Ok, hands up. I confess I’ve been a bad person and not updated my experiment journal for a few days. As a result, there’s a load of stuff that I need to get out there today.

Before we get onto your free keyword of the week we need to cover some of the stuff that has been going on in the big, bad world of Google. It has only been a couple of weeks since I put up my first keyword of the week, but if you go back and check that keyword now, in the new version of the Google Keyword tool, you will find that the numbers have changed dramatically.

There has been a howl of dismay across a lot of Internet Marketing blogs in the last few days because Google is now reporting figures that are sometimes as little as a tenth of the ones you would have seen a week ago. In fact, if you check against the old tool (click at the top right of the new one) you will see that the old figures still show in there.

A lot of folk are saying that it’s great that we may now be seeing some more realistic numbers from Google but that doesn’t help you if you’ve invested a load of time in researching and building a site based on a hope of thousands of vistors, only to see a number one slot getting you dribbles of traffic instead of a flood. It may explain why you are seeing those results, but it doesn’t stop it smarting!

The only way forwards from here is to use the new Google tool for your research and since numbers are now so much smaller across the board, it might be a good idea to search for exact match keywords with good volume (if you aren’t already) and then seeing how you might expand those out with phrase and broad match search phrases letting you build a real authority site.

The biggest problem I can see with all of this is that the big keyword research tools all still use the old Google figures. That means that Market Samurai and Micro Niche Finder still show monster results for some keywords that are showing up in Google’s new tool as being pitiful for search volume. So, for the time being, be super careful with the results you see in them (do a quick comparison with the Google tool).

Still harder is the fact that Google themselves haven’t switched everything across to this new paradise. That means that tools like Google Insight are basically handing out duff information. For example, I found a keyword the other day that was just huge and Google Insight had the UK as pretty much the only place in the world where it was being used (something like 90% of all searches). That same keyword is down to a tenth of its earlier size and not only that, but it’s split almost 50/50 between the UK and the US…so a .co.uk domain name is now a giant waste of space!

Ok, now that’s out of the way, here are a couple of keywords for you as a bonus for being patient and waiting a day. Both of them are primarily UK based searches (even in the new regime) and both will let you set up your new clothing empire.

The first is “cardigans for women” – 1,300 exact searches in the UK, going up to 3,600 broad and the .net is available. Not so spectacular, but a good solid site if you know anything about womenswear.

The second is a bit bigger – “cheap designer clothes”. This one does 8,100 exact searches in the UK every month, rising to 12,100 broad match, but there are a lot of related phrase searches if you look in Google. Traffic Travis reckons this is “relatively easy” – all the top sites have higher than normal PR, but are all really young and there are no exact match domains.

So, as always, grab ‘em and tell us when you succeed. All comments welcome as usual.

I’ll be posting a second report later today about the latest results of my experiment in money making but for now, have fun with the new Google Keyword tool.

I promised a second video today and after a bit of work, here it is:

In this one, you’ll find out how I bring the information from the previous video back into excel and where I go from there.

In a bit of great news, shareasale approved my application super-fast and so I have a new way to fill a couple of my niche websites. Ezinearticles also gave me some approvals, so it’s off to the races in the other article directories next and I even managed to get another niche article written and filled with spintext.

All in all it feels like a productive day!

I just checked round my sites and some are crawling their way up the rankings fairly slowly but the traffic isn’t enough to make any adsense earnings worth talking about.

Having said that, none of the other earnings are doing anything either, so a measly 6c earned on adsense yesterday is it for the report today.

A short while ago, I promised to make a video on how I use Google’s Keyword External Tool to find keywords to write about and build sites from. I went to get that going today and lo and behold, Google have changed the interface. Not much, just enough to ruin my old technique completely. I will re-think and show you how you can still do, but that will have to be for another video.

What I ended up doing instead, was making you a short series of videos on how I find keywords and then search for domains from them. So, here’s part one. Using the Google Keyword External Tool.

There are more of these coming as I get them uploaded to Youtube, so be patient it will be later today.

On a completely separate note, I am just trying to sign up to Shareasale as an alternative affiliate program to Amazon. There are some areas where the big A still has no offering, so I’m going to try somewhere else and see if I can get in.

I’ve talked before about how I intend to move into the world of niche site creation to set up some kind of residual income. What’s happened is that I’ve finally realized just how much messing around I have been getting up to, a little bit of one technique here, a bit of another there. All I have managed to do is make myself a jack of all trades…..and unfortunately a master of none!

If you have been told to focus on one thing until you make some money and then to just do more of that, well, you’ve had some good advice! For me, it means that I have had that dawning of the light – where I’m now just concentrating on one thing with my internet marketing efforts and not trying to learn everything else as well.

So, here I am, building niche websites. Actually slightly bigger than “niche”, as it seems to me that there are plenty of one-page websites out there that add nothing to the experiences of their readers and I don’t want to be that kind of site builder.

Of course, that doesn’t mean I get let off the whole keyword research thing. I still have to hunt for a few east targets to get my money-making empire off the ground. Some of you may know that I have been using Market Samurai for research for some time and I still love it a lot for the comprehensive details it gives about so many SEO related subjects. Having said that, it really relies on your own judgement as to whether or not a particular set of factors mean an easy ride in SEO ranking. As a result of that, I also got myself a copy of Micro Niche Finder (MNF). There is something strangely comforting about the little green blob showing for a particular keyword.

So, just to give you a feel for my own current style, here is how I’ll use MNF. Once I have a seed keyword – or have found one using the “brainstorm” function, I’ll have a quick look at the Adwords CPC sorted high to low……I should have siad that I will be using adsense for some of my monetisation. This gives me a feel for the viability of the niche. If the highest values start at only $1 or near to it, there will have to be some pretty big search numbers involved to make  any money this way! I’ll usually be looking for figure of $3 and up (near the top of the sorted column).

Once I’ve checked this, I’ll look at the searches for the top 10-20 entries and see if there are any good combinations of search values and click values. So searches * CPC gives a feel for the value of the keyword. It’s great to have a high CPC, but if no-one is using that term then adsense ain’t going to pay you much. Similarly huge search times 5 cents a click = wasted time !!

If this all gives me a warm cosy feeling, I’ll filter the whole set of results, weeding out (hiding) all entries with less than 2400 exact searches a month. No real reason why, but 80 a day sounds low enough to me. This usually cuts the list down considerably. Even so, unless you have supernatural luck, all the one and two word keywords will have been snapped up and will show amber to red as an MNF indicator of ease. In a similar way, all the domains will have gone. So I tend to choose one of two ways to go next. I’ll either check if any domains are available….working on the principle that a well-matched domain name can beat the odds in SEO ranking, or, I’ll filter out all terms with 2 words or less. Then, it’s off to the races with an SOC check and hope to find a good keyword with a nice green blob and a domain available too.

Now, don’t take this as gospel. It’s what I’m doing at the moment. As I gain confidence and experience, maybe I’ll snap at more of the “greens” with no domain, or maybe I’ll hit the available domains even if they are into the amber/red. It’s just about getting started so that I can learn what works.

Here’s one thing that I have already discovered to be true and it will work in any metal construction type of keyword (I think).

If you have a product (or product family) that could be made of metal, check out the keyword “Aluminum” (missing i) with your product. You’ll find, that as a result of the US pronounciation of the word ALUMINIUM (with an i), the majority of searches done on the web are misspelled. So much so, in fact, that Google won’t even try to correct your spelling with its usual “Did you mean…..”

So, have fun with that, write your content for the masses. As much as it may hurt the inner scientist, metallurgist or just plain English speaker in you, you just won’t get any searches if you spell it correctly. Whatever next? Will we need to be using nucular in product descriptions of the future?