Jamdo Marketing Blog

The very first thing you will need to build a site or a blog is an idea. Ideally your idea will be a niche (or you can at least alter your idea slightly to fit a niche). It will be very difficult to beat all of the established sites and blogs on the topic of “health” (for example) because it is too general and the guys at the top of that niche have multi-million dollar budgets to promote their sites. Off the top of my head, a health niche which might be worth investigating would be “children’s nutrition.”

But exactly how easy will it be? Let’s find out.

Go over to http://overture.com

Click on “Visit the Resource Center”

Click on “Keyword Selector Tool”

Type in “Child Nutrition” without the “”

This tool tells me that there were 7605 searches last month that contained the term “child nutrition.” Not great, but not bad either. (I usually aim for keywords with around 20,000 searches per month or more) Let’s take a look at the competition.

Go to http://google.com

Type in “Child Nutrition” without the “”

Click on the first result. Now look at the Google Page Rank (PR) of this page which is displayed in the Google toolbar.

Whoah – PR 6 – they will be tough to beat.

Site 2 – PR7 – almost impossible to beat

Site 3 – PR 5 – difficult but not impossible to beat

Site 4 – PR 6 – very tough to beat

Site 5 – PR5

Ok – this isn’t going to be as easy as I thought. Let’s skip down to number 10 and see if we think we can beat him to get into the top 10.

Site 10 - www.schoolnutrition.org - PR6 – Nope, I think there will be much easier niches to attack, so I forget about “Child Nutrition”

Just to make sure, I do a quick link analysis of the site to see who is linking to them (back-links) (this is where the real power of ranking well lies, but we will cover it in a future lesson). Now, Google is terrible at reporting back-links (possibly on purpose), so let’s use Yahoo!

Go over to http://yahoo.com

Type in “link:http://www.schoolnutrition.org” without the “” (There are much better tools for doing this analysis, but we will talk about that in a later lesson).

984 back-links! That is going to be really tough to beat in the short term. (Less than 100 back-links we can beat pretty easily) We can find a much better niche.

Now I have to go back and choose another niche within health that I think might have a lot of people searching for, but not much competition. Possibilities could be “women strength training” or “elderly fitness” – you really need to brainstorm about 50 ideas to snag a good one that is achievable.

Now I can spend a few days using overture and Google for all of this, but this is very time consuming and I am not a patient guy.

Almost every professional keyword researcher I have ever heard of uses Wordtracker – they have a database of search terms that you can compare against how many websites are competing to be ranked on that search term as well as how often people actually use the search term to find something. There are free tools that claim to do similar things, but to be honest every free tool I have tried sucks and I will not recommend any of them.

Now, Wordtracker isn’t free. It costs about $10 per day, but usually they extend your membership out to 48 hours to give you a better taste of their product. 24 hours is PLENTY of time to sit down and get as many good keywords as you can find. You will find keywords that you never even thought of. Make a record of all of the keywords you find that look promising.

Then we can talk about building a blog or a site around those keywords.

Now go do some research on your niche at WordTracker.

You can find them at http://wordtracker.com or if you enjoyed this lesson and want to do me a favour you can use my affiliate link to get to their site here.

When you think you have found a niche keyword then go back to Google and follow the steps above to analyse the competition for that keyword. Be sure to do a backlink analysis at http://yahoo.com to see if you can beat them (if they have PR4 and less than 100 back-links then you should be able to beat them pretty easily). Wordtracker is not always accurate so it is important to do this to double check.

Next we can talk about using those keywords to set up your new site or blog.

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