Today, I’ll start to explore Jim’s odyssey to Internet marketing success. As mentioned in my last post, Jim has chosen the online home business model of a content site. It’s one of the easiest methods for a newbie to use and it’s my specialty.

The first step in starting a content site is to select the niche you want to build it around. Content sites must be tightly focused. Too broad a topic will prevent you from getting the search engines to see you as an authority site, an essential designation for success in search engine listings. You’ve heard the adage, “Jack of all trades, master of none?” That applies to a content site too. For a content site to succeed, you have to be seen as a master of a specific topic.

So, the first step in selecting your niche is keyword research. This can serve a couple of purposes:

  • If you have no idea what niche you want to use, keyword research can help you hone in on your areas of interest to find one that is shared by lots of other people.
  • If you already know what niche you want to use, it can help you prove that you’re not the only one who is interested in the topic.

You MUST prove your concept BEFORE you start building your site. There’s nothing worse than having a passion for a topic, spending weeks or months building your content, and then finding out hardly anyone else on the Web is looking for that information. It doesn’t matter how strongly you feel about the topic; you HAVE to be sure others share your passion, or all your hard work will be for naught.

When you start to look at keywords, you need to keep in mind  3 factors:

  1. How much demand is there for the topic? You’re looking for monthly search numbers in the thousands, if possible.
  2. How much competition is there, i.e., existing content sites already established?
  3. What is the potential profitability (which you can roughly calculate by comparing competition/supply to demand)?

Jim was fortunate… he already had a niche in mind, and his keyword research revealed that it’s viable… tons of demand and very little supply at the moment. So he proved his concept and is now ready to move forward.

By the way, a good keyword research tool is essential. The gold standard is WordTracker and they do have a great free keyword tool: Wordtracker Free Keyword Tool

I find their metrics a bit complex to understand, though. If you’re looking for free, here’s another great free tool, called SearchIt: http://www.searchit.sitesell.com/

But what I use most for my keyword research is also from the same folks who produced SearchIt. It’s part of a robust platform for building super successful content sites, called Site Build It, or SBI for short. One of the key features of SBI is their Brainstormer tool. It quickly provides tons of keyword research data, with easy to understand numbers and flexibility with analysis of the numbers. Check out SBI here.

In the coming installments of this case study, I’ll be talking a lot about the many features of SBI. It’s how I built my main site that this blog appears on, as well as 4 other sites. And it’s extremely newbie friendly, which makes it perfect for Jim too.

That’s it for today. Next time, we’ll look at narrowing down the niche, and selecting a domain name.

To your success,
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Written by Kathi MacNaughton