Keyword Research - Finding a Niche Topic for your List.

July 3, 2007 on 11:54 pm | In Keyword Research |

One of the most important parts of building a list is finding the niche topic that you will target your list at.

So many times people have told me I have picked xyz topic and I’m going to build my list about that. I then ask them; “have you done any keyword research on this topic to see what kind of traffic you will get”? Usually the reply is no.

You simply cannot fly blind when you’re choosing a topic. You need to know:

• What keyword phrases to use.

• What kind of traffic you can drive to your keywords

• What kind of competition you are facing for those keywords.

So the first thing you will need to do is keyword research.

When doing keyword research you are going to want to spend a lot of time choosing the right keyword phrases. You are going to need to use a good keyword research tool. There are some things to know about keyword research tools. There are many of them out there but you need to know where is the data coming from to determine the information you are being given.

If you don’t know where the data is coming from you really don’t know how accurate the results will be.

Many will tell you to use overture (Now called Yahoo Search Marketing). Overture has been around for a long time and the information you are being returned is on the previous 30 days searches. Also important to note is that all the queries being done for research on pay per click advertising also count as a search. This means that the results you get from overture are not that accurate. Also since they only show the last 30 days it’s hard to do research on holiday keywords since that month may have been months prior. The nice thing about overture is it is a free tool.

Another very popular research tool is Word Tracker. Now word tracker has data for a much longer period of time and they get there data from the meta search engines which doesn’t have pay per click advertising so there data is much more accurate. The downside of word tracker is that the meta search data that they use only represents about 9% of the total searches done on the internet. Word tracker is very good if you are just looking for the latest trend keywords. Word tracker is pricey if you will be doing a lot of ongoing keyword research.

Keyword Discovery has data from many of the top search engines. There data is for a year and they cover almost the whole pie when it comes to where the search data comes from.

My favorite is NicheBot. NicheBot has contracts with Word Tracker, Keyword Discovery, Google, Overture and a few others and this is one of the best keyword research tools available they have very good tutorials to walk you through the whole process of finding keywords. Using NicheBot you will be able to get the largest list of keywords to work with on your list. Pricing is very fair with a $1 trial offer and reasonable monthly membership fees.

The URL for NicheBot is in the resource section on the blog.

http://www.listadvice.com/blog/resources/

Now that you know which tools to do your research with and why you need to know where the data is coming from let’s talk about the keywords a bit.

While doing your research find every keyword possible that has decent traffic but is not too competitive. The keywords will usually be two or three word keyword phrases. The term is called long tail. You are going to have to select the main one or two keywords for the site but keep the other keywords so you can write articles and use them to drive traffic to the site.

So just to summarize:

• You want to use a good keyword research tool one that has data that will give you the most accurate results.

• You want to find targeted keyword phrases that are about your list topic.

•  You want to choose the one or two best keywords to target your list with.

• The remaining keywords can be used to drive traffic to your site.

After using the information contained in this document you should be able to easily pick a niche topic for your list. 

Sincerely,
Glen Barnhardt