marketing tips but the fact of the matter is, if you gathered up some PLR (private label rights) material and sold them off your niche website, or even off a Squidoo Lens, then you’re sure to do well.

You don’t have to focus on what you love to succeed with niche affiliate marketing, you don’t necessarily need your own websites, and some niches don’t do too well for digital products but do very well for other types of products.

The point here is that there’s a lot of good advice out there about niche marketing but the real proof of effective niche marketing strategies comes from copying what real successful niche marketers do.

So what do successful niche marketers do?

They do things the easiest way possible. They get a Squidooo lens, then build some entries and content for it and see if there’s any traffic coming to it. If there’s traffic coming to that lens in high enough volume and it’s producing income, then it’s time to expand upon that premise some more by getting a domain name and self-hosted blog or website.

Niche affiliate marketing is for those who want to make money the easiest way possible, and getting a Squidoo Lens prior to building a website is a great niche marketing tip I hope you remember and apply.

Article Source: Niche Affiliate Marketing

There’s a lot of disagreement among marketers and how to get started in niche marketing…

Some say focus on an interest or passion and research the profitability factor.  Others say just focus on finding the hottest, easiest, most profitable markets to target and focus on that.

So, I’m going to focus on the latter business model in this post.

When you focus only on selling what will sell easiest and best, it reminds me of convenience stores.

Think of your overall business as a convenience store… In these stores you will only see items that are proven to sell well.  In any offline business, they only have so much room so they only keep in stock what is selling.

There are a variety of items in the store, of all different types and sizes and prices…

But what’s the one thing all the products on the shelves in the aisles have in common?

They are all items proven to sell, otherwise they wouldn’t be on the shelf.

So, if you’re the type of person who doesn’t want to corner a market, or get branded as an expert in a certain area, or put all your efforts into niches you have expertise, passion, or interest in, then consider the convnience store business model.

Focus on a variety of niches that you researched thoroughly and have pretty good reasons for thinking they will sell easily and often. 

I know for a fact that a lot of people just want to make some money online without having to turn their passions and interest from a hobby into a business. 

I think you should examine this method, but be warned… when you don’t have any expertise or interest in your business sites or topic, you will find it more difficult to present yourself as an expert and become believable in your visitors’ eyes

There are a lot of people who have discovered their own unique methods for doing niche research…  They know how to find hot niches and market to them and they make “bank” because their research was done correctly.

But with all the methods revealed, what’s the true method for doing niche research that will work for anyone and everyone regardless of their interests and strengths?

As always, the best way to learn the truth about anything is to ask Experts that have been doing it for years with great success.

So that’s what I did.

I interviewed 5 niche marketing research experts and put together 5 hours of audio interviews where they discuss their methods and just how easy it really is to do once you know where to look…

This new product is coming out soon, so bookmark this page or get on the list (via top right box on this blog) and watch for the release date

A lot of people and companies offer the service of doing keyword research for you.  But what are you getting exactly?

The low-end types will use Yahoo Overture and tell you what keywords to use.
The next step up is people who use a combination of services and tools to compile more relevant data like Search Volume, KEI values, Number of Competing sites etc….
However, research is always done by humans and always subject to their interpretations of what words and phrases to use.  The person doing the KW research for you is probably someone who has a different goal in mind than you do.
I ran into this issue recently from a reputable service provider with whom I am still working.

Here is what happened:
I hired someone to do some traffic generation for me, and was outsourcing/outtasking a new project to them.
Their service included:
Doing some “deep” KW research and returning with a list of keywords and phrases for some content.  Creation of Squidoo lenses and adding periodic content to them, and social bookmarking some articles written and submitted by them for m
Here’s what the problem was:
There was a disconnect right from the get-go.  They were interested in KEI values since these would help me get traffic right away.  I was interested in achieving SERPs and rankings for specific terms.
KEI is a ratio/score of search results/search volume.  KEI basically is an indicator of how many people are searching for something and how many competing sites there are for just that one keyword.
Article marketers, listen up! KEI is what you want to focus on.  Articles writen with KEI in mind will get traffic right away
Site owners looking for rankings, listen up!  SERPS, backlinks, indexed pages, keyword density is what you should be concerned with if you have a long term approach to the business.
The story continues, I get ticked off!
So, I’m going over MY truly deep KW research analysis sheet and comparing it to my new outsource team’s KW research.
Wow, almost nothing was the same… Did I get ripped off by someone who has hoping to take advantage of a newbie?

I know how to do the truly deep research, and was testing and double-checking my outsourcing team’s work.  I was about to ask for a refund when something dawned on me.
All niche and keyword research is not the same.

My outsourcing team was focused in getting immediate traffic for me via articles based focus on KEI-laden keyword research.   My focus was on long-term gains in the SERPs, but I’m OK with getting immediate traffic, too.

Anyways, the discovery was another hard-won battle in the trenches for me.  I found out stuff that only the true experts know, and I found it out from a BUM.  A Bum Marketer, that is.  an article marketer/niche marketer.

Even though I “laid at his feet” and listened like a sponge, it was still quite overwhelming how much data there is to pore over before you start to get a clear picture of what Keywords you really want.

So, if you’re an article marketer, find relevant keywords with good KEI values for your articles
As an article marketer, your goal isn’t necessarily to gain rankings or get better SERPs.  Your goal is immediate type-in traffic that finds your articles and sends people to your links eventually.
If you’re a website owner trying to figure out what you want your site to rank well for, there are many factors to consider.
1- How long are you willing to wait to unseat the entrenched top ranked sites?
2-   How much time, effort, and money are you willing to spend to gain SERPs?
The answers to these 2 questions will help make the rest of the decisions easier.  Now, when doing Keyword Research with a long-term SEO view, not the KEI/article marketer’s view, then you need to take into consideration the following factors.
Search volume- obviously a pretty important statistic.  You want a few hundred searches a month, at least.  But remember that ranking #1 for a KW that is extremely targeted is often better than 10X the traffic to a generic term that doesn’t conver the visito rinto a reader, buer, subscriber eetc…
Number of Competing sites-  the number is almost always going to be 10, since you’re really only worried about the top 10 site sin the SERPs.  these 10 sites represent page 1 of search engine sites, and everything else is unimportant, IMHO.
Number of indexed pages- This surprised me as being an important factor.
Who care how many pages a site has, right?  Well, apparently the search engines do because it’s one of the reporting features that they look at when spidering sites and research tools usually return this as a sought after value, too.  Looking back on things, I can see that it’s true.  One of my review sites outranks other sites in the same niche because of the large number of indexexed pages it has, even thoug hit has less links pointing towards it.
Number of backlinks- Pretty important.
The more links that point back to your sites with the proper anchor text, the more “votes” that say your site is about XYX content.  Generally speaking, the more links you have, the better, but links from related sites that point back to your site with anchor text…that’s much, much better.
So, in order to do some Deep Keyword research you need to know your goals ahead of time.
KEI and immediate traffic   OR   Long term SERPS?
Once you know this, its time to gather all this data together and make decisions…
If you read this far down, then you definitely want to get my free newsletter on  How To Find Hot Niches For Niche Affiliate Marketing by going to http://nicheaffiliatemarketingsecrets.com

Your niche affiliate marketing efforts are sometimes only as good as the research that went into everything before you got started marketing to that niche.

By niche affiliate marketing, I refer to the business model of being an affiliate and selling products as a non-owner of products, and not creating your own products and establishing a reputation as an expert in that niche.

How do you find hot niches and profitable markets?

Well, it’s actually a lot simpler than you may realize and you can discover what these hot niches are without even using online tools (although they do help quite a bit!).

The answer to where the hot markets is:

All Around You…

• What items do you see being sold in stores?
• What items do you buy regularly?
• What advertisers are buying space in offline magazines?
• What are the news-worthy items being written about in your newspaper?

Think about those things for a bit and your answers to those questions will reveal what some great niches are for getting into…

Go here to find out more about Niche Affiliate Marketing and the Niche Research process

This is Post #5 of The Niche Marketing Case Study

As of right now, the traffic is still good for the niche sites and the rankings have increased for all of the major terms.

For all the major terms, her sites are either page 1 or page 2.  We did this by using WordPress blogs, some automated content, and some link building.

She got approved to be an affiliate because she commanded those rankings and was able to display her Alexa stats (some vendors still rely on that as an accurate tool for traffic volume).

She’s made a few sales here and there for some affiliate products but the audinece isn’t really buying much of what she is offering.  As it turns out, this niche would rather buy hard cover books from amazon that digital products from ClickBank.

This is the part of the research process that was overlooked because if we knew ahead of time via careful research what this niche was buying, then there would have been more sale.

However, without a lot of traffic, it is difficult to determine the reality of what is really selling in this niche.  Her sites are getting traffic via top rankings in the search engines, and it’s just a mtter of finding out what the site visitors want to buy, or be sold.

She is also making her own ebook/digital product to sell on all her sites, and this should convert pretty well when the visitors see that it’s not an affiliate product for sale, but a product written by an true expert in this field.

When it comes to niche marketing, the research process must be conducted thoroughly to shave off a lot of time when it comes to finding the right product to sell.  Since this niche site is centered around her passion/hobby we took some shortcuts and didn’t do enough of the right kinds of research since we were both already committed to building sites for this niche.

This is the last post for the Niche Marketing Case Study since business is ever-changing and these posts could really go on forever…

I’d like for you to consider the all-too-important lesson here which is that anyone can get high rankings for their targetted terms, but if the niche marketing research wasn’t fully fleshed-out ahead of time, you will stand to lose a little time making your niche sites convert into money machines.

Please click here to see my site on Niche Marketing Research and Niche Affiliate Marketing

Niche Case Study Post #4: Watch Me Build A Profitable Site From Scratch

This is post 4 for the Affiliate Marketing Case Study…

Well, we were hemm-ing and haww-ing on what niche to pursue, then we went back to an old, tried and tested method for developing a niche marketing site…
To go with the passion and the “guru within”..  Read this post here to fully understand what I mean, the come back to reading this post….

Here’s the first 2 things we did:
1.We did some keyword research on her “passion-niche” but I can’t tell you what it is or she’ll cry “fowl” (that’s a hint, by the way) 
2.We use Google’s Free Keyword Research Tool to determine what the search volume was for her niche.  I was amazed not only at how much traffic there was to be had here, but also how little competiton….

Then we made a game plan, and here it is:
1.Create a new blog, transfer old pages from old dying site with no traffic over to new blog that I created for her and trained her on how to use WordPress (just like I would do for any Marketer’s Relief member…)
2.Start writing articles, and linking back to her blog from those articles. ( the interview I did with article marketing expert Fabian Tan proved very helpful)
3.Start adding new pages to her new blog once a day (when it’s your passion, you actually enjoy doing that)
4.Came up with some ideas for pillar blog posts (series of blog posts addressing a certain topic, great for SEO and authority building)
5.Started some blog commenting on the authority sites in this niche to get noticed by the bigger bloggers ( good for getting backlinks from her comments to her site and also a good way to get a guest author post there, too)
6.Started a link building campaign (easy and automated)
7.Discussed strategies for future of the site ( monetization, traffic streams and rivers)
8.Started watching to see just how this was all working out in regards to traffic generation.

NOTE: The blog has been installed for less than 30 days and she has attracted an average of 50 visitors a day, and should get about 1500 targetted visitors this month.  People are already commenting on her blog, and some of her posts are on page 1 already, with others on pages 2 and 3…

Here’s what she has going for her, besides being smart…
She’s a writer
Passionate about her blog and niche
Works hard
Learned WordPress in an amazingly short amount of time with a little help from me ( one it’s installed all you have to do is configure it properly)
Is exhilirated that her blog posts are being seen on page one of Google
Surprised and pleased she’s already getting comments on her blog
Is also working a full time job during the day and freelance writing and blogging at night.
She’s going to get over 1000 visitors to her blog this month, perhaps 2000 and in the next few months will be close to getting about 5000 visitors a month.

NOTE: We have already started monetization procedures here, even though I recommend that most people wait a while until they start looking for income from a new site.  Her site isn’t exactly new, just went from dead in the water to alive and well with a properly optimized WordPress blog, links and allowing user interaction.

Summary: 
1.We took a dead site with 60 published pages and transferred them over to a new blog. 
2.We designed a plan to get links to those sites to get new pages, posts and article indxed:
3.Blog commenting to develop inroads for future guest posts and establishing some traffic streams and rivers.
4.Article marketing for backlinks and developing authority status
5.Monetization methods are being investigated and used.
6.Watching the SERPs for certain blog posts and working to get more links via manual and automated methods.

Once the traffic hits 2000 visitors a month, we will display site income in the next post in this pillar series… 

If there’s one thing that many people disagree on, it’s Keyword Research.

A lot of niche marketers will tell you that KW research is everything, and that is only partially true.

Some SEO experts say that keyword research is kind of a waste of time, and here’s why:
Keyword research tools like Google’s External Keyword Tool, Marketing Samurai, SEOBook, Niche Inspector/Detective, Overture, Wordtracker, etc… all mislead you when they provide you with the number of competing sites as a relevant indicator of the SEO competition for a keyword or niche, or keyphrases.
The number of competing sites simply doesn’t matter because all that means is the search engine found XX number of sites that have that word on their site somewhere.

Not many of those sites are actually dedicated to the exact keyword or term you’re going after here, therefore there really isn’t a lot of competition for the keywords you’re targeting.
Theoretically, there could be ZERO competition for the term you’re going after because not a lot of sites actually dedicated themselves to ranking well for the keywords they’re showing up in the SERPs for… they’re just there.

When keyword research tools show you a really high number of competing sites for a keyword or phrase this will make you think that a certain niche isn’t worth targeting, and this is my main point here on why this statistic (# of competing sites) means very little to you when deciding on what keywords and niches to target.

Here’s an example of how my site ranks #2 or 3 amongst 24 MILLION other sites by making a few simple changes to my blog
The search query:

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&aq=t&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGIH_enUS277US278&q=marketing+business+product+reviews

My blog  ranks #2 or 3 for this without a sweat, but a keyword research tool would show you that based on # of competing sites, this term isn’t worth going after.
I do agree that the term in that search isn’t worth going after, but only because they’re aren’t a lot of people searching for that exact phrase, so it’s not worth my time to target those keywords.

How did I outrank 24 million other sites so quickly?
By making the site properly optimized for those terms.  I have ZERO backlinks to this site with those words in the anchor text of the links.
But who the heck is searching for that exact term?
Not many people search for that term… so the  # of competing sites is not indicative of a search term’s popularity, only how many sites Google decided to include in the index for those terms.
What does matter?
Search volume matters, really….who cares if you outrank 24 million other sites if there’s no traffic for that term?
The keyword research tools mentioned above show you the search volume in addition to # of competing sites.  However, these tools also show wide ranges of numbers of searches for the same terms entered into each tool…
This means that not one of these tools can be regarded as “Gospel” so you need to take everything you’re being handed with a grain of salt.
Why do Keyword Research Tools show such varying numbers?
Because they’re pulling from different databases, or have outdated information or just revealing what they want to reveal (kind of like how Google doesn’t really show an accurate number for how many backlinks your site has pointing to it, but Yahoo Search Marketing does…)
Also, Google’s tool shows the $$ being spent on PPC as an indicator of $$$ being spent in a niche, but that’s only telling you what’s being spent on pay per click advertising…  Some niches many not do well with pay-per-click marketing…
I know for a fact that this is misleading because I have a client who is getting a lot of traffic easily to her site, and there’s a ton of money in this niche.
The SEO competition was allegedly fierce, but it wasn’t so performing basic SEO works wonders for her site.

Since we believed what these tools were telling us, we shot too low and went after less competive terms and got high rankings easily,even with her PageRank dropping, too.

Since the SEO competition wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be, we revised the site to go after the KWs we thought were previously unreachable, SERPS-wise…
A GOOD Keyword Research tool will tell you the in-depth SEO analysis of those “competing sites in the top ten for that term.

Micro Niche Finder does that, by the way…

• I highly recommend you don’t aim low with your SEO and just exercise basic SEO to rank well for your terms.
• Get a KW rich domain name…
• Have it SEO-ed for 2 or 3 main terms…
• Then analyze your tracking statistics to see what you’re actually being found for, and you’ll see terms there NO KW tool uncovered for you.
• Then write about those “weird” terms you see your site getting found for.  This is sort of a backwards way of doing LSI for your site, but it works.

Kurt Melvin (SEO guy with 12 years of SEO experience) once said that KW research is an “iffy” thing at best because the way people search is ever-changing.

In the 70s, people said G’s to mean thousands, now in the computer age with K meaning kilobytes, or thousand bytes, we now say K instead of G to mean “thousand”.
Not many people say I want to make 10 Gs a month, and now more people say I want to make 10k a month.

People’s search, language and behavior patterns change over time, so being “married” to a keyword or keyphrase or keyword research tool leaves you trying to get traffic for a limited # of search terms…

How insulting is it to pay a monthly fee for a keyword research tool that is leading you astray?

• The SAFE way to do keyword research is to use a variety of tools and find the common ground.
• The SECRET to getting traffic and high SERPs isn’t always vast numbers of links, but highly targetted links.

What do the search engines have to do to stay in business?
They have to provide the most relevant search results to their searchers or they’ll go out of business, right?

So how do you make your site seem more relevant to the search engines eyes?

• Link yourself to other sites that rank well for the terms you’re going after.
• Find the top 10 sites in your niche and comment on the EZA articles,  Squidoo lenses, hub pages and blog posts…
• You can even trackback to other blog posts if you want.  As a blog owner myself I delete all trackbacks that are not from good sites, but I DO leave the trackbacks that are from related sites. This bolsters me in the SERPs, and them, too.
• It ties us both together in a WEB of sorts.  Yes, a WEB…You know….the WEB…the Internet (interlinked sites sending traffic and relevancy to each other) ?

If your SEO competition is doing their job well, then you’ll still need to get some backlinks.

Get backlinks with ANCHOR text in them linking to your sites.
Anchor text describes the site it’s linking to, lending relevancy to the site the anchor text is linking to for the clickable words that construe the text.

I have yet to meet the person who told me they’re getting the exact amount of traffic a keyword tool told them to expect to get for a certain term they’re ranking well for.

You need to get found for ALL the terms that are related to your site, not just one.
As mentioned above, you can install a tracking script on your site to see exactly who, what, why, where, when your sites’ visitors are coming to your site.
WHY they’re coming to your site is important because it lets you know what you should be writing about more often.
This is a tip you don’t see spoken about too often, but it’s a great way to make your site seem like it has an overall tighter theme, content-wise.

This Micro Niche Finder Review explains how I got my hands on MicroNichefinder a few months ago but hardly ever used it at first, (I will explain why later).

The reason why Micro Niche Finder beats out a lot of other keyword research tools is the following:

1- It’s now pulling from Google for its search volume results, and not WordTracker like some out-dated keyword research tools are doing.

2- It analyzes the profitability of a niche based on the keywords you entered, and seeing how much people are spending to advertise these keywords via Pay Per Click (if people are spending over a dollar per click for a keyword, there’s money in that niche, and especially for those keywords)

3- It can “dig down” to find keywords and phrases with little competition and can create huge Keywords lists in a matter of minutes.

4- It analyzes the SEO competition for those terms based on InAnchor, InTitle, and InURL, which means it’s telling you how many people are doing proper optimization for those terms by:
· using proper anchor text, (InAnchor)
· putting the keywords in the title, (InTitle)
· and even putting the keywords in the domain name ( InURL…a dead giveaway that someone is “going after” this term…)

5-If you’re stuck on where to start for keywords and have no niches in mind already that you want to research, you merely hit the Brainstorming or HotTrends buttons to get a big list returned to you (this helps when you don’t know where to start…)

The best thing about MicroNichefinder- there’s NO monthly fee, like some other keyword tools.

The second best thing about MicroNichefinder- it’s being upgraded soon (at the time of this wiriting) to include some point-and-click-easy ways to find hot profitable niches…

The BAD part about MicroNichefinder- James is going to raise the price soon after the BIG upgrade is done…and may even raise the price to a monthly fee, but if you get MicroNicheFinder before he does that, then you’ll never pay for upgrades or monthly fees.

My recommendations:

Get it now before price goes up so you can get the free upgrades. If you’re not a niche marketer, you still need to know what kind of traffic is easily obtained and MicroNicheFinder does that for you as well.

Definitely get this if you’re niche affiliate marketing, because it tells you whether or not a niche is worth getting into before you spent time on it… saving you hours of valuable time…

Download MicroNicheFinder Here, You will get immediate access to 5 Bonus Videos on that page

Here is Post #1 of the Niche Marketing Case Study
Here is Post #2 of the Niche Marketing Case Study
You’re reading Post #3 Of The Niche Marketing Case Study

Building a business is a system and an orderly process, so I recommend you read these posts in order so you truly understand how to Build A Profitable Site From Scratch.
In Post #2 we touched upon how we did some Keyword Research to determine what to write about.
Knowing what to write about and what words to use is extremely helpful for a number of reasons.
1- You have a “honey-do” list.
You know, like, honey-do this, honey-do that… Married guys understand what I’m talking about here
2- You know what you have to do and why.
You’re writing and publishing content to attract traffic. Many people flounder from one thing to the next because they have no sense of purpose with their business, and most of those people fail. When you’re armed with a to-do list and a reason why list, you’ll be more than happy to get to work knowing that soon positive results will ensue.
If you don’t like to write, outsource it or quit thinking you can run an online business that is almost wholly dependent on words on pages.
3- The more you write the better you get at it.
4- The more articles you publish to article directories, the more traffic you get.
I’m not a prolific article marketer by a long-shot, but these are my stats at the time of this writing. The important statistics to look at here are bolded:
· Article(s) Views: 12,773
· Profile Views: 191
· Articles Published: 365
· URL Clicks: 2,493
· Comments: 9
· Emailed: 1
· Live Articles: 54
These are actually pretty good statistics for someone who hardly has any time to do article marketing. Think of those 54 published articles as 54 backlinks that also sent me 2,493 visitors….so far

5- The more pages you have on your site, the more traffic you will get if you write for traffic and human visitors.
See the stats above which prove my point. Check to see where your pages rank for the longtail keywords you’ll be going after here
6- The more site pages and articles you have published and viewed, the more you will be seen as an authority on your niche topic.
7- The more of an authority you seem to be, or are, the more people will really tune in to you.
However, there’s something else that you need to realize about Keyword Research before we continue onwards to site design:
Many SEO experts say that Keyword research is near useless because the words and phrases your site gets found for is actually all sorts of words and phrases not shown in any keyword research tool.
The key to getting traffic is simply to have lots of words on lots of page and linking to those pages. Keyword Research is important because it tells you how to get the easy traffic, basically. But again, the more you write and the more you expand your known presence on the Internet with numerous linked-to pages, the better off you will be.
OK, enough of that, let’s get down to site design….
It’s far better to get traffic to an ugly site that has words on it that people read than it is to have a flashy site with garbage content.
Build a blog using wordpress, nothing else. Get a free wordpress theme indicative of your niche.
When you arrive at a site for the first time, is it immediately apparent what the site is about?
Is this blog pretty clear of what the subject matter is?
Words sell, pictures don’t.
Fancy flash images and animated banners distract your visitors from reading the content that drove them to your site in the first place. Create an easy to read site that is also easy to navigate. Blogs are good for this since you can easily create categories and sub-categories.
At this point in the process,
You have a list of keywords upon which to base your written content.
You know the basics on how to create a good looking site that people like.
Plus, you know WHY you’re doing these things, which is really important.
NOTE: Many people say you should do Niche Research to see if a niche is Profitable. Well, the traffic that is so very easily obtainable with the niche we’re doing for the case study, there’s no need to worry about that. With the massive amount of traffic to be had here, even minor league monetization will pay off nice dividends.
*- If you don’t know how to do Article Marketing like a “pro”, I interviewed an article marketer who makes $6,000.00 a month and you can get a copy of that interview here.
**- If you don’t know how to set up and create a blog, you can get all the videos and plugins to learn that here.
***- If you still don’t know how to do Keyword Research and site-building, you get all the videos and to learn that here.
The next post will cover how to start getting traffic to your site instantly and how to double it every 45 days.
This is the end of Post #3 Of The Niche Marketing Case Study

I was doing some research on a marketing forum lately and wanted to share something with the article marketers and niche marketers out there

A lot of niche marketers do their research, write some articles, and make some sales..
That’s great if your goal is to be an employee of the product owner…

Affiliate marketing is a great business to have if you run it as a business, but you have to stop treating it like a job!

I mean, think about it…

you’re going to spend time writing articles to promote someone else’s products, and then kiss that customer good bye forever once they buy from you????

If you’re not building a list, then you’re banking on one time sales from an article reader to make a sale and therein ends your relationship with your reader/customer.client.
You lost a valuable customer in a one-off, trade-off (article written, info presented, sale made, nice knowin’ ya!, we hardly knew ya!)
You made a sale and gave the customer away!  This is short term and myopic thinking….
The reason many article marketers don’t build a list is they think there’s no reason to build a list to upsell or side sell them anything.
Niche marketers want the sales, and they get the sales… but have no idea on what else their potential clients (that they’re giving away) could be interested in…
I hear this a lot from people I coach, and it kinda blows my mind when I hear that:
·    there’s no reason to build a list because there’s really nothing else to sell those people or…
·    there’s nothing else those visitors would be interested in besides the article they read, or…
·    there’s no compelling reason why an article reader would want to join my list (have nothing to offer them)
·    etc…
BUT…where the JOB of article marketing starts to turn into a business is when you introduce automation via list building and email marketing.
This is where you will start to see business growth, by leveraging your time better.
Sure, the accrued backlinks and smattering of traffic from article marketing will help your site get traffic over time, but if you make an extra 100 dollars a month with your automated email marketing, then that’s about 20 good articles you could be outsourcing regularly.
And once you have 20 articles being outsourced and paid for in an automated fashion, perhaps your income will grow an extra 200 /month in an automated fashion, too.  It worked before when you wrote the articles, didn’t it?
1.    When you can afford outsourcing because it is being paid for by business automation strategies = you have LEVERAGE.
2.    Apply leverage to the working points in your business and you no longer have a JOB
3.    All you’re left with is a business.
PART 2…
Maybe you don’t know why you would want to build a list because you’re not sure what your list is into, right?
If you’re writing articles on this niche, then you just might know something about it, therefore you can offer an ecourse which could be 5 articles broken up over 15 messages, or a top ten list of tips, or whatever you know they would like.
Offer that to your article readeras via the author Resource box and send them to a squeeze page, which is also easily done.
All it takes is a little thought on what a (nursing school) person might be interested in for side products or services and the next thing you know, you’ve got a head full of ideas on what to put into your autoresponder series.
If you have something that is working for you, apply leverage to it and relax…….. the money will come in even though you may feel like you’re giving away all your profits to pay someone else to do your JOB for you.
1.    With each article you outsource, you will get a backlink, and that’s something right there.
2.    If there’s quality traffic derived form those outsourced articles, so much the better.
3.    Get a lifetime customer instead of giving them away to the product owner… priceless

Finding a “Hot” or trendy niche works.  If you kept working on trendy niches, then your site could develop into a niche site for recent trends, did you ever think of that?

You can follow the trends and easily capitalize on them via free blogs and lenses and hub pages and some social bookmarking tactics.  More on that later…

Once again though, the success of your niche affiliate marketing comes down to the audience that sees your offer.

How do you find out if a hot niche is full of buyers or freebie-seekers?

How can you find out if your target audience is full of buyers or cheapskates?

Look, you don’t have to dominate or “own” the niche you’re getting interested in, you just want to make a good chunk of affiliate income from your niche marketing endeavors the easiest way possible.

…and the best way to do that is not just to find out where the easy traffic is….

If you find a niche with a lot of hungry buyers, very little traffic and very little competition, then that is the best kind of niche to get into for the beginning niche affiliate marketer.

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What’s the best way to build a lens a hub page, a free wordpress site?

In regards to the free sites like Squidoo, HubPages and the free non-self-hosted wordpress dot com sites, you want to put up at least 5-7 content pages for each one that you create and use the appropriate tags for those sites.  The tags you use will be anchor text for the terms you’re going after and this will help you get ranked well quickly for those specific keywords.

When you build a niche site, you can use the method Andrew Hansen mention in his Niche Marketing On Crack product, which was to build one site based around one product you’re selling. That’s good advice, but what most people think of first when they’re building a site is what it’s going to look like and that’s where the whole idea of a hot niche site starts to go astray.

Words sell. Pictures do not.

This would be accomplished by having the right content and categories on your site, not just a flashy header graphic you worked on for a few days.  In a few days you could have created the content that would already be pleasing your visitors.

A good KW tool will tell you how many sites have the proper SEO done to their pages, and this is a more accurate description of your SEO competition.   Again, the number of competing sites is just an indicator of how many other sites have those KWs mentioned on indexed pages.

What really matters is the number of sites that have devoted some time to get links to their sites and spent time optimizing their pages properly so the search engines find them easier.  This is your real niche affiliate marketing SEO competition

Analyzing your competition is all well and good and just part of your total niche and keyword research process

if you’re a niche marketer, you need to know where your hungry marketers or buyers are.

Watch Me Build A Profitable Site From Scratch

A decision was made early this morning on what niche to go after for this Niche Marketing Case study.

There are unlimited niches to go after and I got a bit sidetracked thinking of all the niches I could go after.

The Boston, Massachusetts area where I live is a haven for quality Mixed Martial Arts practitioners.  I was sorely tempted to go after that niche since I practiced it for years and have easy ways to contact national public figures in that niche since many of the up-and-coming fighters are from this area.

It would have been extremely easy to make this niche site into a great authority style site.  But… after a lot of hemming and hawing, I decided to do something that serves my interests as well as yours.

As you may know, I run a site called Marketer’s Relief where I teach members how to build their business one step at a time, with every step spelled out in great detail.  Anyways, I was chatting with one of my members on Skype last night and early into the morning and decided to do what I do best: help Marketer’s Relief members get their businesses going.

Well, this member is a very common type of aspiring marketer, hypnotized by the glamour of marketing to other marketers, yet is already an expert in her true passion. She is very smart, is a good writer and makes money writing for others.  I’ve been trying to get her to stick to just writing and to her “passion-niche”.

EDIT: I strongly urge you to read this post (opens up in new window) before continuing forward reading this series of posts.  Seriously, read it here, then come back to reading this post.

After doing about 15 minutes of Keyword Research, we came to a decision that her site could be the niche we go after for this case study!

What’s the niche?

Can’t reveal that, but I will say this. It’s related to nature and animals and pets, all in one.

1- Her site currently has an Alexa ranking of 11 million.  This means it has pretty much ZERO reach as a website that attracts visitors.

Here’s a link to my alexa statisitcs to show you what I’m referring to here.

2- Her site has 76 un-noticed pages written for it and has a Page Rank of 2, which obviously means nothing as far a getting traffic is concerned.

3- We’re going to take her site and turn it into a blog since that’s really THE publishing platform you want to be on these days.

4- I’m going to build the blog for her and set up categories on her blog for the terms she wants to get traffic for. (I normally charge $500.00 for this)

5- Her current hosting doesn’t have a proper Cpanel set up so we’re transferring her site to my VPS (Virtaul Private Server) because I have a normal set up there, with all the necessary webhosting statistics tools and other features.  She also had her blog hosted with Godaddy, which absolutely stinks when it comes to web hosting.

6- I will do everything for her on the SEO side of things and she will merely do the writing.

7- I think she can devote 1-2 hours a day for this, which should be plenty of time to get some extra streams of traffic coming in.

8- I will also put her site on autopilot to fill her site with unique content and that should be good for 70-100 visitors a day, or 2k-3k visitors a month without doing any extra work.

9- She is going to find a free WordPress theme related to her niche so no money is spent on graphics design

What  I discovered in 15 minutes of Keyword Research with the MicroNicheFinder Keyword Research tool.

1- This is a niche that gets almost as much traffic as the dog training niche!

2- There’s tons of zero-to-little competition keywords here that she can get ranked for quickly.  These keywords and search phrases are all totally relevant to her niche.  I am tempted to call these long tail keywords except for the fact that they will bring in a total of about 10k unique visitors a month just by going after 5-7 of those terms.

3- I am/was amazed at how much traffic she’ll getting with just a little work.

Oops did I just say a four-letter word?  Yup, this will take her about 1-2 hours a day for about a week to get more traffic than my blog does, and this blog gets about 7.6k unique visitors a month which isn’t too shabby.

Quick Note:  Have you ever seen those videos where people show you they got 50k visitors to their sites?  Well, guess what, visitor counts doesn’t mean jack, but the # of unique visitors is the real statistic you should be paying attention to when you’re looking at your traffic statistics via your webhosting’s cpanel and AWSTATS.

Here’s a blog post (opens up in new window) that shows you How To Do Deep Keyword Research Read that before continuing on.

4- After doing the keyword research, we now have a list of easy terms to go after and we start writing content based on that.

But first, how to design the site?

The next post will explain how to properly design a site and more importantly, how to get traffic to it.

I’m going to continue on with the next phase of building this business in the next post.

Any questions so far?

Here is Post #1 of the Niche Marketing Case Study

you’re reading Post #2 of the Niche Marketing Case Study