Paid Survey Success

While your knowledge and passion or excitement makes a big difference in how successful your site will potentially be, they are not the only factors that matter.  You need a site concept that attracts visitors too.  Something that makes them excited and want to learn more about what you’re trying to teach or sell.  You can have the BEST blog out there, but if no one is interested in the topic you won’t make any money.

So, how do we tell what will be a good niche with enough interest (or demand).  Quite simply we take a look at what people are searching for.  You should have a good number of searches not only for your main keyword, but also for related keywords.  We call these keywords long tail keywords and while each might only have a few searches each day when you put them together thaey can add up to hundreds of visitors a day.

When I’m doing demand type research the first place I check is Google.  There’s a pretty good chance that 80% or more of your search traffic will come from them so let’s make sure that people are actually searching there for your niche keywords.  Well you’ve actually already done this research if your following my guide.  The post Developing a Keyword List  should have given you a good starting point to determine if there is demand for your subject area.

Another good way to determine how much interest there is in your subject area is to check out the competition.  Search for forums and blogs related to your subject.  Yes, these will be competition, but some competition is a good thing.  It tells you that there is a demand in your niche and it also gives you some like minded people to network with as your site grows.  Never underestimate the power of networking with others, even if they are competitors.

You can find forums easily by going to Google and searching for ‘keyword’ + forum.  Scroll through the first 20-30 results to see what type of information people are talking about relative to your niche.  Then go to Blog Catalog  and/or Google Blog Search to get an idea of what blogs are already out there covering your niche.  When using Google Blog Search I like to filter the results by the past 12 hours to get more relevant results.

Now, I would never be one to hold you back, but let me caution you here.  When you search at Google filter by daily results.  If you see more than 2000 daily results you’re getting into competitive waters and may want to refine or rethink your niche.  Likewise if you see less than 500 results you may have a niche that’s going to be too narrow.  Or you’re lucky and just found a niche that’s under served.

Do this for all of the niches you’ve identified and score the niche demand from 1-10 in your chart.  Tomorrow I’ll be back to talk about everyones favorite subject - monetization.  After all that’s why we want to start a website isn’t it, to make money.  After that we’ll finalize our niche choice and move on to the development of a complete keyword list as well as the structure of your site or blog.  Until then have a great day!

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If you plan on blogging then you should know that you’ll be writing a lot of articles and creating a lot of content.  Plan on at least 1-2 hours every day researching and writing about your niche.  Needless to say, this means there are two factors that could be VERY important in deciding what niche you want to pursue.  These two areas are knowledge of the niche and passion for the niche.

Knowledge will be very important, especially when starting out.  It is important for several reasons.  First, a good deal of knowledge will let you crank out a lot of content in the beginning which is important for getting pages indexed in the search engines and getting initial visitors to your site.  There is a saying the on the internet “content is king” and it is so true.  If you get 25 visitors a day with just 50 pages of good content imagine how many visitors you’ll get once your site grows to 500 or even 5000 pages of quality content.  You can almost be sure that the more content you have the more visitors (and backlinks) your site will have.

Secondly, knowledge of your niche will help you to be perceived as an expert in your niche.  This is so important in building trust with your readers and often can be the element that keeps them coming back.  Think of it this way, if I am just starting to learn forex whose blog do you think I will want to read - the guy that makes mistakes in terminology and whose posts are shallow, without concrete examples?  Or the guy who obviously knows how to trade forex, whose posts make it clear that they are experienced and knowledgeable about the subject area?  I think you chose blog #2, just like I would.

Knowledge is definitely important, but perhaps even more important is passion about your niche.  This is what will keep you digging for even more knowledge about the subject, will push you on those days you might not feel like writing and will definitely shine through in your writing.  People will be able tell when you are passionate about your subject, they will know that you care.

Passion can also drive you to jump into a subject that you might have no knowledge of and still write with authority.  When you care deeply about a subject you’re driven to dig out every bit of information you can get.  Writing from this perspective is often successful because as a newcomer you’ll approach the subject area without any preconceptions.  So, if you have passion about a subject but no knowledge you can still be quite successful.

Now take out your spreadsheet that we developed in the last lesson - Developing A Keyword List - and fill in the columns for knowledge and passion for each of your 3-5 niche areas.  Tomorrow I’ll be talking about niche demand and you won’t want to miss it because this will tell you if your niche(s) are too broad, too narrow or just right.

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If you haven’t read the first two posts in this series you’ll want to go back and review them now:

• Finding the Perfect Niche
• Tools to Find Your Niche

Basically there are 5 areas you’ll want to look at when evaluating your niche ideas to determine if they are a proper fit for you. Here’s the five areas you want to look at for each of your ideas:

1. Number of Keywords
2. Knowledge
3. Passion
4. Niche Demand
5. Monetization Potential

Once you evaluate your niche ideas based on these five areas you’ll be able to choose a niche and move on to further refine your idea. Now, take out another piece of paper or fire up a spreadsheet program and make your self a chart like this (without the numbers filled in yet and your own niches as possible answers):

Now let’s look at the number of keywords available for your niche. You want a good number of keywords so you’ll have plenty to write about as you add content to your site. If your niche is too narrow you’ll soon run out of new related content ideas and keywords and that’s not good.

The two tools I use the most to develop keyword lists are the SEOBook Keyword Research Tool and Google Keyword Tool. To use the Google tool you’ll need a Google AdWords account which you can sign up for here.

Once you have your account created go ahead and log in. From this initial page you’ll click on the “Tools” link.

Next you’ll click on the link that says “Keyword Tool” to get to the main interface.

This is where you’ll get your keyword list started. Put your main keyword or keyword phrase in the box where it says “Enter one keyword or phrase per line:” and make sure the box to “use synonyms” is checked and then click the “Get Keyword Ideas” button. This will give you a list of keywords related to the keyword you typed in. If you’ve got a good niche there should be 150 results. Eventually you’ll use these results to seed additional lists, but for now just save the keywords as either a .txt or .csv file.

You can also start to get an idea of how much AdSense income you can get per click by using the box that says “Calculate Estimates using Max CPC:”. Simply enter $100 in this box and click “Recalculate” and it will show you what advertisers are paying per click for each keyword. Just glance over the amounts right now. Hopefully they are at least $2.00 if you’re planning on using AdSense to monetize your site. We will visit this area in more depth later.

Now put a number value on your “# of Keywords”. If you got 150 keywords back you can put a 10 in this box, but if it’s less you’ll need to make that number lower - say 1 point for every 15 lower. So you’ll use a 9 for 135 keywords, and 8 for 120 keywords, etc.

Do this for all 3-5 of your niches and I’ll be back tomorrow to discuss knowledge and passion. If you want to make sure you won’t miss any posts please subscribe below. Have a great night!

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