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Day 15 Diary – Hush – It’s a Secret
By Mike Mindel | August 16, 2007
Hi all,
It’s been five days since I posted my last diary entry.
I’m not slacking.
It’s just I’ve found many better niche keywords using my Wordtracker GTrends tool.
26 to be precise.
So I’ve thrown the other four niches back into the niche pool and they are there for the taking if anyone wants them.
All my 26 new niche keywords pass the GTrends filters and they all fall within my broader writing niche.
Remember I had all that trouble with ‘write a psychological thriller’ ?
Well.
I’ve broadened out the niche and my troubles have gone away.
Enough said.
Here’s a Google screenshot of my private ‘writing’ niche spreadsheet.
Reasons for Privacy
Notice that I’ve whited out the niche keywords. I’ve decided to keep my two niche keywords private for the next few posts for the following reasons:
- The last time I posted my niches I had five people concerned that I was competing with them.
- I don’t want to distort the Thirty Day Challenge process by mentioning the niche on this blog. You’ve seen what happens when I mention certain words in these posts. Google ranks me for them! So I want to follow the process Ed describes without any outside help.
- I don’t want to alert anyone to compete on the niche. Again it will distort the process.
Niche Results
As you can see I’ve got two niche keywords in the writing niche.
The first niche keyword has 175 Google trend searches a day and 27,700 competing web pages. There is some decent competition with people selling real stuff to real people. There are affiliate programs and just one web 2.0 property.
The second niche keyword has 100 searches a day in GTrends with 14,600 competing web pages. Not so great on the affiliates, but still some decent competition and no web 2.0 properties.
Signed up at Bloglines
I’m now signed up with Bloglines for Google news, Google blog and Technorati and actively scanning posts for both niche keywords.
I’m busy collecting Golden Nuggets ready for my blog posts over the next couple of days.
I’m also researching various affiliate programs to see if any exist for my niche.
I’ll be back to show you my niche, traffic, affiliate programs just as soon as I’ve set up the blog, got some rankings, some traffic and it’s all happening.
Till then.
Watch this space!
-Mike
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Topics: Diary | 9 Comments »
August 16th, 2007 at 3:06 am
What can I say, simply awesome.
I gotta say your input in this process is second to none and without it I,d be struggling.
Cheers
August 16th, 2007 at 4:22 am
Congratulations on the magical 26! That is awesome. After our discussion about niches I realized that it may be worthwhile to start big then drill down. I call it Go Big Marketing. The best way to find a small niche market… Go BIG!
Congrats, you are the man!
Mike
August 16th, 2007 at 5:04 am
I was building a spreadsheet a bit like yours when I found out yours… I have some questions about it:
What do you mean by “KW in Tail”? What’s the “Close to niche” factor and how do you decide if it’s “yes” or “no”?
Btw, same question about the “Competition” column…
Is there any other “hidden” columns that might be helpful to add?
Even better could it be possible to share that spreadsheet model?
Thanks in advance for your help!
August 16th, 2007 at 9:52 am
Yes Mike. Exactly.
But it first helped to find both the niche market and my starting niche first.
Then when I couldn’t find what I wanted I went big – like you say.
I let Wordtracker tell me which niche keywords with traffic did exist that were *close* to my original niche – but still a market with potential traffic.
-Mike
August 16th, 2007 at 10:03 am
Keywords in tail are just a count of the number of keywords Wordtracker returns in the free keyword tool.
When it comes to being ranked, you’ll often get ranked for these long tail terms too. So I want to see how many there are.
‘Close to niche’ means keywords that are close to the original niche I was after ‘how to write a psychological thriller’.
Competition refers to the competition research in day 3 of the challenge.
I specifically haven’t shared this spreadsheet model as my public thirty day challenge spreadsheet conforms more to Ed’s original guidelines.
-Mike
August 16th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
Mike-
I believe that with so many niches you would be considered what Ed refers to as a ‘girlyswat’… I LOVE it! Your new tool is so addicting that I too have tossed out my old niches for new ones (yesterday). I cannot in good conscience change again because I’ll keep second guessing myself out of the 30 days. No more research for a couple of weeks.
Great work!
-Stacy
August 16th, 2007 at 2:03 pm
Actually I’m a boyswot.
Note: all those niche keywords in my spreadsheet are all sub-niches of my much larger ‘writing’ niche.
For example, one of them is about writing ghost stories (not exact keyword).
I can’t mention exact keywords or Google will index this blog post for them!
-Mike
August 17th, 2007 at 1:42 am
Isn’t this the fun tingly part?!
I’ll stay tuned!
December 22nd, 2007 at 2:22 pm
Wow I’m late. Last post was August 18th. I’ve been on this 30 DC since Dec. 12 and it’s been a ride. Almost sleepless nights to read over and over and listen over and over. But it’s starting to pay off. 95 niches and some are with a ratio of 400/20,000. My frustration is starting to turn to energy.
Thanks soooooo much Mike Mindel for both your Summaries and Diaries. And of course the GTRends tool rocks! They’ve really saved me from attacking people;)