Business at Home Income Blog

Archive for the ‘Blog Niches’ Category

Here’s the next post on how to identify your niche market before you start your blog (or even afterwards). I started to talk about this in my previous post on how to make money blogging with the right keywords, but now let’s talk some more.

Choosing a Niche

This is probably the most important step; choosing your niche.  There are two main considerations here. 

First, do you care about search engine traffic, or do you just want to express yourself?  If you’re writing a blog because you are passionate about a subject, but it doesn’t matter how many or few people read it, then write about it.  Don’t worry about choosing a niche; your subject will take care of itself.

On the other hand, if you do want search engine traffic, you need to be a little more careful in choosing your niche.  And that brings up two points.  Do you want people to read what you have to say, but don’t care about monetizing your blog…or do you want it to earn a regular (even if small) income?

If you’re wanting search engine traffic but don’t care about monetizing, choose the method I described in my last post.  Find words in the free WordTracker tool, then check the two supply numbers in Google.  As a very general rule, keep your in quotes keyword under 1,000.  Now you can go over this at times, but I wouldn’t normally look higher than 2,000 — just too hard to climb to the top of the heap (i.e., page 1 of the Google search results).

How to Identify Your Niche Market to Monetize

Most people wouldn’t mind making a bit of money from their blog, and some want it to earn a regular income.  Indeed, some want it to replace their current income!  Here are some tips for this for you, if it’s your ultimate goal.

Pick your niche carefully.  For example, maybe I wanted to be an affiliate for shoe sales.  Well, “shoes” is a mightly big topic.  So I’ll winnow it down some.  Do I want men’s shoes?  Women’s shoes?  Boots?  a specific brand?  Well, how about boots?

Put the word bootsinto WordTracker and see what comes up.  Hmmm, it’s a really big list, but maybe harley davidson boots?  Click on that, because we want to winnow it down even further.

As a very general rule, we want more words in the keyword phrase; less likely to find other pages that have all these words.  The phrase “harley davidson boots” (in quotes) turns up 157,000 for a supply — far too much.  Keep looking…

Whoa, here’s a term — “harley davidson megamotor harness boots”  In quotes that has a supply of just 6!  Now that could be a winner!  Especially because people searching on that term know exactly what they want, and are far more likely to have a credit card in hand (so to speak) before they get to your blog!

This post has gotten a bit longer than I wanted, so I’ll continue this topic of how to identify your niche market when blogging on the next post.  See you then!

How to make money blogging with the right keywords is what I’m going to discuss right now, and it goes hand-in-hand with the blogging experiments Dave and I have been running.

Choosing the Right Keywords

First, for you to have a decent chance of success, you need to select keywords that have demand, but very little competition.  We’ll use this post as an example.  There isn’t a ton of demand for this keyword phrase, but there is also very little supply.  So the chances for me getting to the top of the search quickly are pretty decent.

Now, that’s the example for just this post — what about an entire blog?  I mean, this particular phrase “how to make money blogging with the right keywords” certainly isn’t worth a blog in its own right.  But it makes for a great post!

Supply Versus Supply

If you do a search in Google using the keyword phrase in this post’s title (without quotes) you’ll see 2,680,000 records returned.  OK, put the quotes around the phrase and the number goes down to 326.  Quite a difference, right?  So one supply figure is wildly different from the other.

You want the keyword phrase in quotes to be as low as possible.  I try to keep it under 1,000.  I’m even happier when I can get it under 500.  And I’m ecstatic when it’s under 100.

So know your supply numbers!

How to Make Money Blogging With the Right Keywords – Update

This is still the grand blogging experiment that you can read about in the previous post.  I have an update from this morning.

David and I decided to play hookey today and spend some time away from the computers, so we went to lunch, took a long leisurely drive, then grabbed a smoothie for dinner.  We came back home and I checked my newest blog.  Yay!  The traffic has started coming in.  Then I decided to check my standings in Google by typing my keyword phrase into the Google search bar, with and without quotes.

With quotes, I came up in the #1 and #3 spots!  And even more exciting, without quotes I was in the #4 spot (I was at like 9 or 10 this morning)!  This, mind you, for a blog that was just born a couple days ago!

How did I manage this?  One, it was by checking both supply figures and making sure the search with the keyword in quotes was as low as possible.  Two, it’s making sure the demand for the keyword is worth the effort — if the number of searches is too small, it’s not worth (to me) making a blog on.  For my keyword tool, I use the free version of WordTracker.  The numbers you see in this tool are the number of searches on a daily basis.

Normally for a single-product blog (if I have a specific product for sale as an affiliate), I want to have a keyword with at least 1,000 unique visitors a month.  That’s roughly 33 people a day.  If it was for an informational website where I was featuring Adsense instead of an affiliate product, I’d want that number much higher — at least 5,000 people a month.

The other way I managed it was with the exciting blogging tool I found last week.  Keep in mind that I’ve been writing online for several years (mainly full-blown websites), but I have never, ever had this kind of search engine success before!

I’ll keep you posted as to how the blogs do.  Meanwhile, go out an check the free version of Wordtracker and run some phrases through, see what kind of demand shows up.  Then pick some keyword phrases from the list WordTracker returns and drop them into Google search, both with quotes (“how to make money blogging with the right keywords“) and without quotes (how to make money blogging with the right keywords) and see what kinds of numbers you come up with.

There’s another tool you can use once you’re familiar with the way WordTracker works.  Unfortunately it’s something that costs money (although it’s pretty inexpensive), so that’s why I recommend the free version of WordTracker for now.  Get used to doing those searches, and being aware of what the numbers mean.