30 Day Challenge – Day 1: The Idea and keyword research

By: Timothy Krause

So Day 1 of this challenge is nearly over and I’m feeling fairly happy about how it’s going so far. I’ve researched some keywords, got an idea and bought a domain. All in about 6 hours (3 hours of actual work on the project).

Product research

I started by going on Amazon and searching through the catalogue for items that sell well, look like they would have a high percentage of purchases and a reasonable price so affiliate sales could be high.

I searched mainly in areas that I’m interested in to make content writing easier later down the line.

These searches took me to 3 distinct areas / niches.  I’m not going to divulge what they are right now.  I don’t want to skew any results or encourage any competitors.

Keyword Research

I did my initial keyword research using The Google Adwords Keyword tool.   I was looking through these niches for keywords with a reasonable number of searches per month and, if possible, low competition.

In the first category, which is a team sports category (OK rugby), I didn’t find a lot of suitable keywords.  I’m sure there are good ones there, but I don’t want this site to be a thin “reviews” site of a very narrow band of products, and competition for the keywords is pretty high.

My second category was to do with gaming, and I really gave up on that before I started.

The third category is what I have plumped for in the end. I found some keywords that are:

• OK search volume (60k global searches, 3600 local searches)
• Approx. £0.67 CPC
• Low competition
• Not specific products, but with great opportunities to add affiliate links for specific products.

In fact I was so excited about this idea I have immediately gone and registered a domain name.  This might be getting ahead of myself but I’m excited about the idea I have and I think it could really work well.

Further Keyword research

So with a definite idea in mind I then went ahead to make a proper list of the keywords I will be targeting.  For this I tried out a number of tools for the first time as recommended by http://www.detailedsuccess.com/keyword-research/

SECockpit

Using SECockpit was a bit of an eye opener.  I registered for the $1, 5-day trial just so that I could try it out for this project and it blew me away. It’s quick and versatile and gives you a wealth of information.

The keyword I chose is the one highlighted in grey below.

The results confirmed what the Adwords tool had already shown me.  But they really also highlighted that the .co.uk domain I had already bought wasn’t going to cut it.  Why would I limit myself to the UK google search market when I could access the US .com market.  But, the exact match domain wasn’t available for .com so after a little searching I came up with something similar that included the main key phrase.  I’m not too worried about this since the recent Google announcements that “brand” is important, and exact match domains don’t give you the same bonuses as they used to.

SpyFu

I used SpyFu to check for related keywords.

The results above further convinced me that there are enough keywords in the niche that I will be able to target to gain traffic.  It’s not a massive amount of traffic, but I hope that the low competition will mean I can get ranked quickly for quite a few of the phrases.

End of Day 1

So at the end of day 1, after spending about 3 hours on the project, I have:

• decided on a main key phrase
• bought a domain (I chose GoDaddy to make the purchase)
• set up a hosting and redirected nameservers

Tasks for tomorrow:

• complete the list of keywords to target

It”s Sunday tomorrow so I won’t do much more than that.