Tips and Principles
In recent days and in view of the new semantic Ycademy Publishing sites we received many questions about how and where to find "profitable" keywords and niches.
The answer is not an easy one, the more that no one will reveal his main money making keywords. However I will try to give you some ideas and tips here.
If we talk about profitability, we need to define HOW we want to achieve the profit. For the purpose of this exercise, let’s assume we want to make $100 per month with Google AdSense.
Principle number 1: B2C is better than B2B
A Business to Customer approach is better than a Business to Business approach. The reason is simple to understand: how many of all internet users surf Google because they want to do business and how many search for a benefit, businesses (or publishers) provide? I have never come accross exact statistics, however let’s assume 1% of all users provide services, products or knowledge and 99% are looking for what’s on offer.
If you target businesses, you target only 1 % of all users and you shut the door to 99% of internet users, or you shut the door to 99% of the traffic. Google AdSense earnings are about the number of clicks and that’s largely function of the number of visitors, or short: Traffic.
Principle number 2: Search in your day to day life for a topic or niche
Start by asking yourself: "What are my main worries in day to day life?"
The common answers could be something like: the cancer of a near parent or friend, my weight and shape, my month end, my mortgage, the health of my children, my over-stretched credit card, how to make more money, the heart condition of my grand-father, my grand-mothers alzheimers, the disability of a near friend …. my upcoming wedding, my divorce, mom’s birthday, my nutrition while being pregnant, …
… just things from day to day life which worry YOU and with you, thousands of other people.
Principle number 3: Assess the daily traffic and the competition
I use the YORGOO Keyword analyser for this part as it gives me a list of related keywords as well as the daily traffic and the number of competitors I have to face (Search returns).
Here an example on Obesity:
What I marked above is what I call my zone of intervention. If the main keyword Obesity gets over 3000 daily searches, we see that the competition is stiff and that we need to get ahead of over 30 Million competitors to reach the top 10 on Google.
The ratio between the number of searches and the number of competitors is much more interesting between rank 2 and 25 on the keyword obesity.
Childhood Obesity looks interesting with 1031 searches.
Pair it with Child Obesity (516), Obesity in Children (339), Obesity in teens (160), Childhood Obesity Facts (139), teenage obesity (121), adolescent obesity (113), teen obesity (109), children obesity (92) and you are already at a total of searches of 2780 and in fact it all has to do with children related obesity. It’s then just important to create your categories and articles along the exact list of key-words you target.
To increase the success in this niche, add closely related categories such as:
Causes of Obesity (1031)
Obesity Statistics (551)
Definition of Obesity (129)
That’s an additional 1711 searches. Add them to the 2780 from above and you get 4491
Now you have taken care of the problem and you may add now the solution (may be you are in the weight loss industry and want to sell products, health plans, weight loss plans, consulting?).
Add now:
Treatments for Obesity (121)
Obesity help (151)
You also can add topics related to America: Obesity in America (343), or others such as: research on obesity (225) and what is obesity (82)…
Note that most of the above key-phrases concern sub-niches with below 1 Million Search returns on Google, an easy target for your Semiomantics site.
By conquering the sub-niches you will gradually improve your ranking on the main term "Obesity" while always remaining in traffic rich environments.
Principle number 4: Be original
No, not everything has been said about your topic; the most important information is yet to be published and that is YOUR STORY!
Existing published knowledge, mixed and enriched with your own story provides original content. Scientific knowledge has very little interest for as long as it is not tweaked into an emotional message. Your own personal experience, your feelings, your sufferings, your joys, your thoughts and your energy will add the salt to the soup and make it worth while slurping … reading … CONSUMING!
Take another example from day to day life: besides obesity, who has not experience in the field of cancer? Be it a personal experience as a patient or as a family member of close persons who suffer from cancer.
Example: Cancer
The zone of primary intervention above shows a mix of cancer the pathology,and the astral sign Cancer. In this case we first need to filter what’s of interest to us.
Also, you note that "Breast Cancer" is a mega topic while "Breast Cancer Symptoms" is in the Quick-reach Zone for your Semiomantics site!
Important is not just to talk about cancer, but about YOUR Cancer, the one YOU are suffering from or the one a family member is suffering from. Living with a person who is suffering from cancer is not easy since people close by suffer as well and are not supposed to show their pains. The same would apply to AIDS or Alzheimers and so on.
Topics such as "How I cope with my breast cancer, how I cope with post-surgery effects, how …." are of the utmost interest because these are stories written by real life.
Your story is original, emotional, subjective and that’s exactly where you create the empathy necessary to keep people coming back to read your next article.
Principle number 5: Don’t just inform, COMMUNICATE
There is a lot of information already online and information as such has no value if it is not proliferated to the target audience. And even if you reach the target market, you notice that some publishers are more successful than others.
If you write about prostate cancer in a scientific magazine, you get a few hundred, may be a few thousand readers. If you publish in the New York Times, its a few hundred thousand, and if it’s in Popular Magazines you write about a Star suffering from Prostate Cancer, you reach millions.
Information is flat, factual, information is a Raw Material! By tweaking it and by working with it, by giving it the right framework and by presenting it in a specific way, in a specific light and under a specific angle you will interest your target audience.
What’s your target audience any way? If you follow our example here and you go for Google AdSense, then you need loads of visitors, loads of traffic, since the earning-potential per visitor is very limited (a few cents per click in most cases). That means you aim for a popular audience.
If you need loads of traffic, you need to attract masses, you need to be popular and write for masses. Your first objective being to be found by people using the search engines, your second is to build loyalty. Just information is OK to get one time visitors.
Communication is what makes people come back, what builds loyalty, what builds a growing readership, a community, a group of like-minded people around you and your publication.
Communication is when beyond delivering information you actually TOUCH people, it’s when you deliver more than just brain food, it’s when you touch feelings, the soul, the heart … it’s when you manage to link to people, when you trigger reactions, when you ultimately succeed to plug-in and vice versa.
Communication is when your message is delivered and received. Communication is when you create empathy!
That is why it is so important to use communication tools and means adapted to the expectations of your targeted audience. Don’t use a vocabulary most people wont understand, illustrate your publication with pictures, use examples, testimonials (your personal testimonial above all). Use technology people have no problem with (don’t publish videos where visitors first need to download and install aplayer…). Make it easy to read you (font and font size) make it pleasant to see your site (colors, design), make it easy to surf your site and to find what people may be looking for (lay-out, internal search, site map and so on).
Principle number 6: Trigger Reaction
As lined out above, the first priority is to get visitors to our site. Traffic is generated organically by the fact that we occupy top 10 positions in traffic rich key-phrases on Google for example.
Once your visitor is on your page, your main objective is to keep him there and if possible to make him return. Google Ads won’t help you to achieve this objective, to the contrary: they send people away from your site and you are paid for providing traffic to Google’s advertising customers.
Why would you like visitors to stay on your site?
First because you want to communicate, you want to deliver your message and you would like your message to be well received.
Second, if your site is of interest, visitors will bookmark your site, sign-up with your RSS feed, subscribe to your newsletter, giving you additional chances to deliver content and ads to these visitors.
Third, what starts with a visitor, may convert into a contributor adding thus more contextual content to your site and increasing its interest, popularity and authority attracting thus more traffic to your site.
How do visitors react?
On information people’s reaction is rather flat: they grab the information, they may retain the informative content of your publications and they will forget…YOU rather quickly.
On Communication: it’s more about how you deliver information than what the information is all about! Readers will retain a mix of informative content and personalized, emotional content created by YOU. You start building YOUR personal profile and authority.
You also start to trigger emotional reaction, you trigger re-ACTION. The reaction can be in form of an opt-in or visitors may leave a comment, start a discussion on your site and ultimatively contribute to your content and the value of your site.
Principle number 7: Let other people work for you
To top a niche or a category, you need content, good content and loads of it. The better you communicate, the more reaction you will get from your readers and the more contributions will be created by your visitors. They start working for the good of your site.
You can take it further and invite contributors to become co-authors of your blog to enrich the content, to diversify the sources and to share the work load.
Think about the Social Networking Buzz: Facebook, MySpace and all the others: they put at our disposal a handfull of toys such as blogs, chats, upload features for video, images and audio and they let us link with other users, that’s it. The rest and the wealth and value of the sites are generated by the USERS! It’s free for Facebook and MySpace and it builds value for Facebook and MySpace.
This shows a historic wealth-building strategy: let other people work for you without paying them and sell the fruit of their labor to make money for yourself. Amazing, no? And good old Abe (Lincoln that is) was fighting against that business model 150 years ago. Yeah, we fought for eradicating it, with arms, with emotion, with hands and feet…and today the most popular websites and places on earth are MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and similar, where people deliver work, without being paid (slaves were fed at least…no food no health and no labor). And when the sites are sold or the shares traded, the members, users and their work is sold!
What we can deduct is that one thing is more important that Money: it’s The 15 Minutes of Glory Principle: people don’t mind giving away the most precious goods they have (their thoughts, time, spirit, work, money…) just for becoming VISIBLE, for exhibiting whatever they want to exhibit.
I don’t intend to be cynical about this issue; I just observe the phenomenon and I try to understand the mechanisms which we then can translate into strategies to profit from the phenomenon.
To conclude: make you site interesting, interesting for your readers and trigger reaction, let people express them-selves, give them the opportunity to enrich your site, to use it as a discussion platform, a place where they like to return to and to comment, contribuite, click on an ad … increase your wealth.
Principle 8: There is only one thing worse than BAD Press…
…and that’s NO press at all. Remember this one! May be this is the reason why so many people do anything, just about anything, to become visible (the 15 Minutes of Glory again).
Better bad reaction than no reaction. The same applies also to your content. While most people are writing in a positive way about their topics and niches, others are just negative and isn’t it interesting to notice that negative, critical, polemic content gets often great listing and ranking?
Controversy stimulates reaction, reaction builds your site, it’s a way to become visible as well. Negative articles are often full of emotion, hatred and similar. Emotion triggers emotion and emotional reaction.
Example: Write one negative article about say, your preferred Herbalife Product, and you may trigger tons of Herbalife Distributors to react with a comment, building thus content and traffic for you and why not wealth by clicking on Google Ads?
Get the point? Reactions are created best by emotion, positive or negative … the worst is no article, no publication from you end, then the second worst are articles without emotional content as they inform in the best case but they don’t communicate.
Communication is when you trigger material or immaterial reaction! And all starts with a keyword.
Notice: traffic is where there are keywords that bear emotion, that represent topics where people are likely to develop emotion and emotional reaction.
Conclusion
The easiest way to find high traffic keywords and niches is first in your own emotional sphere. That’s probably also where you will find the topics where you will be able to communicate emotionally without too much effort.
Once you have a general idea, just assess the market (number of searches) and competition (number of search returns) and short-list the main keyphrases with high traffic and reasonable competitivity (make this your main keywords for your site, Title, Tag line and categories.
The additional keyphrases resulting from your search may be used for your article slugs…that’s it!
I hope this article will help you to choose your niche, your topic for your new Ycademy Publisher Site.
Yorgo
YORGOOpublishing