How to Make Money The Right Way With Niche Markets

When I first started off learning about SEO and all the various strategies on building an online business, I have to say I was very confused on exactly where and what to focus my time on. You see, I found a lot of websites provided superficial advice, but really lacked the substance when it came to telling or showing me, a step by step approach. Can you relate?

Depending on which advice you follow, it will be the difference between making money online or not. Like any business, yes even an internet marketing business, you need to invest time in learning some new skill sets.

Why is the Failure Rate so high in Internet Marketing

There are many factors that contribute to the failure rate. However, I found one of the core reasons people fail, is because of the wrong keyword strategy. Based on all the crap I have seen and read, it really comes to down to your initial keyword selection as the pivotal point for success or failure.

Ok, lets just cut to the chase and make this simple. Stop chasing big keywords like, make money online and home based business when you are just starting out.

So, what is the right keyword strategy?
Laser Targeted Niche Markets

Let's look at a concrete example on what I mean by drilling down in your niche market.

First, go to Google's free keyword tool selector here.

* Step 1 - enter a primary keyword like, home based business
* Step 2 - look down your list to see all the long tail keywords
* Step 3 - Say you pick, starting a home based business
* Step 4 - Now take that long tail keyword and enter that phrase above where you initially entered home based business to get new results.
* Step 5 - This is what I call drilling down in your niche market. You will get a whole new list of long tail keywords and results.
* Step 6 - You keep drilling down until you find a long tail keyword that has low competition, yet still has reasonable monthly search results.

There are several pieces of information that you need to keep in mind when deciding on long tail keywords. First, I look for monthly search results in the range of at least 1k to 5k. Sure you could have more, but this is just an example and its a good starting place. Second, I need to see what the actual competition is going to be. So, enter that long tail keyword term in quotation marks. With quotation marks, it will give me a clearer picture of what my true competition is like. Third, when looking at the search results, I am looking for results on page 1 with actual articles and not just the home page showing up.

Here's why I look for articles in my results. I know that beating an article on page 1 will typically be easier than trying to out rank a website. I won't stop there either, because one other element you need to know about is the number of back links or strength of the results on page 1.

Go to Google first, enter the following format in the search field:

link:yourwebsitename.com and hit enter

You don't need the http or www part, but you need to enter that format. This is constantly in flux, so the results that you see, will not be 100% accurate or up to date. For example, say your results come back showing that particular URL has 10 back links showing on Google. You know that it will require some work. However, if no results show up, meaning no back links show up, then its a good indicator initially, that you may have found a low competitive term that you could easily rank for on page 1.

Now go to Yahoo, do the same thing with the link format above. In Yahoo, you will typically see more results, which is good. Because now I have a better picture on how many back links are showing up for that particular URL. If your results only show a few back links in Yahoo, then it might be a good indicator that again this is a good keyword phrase to go after.

One other point before moving on about the number of back links, is to keep in mind where the actual back links are coming from. If they happen to be coming from a site that is on page 1 and say with a page rank of 6 or 7, then you should realize that its a very strong back link. Page rank is not as important as it used to be, but its still an indicator that Google will factor in.