There are various stages involved in researching a new niche and one of them is the actual topics you’re going to create content about.
The figures in keyword planners are less reliable then putting your finger up in the air to find out which way the wind is blowing.
There are just too many variables involved to get an accurate handle on the real life figures.
What I like to do when I create a new site is just put content on it.
Typically I’ll target long tail keywords – everyone else is targeting the relatively short phrases that you’ll find in keyword planners.
I don’t much care about the “volume” they’re supposed to attract.
The main test I do is whether or not the title I’m thinking about creating new content for comes up in the suggestions that show up as you type.
If that’s the case, that’s a good start.
Google uses current data for the suggestions (Bing probably does as well but since I don’t often use it, I’m not 100% certain) – you can test that for yourself when there’s a new name for a storm or something has just hit the headlines.
The suggestions are normally exceptionally up to date.
And if you go back to something that was in the news a while ago but has subsided, the suggestions reflect that too.
That’s stage 1:
Is the possible topic one of the search suggestions?
Sometimes, that’s the extent of my research.
But usually I’ll at least glance at the results that show up.
Stage 2 (optional):
Does the phrase show in the title of the first few results?
Usually the phrases I’ve chosen are sufficiently obscure that none of the first page of results has the precise phrase in them.
That’s great news because Google like to give relevant results – so my article and/or video with that phrase are likely to get shown quicker.
I don’t care if there’s a snippet at the top of the results – those seem to come and go with no real pattern.
I suspect that they’re still being tested, especially on results where there are few if any adverts because Google would rather keep you on their search results in the hope that you’ll carry out another search and click on an advert.
Some people are worried if there are no adverts.
I just assume that the phrase doesn’t show up in the keyword tool so people aren’t targeting it.
Or they wouldn’t earn enough on a click to justify putting up an advert.
Personally, I don’t worry if that’s the case.
This kind of content won’t attract masses of traffic.
Typically, the page will get a view every day or two, maybe even less.
But it’s a one-off time or cost to create the content. A basic 700 word article on iWriter currently costs $5 and then takes a few minutes to edit for Western English.
Then the content stays unless I drop the site – likely years.
One thing I’m testing at the moment is putting the article up as a slide show style video as well as content on my sites.
About 10 slides seems to be about 500 words of content.
I aim for 15 or more slides so the video is a decent length and the article is too.
That way I get double duty from the articles – as a video on YouTube and Facebook (they’re two different markets and it doesn’t take much to upload it to both places) and as an article on a website.
If I write the slides (and therefore the article) from scratch, record it, upload in those two places, write a description, then copy & paste it onto a website, the whole process takes about 30 to 40 minutes.
Even if it took you an hour or so until you got up to speed, that’s still perfectly do-able.
Create one most days and in a month, you’ve got 20 to 30 new pieces of content in 3 different places.
I don’t worry about duplicating the content – Facebook is self contained, YouTube is a massive site, videos get indexed differently from written content.
The beauty of this system is that it’s simple.
It’s not much more complicated than writing an article but it gets a lot more use out of the content.
After a month or two, you can look at your stats and find out which topics are of interest to your target audience.
Sure, you won’t have gigantic stats.
But you’ll have a lot better idea than if you’d simply been doing academic research and not created any content.
Even if you only do this with one new piece of content a week, you’ve still got 50 pieces in a year’s time.
That’s definitely enough to tell you what the market is interested in.
And it should be getting you some sales from the links you’ve woven into your new content.
Affiliate links are easy to place and providing you create decent content in the first place, people are willing to click the links.
Some will buy the products you suggest.
And that all happens with a one-off time (and maybe money) investment.
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