I around one general niche topic. So this time I want to discuss how to do keyword research so you will know whether your chosen niche for your blog has profit potential or not, and how difficult it will be to compete.

1) Keyword Research

First, let’s talk about how to see how many searches a particular keyword phrase gets. Once you have decided on a broad niche you need to find the keywords within it that you want to target. There are many ways to do this but one of the best free options is to use the Google Keyword Tool.

Once you have the tool open just type in your main keyword phrase in the search box. For example, let’s say you chose weight loss as your niche, so type that into the box. Keep the “use synonyms” box below it checked. Then, type in the security code and click the “get keyword ideas” button. Next, look at the top right of the results and you will see a drop down menu that says “broad” — click that and choose “exact” instead — This is important because it gives you a much closer idea of the actual search volume of the phrases.

Go through that list and find the keywords that best match what you want your site to be about that also have a good amount of monthly searches. Keep it to around 10 or so keywords at first. You can target more and more phrases as time goes on but you don’t want too many right away.

Now, let’s look at how to see how much competition you have for the keyword phrases you want to target. Let’s continue with our example from above and say you decided to start a “weight loss” blog, which is a very competitive niche, so you would have your work cut out for you. But let’s just keep using that as an example for the sake of this post.

2) Check Your Competition

The most basic way to check your competition is to go to Google and search for your keyword phrase with quotes around it. So, you would search “weight loss” and the other weight loss related keyword phrases that you chose from your research with the Google keyword tool above, and see how many results come up. Make sure you use the quotes or you won’t get the true competition.

That gives you a general idea of how many websites you will be competing against to rank #1 for each keyword phrase. If it’s fairly low then you might be on to something. But remember some competition is good because it’s a sign that there’s money to be made in the niche. You just don’t want so much that you can’t compete.

3) Check Backlinks And Pagerank

You are not done there. You also need to see how strong the top 10 sites are that rank for your keyword phrases…

To do that you need to look at how many backlinks they have and what the page rank (PR) of their site is. If you have the Google toolbar installed you will easily be able to see their PR but if you don’t then you can go to http://www.checkpagerank.net to check it. PR is not extremely important but it is something that should be taken into consideration when judging what you are up against. If all the sites in the first 10 results have PR4 or higher then it’s probably a really tough niche to crack. If some of them have low or no PR then it’s a good sign for you.

In order to check their backlinks you will want to use Yahoo site explorer. Your first instinct is probably to use the Google link search but they do not show even close to all the backlinks a site really has so Yahoo is much more accurate.

Go to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com and type in the URL of the #1 Google ranked site for your main keyword phrases and see how many links they have. In the drop down menu next to the results choose “except from this domain” so it doesn’t show links coming from their own site. Do this for at least a few of the top 10 sites in your niche to get a good estimate of how strong they are. The less links they have the better.

Your goal is basically to find niches that have a good amount of monthly searches with some competition but not too much, and the competition they do have isn’t very strong. After that all you do is build the site, do some seo to get your site ranked highly, monetize it, laugh all the way to the bank, then repeat the process.

That’s pretty much all there is to it. Of course, this is the condensed version to fit in a blog post, but you should be able to figure it out using the above information and a little more research on the topic. Finding good niches and keyword phrases to target isn’t the easiest thing you will ever do but it’s not overly complicated either.

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