The Online Sunshine Plan

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Now, not just too long ago, I thought I had this all taped out. (And as you follow me through this explanation, you’ll see how twisted a subject this is…)

Then I stumbled on two distinctly different data:

• That community creates businesses to solve their common problems.

• That even “competition” doesn’t exist so much as it’s been promoted.

We’ve covered the first one, although this is a simpler statement of it. And also why you decided to create that business.

The second has a bit of background (I’ll be brief) on how to find your keywords.

Now, I’ve done a great deal – a great, great deal – of study in this area. And lots of work testing things out.

Here’s the nutshell-version of how you find keywords – and we won’t worry about finding salable products, affiliates, and drop-shippers – then it really, really gets complicated.

Let’s work from your passion.

The steps:

1. 1. Make a very long list of all words which describe the various facets of your problem area and the solution you have for it.

   2. Check these out on Google Adwords (Keyword Tool External) and find alternative phrasings and synonymic terms.

   3. Find the Competition for these terms on Google. Use the phrase “in quotes” in a Google search and note the numbers.

   4. Find the Traffic on WordTracker.

   5. You are looking for low competition and high demand.

   6. A niche (reportedly) will have over 100 visitors a week on WordTracker and less than 10,000 competition for that exact phrase.(Put quotes around you

   7. Then you check to see if people are buying ads for that niche to see if there is “money to be made” in that niche.

Now, this is actually workable. And I’ve found two programs which approach this – RankTracker, part of the SEO Suite by Link-Assistant.com, and KeywordResearchPro. Both have different uses, and both are able to output to spreadsheet. RankTracker is an annual subscription, while KeywordResearchPro is a one-time purchase with lifetime support.

Of the two, KRP also is able to search for adwords activity for a set list of keywords. RankTracker has more ability to find additional terms, although this can be done with some workarounds in KRP. RankTracker is Java-based an so runs as an application more or less independent of your O/S. (And Windows can really bog down unless you are running with the max RAM you can get.)

You want to export these results to spreadsheet (like OpenOffice) so you can crunch the data even faster. As well, there is a database function integrated into OpenOffice – which allows you to do simple queries on massive amounts of keywords (I had one which was on about 3900 keywords for a single subject!) This is a great research tool – but not something to go into at this point. Get the programs and you can work this out from their tutorials.

The problem with “competition”

Mostly: it doesn’t exist. Now, we aren’t just talking on a metaphysical level, but a nuts-and-bolts look by a real pro at this, Charles Heflin (whose been doing nothing but this for 14 years.) He has a page with a video and an MP3 about how little actual competition there is.

Now, while you can check out those links, some background first. Generally, the conventional wisdom is that only about .01 percent of the listed “competition” is ever really SEO optimized. It’s about 3 percent of 3 percent (or 1 in 10,000). So cut 3 zero’s off of any Google Competition and you’ll see the actual – or this is what the theory has been.

When Heflin took a hard-core look at the actual numbers he found that they lied. Google only shows about 750 pages, the rest are placed in “supplementary” results. He took a phrase “cheap car stereo” with over 9 million pages and found that by looking for the actual phrase on the pages in Google, they quit at around only 10 entries out of 9 million which had that exact phrase or had optimized in any fashion with usable content. Only 50 were really semantically related.

Now this actually throws the whole system above on its head.

Because there is very, very little real competition in any niche area on the Internet.

Then what are you looking for?

Obviously, the top sites are using real search engine optimization to hold their positions. Lets review what you need to do to get the top position

• Header title of the page contains the keyword.

• Relevant content which talks about the keyword and defines it.

• Page link (actual page name) contains that keyword.

• Incoming links use that keyword or refer to the content of that page with semantically related terms.

• In Wordpress, your category and tags also contain that keyword.

• And, if you are really tightly focused, your domain name itself contains that keyword.

Now, except for incoming links, the rest is all under your direct control. And if you re-purpose your content into different publishing platforms, you can link back to your own main site with videos, podcasts, articles, PDF’s, presentations, etc. And there are micro-blogs and bookmarks which you can influence through ping.fm and other micro-broadcast services.

If you are operating a blog as your primary site, then you can rank really quickly at the top of Google for exactly what you are doing.

My own experiment in this showed that while video’s and podcasts disappeared off the front page of Google, the site they linked to didn’t. Even though it only had about 3 pages of content. And wasn’t a blog, but a hard-coded site.

Just do the above and construct your page right to begin with. Then re-purpose and re-publish your content on many different major sites which then link back to yours for that exact keyword.