In my last post I spent a load of time talking how I’ve been using Micro Niche Finder recently as a way of digging out those baby niches I can use for my sites.

The one thing I didn’t say at the time was that you should probably take the Micro Niche “Measure of Backlinks” or MOB with a pinch of salt. The problem is that MNF brings you back the top 10 results for an exact match, no matter what setting you are currently using. So you’ll get a false sense of security as to how easy it is to hit that top ten.

What I’ve been doing is pumping the keyword back into my trusty copy of Market Samurai. The SEOC module in their is waaaaay more complete than anything in MNF and is a great final check on the niche.

The other thing the Samurai folks have done is to pull Domain Samurai into Market Samurai too. I made a few videos about that product a while back, so check them out. Now you can get all that domain-checkiness inside MS too.

If you want to get hold of a trial copy of Market Samurai, you can find it here and you can find out more about all the individual modules on their sales page here.

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?