SEO

Chiang Mai SEO Conference 2017 Review

10th November 2017 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

Completely out of the blue I found out that whilst we are here the first annual SEO Conference was taking place in Chiang Mai and the lineup was a cracker…

Put together by Matt Diggity, there was a stellar range of Guest Speakers from the SEO World:

Daryl Rosser from Lion Zeal talked gave a really structured approach to easily find your first 10 SEO clients within 6 months. This assumed you had a certain degree of SEO knowledge, but I liked the way he hustled and the approach he took to prospecting leads.

This involved reaching out to prospects and saying that you had made a video of how to improve their search rankings and whether they were the right person to send the video to. If they responded then he made a simple 5 minute analysis video and had his foot in the door.

Tim Soulo is the marketing director of ahrefs and he gave an overview of how they get their data from something called Clickstream, which seems to be a lot more accurate than other providers. He gave a couple of nuggets of information, such as checking the amount of traffic to the #1 listing in the SERPS for a certain keyword, rather than just the monthly traffic volume.

Gareth Simpson – Talked about outreach and how he structured his link building campaigns. I liked the way he focused on finding shoulder niches and put emphasis on personalising your campaigns to get maximum link ROI.

Jonathan Kiekbusch from PBN Butler then talked about structuring your business for longer term success, focusing on game theory and making sure that your employees are super engaged with the business.

Charles Floate was the last man on the roster, who everyone was looking forward to hear. He smashed in with a detailed technical talk about Black Hat SEO, most of which was over my head to be honest, but was exciting to listen to another side of SEO that you can get into.

There was plenty of chance for networking during the day, which I am particularly bad at, but if that’s your kind of thing this conference would have been perfect for you.

Chiang Mai SEO Conference 2017 Ask Me Anything Panel

The final part of the day was a QA with some of the above speakers, Jesse Hanley and Holly Starks, where the audience threw a variety of questions at the panel, and for me this was one of the most rewarding parts of the day.

Just to top it off, the closing session was a ‘special announcement’ where Matt Diggity got down on one knee and proposed to his girlfriend!!!

Matt Diggity Marriage Proposal

Overall it was an awesome day, even with a mild hangover, and great to be in a room of 400+ people who are all totally passionate about what they do.

During the week prior to this event there were a number talks held by the Empire Flippers guys, Holly Starks and a talk about A/B Testing, which made it even more of an exciting time to be in Chiang Mai, and of course the event ended at the start of the Loi Kratong festival…

I met some awesome people during this conference and have been given access to some groups with immense knowledge that I can tap into. More than anything this has inspired me to get my SEO action going and the overall message is SEO ROCKS!!!

SECockpit Review : Keyword Research and SEO Heaven

18th November 2016 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

SECockpit is an SEO and keyword research tool that dreams are made of. I used a 30 day trial of the product recently and this is my full review of SECockpit and it’s killer features.

Because this is a fairly long article we’ve given you 3 choices:

Read the article:What is SECockpit?SECockpit Key Features REviewed How Much Does SECockpit Cost?What Do I need to Use SECockpit?SECockpit Review Summary

Watch the Video:

Try the software:

What is SECockpit?

Anyone who is serious about blogging or making money online through websites will be interested in doing a decent amount of keyword research. Without this, you are just guessing at what is popular, valuable and easy to rank for.

There are a number of free tools that you can use to help you source keywords, gauge traffic volumes, find the cost per click and drill into the ranking of any site in the Google listings.

Usually you would use a combination of things like Google Keyword Planner, Mozbar, SEO Quake etc but you need to go through and arduous manual process to get the information that you are looking for, and this can take hours upon hours.

In this review you’ll see that SECockpit takes the pain away from these tasks and automates a lot of this process into a simple to read and easy to use interface, where you can quickly analyse the results and get detailed information on your keywords.

SECockpit Key Features REviewed

gENERATING kEYWORDS

The first cool feature that SECockpit gives you is the ability to generate a list of keywords from your seed keyword and allows you to control some of the inputs.

You start off every keyword search with the following dialogue box:

Seeding Keywords

Countries and languages – Allows you to do a local or global search

Google Adwords Synonyms – Will return a large number of results related to your keyword unless you check the ‘Only show ideas closely related’ checkbox, which refines this search.

You can choose to include or exclude terms from your search, for example you might want to add words like ‘best’ or ‘review’ to your search

Min monthly allows you to set the minimum number of searches that your keywords should have

Tag Results – You can use this feature to colour co-ordinate your search results

Analyse Keywords

You will then be taken to a search results page that looks something like this:

SECockpit Search Results Page

Now this is where it gets exciting because there are a huge number of columns that you can add to your search results page, to help you gauge the value of that keyword to you.

I wont go through every option available in SECockpit, but the key metrics that you have are:

Niche rating – This is a really cool feature, unique to SECockpit that gives you a rating of that keyword based on a simple calculation (Number of monthly searches / Top 1 – 10 Competition Bar). The fuller this bar is, the better for you. This is a great initial indicator, however, you really need to use that as a guide only and interrogate the rest of the data before you decide to try to rank for that keyword or not.

Monthly Searches is your standard measure, which is brought back from Google Keyword Planner

Rank 1 – 10 – this is a really useful measure and tells you how easy it is at a glance to rank in the top 10 for this keyword. The lower the bar, the better in this case. Will look at how this is calculated in a minute, but this feature alone makes SECockpit a great tool to use and in my opinion worth the money.

Domains – Lets you know whether the .net opr .com domain is available for that keyword

Adwords – Here we have the standard CPC value and advertisers competition value, but there’s also a ‘Adsense Value’ column, which multiplies these 2 together to give you a simple gauge. In this section you can also add other columns to see how many ads are displayed in the top, right and bottom section of the search results to give you a clear indication of the strength of the advertising competition for this keyword

Top 10 Sites – Again, this is another great feature where it will display an icon if any of the top 10 results for that keyword have a site which is either: Youtube, Ebay, Ezine, Squidoo, Hub Pages or Amazon. This is another good indicator for you to determine whether there’s any chance of you getting on that Top 10 list for that keyword

Analyse the Competition

Once you’ve found a keyword that you like the look of you’ll probably want to dive into a bit more detail and look at the sites that are ranking for that keyword.

All you need to do is click on the keyword and you’re taken to the following screen:

Keyword Competitivenes

Again, you can find most of this information elsewhere, but this compiles it quickly and neatly into one simple interface.

You’ll see that the SECockpit gurus have even colour coded the results for you so at a glance you can see if it is easy to knock any of those sites off of the top 10 (green being the easiest/lowest value)

The standard measures are all displayed here:

MozRank
Page Authority
Domain Authority
Juice Links

Total Links
Internal Links
FB Likes
FB Shares

If you scroll down the page as well, you’ll see that it pulls in the info about that keyword from Google Trends.

Google Trends Data

Calculate Your Returns

Conversion Calculator

The final feature that I found really useful in this review was the SECockpit Conversion Calculator.

This simple tool takes the Traffic volume and cost per click for the keyword and allows you to play with a number of other inputs to help you gauge the revenue returns on your keyword, depending on:

How well you rank for the keyword
How well you convert from your site
Whether you are selling a product or earning money through Adwords

Any Other Features

There are a load of other features available within SECockpit, but this review is only focusing on the keyword research and analysis functionality.

If you want to find out more hop on over to the SE Cockpit Site

How Much Does SECockpit Cost?

OK, so the downside to this product is going to be its price, which is going to make it seem unaffordable to a lot of part time / amateurs.

The basic entry package, which limits you to 10 searches a day comes in at $40 a month, which goes all the way up to $120 a month for unlimited use.

However, my honest opinion is that if you are writing a lot of articles, want to have a bit of an edge over your competition and are really trying to push hard to get onto the top 10 results, then this tool really is worth every penny, as it’s going to save you hours and hours of time and if you use it correctly will reward you with more than the monthly fee in sales/commissions on your site.L

Latest Pricing structure:

What Do I need to Use SECockpit?

To use SECockpit you will need:

Google Adwords Keyword Planner Account
Paypal Account

SECockpit Login
Basic Understanding of Keyword Research

SECockpit Review Summary

SECockpit is an essential tool for any budding SEO enthusiast, blogger or anyone trying to make money online and monetize their website.

It has a number of cool features which help you to generate and analyse keywords and gain an understanding of how easy it will be to rank for those keywords and what your potential revenue will be.

Because it’s cloud based, SECockpit is incredibly fast and it also means you don’t need to install anything on your computer.

Features:

Ease of Use:

Price:

A Year Learning Website Monetisation

31st October 2016 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

I remember that I read somewhere that it would be easy to set up a travel blog and make money from it, which kind of got me started on this whole adventure in the first place.

So over this last year, I’ve been furiously looking into what it takes to monetise a website or a blog and the different strategies you can employ to create an ongoing stream of revenue.

3 Things I learned about Website Monetisation in 2016

I was really keen to find out how that’s possible and whether I could do the same thing, so here are the key things I’ve learned this year

Keyword Research Is Key

If you’re going to start a blog or a website then you have to remember that this is a huge investment of your time, so you really need to get an idea of whether this is going to make you any money at all before you head off writing content.

The first thing that you’re going to need to do is to research a niche.

I’ve written about this in detail before, but they key is finding a niche that:

• You’re interested in

• Has low competition and high volume keywords

• Is a broad enough niche that you can potentially expand this into an authority site in the long term

Get any of these things wrong and you’re going to end up with a blog that is going to be nothing but hard work giving you very little in return.

For any website venture that you’re about to start on I would recommend that you invest up to a month in planning the growth of your website.

• Create a keyword matrix and identify long tail keywords that you will target initially and higher volume keywords that you might want to target in the future

• Consider how your site is going to generate revenue. Are you going to be using Adsense, Amazon Affiliates or other affiliate programmes to earn your bucks?

• Check out the competition in your niche and look at how you could potentially improve what they have created

• Think about how much time your website will take to manage in the future and whether this could be outsourced. The worse thing is that if your site becomes really popular and you have set up systems where you need to be involved in all parts of the business, then the more popular it gets, the more of your time it will use

You can’t Take Shortcuts

Unfortunately, there are no real shortcuts that you can take to building up a successful website.

I’ve read a lot about Grey and Black Hat SEO tricks such as using Private Blog Networks, however, whilst these might get you success in the short term, in the longer term you’re likely to get banned from Google, and ruin your business.

If something looks too good to be true like a gig on Fiverr promising 50 top quality links for $5, then you know it’s going to be dodgy so steer clear.

Yes, there is nothing for it, but hard work and putting in the hours initially.

You’re going to need to write a lot of your content to develop your own voice, manage your own website and then most importantly learn how to market your website and generate traffic, all of which can be hugely time-consuming.

On top of this, you can’t expect instant results as your new website will go into Google’s sandbox and won’t start ranking for 3 – 6 months anyway.

Content is King and Links Are the Queen

The days where you could just throw up an article of a few hundred words for niche keywords and expect to rank easily are long gone.

Now you’ll need to put a lot more work and thought into this.

The content that you generate will need to be:

• Unique (Either a fresh idea or a vast improvement on existing content)

• Interesting (Needs to be made shareable)

• In-depth (Minimum of 1000 words per article)

• Answer a question / Solve a problem

The digital landscape is now so crammed full of content for every conceivable subject, you’ll even find in depth 2000+ word reviews of toilet seats, so you have to make sure your content sticks out somehow.

Once you’ve written this killer content, the hardest part is generating links to this content, which seems to be the biggest single factor in 2016 for ranking your content.

There are plenty of strategies all over the internet on how to do this, but once again, this will just consume a lot of your time.

What Did I Achieve?

On a positive note I have to say that I achieved a great deal in this sphere over the last year:

• I set up 2 websites, www.mylifestyledream.com and a niche website

• I have learned a good understanding of SEO and different tactics

• I’ve learned a lot about internet marketing

• I’ve learned about affiliate marketing and the different tactics that people use to monetize websites

Overall I’ve got a great foundation now in both my knowledge and my websites to build on over the next year.

I haven’t been able to focus as much of my time as I wanted to on the niche website, but plan to switch focus back on to this next year.

Low Light of the Year

I think I’ve found a great niche with low competition keywords, however, it’s not the most exciting niche and is quite hard to write articles for.

I’ve written about 8 so far, however, have kind of lost heart a little bit, because even though some of the keywords that I am targeting are sub 20 Keyword Competitiveness, I still don’t rank in the top 100 for these keywords, which I find really bizarre.

I think the answer to this problem, is that I just need to put in more work, build out more articles and start my link building activities then the site should start to grow in traffic.

Highlight of the Year

The best thing for me with building out these sites has to be the amount that I have learned about SEO.

I find this dark art really interesting and is definitely something that I want to learn more about and spend more time perfecting in the future.

How much Time did I spend?

With a full time job in front of a computer screen, I’ve also needed to research and practice these 3 ways to make money online as well as write about them, all of which takes a huge amount of time.

In reality I’ve needed to just focus on one thing at a time, or free up more time, which I intend to do next year.

How much Money Did I make?

A big fat £0

In fact, by the time I take hosting and themes and domain names into account I’ve probably invested about £150 so far.

However, I feel that I’ve put in a lot of the groundwork with which to monetize these sites in the future.

Was It Worth the Effort?

Yes, absolutely. I feel that I’ve started a new path that I’m interested in and could potentially reap rewards in the future.

Out of all the things I’ve looked at this is most likely to be the idea that comes closest to giving me real passive income in the future.

My Website Dream : Chapter 4 : Content Creation and Optimisation

28th February 2016 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

Niche Content Creation

This last month has been all about content creation and organisation for both my niche site and www.mylifestyledream.com

My target was to write 3 articles for my chosen niche site, but luckily enough I’ve had quite a quiet time at work this month and I’ve tried to use every spare hour I could get for writing. This meant that I managed to create 5 pillar content articles for my niche site, totalling more than 12,000 words of pretty decent content.

I think that with another 5 pillar articles and 5 smaller articles I should have enough content on the site to be able to launch it. On top of this I have also collated a list of all the businesses in London that are qualified to provide the service in the niche that I am focusing on. I’ve captured their addresses, services provided and am writing a paragraph of SEO focused introductory text for each of these businesses. My plan is that I will then create one big listings page that targets the keyword ‘[myniche] service in London’.

Failed Survey

One of the keywords that I want to go after as well is ‘[myniche] service prices’ or ‘how much does an [myniche] cost’ so I decided that I’d put a survey together and reach out to a number of businesses in the UK who offer this service and find out what their price list is.

I set up a Survey Monkey survey and wrote an email to 20 different businesses, pretending that I was a student doing a study on regional diversity and was interested in finding out how prices in the industry differ across the country.

Out of the 20 businesses I surveyed, guess how many responded? Yes, that’s right, a big fat 0. Looking back even though the email was nicely worded and the survey would only take 5 minutes to complete, it did look a little complicated and there was no real reason why they would participate as they weren’t getting anything out of it. I think I’m going to put this on hold now, until the site takes off and then do a proper survey offering the businesses a page to promote their business on my site in return for their participation. I’ll then create a nice infographic out of the results, which would be a useful piece of information as no one really has this information readily available on the internet.

Alexa Submission

Another thing that I did this month is submitted my site to Alexa as this sounds like another useful place to list your site to enhance your search rankings.

A couple of quick tips to help boost your Alexa rank are to install the Alexa toolbar in your browser, and the Alexa widget to your site. The word on the street is that this will boost your Alexa rank, although I am still showing as having no data! I think it just takes a month or so until you get listed though.

Optimisation

I thought it was about time this month to take stock of where I’ve got to with building www.mylifestyledream.com. I wanted to check how the site was performing and see if there were any issues with how I was creating the content and the structure of the site and also check my SEO rankings.

As I was looking into this I came across 2 really useful tools:

Onpage.org

This is a really handy tool that checks your site for 3 key areas:

SEO Aspects
Technical Aspects
Content Aspects

Onpage.org allows you to generate a report where it will check against a multitude of criteria in these categories and list out any errors for you. It takes a while to generate the report, and you are limited to creation of 1 report a month, however, this gives you some really great pointers into potential issues on your site.

Moz

Moz in general is a pretty amazing must have tool for anyone interested in SEO. They have a free toolbar that you can install on your site that looks a bit like this:

This helps you tell at a glance useful SEO metrics such as the domain authority or page authority of pages in the search results so you can see how easily you could rank for that keyword. You can find out the full feature set here : https://moz.com/tools/seo-toolbar

On top of this if you can afford it then I’d recommend getting a Moz Pro account, which has some really useful features such as doing an indepth SEO analysis of each page on your site. Based on the tips that it gave me, I went back and re-worked all of my pages so there were no issues showing with Moz.

Fiverr Gigs

Welcome to the world of fiverr.com. If you haven’t heard of this before then this is basically a marketplace where people offer all different kinds of services for a maximum of $5. You can source everything from logos to software subscriptions so there are a number of things that can come in useful if you are just setting up a website.

Because I am researching niches at the moment I used it to get a 1 month subscription to SEMrush and it worked perfectly. To be honest, it is a little bit dodgy so I wouldn’t use it in the long term, and you are sharing your account with other users, so if you want to keep your niche close to your chest, this may not be the best bet.

There are a lot of gigs on Fiverr offering traffic and backlinks as well but you should definitely stay clear of them as this will do more damage than good to your site.

Podcasts

Amongst all of the content that I’ve been creating I’ve also been making the most of every second I can get to listen to Podcasts from some of the key influencers in the internet marketing / niche website markets.

The best of the bunch are listed below:

Smart Passive Income

This podcast from guru Pat Flynn gives you all kinds of hints, tips and motivation to get your online business up and running. His goal has been to set up businesses with a bit of hard work to start with that free up time in the longer term and generate passive income for you. Great listening, but takes a while to get used to Pat’s fast, squeaky voice!!!

Ask Pat

This is another podcast from Pat Flynn but comprises of shorter 10 minute podcasts, where he responods to a listener’s questions. A wide range of topics discussed but he provides useful, digestable information

Authority Hacker

My personal favourite site and podcast at the moment. The duo of Gael and Mark give you no nonsense tips about creating your authority website based on their real experiences running Health Ambition and Authority Hacker. They ran an agency together but the podcasts are usually full of actionable information about SEO, content marketing and anything you need to know about running a site.

Niche Pursuits

Spencer Hawe and Co-host Perrin Carrel focus on creating niche websites, and are now branching out into the Amazon FBA programme. These guys are behind the Niche Site 3 project, where they are mentoring 3 differetn listeners as they help them to set up and develop their websites. Essential listening.

WP Elevation

This blog is more focused on how you can use the power of WordPress to elevate your blog and improve your business and features interviews with a range of eminent online entrepreneurs and internet marketers.

Pro Blogger

Darren Rowse is the goto man for blogging on the internet and has many years of experience. His podcasts tend to offer writing tips and anything blog related. Worthwhile listening, although the nuggets of information are a little hidden amongst the waffle, and he does sound a little bit preacher-like. Still, he’s been there and done it, so you should listen!

Last Month’s Goal

Write 3 articles for the niche site – COMPLETE
Create a list of the niche services in London – COMPLETE

Next Month’s Goal

Complete the London listings page for my niche site
Write 5 more articles for niche site
Stretch goal – look at the Thrive Content Builder

Tools and Sites Used

How to Find a Niche Market in Less than a Day

4th February 2016 By martinos74 4 Comments

Choosing a niche for your online business can seem complicated, however, this guide will show you how to find a niche market right for you.

In this guide I’m going to give you the tips and the tools that you need to select your niche in less than a day!

Quick NavigationStage 1 – Creating a Shortlist of Niches Stage 2 – Find a Niche Product Using Amazon Search Step 3 – Find the Best Keywords for Your Niche Using Keyword Modifiers Step 4 – Sample Your Keywords for Keyword Competitiveness STEP 5 – Analyse the Competition Step 6 – How to Choose a Niche Market?Summary Tools Used

Stage 1 – Creating a Shortlist of Niches

Task Time : 1 Hour

If you’re looking to make money online, then finding potential online business ideas and understanding how to find a good niche are critical to your success. There are so many potential niches out there for you to choose from and getting started is going to be your biggest barrier.

My main advice to you is start with something that you’re interested in. After all you’re going to spend a lot of time researching, writing and being part of that niche community so it’s best that you are in some way interested in the subject.

Some of the most profitable niches are going to be hobby or passion niche’s where people are emotionally attached with the product so are a lot more willing to spend money, and therefore advertisers will be a lot more willing to pay for space on your site!

I had a number of ideas for niches that I was thinking of entering but wanted to broaden my reach a bit before entering into keyword research so I started with our good old friend Wikipedia. They have a really useful list of hobbies page, which lists pretty much every hobby you can think of.

My process was to simply run through this list and make a shortlist of niches that I was interested in. This took me about an hour to do but was a really useful brainstorming exercise as well as it generated a lot of potential online business ideas.

Once you’ve created a list of potential niches that you’d like to set up a business in you want to see what kind of keywords are available for that niche so you can interrogate them and see if there really is a business there.

In general we can split the keywords into 2 distinct groups:

Product Keywords – These will be useful for your website monetization strategy
Information Keywords – These will be useful to drive traffic to your website

Both sets of keywords are equally as important as they can bring revenue and traffic to your site.

Stage 2 – Find a Niche Product Using Amazon Search

Task Time : 10 Minutes per niche

If you’re going to make any money online you need to know how to find a niche product or a service to either sell or recommend. Without products in your niche, your bank account is going to remain very empty.

For each of the niches on you shortlist, spend 5 minutes brainstorming some products that are related to that niche. For example, if you’re really into walking then your first list of product keywords would be something like

Hiking boots
Hiking poles
Backpacks
Fleeces

Once you’ve got a small set of keywords together then I’d simply jump on over to Amazon.com and type these keywords into the search bar:

How to find a niche product using Amazon auto suggest

What you’ll find is that the auto-suggest kicks in and shows you a load of other related product keywords that you might not have thought about before.

In the case above we can now add the following keywords to our list:

Hiking socks
Hiking armband
Hiking trousers
Hiking gaiters

I also recommend clicking around the categories as well and you’ll probably find another few related products that you could add to your list.

Step 3 – Find the Best Keywords for Your Niche Using Keyword Modifiers

Task Time : 10 Minutes Per Niche

The next trick that we are going to use is a combination of keyword ‘modifiers’ and a free tool atUbersuggest.org to help you find profitable niche keywords.

Keyword modifiers are simply additional words that you put either before or after your keyword to help you find keywords in your niche with a stronger buying intent.

Examples of these are

Best eg ‘Best hiking boots’ or ‘best hiking boots for’
Reviews eg ‘hiking boot reviews’
Top eg ‘Top hiking boots’
where to buy eg ‘where to buy hiking boots’
versus eg ‘hiking boots vs sports shoes’
brand names eg ‘North Face hiking boots’

You can find a full list of these types of modifiers here

You should then take some of these sample keywords that you think will work and plug them in to the free ubersuggest tool. Ubersuggest basically uses Google’s autocomplete function and goes through every letter of the alphabet trying to find related search terms.

Ubersuggest Search Box

This won’t work in all cases but if you put open ended strings into the search box, then you’ll get better results back eg ‘best hiking boots for’ or ‘where to buy hiking boots for’ will bring you back much better results than ‘North Face hiking boots’:

Ubersuggest provides a list of related keywords

All you need to do next is to click on the ‘Select All keywords’ button and copy the keywords that you’ve created into a master list of keywords for that niche. I usually keep these in a spreadsheet, which has a tab for each of my niches like this one: How-to-Choose-a-Niche-Workbook

Ubersuggest Keyword Suggestions

Step 4 – Sample Your Keywords for Keyword Competitiveness

Task Time : 20 Minutes Per Niche

When you’ve gone through this process a few times in Ubersuggest, copy all of your keywords and add them into Long Tail Pro. Add one of your main keywords like ‘best hiking boots’ as your seed keyword and add all the other entries into the ‘Add My Own Keywords’ section then just click the ‘Generate Keywords’ button and sit back and relax for a bit:

how to choose a keyword for website

You’ll then be returned with a huge number of results from Long Tail Pro but to help you filter this list I would recommend the setting the following filters in Long Tail Pro

Suggested bid : £0.50
Local Searches : 10
Advertiser Competition : Set to Medium/High
Number of words : 4

Once you’ve done this then you’ll have a much smaller list that you can go through and check out the Keyword Competitiveness scores. Usually I’ll try this across a range of keywords, starting with the higher value and higher traffic keywords but sampling all the way down to keywords that have low CPCs and low traffic.

In the process that I went through I tried to sample about 50 keywords for each niche, which really gives you a good idea of how competitive the niche is. If there are hardly any keywords with a KC of under 30, then it’s going to be really hard for you to enter that niche, so probably best to move on to the next one in your list.

Here’s a real example of hiking boots that I looked at:

what are the best keywords for my website

For each of your niches when you find a good keyword then add this to your favourites, which will help you when you come back to review them later on.

STEP 5 – Analyse the Competition

Task Time : 10 Minutes Per Niche

The next thing to do is to analyse some of the keywords in that niche, to see if you are going to be able to push your way onto that elusive first page of Google. You want to start by looking for keywords that have a high traffic, high competition and low KC score.

Click on the result and ideally you want to see a minimum of 2 sites that have a Domain Authority of less than 30, with a KC of less than 30. This gives you a good indication that if you write a good article and with a little bit of SEO loving you could probably get your site to rank in those top 10 results as well.

In the case of hiking boots I can see a keyword (best hiking boots UK) that gets 140 visits a month and has a KC of just 22 so lets click on that:

finding a niche in the market

Unfortunately there’s only 1 site with a DA of less than 30, which has a pretty low KC of 24, so lets start by checking that site out. We can see straight away that it’s a niche site as it has a product comparison table, some reviews and a load of affiliate links : http://bestwalkingboots.org/

Best Walking Boots Reviews and Ratings of Hiking and Walking Footwear

Now the next little trick uses a tool cool SEMrush, which really just helps you to spy on the competition, look at how much traffic they are getting and then eventually steal their keywords! After all, all’s fair in love and keywords!!!

You can get 10 free searches a day with SEMrush, so head over to semrush.com and plug the url of the site you’re looking at into the search bar:

SEMrush : Organic Search Positions

Straight away you can see that SEMrsuh provides you with an estimate of the traffic the site is receiving, in this case 136 visitors a day, and then even better than this it shows you a complete list of the keywords that this site is ranking for and how much of their traffic volume this makes up. Simply click on the ‘export’ button and these keywords can be yours as well!!!

How to get keywords from a website”

The other useful feature that you’ll see is the competitors graph, which gives you a list of related sites, and also plots them on a graph split between number of keywords and traffic. SEMrush has loads of great features and shows you how to find search volume for a keyword, how to find out keywords of a website and can really show you how to identify a niche market.

All of these things together give you a really useful insight into the competition and can help you understand whether this is a niche worth going into. When I went through this process it helped me to eliminate a number of niches, purely by the fact that the main competitors were getting so little traffic that it wouldn’t be worth my while entering that niche.

COPYCAT SITES

Another good tip is to try and find sites that are similar to how you imagine your site will become. If there are sites like this in the top ten then it’s a pretty good sign, so spend some time and analyse their sites as well.

Look at their traffic figures and check out their competition and keywords and this should give you a really good indication if you should go for this niche or not.

For each of your niches make a note of the number of sites that you found like this and jot down their traffic volume.

Step 6 – How to Choose a Niche Market?

Task Time : 10 Minutes Per Niche

Once you’ve gone through the above process for a number of different niches, you’ll quickly get a feel for whether there is any business value in the niche, whether it is easy to enter, and most of all whether it’s something you’re going to want to dedicate a lot of your time to in the next months.

My final check list for each niche that I looked at would be something like this:

Does the niche interest or excite me enough that I could commit a lot of my time to?
Are there a good range of products that I could create or promote in this niche?
Is there enough scope in the niche for me to write a decent amount of content about? (100 articles or more)
Out of my keyword sampling exercise, were there a decent number of keywords with KC scores of less than 30?
Did I manage to find a lot of copycat sites for keywords that had a KC of less than 30?
Was there a good volume of traffic in the market for my copycat sites?
How could I make my site stand out from others in this niche?
Is there potential to expand my niche into further markets/niches?
Would I be proud of talking about this niche to my friends/family?

Summary

Stage 1 – Create a shortlist of niches : 1 hour
Stage 2 – Finding Product Keywords using Amazon Search : 10 Minutes per niche
Step 3 – Use Keyword modifiers to expand your keyword list : 10 Minutes Per Niche
Step 4 – Sample your Keywords for Keyword Competitiveness: 20 Minutes Per Niche
Step 5 – Analyse the Competition: 10 Minutes Per Niche
Step 6 – Choosing a Final Niche : 10 Minutes Per Niche

Tools Used

My Website Dream : Chapter 3 : Keyword Research and Choosing my Niche

24th January 2016 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

Through listening to the podcasts on Niche Pursuits and doing a lot of background reading, I’ve decided that I need to diversify my website monetization strategy. I had originally planned that I would focus my efforts on building out this website www.mylifestyledream.com and look at how I could monetize this site, however, I’ve switched my focus somewhat.

Through the initial keyword research that I’ve done it’s obvious that the ‘How to make money online’ niche is one of the most competitive niches out there and will take me a long time to rank for an ultimate build up an audience. Whilst I still want to pursue that avenue, I also want to try something that can bring back dividends in the shorter term, so I’ve decided that I also want to set up a niche site.

From what I’ve read so far, creating a niche site that brings back £500 to £1000 a month in recurring passive income, is not a dream, but actually a distinct possibility. There are loads of people out there doing this and making money from niche sites already, and most of them seem to be employing pretty similar methodologies and techniques. In the short term, I’m going to look at these approaches and start to apply them in practice as I build out my own niche site.

Detailed Keyword Research / Choosing a Niche

I know I’ve banged on about it before but doing extensive keyword research before you start building a site is absolutely essential. There’s no point in spending hours and hours writing content that no-one reads, so this month my focus has been 100% on keyword research, evaluating market size and eventually, choosing a niche that I want to go into.

One of my money spinning plans has been to set up a niche website and monetize it with either Adsense or Amazon affiliate links. I’ve had a few ideas bouncing around in my head for months now, so I wanted to road test these ideas and find out whether there really was any business opportunity in developing a niche in those areas.

To come up with my shortlist of niches I simply went to Wikipedia and looked through their list of hobbies to find potential niches that I might be interested in.

Then for each niche, I looked on Amazon for potential products and also used Ubersuggest to give me a list of keywords related to that niche.

I then plugged these keywords into Long Tail Pro and did a short sample of keywords to get an idea of keyword competitiveness in that niche. Some of these niches were clearly overly competitive with lots of keywords with keyword competiveness scores of over 30, so this helped me to start whittling down the list to about 5 niches.

For each of these 5 niches I then used SEMrush to gauge how much traffic was in those markets. This was quite a simple process of looking at the top ten results for some of the keywords in the niche, and choosing sites, which were similar to what I would like to build ie Doppelgangers. I could then take their URLs and put into SEMrush, which gives you an indication of the traffic size:

SEMrsuh monthly traffic stats — Screenshot showing SEMrush monthly traffic stats

The other good thing about SEMrush, is that you can view the keywords that the specific site is ranking for and put these on your list of keywords you want to rank for:

This clearly showed that a couple of niches I was thinking of entering had very little traffic, so I removed them from my list.

In the end my choice was between 2 niches:

Niche 1 – This would be entering a sub-niche for a product that has taken off in the last few years, and I think will have great potential in the future. The sub-niche doesn’t have great traffic at the moment, however, is fairly easy to enter, and I think will grow in the future. I can also see potential that you could then expand into the main niche with time and become an authority site, even though that is quite a competitive niche.

Niche 2 – Is entering into a niche where you would promote a service that other people are supplying. There are loads of really low competitive keywords in this niche, and most of the sites are obviously built by people who don’t know a lot about SEO. I’m not sure how much it helps either, but the Cost Per Click for these keywords is really high:

Long Tail Pro Screenshot screenshot showing keyword competitiveness in my niche

The only problem I can find with this niche is that it will be hard to write a lot of decent quality articles.

In the end, I have decided to go with Niche 2, just because the Keyword Competitiveness is so low and the major site in this niche is getting 40k visits per month!!!

Content Research

After choosing my niche I was really keen to crack on with content creation so this month I’ve started to do a lot more research into the niche to generate content ideas.

I’ve basically been reviewing other sites in the niche to ‘borrow’ content ideas, and this has proven to be a really useful exercise. From this exercise I have decided that I can expand my site into 3 main areas:

Helping visitors to find the niche service in their area
Helping businesses to find training for the niche service
Helping visitors find a related niche product

I really think there is potential to become an authority in this niche as well, and I’ve started creating a list of different content ideas to put on the site. I found the guys at Digital Marketer wrote this really great article

How I Nearly Bought a Website

Talking of distractions, well this month I nearly took a massive shortcut around the whole niche site building process and almost bought myself a ready made website, complete with WordPress plugins and 40 keywords focused articles.

The opportunity arose when I was reading an article on Matthew Allen’s blog about the Google Thin Content Penalty. This is basically a new algorithm that Google introduced recently to penalise websites, which are perceived to add no value and are built for the sole purpose of generating Affiliate revenue ie Niche Sites. If you don’t have a lot of content on your site and you have a lot of affiliate links, then you’ve probably been penalised and received something like this from Google:

So, Matthew Allen had 2 of his sites hit with this penalty and had since then de-indexed the sites, put them on a new URL and was selling them through Human Proof Designs for $799. He claimed that these sites were making a few hundred pounds every month and with a bit of careful nurture could make even more money.

To me this sounded like a great opportunity, not just because they were tried and tested websites that had already made money, but because this would afford me a great opportunity to learn how he had set these specific niche sites up in WordPress. More than anything I was looking at this as a really good learning tool so I clicked on the ‘Buy Now’ button for the site about Organic Shampoo, and initially it looked like I was successful.

However, I was completely gutted to find out a few hours later that there had been an issue with the checkout flow, and that the site had already been sold. Matthew was extremely apologetic and offered me first refusal on the Fertility Kit site instead, but to be honest, that niche just wasn’t going to float my boat.

Looking back, it’s probably not such a bad thing as I want to go through this whole set up process myself, so I guess it’s back to the drawing board and time to focus on writing them articles!!!

NEXT MONTH’S GOALS

Write 3 articles for the niche site
Create a list of the niche services in London

LAST MONTH’S TASKS

Choose a niche for my website – COMPLETE
Publish 5 more articles – INCOMPLETE
Create a backlinking strategy – INCOMPLETE

TOOLS AND SITES USED

SEO

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What is SECockpit?​

SECockpit Key Features REviewed

gENERATING kEYWORDS

Analyse Keywords

Analyse the Competition

Calculate Your Returns

Any Other Features

How Much Does SECockpit Cost?

What Do I need to Use SECockpit?

SECockpit Review Summary

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3 Things I learned about Website Monetisation in 2016

Keyword Research Is Key

You can’t Take Shortcuts

Content is King and Links Are the Queen

What Did I Achieve?

Low Light of the Year

Highlight of the Year

How much Time did I spend?

How much Money Did I make?

Was It Worth the Effort?

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Niche Content Creation

Failed Survey

Alexa Submission

Optimisation

Moz

Fiverr Gigs

Podcasts

Last Month’s Goal

Next Month’s Goal

Tools and Sites Used

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Stage 1 – Creating a Shortlist of Niches

Stage 2 – Find a Niche Product Using Amazon Search

Step 3 – Find the Best Keywords for Your Niche Using Keyword Modifiers

Step 4 – Sample Your Keywords for Keyword Competitiveness

STEP 5 – Analyse the Competition

COPYCAT SITES

Step 6 – How to Choose a Niche Market?

Summary

Tools Used

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Detailed Keyword Research / Choosing a Niche

Content Research

How I Nearly Bought a Website

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What is SECockpit?