Choose A Niche

I don’t update this blog a lot because most of the material is pretty evergreen. However, today I’d like to share with you a really great tool I found last week that I absolutely love. Link Luv Post Builder is a tool that anyone working with niches online could use. At the ultra-cheap price of $27, it is a product within purchase reach of a wide range of people and it really pays for itself in the time it will save you. You can read more and Purchase Link Luv Post Builder at the link. I wrote an in-depth review on my other blog here: Five Reasons (and then some) to Purchase Link Luv Post Builder.

Here are the basics if you’re in a hurry:

• You can quickly put together speedlinking or link luv posts based on keywords.
• The built-in authority sites that Link Luv Post Builder crawls can help you gain authority.
• You are able to add to the built-in list of searched sites to include your favorites as well.
• You can help you expand your blogging circle and find new reading material within whatever niche you choose
• By running regular searches, you will be able to stay on top of trends and breaking news
• Entering a keyword and searching brings up a hundred links from as many sources, this can help you break writers’ block, expand story ideas and think in fresh ways.
• When you link out, you often get a trackback. This means that Link Luv Post Builder can also help you build incoming links to your blog, not just outgoing links to others’.

There are more things I could add, but I’m going to leave it at that. Again, use the link above to read my full review at Pajama Professional or you can purchase here:

Download Link Luv Post Builder

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Gone are the days when you could become an overnight success writing about your cats, that fight you had with your mom and the math assignment that’s due tomorrow. These days, to have a successful blog, you need to choose a niche. Niche marketing has become something of a science. It has its own language, a specific set of tools and steps that need to be completed.

Blogs today are about information. Successful blogs today are about very specific information. For example, a blog about English Literature probably will not be the biggest success because the topic is too wide. However, if you build a blog about the poetry of John Donne, you stand a fighting chance of dominating your niche.

After having created several niche blogs, I’ve narrowed the process down to seven specific steps. This article is an introduction to these steps and this website. This article will be followed by articles discussing the seven steps in more detail and sharing resources I use when building and advertising my niche sites.

• Step One: Brainstorm

  Perhaps the hardest part of creating a blog is choosing a topic. If you’re looking to make money or bring in visitors, your topic could very well make or break your success. The first step I take when choosing a new niche blog topic involves making two lists: a list of topics I love and a list of topics about which I am know ledgable or would like to become knowledgeable. If you are new at this, I suggest choosing something you already know about, but if you are willing to research it isn’t strictly necessary.

  To create the lists, I simply brainstorm. Let your mind wander and write down anything that comes into it. There’s no editing required at this stage because these lists will be just for you. Once your lists are complete, compare them. It’s quite likely you’ll have some topics on both lists. These are the topics with which you will move on to the next step. Choose your two or three favorites and get ready to do some research.

• Step Two: Research Keywords to Target a Sub-Niche

  You could spend anywhere from ten minutes to ten days researching keywords. In fact, keyword research is an excellent way to procrastinate. Don’t let it be. Allot yourself a specific amount of time (no more than an hour) to research each of your potential topics. There are many tools you can use to discover a niche’s profit potential. You want to make sure that there are plenty of products available in the niche (Amazon and Clickbank are both great places to do that) because if people are selling, that means that people are most likely buying. Run your keywords through Google: you want enough results to show there’s an interest, but not so many that the niche is super-saturated. I will cover this in much more depth in upcoming articles.

  Once you’ve accumulated the information necessary, choose a broad topic and then use the same information to narrow it down to a sub-niche. With so many niche blogs out there, the smaller your target, the better chance you have of scoring big. There is, of course, a fine line between targeted and too small. For instance, don’t start up a blog about a certain brand of contact lenses; the chances of getting either traffic or sales are very slim.

• Step Three: Choose a Domain (And Buy it!)

  All the good ones are gone. That’s what you’ll hear about domain names from many people. Is it true? Only if you’re looking for a single word or popular two-word combination. When people refer to the “good ones” they’re not generally talking about the type of domain name that is well-suited to a niche blog. Your topic is specific and your domain name should be as well. By this point, you should have a list of keywords for your niche. Use different combinations of these to find an effective domain name.

  For finding domain names, I recommend a few resources: Go Daddy’s Smart Search and Make Words dot com. Both of these free search engines will add popular terms to your keywords if your domain isn’t available. For instance, you may want to buy ContactLenses.com. Sorry, you’re way too late for that. However, these searches will automatically add words like “the” or “best” or “your” to create domain names that actually are currently available. It’s very helpful and sometimes you end up with a domain that’s even better than the one you were originally hoping to purchase.

  If you are willing to shell out some cash for an existing domain, I recommend checking out the Digital Point Forums. You can usually find some great names here. However, as I said, keyword domains are generally better suited for targeted niche marketing.

• Step Four: Choose a Blog Platform, Design and Begin Posting

  Wordpress…Wordpress…Wordpress. Trust me, it’s easy enough for a newbie to customize and robust enough to keep a hard-core techie feature-happy. Wordpress is free and it has everything you need to build an original, eye-catching, easily navigable blog.

  There are tons of design resources online both in template and how-to guide formats, so I’m not going to delve into that topic too much in this article. I’ll just share with you what I consider to be the three most important aspects of a well-designed blog: (1) It’s not over-designed or too busy. (2) You limit yourself to ten categories or less. (3) Stick with a regular posting schedule - whether it’s once a week or twice a day, readers like consistency.

  Once you’re up and running, start posting. Writing style, length and content is all up to you. If you feel stuck, visit some other sites/blogs in your niche for ideas or check out some forums. One thing to keep in mind is that consistency is key. I highly recommend setting a posting schedule. You don’t need to post every day, but if you start out posting every Tuesday and Thursday, then stick to that.

• Step Five: Advertise and Build Traffic

  If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Let me rephrase the question. If you write the best post in the whole blogosphere and visits your blog is it still the best post ever? The answer to the question is this: if you do not have traffic, you do not have a blog. It’s as simple as that. You must let people know that your blog is awesome and get them to come visit it… often.

  There are as many options for advertising as there are niches, but some art more effective than others. A few of the most effective free ways to advertise are: RSS feeds, Technorati, Stumble Upon, article directories, site maps (for natural search engine results) and Craigslist.

• Step Six: Start Building Your List

  The money is in the list. Repeat this over and over in your head until you believe it. The best way to look at this is to view each subscriber as $1 a month. The trick is that while you view them as $1, you also need to view them as an individual person.

  It may seem that if you are building a blog you don’t need to build a list. While it isn’t strictly necessary, it is highly advisable if you are looking to make money online. In order to build a list you need an information product to give away as an incentive for sign-up and an autoresponder. Though I loved using Aweber, I didn’t use it often enough to justify the charges. I will discuss autoresponders in depth a bit later, but you definitely need one for your list.

• Step Seven: Monetize

  Making money online is a huge topic. There are as many ways to do it as there are dollars to be made. From affiliate marketing to private advertising, you have a huge array of choices when it comes to monetizing your blog. On Choose a Niche, I will be discussing many of them, starting with some of the simplest.

And there you have it: the seven essential steps to building a successful niche site. Tomorrow’s post will focus on Step One: Brainstorm.

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When it comes to blogging applications, I have three words for you: Wordpress…Wordpress…Wordpress. Trust me, it’s easy enough for a newbie to customize and robust enough to keep a hard-core techie feature-happy. The good news is Wordpress is free and it has everything you need to build an original, eye-catching, easily navigable blog.

There are tons of design resources online, both in template and how-to guide formats, so I’m not going to delve into that topic too much in this article. I’ll just share with you what I consider to be the three most important aspects of a well-designed blog: (1) It’s not over-designed or too busy. (2) You limit yourself to ten to twenty categories. (3) Stick with a regular posting schedule - whether it’s once a week or twice a day, readers and robots (search engines) like consistency.

There are two types of SEO that relate to your site: onsite optimization and offsite optimization. I am not an SEO expert, so I will just briefly cover some basic optimization methods that you should employ as you build your site. If you took my advice and installed Wordpress, then there are several SEO plugins available to you.

Let’s start with on-site SEO: meta-tags, keywords, and internal linking structure and robots.txt. These may sound a bit overwhelming at first, but I promise they are a lot easier to employ than you’d think. In fact, the two most complicated - meta-tags and robots.txt - can be almost completely automated by some very cool plugins.

Meta-Tags

You have already chosen your domain name with your keywords in mind so now we are going to embed them in your pages as well. When I say “embed,” I’m not talking about any black-hat tactics (never put hidden text on your pages!). You will not find any of those on Choose A Niche simply because they rarely have longevity when it comes to SEO. If it works this month, Google will learn it next month and then you just have a bunch of junk code clogging up your pages. We will be using good old-fashioned white-hat SEO tactics with the help of a seriously awesome Wordpress plugin.

You can write meta-tags by hand if it floats your boat, but my highest recommendation goes to All-in-One SEO Pack. It is easy to optimize and automates all the meta-tagging that you don’t have time to learn about right this minute.

If you are looking for a killer theme that is SEO Pack-enabled, I suggest you pop over to Court’s Internet Marketing School and see his SEO Wordpress Themes. While you are there, don’t forget to subscribe to his feed so you can read his blog regularly and catch up on the archives later. Court gives away invaluable information with every post he writes. Now, back to work.

Keywords

Another on-site SEO tactic is the use of keywords in your posts. Some internet marketers are very mindful of this, making sure each post consists of a certain percentage of their primary keywords. I do not recommend becoming obsessive about it. If you are over-concerned with including keywords in your posts, your content can sound unnatural. The key to keywords is to find a happy medium: use them enough to make your site topic(s) clear to the spiders, but not so much that your readers begin to feel the repetition.

Internal Linking Structure

To achieve the best rankings possible throughout your site, you need to make sure your entire site is being indexed by the bots. The first thing you can do to help this along is to create sitemaps. Most of my sites have two: one for my readers and one for the spiders. There are super Wordpress plugins that automate the creation and maintenance of sitemaps. For my robot sitemap, I use Google XML Sitemap generator. For humans, the Dagon Design Sitemap creates a user-friendly organization of my posts.

With Wordpress, you have the option to place posts in categories. I highly recommend that you use this feature, but plan it out carefully before you begin writing. Choose about 10-20 categories to post within. It is very easy to let your categories get out of control and it will be much harder to fix them later if you don’t plan well now. Trust me, one of my blogs has over 100 categories and it is taking me forever to reorganize it.

An often-overlooked area of on-site search engine optimization are the links you place in your posts to other posts on your blog. If you are discussing a topic that relates to another about which you have already written, link back to the related article. To increase internal links, you can also install the Wasabi Related Posts plugin or something similar. You will need to insert a tiny piece of code into your Wordpress theme, but this is very easy and it is a skill you need to develop as a blogger anyway. Unless you want to pay outsourcing fees every time you want to alter any tiny bit of your layout.

Robots.txt

The robots.txt file lives in the root directory of your blog. It is important because it tells search engine robots (hence the name) what parts of your site to index and what parts to skip. Wordpress creates a ton of duplicate content because it automatically makes pages for each category, archives by date and all sort of other instances where your posts are … well … reposted. With the robots.txt file you can tell the spiders not to index those pages and you won’t have to worry about being penalized for having duplicate content. The Google supplemental index is not a fun place to find your page.

If you aren’t a coder, creating your own robots.txt file is a bit of a daunting task. There are articles online that can help you out. However, if you are new to this, I recommend using the Robots Meta plugin by Joost de Valk. After filling in just a few (well-explained) options, you will have an optimized, customized robots.txt file of your very own. The plugin even puts the file in the right place for you so you do not have to even upload anything.

Incoming Links
Off-site SEO is primarily concerned with getting others to link to your site. You can do this by trading links with other bloggers, but the best type of link is one way. You could pay for links, but Google considers this cheating and your pagerank could seriously suffer. The very best way to get quality one-way links into your blog is to comment on other blogs and make friends.

The key to making friends through comments is to write constructive, interesting things that actually add to the conversation. As my college history professor used to say when we did peer editing of essays: “This isn’t about sending Valentine’s!” Meaning that writing “Great post!” is as useless as never reading the post in the first place. If you put time and thought into your comments people will be intrigued and often they will come check out your blog.

Once you’re up and running, start posting. Writing style, length and content is all up to you. If you feel stuck, visit some other sites/blogs in your niche for ideas or check out some forums. Mark at 45n5 hosts the Top 100 Make Money Online Blogs list. These blogs are all well-written and full of great content on how to make money online. If you are stuck this is a killer place to start.

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