Want to write first blog on skincare

Use buzzsumo.com and find out what are the trending topics in your industry.

Researching other articles is a good idea because the more information you have the better, however, I think originality and your own personality in delivering the message is very important. In writing articles I always think "what would I want to read", "what is the question I want answered?" "what are most women searching for?"

What is also really great is "Google Alerts". It basically lets you choose specific keywords and then reminds you whenever a high traffic/ authority site publishes a new blog post containing this keywords.

So you could make it keywords such as:

skin youthening
take care off your skin
best skincare products
etc.

The cool thing is that you'll only get notified once a rather popular website publishes such a post. Then, you can have a look at the post and use ideas to your needs.

Hope it helps,
Sven

As someone who loves reading cosmetic and skincare blogs, I think you're going to need a tighter niche than just "skincare". For instance, there's a "vegan/cruelty-free skincare" community, "skincare for black women", etc. I hope you are successful in your venture!

Iseult

One of my favourite subjects.

I use paid services to analyze competitors. To get your feet wet, though, you can do it for free.

Plenty of useful sites exist. Here are 2:

1. SimilarWeb.com
2. Open Site Explorer on Moz

As an example case study, plonk in one of my favourite blogs, ProBlogger.net.

SW

You are a bit limited with a free account on SW, but 4 items to look at are as follows:

1. Organic Keywords.
2. Also Visited Websites.
3. Similar Sites.
4. Topics.

In the case of PB, we can look at topics and see that two popular ones are "writing jobs" and "publishing." Similarly, we can see a great deal of interest in "affiliate programs" when we look at organic keywords. Finally, looking at similar and visited sites, we expand our awareness of the competition.

OSE

This you will find really useful, Mairin.

If we plop PB into it - and filter for "only internal" at the link source - we receive data related to blog posts, where pages are ranked according to "page authority," which can generally be taken as an indication of quality and popularity.

A cursory look informs us that the following 3 posts have the highest page authority:

1. How to Blog: Blogging Tips for Beginners - @ProBlogger
2. 10 Techniques to Get More Comments on Your Blog - @ProBlogger
3. How to Quit Your Job, Move to Paradise and Get Paid to Change the World - @ProBlogger

There are many ways - I should actually write a free eBook for it. Apply the above, though, and you won't go wrong.

Best of luck with your venture!

- Tom

Do some research and study the articles that you're looking at. Look at the structure and the way it's delivered. Then do some keyword research and look for long tail keywords. Then go ahead and start blogging away. Be consistent and work hard at it.

See what you can find over at ezinearticles(.com) or some of the other article directories (List Of Top 50 Article Directories By Traffic, PageRank). I noticed that several of them display a "times read" number on each article.

Without reading all the responses you can use something like Alexa or other traffic/web research tools (not going to start a debate on which ones are more accurate or what have you...it's rarely going to be exact data) and see what sites or even individual pages have what kinds of traffic. You can even see trailing/trends for traffic and breakdowns of country demographics, etc.

Technorati was great for this kind of stuff until they stopped offering their blog search services to thte public. Type into google/other search engine "blog search engines" and use them to find related blogs. Note: Google is not the end all be all for finding things online. There are many many limitations to Google's search service and internet capabilities...it's still a great and the most widely used tool but branching out a bit will give you more info than the majority of your competitors

Popular websites usually have lots of readers. So I think you can try to find references from them..
Don't forget about the fact that it's a hard niche. But go ahead..You will never know till you try...