The 2011 name Your niche and Rank experiment -MULTIPLE traffic streams

[Mike Anthony]

Update

SORRY GUYS HAD TO CLOSE THIS.

Because of the project I mentioned in the thread. Looking forward to unveiling it in a few weeks.



I've been telling people that if they do great keyword research their traffic issues will be solved but I realized that talk is cheap. the best way to show the power of keyword research with competition research is to show it working - from scratch.

So you may not want to use your own primary niche since this will be a public experiment but feel free to suggest other niches. I'll pick one that is interesting and show how with good research to start with your success rate will be high.

Please no porn, gambling or other such niches.

Stage one - Niche selection complete ----- Home audio (covers discussion posts 1-10)

Stage Two - Keyword research complete - full unedited file here (for those of you who want to pour over everything)




Stage Three - Competition Research - possible targets filtered. small sample below all exact searches shown (will not be using these so feel free to do with as you wish)

wireless headphones for tv 6,600 exact
outdoor speakers wireless 5,500
subwoofers for sale 2,000 softness few title matches etc
subwoofer wiring diagrams 1200 however with wider results for "subwoofer wiring" 12,000


Stage Four - Content/domain strategy - Complete




Stage Five - Link building - In Progress

[aaron_nimocks]

You can use my niche that I sent out to my list today and see how it goes.

Niche: Slatwall

Don't know if your after bigger niches or just small profitable ones. But I think the one I provided could be interesting.

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by aaron_nimocks

Niche: Slatwall

Don't know if your after bigger niches or just small profitable ones. But I think the one I provided could be interesting.

Maybe but since I am willing to spend time on getting a site ranked for it I was looking for something even a little more sexy

[aaron_nimocks]

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

Maybe but since I am willing to spend time on getting a site ranked for it I was looking for something even a little more sexy

Ohh you wanted to actually put in some work, ok.

[RahulNag]

A niche I am interested in is 'marketing yourself for actors'

It would be great if you could show me how the keyword research would work for this particular niche

[Matt Helphrey]

Ill throw some out there. How about...

home audio
camping
increasing vertical
drug and alcohol rehab
skin and beauty supplies

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by RahulNag

A niche I am interested in is 'marketing yourself for actors'

It would be great if you could show me how the keyword research would work for this particular niche

Do you mean marketing for actors looking to get parts or marketing something to actors? Not sure what you are getting at there.

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by Matt Helphrey

I'll throw some out there. How about...

home audio
camping
increasing vertical
drug and alcohol rehab
skin and beauty supplies

Ah ha! now we've got some options. I'll leave it open for awhile but I could work with any of these.

[RahulNag]

Yes sorry - for actors how to market themselves to find work

[Mike Anthony]

Okay I am going with Home audio. Three reasons

A) its a real challenge because its a niche that is dominated by a lot of competition for the base keywords. Lot of amazon and product page results on the front page.
B) its kind of mainstream enough so that I think more people can relate to it.
C) sufficiently wide to test another strategy and build out to multiple targeted keywords.

I will post the base keywords I come up with and the lateral ones that I find give most of the gems. They will be in CSV or excel format. Too many to list out here and I want this to be wide open so everyone can see whats going on. We're under way! (OP updated)

[Matt Helphrey]

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

Okay I am going with Home audio. Three reasons

A) its a real challenge because its a niche that is dominated by a lot of competition for the base keywords. Lot of amazon and product page results on the front page.
B) its kind of mainstream enough so that I think more people can relate to it.
C) sufficiently wide to test another strategy and build out to multiple targeted keywords.

I will post the base keywords I come up with and the lateral ones that I find give most of the gems. They will be in CSV or excel format. Too many to list out here and I want this to be wide open so everyone can see whats going on. We're under way! (OP updated)

Sweet!

There are a ton of ways that you can monetize off of that niche assuming you can get traffic, which Im sure you can. But this should be a great learning experience for everyone and I look forward to seeing this progress.

I'll be tuned in and I would strongly suggest others do as well.

Thanks Mike!

[Mike Anthony]

the Op has now been updated with the raw keyword list. I did a double pass and a site content search along with adding my own twists. We have around 800 terms. again its raw so there are some terms I will filter out completely befor doing competitive research.

Note: I don't mind keyword software but most tools are just too slow and no machine exists yet that can understand all the relationships between terms.

Take for example (didn't use this but) most tools wouldn't pick up the relationship between listening to say Michael Buble - guy who sang the spiderman theme song for the recent movies - with Home audio.

When you are in a really competitive niche people run their tools for hours but these kind of relationships stay hidden from them and create real keyword gems.

Unfortunately a lot of people think keyword research is really nearly over at this point. truth is it really hasn't started. Now we have to do research for the softest first page keyword search results we can find.

Overall search count is of little value. its only what happens on the front page that is worth any attention. So I'll get to it. I use a few different tools but a free one that you can use is seoquake. Installs right into firefox as an addon.

We are at the crtical stage. knowing where the serps are soft will give us a blueprint to getting traffic in the fastest time possible.

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by Matt Helphrey

!

There are a ton of ways that you can monetize off of that niche assuming you can get traffic,

Certainly but this really is an experiment because I will be doing a few things differently that I never have officially tested out. In addition I don't want to go the same route as previous threads have in testing out things that have been demonstrated to work to some degree (exact match domain, nothng but profile links etc) and I won't use any of my existing resources and sites to rank.

So new domain, no established links from other aged sites I own and no buying links etc. Starting right where the average person would start.

so there are some handicaps I wouldn't normally always work with. Should be fun and quite a challenge!

[Dan B Rusu]

This is an awesome experiment you're running.

Will you disclose the site address and your backlink building methods?

[R. Shawner]

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

So new domain, no established links from other aged sites I own and no buying links etc. Starting right where the average person would start.

so there are some handicaps I wouldn't normally always work with. Should be fun and quite a challenge!

Does that involve no outsourcing and no usage of any SEO software?^^. I mean this is where the average person is probably starting from, right?

Anyway, all the best and thanks in advance for your experiment because it takes a lot of work especially if you can't use previous assets.

~R. Shawner

[yukon]

Any new updates on the competition Research?

[Drewry_Media]

I always assumed doing keyword research was surely a waste of time. Heck, all i do is write articles that are meaningful and submit them online, social bookmark, use a free RSS submitter and submit the article's RSS url to RSS feed directories, so i can piggyback free traffic. How long have you been doing keyword research for that you find this method effective?

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by Daniel7rusu

This is an awesome experiment you're running.

Will you disclose the site address and your backlink building methods?

Yes you will see the address and of course you can look at the backlinks. However as I indicated I won't be using anything unusual since the idea is to help the average site owner rank within a niche.

Originally Posted by R. Shawner

Does that involve no outsourcing and no usage of any SEO software?^^. I mean this is where the average person is probably starting from, right?

Welll I don't see why a new person couldn't outsource but no outsourcing and I will be using Magic submitter but the average user can try it out for free or near free the first month.

Originally Posted by Drewry_Media

I always assumed doing keyword research was surely a waste of time. Heck, all i do is write articles that are meaningful and submit them online, social bookmark, use a free RSS submitter and submit the article's RSS url to RSS feed directories, so i can piggyback free traffic. How long have you been doing keyword research for that you find this method effective?

so you get no traffic except from links in your articles? Sorry man but with no research you are wasting the power of your articles and your time. Of course Keyword research is effective.

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by yukon

Any new updates on the competition Research?

I now have a list of about 20 terms that I am thinking of going after based on analyzing the front page results of those keywords. I've put up a few in the OP now that I won't be using (any of you feel free to) but have relatively soft competition. I determine weakness a number of ways. Its a mix of

pagerank
keywords in title
keywords in snippet (blurb under the title)
backlinks with anchor text matching the terms

As an aside two of the terms in the samples I put up have domain name matches in the number one spot with relatively few backlinks and the backlinks I did see were blog comments and other easily matched links. Other experiments have been done on domain matches but it serves as proof of the value of doing keyword research. Those webmasters clearly did it and on that research bought the matching domain and are now ranked number one with no great sweat. Looks like made for adsense sites.

Second thing it shows is that pagerank is not the end all and be all. One of the site was outranking a page that had four times the pagerank but was not targeted for that keyword.

So those results ALREADY show that the bulk of the success in getting free Google traffic was in the research.

Now some people might be wondering how do you filter down the long list of keywords I came up with. No I didn't go through all 800+ so there still may be gems in there (and I even go back and run more searches if I see softness in particular term to get even more related)

Theres no set rule for determining where the soft competition results might be. Just guidelines that you put together.

A) Longer tails (more words in the phrase) tend to be less competitive
B) Obviously higher searches tend to be more competitive.
C) SOMETIMES there is a relationship to the adwords competition Google gives (shows as the green bar in the adwords tool)to whats going on in the natural serps (but not always)
D) Human intuition - if you know something about a niche then when you see a term you sometimes know a phrase isn't as common.

Now I know a few SEO types might be thinking that they couldn't be bothered with keywords with less than 10-20,000 + searches but I think thats a mistake for most newbies. When I was starting out I'd rather have gone after ten terms that had a thousand searches each. You need some success sometimes to go on and many times the work reward ratio is just plain better ranking for a number of low competition.search phrases than going after the home run.

Now I am going to take the ones I did decide to look into and put a few anchor text links up, get the site (which I will let you know about soon) indexed and see where I stand. Sometimes where your site first settles out at can tell you a whole lot about how difficult its going to be to actually rank.

[jesus3]

great info. i want to see how fast you get there lol.

[emozart]

Originally Posted by Drewry_Media

I always assumed doing keyword research was surely a waste of time. Heck, all i do is write articles that are meaningful and submit them online, social bookmark, use a free RSS submitter and submit the article's RSS url to RSS feed directories, so i can piggyback free traffic. How long have you been doing keyword research for that you find this method effective?

Aim small, miss small

[Mike Anthony]

Sorry for this week guys. I got derailed by an allergy attack and some other projects. Will get back on this big time for Monday

[navyseal]

My niche would be offering a powerful instructional video.

and not a crap...

[Mike Anthony]

Update time.

Once again i apologize for the delay. A couple weeks after starting this challenge I got the opportunity to work on an INCREDIBLE new SEO project which is sucking some time in a good way. Anyways

The site is up (see OP for url) and is being finished this week (still a bit of a wreck for human consumption but that will be fixed up by this weekend and of course more content will be added). It HAS been indexed and is a brand spanking new domain. its also NOT an exact match to my keywords. I'm stacking the deck against myself . In fact part of the holdup is that it had already been built before this - in Drupal. Turns out I found out that quite a bit of you hate Drupal and find it too hard. So I looked into Wordpress, didn't like it for one key test I wanted to run and settled on Joomla due to a better social network setup option. I know some people still don't like Joomla but I have ways that make it even easier to work with in the backend in case anyone wants to follow suit. However adding a social network to your site can be done in Wordpress as well. I just don't like how it looks

I'll be packing alot of different things into this test. My only goal is to be on the front page of Google within 60-90 days from the day this thread started for some terms. I want to take my time to test and discuss several things and if you do it too quickly you don't know what actions ares really responsible for which results. Frankly if I rank this site in 60-90 days while doing all these tests then you will be able to rank in weeks or days.

The site was indexed by doing a bookmark run. Outside of indexing as expected bookmarking has not had much of an effect. Just my findings. I know some people disagree.

Next up will be a press release for the new social network I have added onto the site to be followed by some standard article marketing and link building. the one thing that makes alot of press releases fail is that there really is nothing newsworthy in the press release . A new social network these days isn't any shattering news but since it takes a few minutes to add on a social network theres nothing to lose and its better than announcing what is nothing more than a sales pitch. In the coming week I hope to do even more leveraging the fact that the site is not just a micro site. Joomla allows you to add some nice features with a few clicks.

Will update No later than Monday after the press release phase.

Oh and I will also take the the opportunity to give Magic submitter a few tests. Not a great fan of automated software but it will be used in this experiment if for nothing else its ability to add sites of your own. I half heartedly used some forum links on it - Again not much results but then I did not do it in a big way more just to test out MS.

[nafeesra]

Any update dear Anthony on this project so far