Niche Site Duel: Progress Log #2

September 20, 2010 at 9:15 pm (Work) (internet marketing, niche site duel, The Keyword Academy)

Ooookay so I’ve been really unproductive since the last update. I went to stay with out-of-town relatives for a week, and while there was Internet access it wasn’t quite as convenient as at home, and I ended up getting distracted reading the books I’d just gotten from the library. So, a week and three books later, I’m at pretty much the same point as last time. The keyword I was ranking at #23 for I’m now at #19 for, so that’s something at least.

Over at The Keyword Academy they’re having something called “Summer Rush,” which involved setting (and meeting) a goal for number of words published over the summer. It goes through the end of September, which is 10 days away, and I’m still way behind my tiny little goal of 50,000 words. I got a late start, but it’s still no excuse, and I plan to make up the difference before the end. I’m going to ignore my Hubpages stuff for now, and focus entirely on my site for the duel. My goal is to have 15-20 total posts up on the site in the next 10 days, as well as at least one backlink article posted a day (preferably more than that written a day, but I’ll schedule the publishing dates).

So, since I don’t really have anything to report this time, instead I’ll respond to a comment on my last update wanting more information about my keyword search.

Like I said, I picked the main keyword for my site a year ago. I can’t remember exactly how I came up with it, but the general process I was following was:

1. Pick a general topic. This could be chosen out of the blue, from something I happened to see or hear, or by browsing Amazon departments until something stood out.
2. Put that general topic into the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.
3. Save the CSV file generated.
4. Put in other words from the CSV file, or from the Additional keywords to consider section on the Keyword Tool.
5. Save those CSV files as well.
6. Continue until there’s a lot of words to sift through.
7. Decide which keywords are worth going after.

This is a bit tedious but I don’t mind that sort of thing (beats writing the articles, anyway :D). The most tedious part is figuring out which keywords are worth pursuing, which is where The Keyword Academy comes in. When I picked the main keyword for the site a year ago, I was doing everything by hand, using their methods. However, since then they’ve come up with a tool called “Niche Refinery,” which streamlines the process like crazy. It will take multiple CSV files from the Adwords Keyword Tool and give you what TKA calls “green” keywords, which means those that have a high enough potential and low enough competition to be worth trying for.

By using Niche Refinery, it’s really easy to get a whole list of keywords related to your main keyword that are also potentially profitable themselves. This is what I’m doing for the duel: I’ve got a list of about 100 related keywords that I got through the Refinery, and going through and writing a post focusing on each one. I’ve decided to go through them roughly in order of lowest-to-highest “Difficulty” ranking, which is a number Niche Refinery assigns to each keyword, giving you an idea of how tough it will be to rank for that keyword. It’s probably because of this that I’m already in the top 20 for one of my keywords, with only a few backlinks.

I think that’s about everything as far as keyword selection. Basically I just let the Adwords tool and Niche Refinery do all the work. ;) If there’s any other questions be sure to let me know!