There are many crucial factors which should be always considered while planning a new online project. Many newbie internet marketers make this mistake frequently; they do not spend time in doing research and project planning. Their decision is just based on hype, they hear from somewhere that there is money in any niche; they just start running and copying in a blind manner.

Beware and stay away from this mentality….

So what we basically need while doing our research for a new project?

In a simpler sense you need to know lot of things while designing, developing a new project as well as during content preparation.

Basically you want to know (you need to research your market)

1. Age group of the audience
2. purchasing power of the audience
3. educational status of the audience

Let us take an example. Suppose you need to start a website for car insurance (you made up your mind for this, however this niche is super competitive and saturated and starting a new website in this niche is not a very good idea if you are new to this field and have small budget, this is just an example to make you understand the point) J

Now let us check which website has the Google number 1 crown for the keyword “car insurance”

Number 1: www.progresssive.com

Number 2: www.geico.com

Now let us check them one by one

Site: www.progressive.com

Page Rank: 6
Alexa Rank: 6270
Backlinks (Google): 708
Backlinks (Yahoo): 214531
Pages Cached (Google):2080
Domain Age:
Created on…………..: Mon, Nov 17, 1997
Expires on…………..: Sun, Nov 16, 2014

Site: www.geico.com

Page Rank: 07
Alexa Rank: 3702
Backlinks (Google): 676
Backlinks (Yahoo):86203
Pages Cached (Google): 1800
Domain Age:
Creation Date: 22-jul-1995
Expiration Date: 21-jul-2010

I think the data from the top 2 is sufficient to establish the competitiveness of this niche and it will be very hard to appear on first page in a short period of time. Here I am not suggesting you any niche to start with, our topic is something else from this. Now back to the topic.

So we have got some pretty impressive data, do I need something else?

Yes you do. Up to now you have just checked the competition and feasibility of a niche you wish to enter. You need more data about the 3 points which we have discussed in the starting of this article, for planning and developing your website. Ok I got it… Now how and where can I find those data?

There are many ways to research it. The simplest one is to use a website called www.quantcast.com , visit QuantCast and you can get audience data of any website on the internet.

Now in our case let us see what happens, I opened quantcast.com and entered the URL progressive.com for information.

Data you get:

1. Visits per month, people per month with daily, weekly and monthly comparison of visits.( you can know how many people use the website)

2. Which subdomains of the website, are receiving most and least traffic.( you get the data about the various segments of the website, where people are visiting and get an idea of demand)

3. The most important factor is demographics, which tells you about the percentage of male and female visitors, age group of the visitors, ethnicity, percentage of households with kids’ visiting the website, the income level of the visitors and their educational status.

4. At last Lifestyle which tells” People who visit this site are likely to visit sites in these categories” and which other website visitors go apart from the one in question.

Oh my God, now you know everything about your prospective audience. Yes now you have the power, you can now plan the design, look and feel, colors and graphics, content and all other factors of your website. The best part is, as you now have an idea of the educational background and purchasing power of your audience, now you can decide how to market your website, which offers to use and which products to sell.

I would be happy if I was been able to convey the right message to you.

So use QuantCast in your market research and make your planning better.

I do not know what your reasons to join internet marketing are, but the general thing which underlies in every new online project is to invest minimum time, effort, money and gain profits. Atleast I have the same reason when I joined the cyber world.

Like this article or have some questions, post in the comment section and I will try to reply it.

Related Articles:

Spying on your competitors

How to choose various Elements for your webpage

Simple Steps for preparing great content

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Spying and intruding into other’s privacy is a very bad habit and punishable by law in many states… but it is vital as well as necessary for your online business.

What does it mean by spying your competitors?

As we all know that to reach at the top there are two ways. First one is to follow the basics, input your hard work and wait for the time when you come at the top. Second way is to spy on those who are already at the top, find out their strategy and implement the same for your business but using better tactics.

Hard work and persistence is no doubt a sure shot way to get success and patience is virtue we all know. But if you ask me which route I will take. I will surely take the second one because life is very short and I cannot give 3, 4 years to visualize my success.

For all of you who are interested in the latter one, today I will discuss some points on how to spy your competitor and reverse engineer their strategy and get to position number one on the organic search( especially Google), overthrowing them out of the game.

Can you think what would be the value of keyword “weight loss” or “car insurance” at the first position of Google?

Let’s check… for the purpose I am using www.semrush.com

Let us take two examples, fist one is “weight loss”, if we check Google the number 1 rank for this keyword goes to website www.webmd.com , now check it in Semrush.

We get the following data. The average CPC for keyword weight loss is $2.63 and the search volume is 450k. Now do the simple math 450k x $2.63. According to Semrush the website is getting search engine traffic worth $15584k.

Our second example is “car insurance”. While I was checking the ranking I got www.progressive.com on number 1, now checking it with Semrush, it is receiving organic traffic worth $24967k.

The data from Semrush may not be perfect, but if we assume only 10% of the figures, you can easily calculate what the worth of being number 1 on Google is.

So I am quite impressed with your argument… now which things I would like to spy on?

Basically you would like to spy on keywords they are ranking organically, keywords they are using for PPC, their daily ads budget, sites which are linking to your competitor,

Organic keywords: find out the keywords for which your competitor is ranking organically and the traffic those keywords attract. After analyzing these keywords you can plan your long time strategy for SEO, starting with the long tail keywords of main phrases and gradually using the short tails.

PPC Keywords: The basic idea behind finding the paid keywords is if they are paying consistently for some keywords to appear on paid result then those keywords must be converting for them. After you compile the list of their paid keywords, view their landing pages. Then plan your strategy using those converting keywords and their long tail phrases. Design your landing page better than them and you will surely hit a jackpot. Also look their daily PPC budget, the more the better.

Backlinks: Find out how many backlinks your competitor have, which sites are linking then and what the anchor texts are used in their backlinks. For this purpose you can use www.backlinkwatch.com and you will know the anchor text of the backlinks, their PR and whether they are follow or Nofollow. You can also use Yahoo Site Explorer for getting the backlinks data for any website. Never depend on the Google backlinks for a website, as Google displays numbers much less than the actual.

Other online tools you can use:

Keyword spy

Spyfu

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If you are not new to internet marketing world, you would probably have heard the most popular saying in the internet marketing world “Content is King” and really it is the ace in a pack of card.

But an ill structured, non-targeted and information less content is similar to a joker between the aces and kings in a pack of card.

So what is essential, the content must be targeted to the audience, in the language the niche speaks and must be valuable.

Below are some points if kept in mind and taken care of, you can prepare very good content for your website, which not only your audience will like but will have high chances to become viral establishing your authority.

Know your targeted audience: The first and very important fact is “know what your audience needs”. I have seen many newbie and intermediate internet marketers and bloggers, who write in a way that resembles that they never tried to know the need of their audience and they write just for the sake of writing. So you please do not try the same and provide valuable inputs.

Basic problems of the audience: Try to find out the basic needs and problems of the audience of the niche you are concerned. Do not bluff and always do your best to solve problems or atleast provide simple steps to find solutions. Heyyyyy……. What does it mean …..? Let me try to give you an example.

For an example: if you do not know clearly about any specific topic, no matter, provide them various links to authority sites, where they can find solutions. Never think that you will loose your visitor forever, no not at all, rather you will gain trust in the eyes of your visitors as well as search engines because doing this you leave a message that you are committed to provide solutions.

So note a point in your mind that always keep the requirement of your audience handy before you write content. You can get a feel about their requirements by visiting different forums and blogs in your niche.

There are two very common things which will appear in your mind when you start writing (how I know it? Because I have also traversed the same route before I started to know all this) first is “what I am going to write is well known among my niche” and the second is “what I am going to write is not known by anyone” …..   Both these doubts are just myths. So never think of all this and always try to provide real solutions for the problems (problems doesn’t means to provide medication, it means to be informative on the subject you write.)

Age group, demographic factors: Age and demographic factors must be kept in mind while preparing content. Why? Because a concept which a teenager can understand in a simple way, an old age person cannot. So you need to find other ways to make the person understand.

So understand the demographics of your audience.

Targets of the niche: Targets in other words we can call “needs” must be kept in mind. Got confused….? No need to …..! A target of the niche means what your audience prefers – text, video or audio. So provide them with the solution which they can easily use.

Use easy ways to create content: use the most informative and easy way to create content. Content never means only chunk of text, it may be in many other forms e-book, audio, video, music. Slide show presentations.

Gone are the days when technology had limited capabilities and exposure, we are now living in such a world where technology has made every form of media feasible to common audience.

It is better to create a 10 minute audio or 15 minutes video, than to create 150 pages of content of text. The aim should be to give you message clearly to your audience. Also keep in mind your audience age group and their preferences.

So always think that which type of content would be most suitable on the topic you want to convey as well as your audience would like to read and then prepare yourself in the same manner.

Apply these points as I discussed with you in this post and you will realize that you were missing a lot in preparing content for your audience.

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Are you just starting in the internet business world and just going to start your first website or blog?

You have already decided your niche, market and audience and now you need to research keywords for topics to include in your website?

Sounds familiar?

If the answer of the above question is YES, then you must be in the confusion about choosing keywords for starting your new web project.

Most Common Mistakes an IM Newbie Makes:

The most common mistakes which the beginners make while starting their very first project is choosing a highly competitive niche, whose main keywords are very hard to rank. Let’s move forward in the discussion of choosing niches and keywords and what to consider while doing research.

While choosing a niche you should keep the below points in mind

1. Are there good affiliate programs in the niche? the more the better
2. Average payout of the affiliate programs
3. Are there good number of paid results in Google Search ( there must be good number of AdWords advertiser, you can also check Yahoo and Bing Results also)
4. Use Google Trends to analyze about the trends of the main keywords of the niche, Is it stable (is it getting almost similar number of searches for whole year, or is it seasonal)

If you get positive result for all of the above points, it confirms the niche has potential for making good money.

Do not get afraid about the competitiveness of the niche at this point of time. We will discuss about that after a short while.

While doing niche research, the only aim in you mind should be about the profitability of the niche and not about competition, because if any niche is highly profitable, then it will surely have a lot of micro niches, where the competition will not be much higher and can be easily dominated.

For an example “Weight loss” is a very competitive niche and highly profitable too. Now as we know this niche is very profitable (using all the four points we discussed above), we will try to find out smaller niches in this broad niche. If we do a little research there are several smaller niches, like

Weight loss using exercises
Weight loss using yoga
Weight loss using green tea
Weight loss using hypnosis
Weight loss with walking
Weight loss with dieting

And lots more…..

Now find a smaller niche for you and start to delve deeper in it.

Use keyword tools to find more keywords related to your main keyword.

Now visit different forums (you can find them easily by using Google typing “your keyword” forums), Yahoo Answers, AnswerBag etc and try to find out different topics people are discussion.

Now do some more brain storming and try to find out some more relevant keywords.

Hope you got the point

A simple trick to gather more keywords for you niche:

Visit ArticlesBase, for those who are new in internet marketing, it is one of the best article directory which receives a lot of traffic and there are millions of publisher who submit and publish their content daily.

Now search for articles related to the main keyword you decided for your new website and open articles and see the author’s bio box where you will find links which will lead you to the author’s website for which they are doing promotion.

Try to find out which type of promotion they are doing on their website, affiliate marketing, Adsense or something else.

Now come back to the article and see the article tags section and you will find numerous keywords related to that article. Repeat this step for 10 to 15 articles and you will get a bunch of keywords to start with.

After gathering keywords, again use keyword tool to find more.

The key here is, if the person is promoting any affiliate product, they must have done a lot of keyword research in the niche and we can use it for our advantage.

For some persons this trick would seem wrong and unethical, but one point to remember is that we are not stealing anything and these article tags are publicly visible.

So now you got the way to find out some micro niches in highly competitive and profitable niches.

So how many keywords we need to start:

In my opinion you should start with around 50 keywords and further add 30 more in the period of every six months.

As the time will pass, you will have ample content on your website and with proper off page promotion you will gain authority status on the micro niche and completely dominate it.

So start finding your niche keywords today. If you have any question or comment, then please post it here.

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If you are new here, you would like to read previous posts on link building here at: Off Page Elements: Increasing your Web Visibility and Reach Part 1,Off Page Elements: Using Articles and Blogs,Off Page Elements: Link Building and Blog Comments

We have discussed several traditional methods of link building, today we will continue with some more discussion on link building and increasing link popularity.

A note about Nofollow: if you are not aware about Nofollow attribute, let us have a little outlook in the background of Nofollow. Google allows you to make any link (both internal and external) un crawlable by using a special tag rel=”Nofollow”.

This tag is used for primarily three purposes.

1. Avoid leaking of link juice to less important pages. Web pages like contact us, privacy statement, shipping and order, cancellation policy have less value in terms of SEO, so Nofollow tags can be used for these pages to avoid leaking of link juice , which in turn will help you to achieve higher page rank for main pages.

2. To stop theme ambiguity. Nofollow tags are very useful in building a theme of a website, in other words its very useful in proper SILOING( discussion in coming posts) of a website. For an example if you are building a website related to wooden furniture and want to base all your keywords on it, you may want to Nofollow all the pages related to basic knowledge of the wooden furniture and all the pages related to fiber and steel furniture.

In this way you can establish a solid theme for your website. A special point to note here is Nofollow tags are only for search engines and not for human visitors these links are still clickable and can funnel traffic.

3. While linking to websites for whom you are not sure about the correctness and authenticity of their information and authority.

What does No follow tags inform to search engines and are they counted in backlinks?

The answers is yes , the links having Nofollow attribute are still crawled by search engines and help in increasing link popularity.

The Nofollow attribute only tells the search engines that the reference, in which the link is used, is not sure. This means if any webpage is linking to another webpage with reference green bags and uses Nofollow attribute, then it marks the search engines that although I am linking this webpage about green bags but I am not sure about the content and authority of the webpage. In other it can be taken as voting a webpage whose authority is not confirmed.

So do not be over concerned about no follow tags in various web2.0 websites and forums. They might not transfer as much link juice but they will help you in increasing your web visibility which will gradually establish your authority in your area.

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