Today we had to have our two keyword phrases chosen. I had 5 possibilities and chose my two based on acceptable traffic, wide audience, separate industries, and affiliate programs associated with them. My top two were in very similar industries, so I had to leave one for later.
After we had our top two (or top one if we didn’t have two), we learned a couple of quick techniques for learning about those markets using Bloglines and Google Notebook (I will abbreviate Google Notebook in the future as GNotebook or GN). Using these techniques is all about leveraging your time and letting your technology tools work hard for you so you don’t have to.
First, we typed our first keyword phrase into the Google Search box and clicked [News] to get all the news available on those keywords. If your keyword phrase didn’t have any news, you can go to broad search or leave out one of the keywords that makes the phrase a niche and read on the broader topic. We don’t want to have to perform this same search every day, so we used the RSS feed button in the address bar that we set up during pre-season to subscribe to those search results in Bloglines. I put each of my keyword phrases into its own folder to keep things a little more organized. Now, when we go to Bloglines, all the recent news on our keyword phrase is waiting for us to read. It updates automatically.
Second, while we were still inside the Google News search area, we clicked on [blogs] for our keyword phrase and subscribed to blogs on our topic in Bloglines just as we subscribed to news using our handy RSS feed button in the address bar. This way we don’t have to perform the blog search every day. We just go to Bloglines and read up on the latest blogs about our keyword phrase.
Lather, rinse, repeat for the second keyword phrase. Subscribe to news and blogs for that phrase.
As we read we’re supposed to take notes. We can take notes in GNotebook or on 3×5 cards. I’ll be using GN because it’s so easy to use and is by far more powerful than using handwritten 3×5 index cards. For one thing, it’s searchable, and to search 3×5 cards can take a lot of time if you have a lot of cards. This is about leveraging time, so as far as I’m concerned, the 3×5 cards are out of the picture when doing online research. They’ll probably be out of the picture with other research as well. They will probably still be a good, solid study aid for my tutoring students, however.
Why do we need to read news and blogs and take notes on our keyword phrases? Because we will need a good grasp of the all the information we can absorb so we’ll have reference material for letters and website content later. You can’t just throw up a site and say nothing about what you’re selling. Your copy is important to the sales process just as much as finding a good niche. What you write and how you write it may make the difference between making a sale and not making a sale. But, if you have to “sell”, you don’t have the right keyword phrase to begin with. I guess what I mean here is you don’t want to turn anyone off from buying from you by not doing your homework and sounding dumb. People buying in your niche already know a lot about it and are coming to you to make a purchase, so you don’t want to give them any reason not to make that purchase.
Ed Dale also pointed out the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) information under our Google Searches. We don’t really know what it all means right now, but we are assured to learn later and by experience. This information is a gold mine and can tell you why you aren’t in a top-ranked spot in a search if you know how to read them. I don’t know, so I’ll have to go on faith and trial and error for the time being.
