Choose A Niche

You could spend anywhere from 10 minutes to 10 days researching keywords. There are many many ways to conduct the research, but they are not all created equal. I break this process down into a few steps which you will complete for each of the topics you chose when you were brainstorming.

Search engine optimization is important for a blog in any niche and choosing the right keywords can be crucial to a site’s success. At this point, you are going to run each of your narrowed down idea through these steps because they will (1) help you determine whether the niche is oversaturated and (2) help to build a list of keywords to target when you are optimizing and writing articles for your blog.

To determine market saturation, we will use a formula called the keyword effectiveness index. KEI compares the number of search results for a particular keyword or phrase with the number of web pages returned by that particular keyword or phrase. Easy, right? Sure, just as easy as any other aspect of search engine optimization. Which is to say that it sounds straightforward and simple, but after three days of research on how to optimize you feel that perhaps you’ll just write that Great American Novel after all.

The formula looks like this:

KEI = P^2/S = P/S*P

S = search results
P = popularity (search count)

In English, the formula says that as popularity increases and the number of competing sites decreases, the better choice a keyword is. To get a clear picture of the situation, I generally build a spreadsheet with four columns: keyword, # searches, # pages, KEI.

Open your favorite web browser and pull up Overture’s Keyword Selection Tool. Type in your primary keyword and click the little blue arrow. You will get a list of suggested keywords and the number of searches conducted. Copy and paste as many results as you wish into the spreadsheet you created (in the keyword and searches columns).

Next go to Yahoo and search for each of the keywords you got from Overture. If you use a spreadsheet application, you can enter the KEI formula in the fourth column so that calculations are made automatically. Below is an example of a completed KEI spreadsheet:

The two keywords I highlighted are distinctly different. The first one is somewhat usable. I think with a few cleverly placed articles it could work. However, the second one that is highlight is completely hopeless. I have no idea where the word “hulk” comes in and how there could possible be over 300 people searching for that term. You will often find anomalies like that as you conduct your keyword research. They provide nothing more than a bit of comic relief.

Since we are looking for the highest KEI, you are now getting even closer to your topic. This is a good point to touch base with your topics. If you can see that there just aren’t enough searches for any of the keywords in one of your topics, don’t waste any more time with it. Otherwise, let’s move on to the next step: assessing the competition.

If you are going to attempt to infiltrate a niche in the hopes of financial success or social popularity, you need to know your competition. The KEI of a search term can give a good indication of where it stands, but it can’t tell you how tough it will be to get noticed. Even if there were 50 million searches and only 50 competitors, you could still be sunk if those 50 competitors have huge budgets and you are working with $100 a month.

There are some very cool niche marketing keyword tools available for a price. Wordtracker is one of the best known and you can use the free trial to see if it feels like a good fit for you. If you know of a tool that is not already on the Keyword Research Tools list please leave a comment and I will check it out.

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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.

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.

One more thing to keep in mind: keywords. When you’re choosing your domain you have to decide if you want a name that will brand your site (like Google) or a name that uses your keywords to tell exactly what your site is about (like ContactLenses). For a niche blog, I highly recommend going with the latter because you want to utilize your keywords as much as possible. Also, within laser-targeted niches, it’s best to tell potential visitors what the site is about while they’re searching. If someone is looking for contact lenses, he/she much more likely to visit a site with those words in the domain name than a site with an obscure branded name like TrickyFly or MosheMashe.

I’m not going to recommend a specific host. You’ll have to decide your price range and the features that are personally important to you. There are, however, a few things you must have if you’re going to run niche sites:

1. Unlimited Domain Names: Unless you want to pay for several hosting accouts, you’ll want a host that allows you to have unlimited domain names on one account. As your traffic increases, your bandwidth usage will increase and you’ll have to pay more for that, but your traffic and income should increase relative to each other. Meaning that by the time you need to upgrade your hosting account, you’ll be bringing in enough profit to afford it.
2. Plenty of MySQL databases: Wordpress runs on MySQL, as do many other blog engines. If you’re going to host many sites under one account, you’ll need to make sure there are enough databases included in the account.
3. Uptime: Believe me, you don’t want to go with an unreliable host just because the price is right. Check uptime guarantees and don’t settle for anything less than 99.99%. If you have to pay an extra $2 a month for it, you’ll be glad you did later. I made the mistake of going with a super-discounted host when I first launched Pajama Professional and it was a nightmare in terms of both reliability and customer service.

   I now use Quality Host Online and they are outstanding. Last May when I’d just started marketing to my list, I sent out hundreds of emails at once (not realizing that I needed to use a service for this) and crashed the server my (and several other clients’) websites were on. They got the server back up quickly, but kept my sites shut down. Once I explained what I’d done, they made me promise never to do it again, but turned my account back on.

   Oftentimes internet hosts offer free or reduced domain names with the purchase of a hosting plan. This is a great way to get a good deal and avoid paying for at least one of your domains. Just remember, read the fine print and make sure the hosting account meets all your criteria.

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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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