Picking a topic and optimizing your website for that niche.
Okay, let’s say that you have a niche or you are still looking. You can research topics by using free search engine tools.
This will tell you what people are searching for and also help you set up your pages to get free traffic from the search engines by using exact phrases which people are typing in to search.
Overture.com’s keyword inventory tool used to be the go to tool for keyword research, but since they were bought by Yahoo they no longer offer this free service in the same form. (See Yahoo below in this article.)
Some other options are Google’s Adwords keyword tool,(it’s free to use), located at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal?defaultView=2
or Submit Express’s keyword suggestion tool and traffic estimator at
http://keywords.submitexpress.com/
and Spacky.com monthly keyword search volume tool.
You can find some really good info on keyword research athttp://www.wordtracker.com/academy/ , this is Wordtracker.com’s Keyword Research Academy with articles by the top people in Internet.
Checking to see if anyone is using key phrases to look for information on your topic will give you added traffic if you can work some of those phrases into your content, meta tags and link descriptions.
Make a list of questions about your topic and terms or phrases which you would use to search and also list the same using synonyms for the words in your original list, because others might use different words than the ones you are using. Run these through the online tools mentioned and make a list of any additional phrases which show up.
Do a google search on each of the terms in your final list and see if you get anything with fifty or less results. These will be your most profitable phrases or terms to use.
Anything with less than 20 results may be worth investing in an Adwordsaccount, if you can get listings really cheap and can make sales from these listings.
Finally, make sure that you have your site listed using Google’s Sitemap tool, it’s free to use and tells the googlebot where all of the pages that you want indexed are at. Find info on it at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34575&ctx=sibling ,
you will have to sign up for a free Google Account at
http://www.google.com/accounts/ManageAccount first if you don’t already have one, but it is free! You can access the sitemap tool from inside your account.
I mentioned Yahoo having a keyword research tool previously, but in order to get access to it you have to have a Yahoo Search Engine Marketing account, which requires a $30 dollar deposit for pay-per-click which you can budget however you want, but still you have to put up 30 bucks.
You can check it out here and sign up here. They also require a minimum bid per click of $0.10.
Saving the best for last, right-click and download this informative PDF ebook, “The Keyword Jackpot“, it’s free.
Seen a resale product you would like to offer on your website or in your newsletter or ezine?
Even if you plan on buying the product license and setting it up yourself, you can start making some sales immediately by joining an affiliate program if there is one offered.
Get your aff link and then set up a page to presell your affiliate link from, and use that page url in your advertisements. (Another good reason to have some kind of web hosting of your own.) Whenever you get your own sales site set up, just change the link on your presell page!
And if you don’t want to spend money on the product itself, you still have the aff page to sell from. (Most, but not all, sales offers have a free to join affiliate sales program.)
Thank’s for reading,
Douglas Wade
WeekendFreebies.com
Don’t even think about doing it for the money!
Looking for a new niche to market to, or just starting out and need a place to start? Try to make it something that you will enjoy.
Pick one thing and get good at it.
When you have something to offer on a regular basis, and you’ve started to build a traffic base and an email list, the money will come as long as you focus on what you have become good at.
You can buy everthing that comes out, join so many programs that you can’t even remember which ones you are paying for, and go broke because you aren’t getting anywhere with any of them, but if you pick one thing and read everything you can find, test everthing you try, and sort out what works for you and what doesn’t, you can find success in that niche.
If you want to expand to other things this is OK, but you need to focus on one thing until you no longer need to invest all of your time on it before you should move to the next or you’ll never get anything done.
If you work at First: providing a useful informational resource, and Second: making money from your traffic, you will be much more satisfied with the results from your labors.
