My First Website - Part 1

INDEX:
1. Intro & Research
2. Create
3. SEO
4. Backlinks
5. Update
6. Expand

INTRO

Many of you reading probably don’t even have your own website yet. The most common readers for blogs in the “Make Money Online” niche are just that. They are readers and not doers. I am going to help your sorry self. People spend tons of time reading Make Money Online sites, but don’t actually follow through. Why they don’t start I don’t know. Within 6 months you could be making some decent cash from your site. How much money you make off of your site depends on a few factors. I am going to point out two of the main reasons people fail.

Dedication - Dedication is probably the number one reason why bloggers fail. You must create a site that you are passionate about. Something you can write about daily, and have unique and fresh content. You can not just throw up your site and expect tons of traffic for free, and not do anything. You have to put a lot of hard work and effort into it. Once you get the recipe down, you can rinse and repeat. People that make a living off of the internet work probably about 7-10 hours a day average.

Research - Probably the second factor for failure comes down to research. I am going to tell you right now, 9 out of 10 people will not get rich off of a Make Money Online blog. Then why do these Make Money Online blogs exist? It is a way of reaching out to newbies and helping them get started. I make my hosting costs back off of this site, but the niche is so saturated it is hard to make tons of money off of it. So my suggestion to you is, do not start a make money online site with the intention of making big money off of it. It is our way of documenting what we do publicly to help out others. In my next post, I will help you use research to chose a good niche to get started in and help you choose keywords to target for organic search engine traffic.

RESEARCH

Research is going to be the make or break of your success. This goes from creating a blog, to niche stores, and even affiliate marketing.

The first step is to think of a few niches you want to jump into. Then go another level deeper into that niche to get more specific. You want to think of things you are interested in like cars, sports, shopping, video games, ect. Those would be niches. So lets say you pick sports. With sports you have tons of options to narrow down and find a micro niche. The niche “Sports” is too saturated, and so is basically everything on this level. So we go a few steps deeper. You could choose basketball, baseball, football, nascar, golf, bowling, cheerleading, and the list goes on. Also at this level, our choices are probably still too saturated. We need to go another level deeper. So lets choose Bowling. Now we are at Sports > Bowling. We now have some more refined choices to make. Some micro niches for bowling could be: news, leagues, accessories, and probably a few more that I can’t think of. So looking at the choices, I would probably have came up with bowling accessories. Now we took the sports niche that is over saturated, and refined it to a micro niche at Sports > Bowling > Accessories. We will take this one step deeper and find out what kind of accessories we are going to create a website about once we find out our keywords.

So what? Why would I want to do Bowling Accessories over a sports site. Well, create a sports website and see how easily you rank on the first page of Google? Without ranking well, your site will probably be a ghost town. Google is going to be your main source of traffic, and ranking well in it’s SERPS will help you out a lot. Besides that, it will be free steady traffic, and who doesn’t want that?

Your next question may be, “How am I going to post daily on a blog about Bowling Accessories?”. My answer, “Who said anything about creating a blog?”! I suggest using Wordpress as search engines love it and it is really easy to use, but you can still make it a website and not a blog. My suggestion is to create a phpBay site for the micro niche. Another option is to use affiliate offers, or some other creative way to earn cash. Maybe you have a deal with a bowling ball company and get bowling balls dirt cheap. You could then take pictures of the inventory and sell them for the company for a share of the profit. but if you insist on a blog, you probably want to stay on the lines of a news or review site.

So now we have our micro niche of Bowling Accessories. We need keywords! You want to stay away from keywords everyone else is using. Most people just think of popular keywords like “bowling accessories, bowling balls, bowling shoes”, and expect them to perform well. It actually works opposite of that. You are looking for keywords that not a lot of other marketers are using, but get searched a lot. Some examples could be “wholesale bowling balls” or “bowling ball skulls”. Using that example, you would make the site around bowling balls. These are keywords that I like to call “gems” (or gemz if you are 1337 enough to say it like that). So lets find our gems.

Google’s Keyword Tool, WordTracker’s Keyword Tool, SEOBook’s Keyword Tool, and Keyword Spy are going to be your best friends. I normally use Google’s tool first to narrow down my keywords and also it suggests other keywords I may not have been aware of. Then I pop in the keywords into SEOBook’s Keyword Tool and see how many estimated searches that keyword gets a day. I have heard you want to pick a keyword with about 100-200 searches a day. That would be at least 3,000 per month for google’s tool.

I started out with a list of about 300 keywords, and narrowed it down to about 25 for my last niche store. I then chose the best 5 of those to acutally push for. Search google, keyword spy, ect and get a massive list of keywords. Remove general keywords like “bowling, accessories, sports” from the list as you go because those are over saturated ones. You also want to stay away from one word keywords. So stay away from “bowling” but use 2 or 3 word phrases like “brandname balls” or “model brand balls” or “brand bowling balls”. Once you have a massive list of keywords, pop them into SEOBook’s Keyword tool one by one. Remove any from the list that get under 100 estimated searches per day. Also put them into Google’s keyword tool. Ideally you are wanting keywords that have a very low competition level, but a good amount of searches. You can take a few low competition level keywords if needed, but I would increase the requirement for amount of searches as you are upping competition. Stay away from keywords that have average competition and above. Here is my requirements, but yours may vary. Very low competition and min of 3,000 searches per month. For low competition, I up the searches to 5,000 per month. If you are having trouble finding any keywords that meet these requirements then either you aren’t looking hard enough, or you need to check out another niche. Not all niches are going to work.

For this next portion, I would suggest having about 20 keywords that match the above requirements. Go to Google and search for each one of your keywords with quotes around them. So say you used, discounted bowling balls. You would enter “discounted bowling balls” into the search box including the quotes around the words! On the right hand side you will see how many pages were found, and how long the search took. You definately don’t want any keyword phrase that brings up more than 1 million pages. The less the better. I have some keywords that brought up anywhere from 700-14,000 pages. That is really good. I suggest writing down somewhere the stats of each keyword including estimated searches and the pages google pulled up. So you would have a list in notepad that looks something like:

keyword phrase 1 - very low comp - 6100 estimated/mo - 14,511 pages
keyword phrase 2 - very low comp - 4700 estimated/mo -  2,050 pages *

While making your list, keep putting them in order. I usually have two sections, very low competition and low competition. Then in each list I have the keywords sorted by estimated searches. While you do the google search with quotes around the keyword phrase to see how many pages are pulled up, also look at the first and even maybe the second page. You want to take a look at what sites are sitting there. If you see nothing but espn or big name sites on the first page, you probably won’t be able to beat them out. For sports, it is common to see myespn.com as one of the first results. But say the first 3 spots are huge sites like espn, but then you see joesblog.com and bobbiespage.com filling up the rest of the page, you then have a chance. These are normal people’s websites that have landed the first page. Check out the site and see what its about. You have to determine if you can beat them or not. If you feel that you can beat this site in the ranking, then put a star next to it in your notepad. As you see in my above example, keyword 1 gets more searches per month, but upon research I determined that it was too difficult to rank the first page. Keyword two was filled with generic web sites and I feel I have a chance to beat them. Lucky for me it also has pulled less pages, making our job easier. Don’t get caught up in keywords that have tons of searches per month. It is useless if you can not rank well for it. You will get more traffic with a less volume keyword if you land the first page.

Your goal is to have 5 awesome keywords on the first page of Google. Not all of your keywords will land on the first page. Just because you found a keyword with a good amount of searches, low competition, and generic sites on the first page, does not garantee you the first page. There are other factors like backlicks and relativity. Backlinks will be covered in the rest of this guide later. You should be fine on the relativity part if you chose a micro niche. If you chose bowling balls, then you site needs to be 100% about bowling balls. Leave the talk about the new car you bought for another site.

I usually do a split test with my keywords. I start out with more than I need, and remove the ones that don’t perform. Say you have 10 keywords that land on the first and second page, and you have 5 other keywords that are somewhere out in space. If you remove those 5 keywords that didn’t land on the 1st or 2nd page, you may see your other keywords move up in ranking. This is because removing those keywords may help google think your site is more related to the keywords you ranked well for. No not overnight, but possibly with the next google update. So it could be a few weeks. Once you narrow down to 5 keywords that are on the first page, you can then test more keywords one by one. Just because you have 5 on the first page doesn’t mean your job is done. You may be able to find a keyword that can land on the first page of google, but bring in more traffic.

It is also a good idea to check up on your keywords. Once you have your site totally finished, go back and do this process over again. This time it will be much easier because you are only checking a few keywords. So first check your keyword ranking and ensure it is still on the 1st page. Then check the estimated searches to ensure it didn’t drop off the map. Basically check the stats of each one of your keywords on a monthly basis. You may find one of your keywords became saturated and pushed to to page 10 of google, and that isn’t nice. You then would need to find another keyword to rank 1st for repeating the steps above.

Well in this portion of my very long tutorial, you learned how to do proper research to determine what you are going to make a website about. In the next portion, I will walk you through picking a web host and getting your web page up and running. Following that will be how to make sure your site is SEO friendly, how to find/get backlinks, and how to expand your website for more traffic.