Finding the Right Niche

Choosing the right niche for your blog is important. If you recall, I said earlier that a good way to find the right niche is to focus on something that you know and like. Make no mistake about it, you have to provide content to your blog, and it is far easier to draft out content on a subject that you know and enjoy. This does not mean that you will not have to do some research, you will. But at least you will not be bored to tears as you sit down to write.

Here are some tips to get you started: Make a list of the things that interest you. This might be hobbies or sports, or just about anything that you know something about. Once you have your list, pick out just one of them and make another list of keywords associated with this topic. See if there is any demand for this topic. Keyword research is critical to your success, so do not dismiss or skip this step. Once you know how to do it, keyword research is fast and easy.

You want to find a niche that does not have a lot of competition. The more competition you have to face, the harder it will be for you to make your own sales. This does not mean that you will not make any money at all, but it will be more difficult to earn a good income. On the other hand, if you focus on a niche that does not have much demand you will not have much of a market and will not make much money. You want to hone out the best keywords that are being searched by potential customers, yet do not have too much competition.

In order to do this work, you need a good keyword research tool. You might like the free tool called SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool. This online research tool will let you know how many searches any particular keyword will get. It can also help you with long tail keywords that are closely related to the keyword that you are looking at.

In my example I used Ebay as the keyword. What you see is just the top few results. It also reveals the estimated daily searches for those words through Yahoo, Google, and MSN. Please note that the top word is the word I searched for. In this case Ebay. Under this keyword is a list of the other keywords related to Ebay. These include ‘ebay motors’, ‘ebay uk’, and many others.

Having this information is important because these are the words you want to place into your blog posts. Do make sure first that they are still getting a lot of searches each month. For me, I prefer using the Adword Analyzer. This is not free, it cost about $77, but it is worth every penny for those who need the best results in keyword research. The price has actually come down since I bought my copy at $99. One thing is for sure: I have gotten my money’s worth and I still use it daily.

This particular software has lots of benefits, but one thing I really like about it is it gives you a list of long tail keywords, something other programs do not do. It also reveals the number of searches on the keyword on all of the major engines. This lets you see how much competition you have across the board. It shows this via the PPC (Pay Per Click) ads that are being clicked on. Just because we are not using PPC, we can still use this information to show us how much competition there is.

Another benefit I like is that is easy to use and understand. It sits right on my desktop and it fast to open when I want to use it. As I do my keyword research, I jot down the long tail keyword into a note book I have just for that purpose. I can then add these words to my blog posts later on. It makes getting keywords into the blog easy as pie.