This is part 2 of how to identify your niche market when blogging.  Here’s part 1 of the post.

We left off with our term “harley davidson megamotor harness boots”.  We looked at the phrase (in quotes) in Google and found that there were only six listings.  Now we want to think about this for a second.  In quotes, it’s a cinch you will be on the page 1 of the Google listings.  But what about the flip side?

You’ve got the demand, you should be able to reach page 1 of Google.  But is there anyone selling these boots that has an affiliate program?  I took a quick look and didn’t really see any.  So if you planned to monetize your blog by selling boots as an affiliate, this phrase doesn’t seem to work.

Another Example to Identify Your Niche Market

OK, now you’ve seen that for a successful blog (for traffic and monetization) you need:

  • Niched-down (long tail) keyword phrase.
  • Sufficient demand.
  • Able to be monetized.

Let’s take another example.  I’ll use acne as an example.  I happen to know there are a couple of good Clickbank ebooks that I could sell as an affiliate.  Now I need to know a decent keyword phrase to use!

Over to the free version of WordTracker, and put in acne.  It’s a bit of a tough one, because it’s such a hot topic, but the phrase “acne blackheads natural treatment” merits a closer look.  Sure, at 5,020 supply it’s over the numbers I usually use, but I want to see how strong the competition is.  In other words, are there 5,020 pages that I could blow past, or are there a lot of well-optimized pages already?

Still in Google, type the following into the Google search bar exactly as I have it shown: 

allintitle: “acne blackheads natural treatment”

This returns us 154 listings.  What does this mean?  Why should you care?

This particular search tells me how many pages are optimized, with the phrase “acne blackheads natural treatment” in the page title.  Now I really look at the results; these are the people and pages who have at least marginally optimized their pages.  Can I do better by optimizing the title, the links and the URL?

Which leads me to a quick talk about optimizing your blog.

Optimizing Your Blog

Yes, I’ve told you how you can get a free blog on blogger, wordpress.com and some other services.  But I also have to say that none of them optimize your posts very well.  And when you’re up against other blogs and websites that are optimized…you may be fighting a losing battle if other blogs are optimizing.

I know it’s kind of scary, but if you honest-to-goodness want to optimize your blog for the best possible search engine inclusion, you need to use the self-hosted version of WordPress (wordpress.org).  I’ll talk about this more in another post, but it’s something for you to think about now.

Blog Experiment Update

Yep, more entries for David’s and my great blogging experiments.  David has had a really cool success.  He created a 2-post, 1-page blog for a niche he found.  I think he made his posts yesterday (Sunday, August 17th) and today…he’s right up at the top of Google today and is getting lots of traffic!

I made a post to one of my blogs a little while ago (one of the ones in this experiment) and went to make dinner.  After dinner, I sat down in front of the computer and checked — I was already listed in Google, page 1 (with quotes)!!!  I’m #21 without quotes.  But that was in a space of about 45 minutes!

So, I am still a firm believer in this truly exciting blogging tool — it’s awesome!