Marketing Insight - WordPress site-building sequence

(photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eirikref/)

This post on Marketing Insight is how to build your site. (And those are silo's above - where grain is stored before it is shipped to processors.) Dr. Williams (below) is offering one concept about how to build a site. He's actually converting old hand-coded sites over to a new WordPress platform. And I respect his work.

ezSEO Blog: "The overall idea of this new system is to concentrate on sub-niches, one at a time, and build those sub-sections before moving on to the next one.

THINK OF EACH SUB-SECTION AS A MINI-SITE

Suppose my website was on dieting. This is a huge niche and to try to do the keyword research up front would be a monumental task. A large part of my site would probably be the various diets that people could go on, so I would start off by setting up my Wordpress site with a super category called 'Diets'.

I would then pick one diet at a time, e.g. the Sonoma diet, and carry out the keyword research only on the Sonoma diet. I’d keep this data in a separate database in KRA Pro.

I could then concentrate on the Sonoma diet, creating a main page for that diet as well as articles on the diet that can link back to the main page.

When you are finished with the Sonoma diet, pick another area you want to work on, e.g. South Beach Diet and repeat.

IT’S LIKE ADDING LOTS OF MINI-SITES TO THE SAME DOMAIN, AND LINKING THEM WITH THE HOMEPAGE AND MENU SYSTEM"

I would take a different approach. And as you know from following this blog I use RankTracker to query WordTracker to get my niches (which is a whole lot cheaper and more powerful).

Now, as I've discussed, my approach is to distill my niches and their keywords. This gives me what keywords add up to the targeted main keywords I want to use to create content. I simply line them up by KEI and then work on them in that way. I don't take a certain one and then create content for all the pages like that. I don't do all the dog-collar keywords and then do dog-leash keywords. I'd work all of the long-tail niche keywords for dog in order of their KEI. Sure they'll cross, but what you are trying to take over is "dog" as a main KW - and that is what your blog is named. (Yes, that is a lousy choice as a "niche", since it isn't really, but it gives a good example. )

Under dogs, you'd have categories (silos) of dog-collars, dog-leashes, dog-dishes, and so on. As Andy says above, I don't really hold to silos either. Mainly because people don't want their content served up that way. And your "back" button is there by default on every page you visit. So bouncing from a too-content-limited page is easier than not.

And WordPress has the option of viewing all your categories on the sidebar. So while they might be interested in dog-collars, they might want to compare with the content you have for cat-collars. Or just Cats. Those are all on your categories - and allow you to nest categories as well.

I recently imported a Blogger blog into WordPress and found that now I had tons of default categories. So that screwed any idea of having category-silos without editing every single page out of hundreds. (And I have more to study up on the use of both categories and tags for posts - both of which cross-link posts, making it easier for viewers, but ridiculous if you are trying to maximize page-rank.)

Another reason I like to post by KEI rather than category is to break up my week. While I still have lots of research to do on the various keywords, it gives you more diversity and options if you are posting for the best traffic/competition first. And when you have all the long-tail keywords established, you can come back to work them all in sequence again (or several times) because you already have the research done.

My writing is what I am inspired on - so I jump from blog to blog, depending on what I'm covering at the time. Lately I've been hobby-horsing how to stop telemarketers' Internet scams, but this also gave me a post on hate-addiction, as well as putting up a new post from an old draft about expanding your marketing mix beyond email newsletters I had hanging around on that imported Blogger site. So I'm working on several keywords at the same time. Each with different publics. Keeps me from getting bored, but it's mainly to get those-type thoughts out and written down before I forgot about them and lost the inspiration. (Plus, it makes my friendfeed life-stream far more interesting, let alone twitter.)

And this method of writing for just a single blog also makes more sense to the search engines, since a person doesn't just talk about dog-collars for twenty articles over a couple of weeks and then fascinate on dog-leashes. This also breaks up your flow if you are doing posts, so your subscribing public isn't bored to tears by dog-collars, then bored by dog-leashes. A simple approach would be to write in one category, then do your next post in the next-best KEI category, and so on.

But I'm pretty sure with both tags and categories, any idea of a silo is pretty shot. Silo's are actually a hold-over from the days when PageRank ruled SEO. And pagerank has been pretty back-watered for some time now.

The general rule is that search engines follow viewers. So Content is King - like nothing else. Build a great site and you'll get more subscribers and they'll stick around for more (as well as buy).

The point of doing your articles/posts by KEI then targets your most likely traffic first. Rotating through these keywords until you have several articles for each long-tail-KW - and a good leg-up on taking over the main phrase, this keeps your readers interested and coming back for more.

Just my thoughts on the matter. What are yours?

Keyword research - an example of a very deep and wide niche

(photocredit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/koalazymonkey/)

Index-mining of a huge niche - an example
(a dull and boring, left-brained exercise)

Had to sort out some other stuff, so I've been vacant from marketing insight posts. But I was able to get some work done on the side, because an upcoming mess was staring back at me - so I put the old RankTracker to work at digesting stuff it wasn't designed to do.

My example is the huge, vast "niche" of self-improvement/self-help/personal growth, etc. It's that big because all humankind's adventures fall under it. Any time you push the condition of a person forward, it's self improvement in some guise or another. (Because actually, only the person himself can improve or worsen their own condition...)

So there were really far too many words to describe this area. And those terms above either gave no useful terms or too many when I ran them through my Adwords/RankTracker/OpenOffice system.

But I'd been doing this for months, getting various insights and doing trial searches. All of which resulted in lists and spreadsheets of words, but nothing definitive.

Finally, I decided to take a rather adventurous leap (like some cliff diver) and assembled all these numbers of lists into RankTracker and made it digest them. Turns out it was far more difficult than I thought. It chokes the WordTracker component at about 240 words, so I had to split these up - meaning my 6000 words took about 120 times to get them all ranked by KEI. (Several days' work in the background.)

And then I tried to get it to find alternate WordTracker suggestions - it doesn't choke so easily, but RankTracker can appear to hang after a thousand or so...

Finally, I got most of these done and wound up with over 12000 keywords (that's right - what a masochist). Extracted these to a spreadsheet, cranked up a database from that (OpenOffice is a wonder) and then built queries based on the top single-world keywords.

Turned out I had about 20 or so real keywords that were applicable (and not porn or popular culture related).

Now, I copied these by hand into a text editor, and then pasted that list into a new RankTracker project. Right now, I'm getting the WordTracker suggestions for these, which I'll run several times until I quit getting any decent KEI new keywords.

All this just to tell you how to take something that doesn't really seem to have a keyword set for that niche you know is there.

The steps:

1. Compile all the lists you have into RankTracker and find their KEI and suggested alternates.
2. Copy/Paste this into OpenOffice spreadsheet, then convert that to a database format to do queries and narrow down to relevant terms.
3. Take that short list and run it back through a new RankTracker project to find the real bottom line.
   
4. Convert that into a spreadsheet database and mine it.
   

Some notes:
If I had these all in spreadsheets to begin with, I'd probably been able to just extract the top KW from each and drop them into RankTracker. But some of these were simple text files from my earliest research into the subject.

Now I'm up to date and should shortly have a concise set of huge KEI niches (in the thousands, literally) that can be approached with finding the QAT (in quotes, in anchor, in text) for these and then lining up content and products to start this approach.

- - - -

The results: about 3700 keywords gave me just over 1100 usable (above 2.0 KEI) terms. Of these, there are nearly 50 which are over 10K KEI (rare). To get that kind of KEI, nearly all are under 300K competing pages (rule of thumb says that I probably have less than 1,000 actually optimized pages for these terms) and those high-competing pages have around 3K visitors every day.

While that mega-digestion took days, it now sets me up with some apparent uber-niches to develop. (Let's hope I can find a product for that niche which serves the community...)

So: there's your example of what is possible. I imagine if you took something as broad as pets, you'd then also be able to digest this down nearly as profitably. (I may go back to those top terms I had before just as a test, but I'm really going to have to have some free time on my hands...)

Good Hunting!

Keyword Research Marketing Insight - Don't think the inmates know how to unlock the sanitarium gates...

(photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/amagill/)

Marketing Insight:
Escaping the sanitarium profitably with your keywords
-- don't ask the inmates for directions.

Sometimes I get fed up with people who use advertising as proof that people are buying or not buying stuff in any particular niche.

I've been doing a heckuva lot of research on keywords recently and can tell you this - advertiser are generally clueless about what people are going to buy. And they are caught up in this insane addiction to buying advertising as a way to get leads which will convert to paying customers.

The reason I say this is I've pulled in my Ranktracker files from Google adwords KeywordExternalTool and found that there are some fascinating keywords being used that have a lot of advertising competition, but no one is actually visiting these sites. True.

Now, this doesn't say all advertisers are this way - but when I've now run into the fourth or fifth "authority" saying that you look at these sites which tell you what advertising is being bought as an indicator of whether people are buying products in that area - and I say "BULL".

If you want to see if people are buying that product, check out eBay with one of the free analysis tools out there. This will tell you if there is a real buying market for it. Now, eBay is a bit different from Google, as people who are looking (google) aren't necessarily buyers (google and ebay). But if you use Terapeak, you can see over the last two weeks (for free) if anyone is looking for a product in your category and what types of products (and prices) they are willing to pay in an auction. (One caveat - auctions are for 1] Collectors, and 2] Bargain Hunters. So prices are unreal here - both too high and too low.)

Right now, I don't know of any other area where you can find out actual sales data. You want to be able to look at the records of buyers buying. Terapeak and HammerTap both license eBay's database records to generate their data. Another source would be WorldWideBrands - even though their entry is rather high, even for a lifetime subscription. But they can tell you the rough value of an area and whether there are buyers for that product. WWB does have an online trial where you can check out your keywords in a limited degree.

Oh - but you could check out Clickbank, which does (in a round-about way) give what is selling and you can work out roughly whether you could actually make money at that stuff. Also has return rates (as some of those digital products aren't worth the digital paper they're printed on...)

But when someone tells you to see if people are advertising as an idea of who's buying what - just smile and nod and thank them - then go right on by. Because those people are probably going to be there for a very loooong time. And you should be out in the real world earning money by the carloads.

So:
Places to find out if someone is actually buying products for your niche:

• Terapeak
• WorldWideBrands
• Clickbank.

Good Hunting!

Small Business Marketing Insight Tip #7 - Wordpress, SEO, and technical hocus-pocus

(photo credit: augustinrouchon)
All things build in Wordpress SEO marketing - especially for small businesses.

(Warning: technical search engine optimization verbiage ahead - not for the faint at heart...)

Your blog has to have good content, but it also reflects your business plan. Like the Russian nested dolls (matryoshka's), everything builds around the earlier one.

This is one thing that has kept me from really building out my own sites, that I kept finding another doll inside the one I was working with. Right now, I think I'm close to the smallest possible one.

Now: follow this chain of thought -

• Each product line you have - and we are talking mostly info products, although this is applicable widely - should have it's own mail-list (autoresponder series, or A/R).
• These product lines build into your product funnel. Cross-sales and up-sales. "Would you like fries with that?" and "Supersize your order?"
• As well, if you can set up mini-sites for each product line, that drives both SEO/linklove and keeps product lines distinct.

However, if you have a single Wordpress-driven site (and this is currently the best and easiest way to build sites), you have a common template for all pages. Means you can only promote a single A/R opt-in - or nothing.

The solution is to do custom templates and set up every category as a subdomain.

This essentially gives you a mini-site, since (for the time being) Google classifies each subdomain as it's own domain. Of course, they are all on the same IP address, so you won't get the real linklove you deserve - but organizationally, this starts to un-nest those dolls... Here's how it works:

1. Get a plug-in to make your categories into subdomains (there are several out there - I'm still evaluating them).
2. Set a custom template for each one. Means you can put an opt-in form for that product on that set of pages.
3. Your category pages then talk about a specific product line - in my case, it's best seller famous authors who have written self-improvement books. (At that link, you may find I haven't implemented this yet - life itself is a work in progress, and this blog is to brief you on the news as I find it - excuses, excuses. )

Now, this doesn't mean you can't have a static landing page. Just write a static page with your sales pitch and then set it to be a daughter page (junior) to another page on the site. (I'm not a big fan of landing pages, since I tell people how they work on my marketing sites. I then have to be far more honest and less hype-driven. Once you know how sales pages work, they are ineffective - but there is always the Collier method...)

Your external articles, remote blogs, other video content - all these can now link to your subdomain - or within that to a specific post. Or they can link to a specific static page, which then links to that subdomain (which might even get you more linklove).

The idea is to make it as simple as possible for your viewers and for the search engines.

Search engines see: keyword-subdomain.memorable-domain.com/keywordphrase.php

Because you set your Wordpress Blog to lay out the category and post title in the permalinks - and your categories become the subdomain.

With me so far? OK, so I need to do a complete write up on this at some point with sequences and everything - and as I re-release the Online Millionaire Plan (under different title, same brand), I'll get this out to you. (And as you subscribe to this blog, you can be the first to know...)

But your categories are your main keywords, right? How do you know that you have the right categories before you make them into subdomains?

Next point: supercharging your keyword lists with RankTracker

(That link above tells you briefly how and why to use RankTracker - and I really probably owe you a video on this.)

I was messing around a couple of days ago and found how to pick your categories when you're looking for keywords.

Simply, I was wanting to see how usable two keywords were. However, they gave me tons of new stuff. And within that new stuff were more categories I could use.

Essentially, you look up your keywords in the Google Adwords KeywordExternalTool, then get these text files and drop them into RankTracker. This program then finds your KEI - you then take anything above 100 and run it through Suggest->WordTracker and find the related high KEI terms. Copy/paste these into a spreadsheet and sort - at least that was the earlier method.

Now: watch closely...

• Taking that whole set of keywords once you're finished finding keywords with the WordTracker step - now, take out your low KEI and low traffic keywords. Save your work.
• Copy/paste the whole long link into your spreadsheet (I use OpenOffice - your mileage may vary.)
• At this point, you can search within OpenOffice for keywords ("find all") and then assign a background color to that series of KW. Makes your spreadsheet look very nice and easy to see relative values of keywords to each other - even if they are disrelated. But hang on there...
• Sort by competition and insert a row between everything above 3mil. Color it something distinctive. Now sort everything above that color bar by KEI, first by number of keywords in ascending order and then by KEI in descending order. What you wind up with is high KEI terms which have too much competition. (You have the spreadsheet do both sorts at once, so your 1-word KW's show up in KEI order above you 2-word KW's, etc.)
  
• Now, take each of those terms at it's base ("biblical" and "bible" have "bibl" as a base, "christian" and "christ" have "christ" as a base) and search for these in RankTracker. This gives you all related terms which a search engine will also find.
  
• Copy/paste your search results into a second sheet on the spreadsheet - one after the one you put the entire list on. Rename it with the keyword base you just searched for.
• Do this for all the top KEI single-term keywords you found. Each base term gets its own page on the spreadsheet - just add more until you have everything you want.
• Then sort out the pages by competition, then by KEI and you'll have what you want. (See the note below on this sequence if this is new to you.)

And you now have your publishing sequence. Work from the top down with articles and blog posts, etc. and you'll then take over that high KEI single term keyword as you take over the smaller niches.

Discussion

Where you find a high KEI search term that has few subordinate long-tail niches, you can skip it. Example: "Spirituality" search gives "healing", which gives "crystals". Related terms also gives you "crystal meth", "Crystal Gunn" (porn star) and "crystal balls". While crystal ranks high, if you take this down to only healing-related keyword phrases, you have little to work with. If you want to talk about crystal balls, there's a lot to talk about. Otherwise, no. "Bible" on the other hand, is massive with ripe keyword phrase niches. (But it's been around some 4,000 years...)

So your base terms (tidied up for your viewers - add the 'e' back to Bible) become your categories. Your long-tail niche keywords are the basis for your post names. As your categories become your subdomains - Google then thinks this particular (subdomain) site is all about Bibles, since every post on it discusses some other aspect about Bibles. And linklove is spread all around, since you will have pagerank just for that subdomain - while your crosslinks then share it with your ecommerce site.

And as you do your keyword searches, you'll find more categories - which can simply be added to your site, and they can be turned into subdomains, etc. etc.

That's a bit thick above, but when you do it for yourself, it becomes very clear. (Yes, I need to do a video on this, don't I? Well, as I can get to it, I will - look for the revamped Online Millionaire Plan coming to an embedded YouTube video near you...)

The point is that now you don't have to guess at what categories to use. You simply go after the top keywords by publishing effective content, properly optimized, which takes over the long-tail niche phrases. These then start ranking you higher for the high-competition, shorter keywords.

And since your subdomain is (currently) given the importance of a site, you are now creating a niche site just for that exact keyword. Google will love you for this one.

With separate templates for each subdomain, you can tweak up these subdomains to actually look like different sites - like mini-sites - and have them all crosslink neatly.

(And if you really wanted to take this right on out, you'd set up WordPress MU for a multi-user environment - and then you'd really have separate mini-sites for each product. But your maintenence costs - in terms of time - really expands with this idea. By having everything on one blog, you can then simply add more content without having to log into each blog, etc. I guess you could do it as an administrator...)

Subdomains with custom templates look to be the most elegant application at this point.

• Linklove - Google treats these as separate domains, each cross-linking, so greater trusted authority for each.
  
• Segregated product lines - so you can actually maintain several diverse lines without conflict. Someone who knows all about Dogs isn't expected to know much about Bibles.
  
• Customized user experience, so you can tweak each subdomain template to get better conversions without changing your main template.

But you still have to surf each subdomain as a newby user and see that the way you have your template makes sense for that subject area - "sense" is what the viewer expects to find.

- - - -

Setting up your spreadsheet to make the best of your keywords from RankTracker.

Here's the sequence:

1. You have your spreadsheet and RankTracker open, with your keywords searched the way you like them.
2. In RankTracker, delete any keywords less than 2.0 in KEI and less than 20 in traffic. Don't delete anything else.
3. Now, copy and paste the entire KW list into your spreadsheet (the registered/paid version of RankTracker allows you to do this...)
4. Sort your whole list on the spreadsheet by competition, ascending (biggest toward the bottom).
5. Insert a (colored) row between everything above 4 million.
6. Select and sort only that bottom section by KEI, descending (biggest toward the top).
7. Sort everything above that bar by traffic, descending.
8. Insert a row at less than 100, and then color it.
9. Sort this middle section by KEI, descending.
10. Now, sort the top section by KEI, descending.

What do these sections mean?

• Bottom section gives you your top keywords to take over.
• Top section gives you the sequence of content to publish to do that.
• Middle section is full of "less profitable niches" as traffic is lower - so you have to write more content to get the same amount of total traffic. But competition is waaaay lower, so...
  

Why these arbitrary numbers?

• About 1 percent of sites are properly/accidentally optimized. By taking 3 million competing , you will wind up (roughly) with 30K pages to compete with (WordTracker says that's a niche). Analyzing the top 10 out of these sites will give you what you need to do to compete with/out-create them effectively.
• You want at least 100 per day coming to your site. But the smaller traffic niches also usually have much lower competition - so if you can crank out pages, you'll be able to do five times the pages and have many times greater response. (Some niches actually have no sites optimized for them - easy pickings.)
• If it doesn't have KEI above 2.0 or better, it's not worth your time. Some say 3.0 - but I've found that this throws out some hot sub-niches and can really limit your ideas for content.
  
• You can pick any numbers you want, though. Try them out and you'll see what works best for you.
  

- - - -

OK? Well, I've got to run - a lot of content to produce on top of everything I'd already scoped out.

If you have a better idea or just think this is crock - feel free to comment...

Hot Search Engine Keyword Niche Tip - Getting keywords from news

Getting hot keyword niches from the news

Just a fast one for you. I outlined a way to get hot keywords from the news before.

But this was limited, since I haven't found a good keyword extraction tool. Most give you gobble-de-gook, which you then have to sort through.

Today, I tried a different approach:

1. On a top website (I tried US News and World Report), look for their most visited and most emailed stories.
2. Scrape these and drop into Google's Adword KeywordExternalTool.
3. Now you have the synonyms which are a gold mine.
4. Get the text file and drop into RankTracker to find the KEI.
5. Take off the low KEI (>2.0) and high competition (>3 or 4 million).
6. What's left is the top niches of the week.

I wound up with about 8 decent keywords (out of 190+ that Google gave me).

However, when you run these through Web1Marketing's Keyword Competition Estimator for exact phrase, intitle, and inanchor - you wind up finding that these terms may or may not be really all that hot.

Exact competition for three of them still wound up with over 120K in competition -and this is real competition.

Next step, if you have a product or a pressing interest, would then be to take those 8 terms and through them through Google's tool again to find the sub niches. And you can do them one at a time, since you only get 200 terms each time you try.

Then, take the sub niches and promote to them - which will eventually get you top standing in these 8 high KEI terms we just found.

Now for my use, this is just fine - since I'll then use these phrases as inspiration for cartoons. But I'd be better off also going that route, because social media can get buried as well. And this digresses.

But really for me, I'd probably do something like log into FriendFeed and take their most popular stories of the week and run those titles through Google/Ranktracker/Web1Marketing - because these are a bit more real than the news. (Propeller or NewsVine look most promising at this point - as some of this other doesn't look to be all that useful. Haven't tested it, though.)

Anyway, it's interesting to see what the Google Adwords Tool can do...