Lately in addition to Google’s keywords tool, I’m using Micro Niche Finder for keyword research. A lot of my sites are on what you call a micro niche. I would define this as a niche that gets somewhere around 1,000 searches per month.

Here is how you would do the research using Micro Niche Finder:

1) Enter a keyword in the box. Lets start with “golf”, which is an extremely generic word. MNF returned the top 200 keywords for this. They range from “golf”, with 2.7 million monthly searches, to “gc golf”, whatever that is, with 140 monthly searches. I’m going to look at the middle part of the list, where the keywords have appx 900 searches. I see there are 13 terms that have between 720 and 1,300 searches per month. This is the subset I’m going to focus on. Here are the 13: golf valley, bar golf, golf mill, golf club swing, hills golf course, golf professional, putting lessons, private golf club, golf stories, international golf, private golf, championship golf, and golf expo.

2) I now want to narrow down my list to terms where I think I can find a good affiliate product to sell. A term that someone would use when they are looking to buy something. Active buyers are THE group you want to target when making niche sites.  Especially nice would be something I could find a ClickBank product for, since that is one of my favorite affiliate systems. I will take a closer look at these four: golf club swing (book?), putting lessons (book?), golf stories (book?), international golf (travel affiliate or book?).

3) The next step is to use Micro Niche Finder to check out the strength of the competition. The strength of competition formula is one of the great strengths of MNF. It returns a numeric score and a green, yellow or red button, to indicate which keywords might be the best to go for. The four keywords I settled on scored like this: golf club swing – green, putting lessons – yellow, golf stories – red and international golf – red. Now I’m down to two.

Here are the stats. All of this data is retrieved by MNF:

golf club swing – 1,000 searches, 258,000 exact matches (quotes), ad cost 1.27, strength of competition score 28, green.

putting lessons – 880 monthly searches, 117,000 exact matches, ad cost 1.29, competition 66, yellow.

4) Next thing I’m going to do is look at the competition. I head over to Google, and first do an allintitle and allinurl search. This will tell me how many pages are specifically targeting these keywords. Here are the results.

allintitle:golf club swing – 87,600

allinurl:golf club swing – 33,000

allintitle:putting lessons – 7,790

allinurl:putting lesons – 2,450

What these results show is how many pages include these terms in their title or url. In other words, how many pages are out there that are specifically targeting these terms, or at least including these terms. Based on this, I’m somewhat favoring putting lessons, because of the minimal competition. However, Micro Niche Finder told me the strength of this competition was a little higher. So, time to look at the competition.

5) What I want to do is figure out what it will take to get into the top ten in Google. Anything else, in my opinion, isn’t worth the time. You can still grab a little traffic if you are ranked lower, but not enough. Obviously if you are using keywords that have more searches than these, you may be able to get away with it. For example, I would be very happy to be in the 20th position on a search term that gets 2 million searches a month. But that’s not what we are focusing on here. For this analysis, I’m going to do the searches without quotes, since that’s how almost everybody uses Google. For purposes of this article, I will continue on only with putting lessons.

Top 10 for putting lessons:

1 – youtube

2 – youtube

3 – Very nice site by a marketer offering free lesson (to build his mailing list) and selling ClickBank and Adsense. Site is a PR3.

4 – A golf course site. They have a very long article on golf swings, probably done for SEO purposes. PR3.

5 – wikiHow site, PR3

6 – essortment site. Looks like an article site, PR3.

7 – 5min videopedia site, PR2

8 – Marketers site on golf instruction, PR1

9 & 10 – This is a patent site for a golf swing. Interesting! PR3

11 – Amazon page for a golf swing book, PR3

12, 13, 14 – All pages with PR0 that look like marketers sites.

6) OK, decision time. Frankly, I’m not going to build anything here. With a reasonable link building program I would expect to end up around 11 or 12 after a while. This falls into the category of “not worth it”.  This keyword has a few too many strong sites for my preference. With such a small niche, I’m doing a lot of work (or outsourcing a lot) just to get a share of 1,000 searches per month. So I would move on. The beauty is, this entire research would only take me about ten minutes using Micro Niche Finder.

For this article, I have only used a very small portion of the Micro Niche Finder functionality. You can do MANY types of searches using the tool, including trends, new content, ClickBank Marketplace, domain tools lookups, Ezinearticles lookups, and on an on. I’ve been using this for a month, and I haven’t even touched most of the functionality yet.

You can also save and retrieve searches and projects, import keyword lists, and do a lot of data manipulation.

Hope this helps! If you have any questions, feel free to e-mail me at david [at] webtooltime.com.

There are ten free review site templates included with this program. The program itself is a bunch of files you upload to a web server. It does not have to be on the domain you are building the review site on. When you open the program, the first thing you do is select a template, then enter header, footer and title information. You choose how many reviews you are planning on writing. (I would suggest that prior to building your review site, you do the product research, and know what products you are going to feature.

After you tell the program how many reviews you want, it opens a new page, and there are edit boxes for each review. You upload images, generally obtained from the products you are reviewing. Then you write the reviews. It has similar edit features as WordPress, with several icons you can use to insert links, color text, bold, etc. You insert your affiliate links into a space by each review.

After you type your reviews, you can preview what your site will look like. You can go back and switch templates, and edit any text. When you are satisfied, you click a button to generate a zip file. The zip file includes your graphics, and any files you need for your review site. The last step is unzipping and ftping the files to your webserver. Your site is built! It takes about ten minutes to build a site. However, you will probably spend more time on product research, finding your niche and products. This is ideal for Clickbank products, or really any kind of product that can be compared.

A site I just built using this tool is a wordpresswizardry.com, where I review WordPress money making ideas.

To our success!

David

Happy Thanksgiving to those of you in the U.S., and anywhere else you may have a reason to be thankful for. I have another little freebie for you. Enjoy a free copy of SEO Made Easy, by Brad Callen, one of the foremost internet marketers. It’s not every day you can learn search engine optimization for free, so enjoy!

David

Are you ignoring MSN Search and focusing on Google for traffic? I
generally do too, figuring that when I succeed in Google, all
others will follow. This has been a pretty good strategy. However,
there is a new kick-a$$ way to drive your MSN rankings right
through the roof — in a hurry.

This is a product I’m JV’ing on, and it’s super-hot right now,
especially with the economy in the condition it’s in lately. We
need all the traffic we can get, and MSN does have about 10% of
search engine traffic.

This is a very odd product. It’s more of a “secret” being revealed
than it is a how-to or training book. It’s only 20 pages long, and
about a 15 minute read!. But it will change forever the way you
think about MSN! Because of this, I can’t say much more about it.

Here it is, check it out!

The Ultimate Search Engine Loophole!

Of course it comes with a money back guarantee, but you won’t need
it!

To our continued success!

David

You have to try this $1 offer. Those of you that have known me for years know that I’m a great fan of Pete Drew’s SEO tools. Many of them are favorably reviewed here. His latest offering, Bruteforce SEO, is really a combination of several of his existing tools. You can automatically build websites, automatically build blogs, automatically build links, automatically submit articles, automatically submit feeds, and a whole lot more with this new tool. It only costs $1 to try if for seven days. You will be MAKING MONEY by then, so you will probably want to continue! Check out the Brute Force SEO video.

You just wait and see for yourself!

To our continued success,

David

Enjoy the list!

David

Pinging, at least this use of the word, is a way of telling search engines that you’ve written a new post, or you have made an update on your site or blog. A ping is a short data message sent to a ping server, telling it that the blog has been updated with new content.

What is a ping server?

A ping server is best described as a service on the internet that accepts messages in a specific format, called XML-RPC format. It takes the info from these XML-RPC messages, and uses it to publish lists of sites or blogs that have content that is new or just updated. These ping servers turn around and publish these lists to other ping servers or to search engines. Also, some ping servers have their own search engines.

How does pinging work?

WordPress, and many other blogging and site-building platforms have the pinging function built into them. Every time you make a post, a ping is sent out to one or more ping services. If your software doesn’t ping automatically, you can manually submit a link to most ping services. Normally, just go to their website and enter your url to ping.

The ping service that is defaulted in WordPress, is called Ping-O-Matic. When your site pings them, Ping-O-Matic in turn sends a notification to several other search engines and pinging services for you. So by pinging Ping-O-Matic, you ae in effect pinging several services. As of this writing, they ping 20 different services.

These ping services, or search engines, update their listings with new content immediately upon being pinged. Every time they are updated, you receive a backlink to your site. These are one-way links, and are therefore more valuable to search engines like Google, that place a high value on one-way links.

Here are some tips on pinging

- Only ping when you have new or changed content. Otherwise, your site might be blacklisted by that ping site for being spam. Spamming pings was a popular blackhat SEO method until the ping services started catching on and blocking it.

- Be careful to not ping the same service more than once. or example, if you ping Ping-O-Matic, don’t also ping the services that they turn around and ping. If you do this, they will catch your multiple ping and could label you as a spammer. If you have any doubt, check on the ping services site to see who they ping. It is better to ping less services than it is to duplicate your ping.

- Keep in mind that some site-builders, like WordPress, automatically ping every time you save a post that you are editing. (Although saving a post in draft status does not send a ping.) So if you are going to do multiple edits, you may want to do them off-site, then save them once on the site. Or, there is a plugin called post-schedule ping optimizer that you can use to prevent this.
- Some ping services are focused on specific niches. Do not abuse this. If you don’t fit their niche, it hurts them, and they may ban your ping.

What are the best ping services to ping today?

Here is the list I’ve been using lately:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.wasalive.com/ping/
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://blogping.unidatum.com/RPC2/

Good luck with your pinging!

David

The site is called Backlinkwatch.com.

It does take a while for the tool to run the analysis. I just ran one on a site that has 805 backlinks, and it took around 20 minutes to do
Enjoy,

David