Panning for Gold

August 6, 2010 by +Marj Wyatt
Filed under Featured, Niche Research, SEO Strategies

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While having fun with the grandkids the other day, we visited a place nearby that specializes in educating people about the California Gold Rush by providing an experiential tour of a mine on their property. What does this have to do with Web Marketing and Branding, you might ask? Read on….

www.GetIncomeBlog.com | Panning for Gold

Finding Internet Gold

The California Gold Rush created a lot of wealth. So has the internet. Not unlike internet properties, 49ers staked claims on mines, hoping the vein was rich. The conditions were difficult, picking their way back into the mines and chiseling through rock by hand. There were certain things that they looked for that provided direction about pursuit of a path. The same is true of internet businesses. It all relies on choosing the right “real estate” to begin with and doing the work necessary to extract the value of that space.

As the kids panned for gold in the trough that the owners of the ranch had set up, they each had different reactions. One child in the group complained immediately, saying it was too hard, and sulked for a while. Another “struck gold” right away, shouted out about their good fortune and continued to shriek every time they thought they had found another nugget. The remainder of the group quietly found nuggets, washed them off and set them aside, and proceeded to look for more.

Where is the Online Mother Lode?

If you are not new to online business, you know exactly what a niche is and how important it is too. If you are new, this is a term you need to understand. I can’t tell you what is a profitable niche in a blog post but I can tell you there is a lot of material out there regarding choosing a niche.

In summary, a niche is an area of interest for consumers. I will always recommend that people begin a business that is in line with their personal passions or hobbies. While your passions may align with a profitable niche, it is equally possible that your highest area of interest is NOT what other people are looking for. This should not dissuade you entirely but it will make penetration of that niche more work. Equally possible is that a niche that you know people are looking for is also a niche that is saturated. Specializing that niche may allow you to find a “vein” to follow to create online income.

There are free tools to use to explore possibilities but, as expected, digging for gold by hand requires a little more effort and time. The external Google keyword research tool is a great place to start. It may seem like a good idea to choose the niches with the most search volume. Within reason, it is. You need to be aware that searches with a lot of volume also have a lot of competition. A good rule of thumb is to choose phrases that have monthly global search volumes between 1,000 and 15,000.

Once you think you’ve found a niche to exploit, continue your due diligence. Use Google again to find out how many pages are there for you to compete with. Take the term that appeals to you, place it in a Google search box in quotes, and submit your search. This will return the number of pages with each word in your phrase in any order. If you submit the search without the term in quotes, it will turn up the count for all the pages that have all of the words in your phrase anywhere on that page, whether together in a string or not.

From a reasonableness perspective, it is best to choose niches that have less than 100,000 competing pages online, so long as the supporting search volume is there. This is a guideline only. Persistence will get your pages elevated in search engine listings for more saturated niches.

For the expense, a great niche research tool is cleverly named Micro Niche Finder. This tool allows you to analyze the strength of competition and computes the number of back links, which is a measure of how many links you will need to build to your site to allow it to rise above other listings for that term.

If you don’t want to learn at this level or purchase tools that would make it easier for you to conduct your own research, you can opt to work with someone who has knowledge of how to research a niche and choose good keyword phrases. Use the convenient contact form to initiate a conversation with me.

What Tools Can You Use to Launch your Campaign?

It is hard to be in an online business without a website. If the great keyword phrase you’ve found is an available domain name, grab it quick because you will need a website somewhere online to promote your niche. With all of its built-in features and since my specialty is WordPress Website Design, it is the best software that I can recommend for your business website.

While you can start a free site using wordpress software at Wordress.com, my position has always been that it is far better to retain ownership of your content. Besides, theme choices and add on open source software is limited at WordPress.com. These limitations can impede your progress.

I’ve worked with people who operate on an assumption that a site hosted at WordPress.com will get more traffic. WordPress.com is a high-traffic site but you must build interest in your page in order to have traffic. Why do all of that SEO work on a site if you don’t own it? Seems silly to me…

There are many free themes out there for you to use and, if you find a theme that is close to what you want, you don’t need any special technical skills to put up your own website. Personally, I recommend taking a look at Studio Press themes.

Remember that owning a website does require you to know something about HTML. Last year, Holly Powell and I conducted a couple of online webinars to teach people the nuances of choosing domain names, registering them, activating them on your chosen host, installing wordpress, and other things you might want to know to use the software. I will be updating the training for the latest version of WordPress soon but you can follow this link for access to the 2009 Live Blog Training at no cost. If you sign up for the newsletter there, you will find out more about new training modules as they become available.

What Kind of Miner are You?

Let’s get back to the kids who were panning for gold. Maybe you’ve already found your Mother Lode niche and are living your dream life. But, if you haven’t, what kind of miner will you be when you locate your niche and the first online payment arrives? Will you shout out your success for all to hear or will you use the knowledge you gained to find that niche to locate and develop another?

Happy mining!

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Tags: Internet Marketing, Market Niche Research, Wordpress Websites

Comments

4 Responses to “Panning for Gold”

cornishkev says:

August 6, 2010 at 2:25 pm

There are several free Google tools available that you can use to create targeted keywords which apply to your website and your market, which will help drive FREE web traffic to your site.

There is a system that can syphon highly targeted
leads for any possible niche you can think of!

One reason why the leads are very targeted is because of a unique approach to keyword research.

The keyword research is actually simple, but it may seem counter-intuitive.

You see,the keywords should be highly competitive and attract
a massive audience.

In the world of PPC, those type of keywords are too expensive and way to competitive to profit from.

Reply
- Marj Wyatt says:
  
  August 6, 2010 at 3:40 pm
  
  You’re right, CornishKev. There are a lot of different ways to attract organic targeted traffic to your web pages. Some work much better than others, for sure.
  
  I’ve never recommended that any of my clients use PPC methods when a moderate amount of research and attention can acquire better traffic without the expense.
  
  Thanks for your comment!
  
  Reply
David W says:

November 25, 2010 at 12:33 am

First-class share it is definitely. I have been searching for this update.

Reply