Posted by admin on Jan 10, 2009 in
Basics,
research We are almost done with our research! As of now I am pretty sure this will be the last research portion and we can move onto the actual website development tomorrow, which i am really excited about because that’s when things actually get “fun”. 
Today is all about checking out or competition in the search engines and seeing how well we need to do to hopefully defeat them in the all important search engine battle.
Researching the Competition
It’s important to check out your competition in your niche so that you know what you’re going to be up against. All of this research we are doing is going to help us out when we start developing and the competition research is just as important as the rest. If we figure out how the competition has gotten to where they are then we cna get a figure of how well we must do to beat them but of course this will just be an estimate. First I must say that when I do my competition I use FireFox because normally I use Chrome for all my other stuff but FireFox has add-ons that make this work a lot easier so I highly recommend that you download it if you don’t already have it. The first thing you need to do is download the SEO For FireFox add-on. This add-on allows you to see useful information such as PageRank, age, Alexa, and links among other things and it is just one plugin that makes all the competition research much easier. Now what we do is plug in our niche keyword into Google, or Yahoo, andI usually like to put quotes around them, “keyword here”, like that because then you will find the sites that are actually trying to rank for those specific keywords.
I usually just take a look at at least the first 3, but sometimes I will look at the top 10 or so just to make sure I can see the averages of the sites. What I do is first look at the PageRank of the results, the top sites usally have a decent PageRank so if say the average is 3 then I will want to get at least 3 and preferably 4. Then I look at Alexa and then links, because these are the other two important factors. Alexa may not be incredbily important but it’s just another indicator of a site’s strength. The links is what I want to look at, if say the top site has 100,000 links then I know that I need to get either that many links of the same quality, or less links of higher quality because the higher quality will rank more in Google’s eyes. I write down these numbers for future reference and then I go ahead and just quit FireFox because I don’t need to use it anymore. Once you have these numbers you can understand what it will take to rank on the first page or so for Google, and then you are done.
I love when I finish my research because it means I get to move onto development which in my opinion is the really fun part. Once you finish this up go ahead and give yourself a very well deserved break and get ready for a nice day tomorrow because I am sure looking forward to it.
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Tags: research
Posted by admin on Jan 9, 2009 in
Basics,
Niche,
research I don’t want to ever waste any of my time on something that won’t pan out in the end so I also want to make sure that you do the same thing. Picking the right niche to promote is very important because if you put all your eggs in one basket then you might end up being out of eggs. So to make sure that we don’t fall to this trap we will spend a little time researching if the niche ideas we came up with are worth actually promoting.
The first thing I always do when seeing if my niche is profitable is I just pop it right into the big G and see if there are any AdWord ads on the right side, because my philosophy is if people are spending money in the niche then there must be money to be made. If there are at least a few then it is a good sign that the niche is at least slightly profitable, but it usually is much more then slightly. If your niche idea doesn’t have any ads on the right don’t worry just yet because that doesn’t mean all is lost.
The next place we are going to check out is ClickBank, one of the best places to sell and buy digital products, that is, items that aren’t actually shipped and rather are downloaded. ClickBank has many products in many different categories and I’m pretty sure that you can find just about anything for your niche needs, but if you can’t don’t worry. There’s another site, Comission Junction, that is just like ClickBank but some belive it is even better then ClickBank, and sometimes I agree just because of the sheer amount of offers they have. You really should be able to find something on those sites pertaining to your niche. If you find one that you think is good you should take a look at the money you make per sale. There’s no real price target that you should be looking for but of course the ones that are higher you will be more attracted to. On Clickbank check the offer for a high gravity because that generally means it’s a better offer. If you can at least find one offer to promote then you should be good.
The last possibility that I always search is Amazon. If you can’t find any decent products on the previous sites then you amy want to check out Amazon because they sell actual items that you can get a commission on for every item you sell. If you want to sign up to Amazon Associates you can go ahead and do that and check out the tools and things they have to help you make money through geting them sales. It’s a good alternative if your niche is more focused on tangible items.
Once you go through and check these out you should be able to see if this is worth it. After doing the research you should be able to make an educated guess on how the niche should perform. We are almost done with the research and I just have one more post, at least for now, to research a little bit more on your competition in your niche. Once we finish that we get to the real “fun” stuff, so I can’t wait for that.
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Tags: Basics, Niche, niche research, research
Posted by admin on Jan 8, 2009 in
Basics,
Niche,
research Okay, so now that we know what a niche is we can actually go out and find a niche to build a website around! We know the benefits of niche marketing and how awesome it can be it’s time to find a niche that is suitable for you and that can get you money.
Let’s Find a Niche!
Well, there is actually no “easy niche” but there is a niche out there for everyone that they will feel is easier to promote. Generally speaking, things that you enjoy you are more likely to stick with, because let’s face it, if you don’t like doing it you don’t want to do it. So picking something you enjoy would be the “easiest” thing to do. try thinking of your favorite hobbies, because the fact is that if you like it, odds are that other people like it too. If you don’t really have a hobby then pick something that you think you will enjoy promoting and spending a LOT of time working on. If you at least know a little bit about the niche you are going to promote it will be better then nothing.
Let’s take a look at how to find ones if you are having some trouble coming up with ideas. There is a nice program that allows you to find a niche really easily if you just put in some things that you enjoy. It’s called Micro Niche Finder and it delivers every last thing that you need to do your research. It cuts down on the time it takes to do your niche research and your keyword research and puts it all into one simple and easy to use program. It does cost a little bit to get this program but I think that if you have the money that it would be well spent because it does dramatically cut down the time it takes to do all the research and allows you to move on to other steps faster. However, if you don’t have the money to spend on it or you don’t feel like it’s necessary then we can move on.
This is how I generally go about picking a niche to get started. I think of one random niche, such as finance. Then I use the tools that I talked about in my keyword research article to find a nice sub niche to target. You get lots of suggestions and if you dig a little you can find some real gems. That is generally a good way of finding a niche if you can’t really think of anything off the top of your head. If after all of this you still can’t think of a niche then maybe just take a nice break, then come back and try again. Once you get back just think of 5 random words that pop into your head. Write these down on Notepad or something else. Then think of other topics in each of these words. Sometimes I am able to find a niche I didn’t think of before by doing this. Now that we have gone over all of these you should definitely either have a nich idea in mind or have a nice set of ways to get ideas, so try and get at least 1 or 2 ideas for niches that you want to promote and tomorrow I will talk about how we are going to decide if these are worth spending time on.
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Tags: Niche, research
