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Once you’ve picked a popular niche, the next question is: how do you get noticed? The problem with young or poorly targeted blogs is they don’t have an audience. You can’t just write a brilliant post and expect people to find it and subscribe. Instead, you need to proactively target people that might be interested in your topic. How? Keyword research. Let’s go back to our mixed martial arts example and come up with some post topics to launch the blog with a bang. Researching Your Main Keywords for Post IdeasIn the last section, my friend decided to target the MMA niche—people that want to train and eventually participate in mixed martial arts. Now he needs to choose post topics that will attract their attention. The easiest place to start is with the main keyword: MMA. In this section, I’m going to use the Wordze keyword tool, as it performs this kind of work exceptionally well. Here are the results for “MMA” from their keyword research tool:
Note: The numbers in the far right column represent the predicted traffic within a 30-day period. Looking through the results, we see that a lot of people are looking for:
Skipping the gear keywords for a moment, it looks like the following post topics might be popular:
It’s useful information, but it’s all pretty general, right? To really come up with targeted post ideas, we need more specific information. For instance, which fighters should you interview? Are there specific training routines that you can write about in detail? Which fighting styles should you explore? Also, you could exhaust the above topics within a few weeks or months. If you’re going to start a blog on MMA, you need a larger repertoire of post ideas. The keyword research tool isn’t really built for in-depth analysis, but fortunately for us, Wordze provides another tool that does the trick beautifully. Researching Related Keywords for Post IdeasThe Wordze Dig Tool is magic. It searches the web for your target term (in this case, “mixed martial arts), and then somehow figures out which words might be related and gives you a long list of related keywords to consider. All the companies we’ve reviewed have similar tools, but the one for Wordze seems to work the best for this particular task. Below, I’ve included just a small section of the results from a dig on “mixed martial arts.” There are actually 217 pages of results to sort through—enough topics to keep my friend writing for a long, long time.
Note: The numbers in the far right column represent the predicted traffic within a 30-day period. Out of this selection, the majority of the related keywords are different fighting styles. Some of them also seem to get a lot of traffic, like boxing and wrestling. You might think that they’re unrelated topics, but really, these are related markets that you can tap into for readers. For instance, lots of people who are interested in becoming professional fighters aren’t familiar with the intricacies of mixed martial arts. They’re only familiar with one fighting style. You could target these people with your posts to bring them to your blog and “convert” then into MMA fanatics. For instance, consider the following post titles:
Each headline is designed for a different audience. If you’re a boxing fan, could you resist clicking to find out why boxers are supposedly scared of mixed martial arts? Or if you’re a karate newbie, wouldn’t you like to know the secret history (which is directly tied to mixed martial arts)? These kinds of posts would probably do well on Digg.com, bringing you thousands of visitors that might only be vaguely aware of mixed martial arts. If you write an interesting enough article though, you might be able to convert some of them into subscribers. Wordze’s Dig Tool also answers other questions, such as “Which fighter should I interview?” Skimming through the results, Chuck Liddell and Royce Gracie are two of the top names. Interestingly, Chuck Norris, Bruce Lee, and Mike Tyson also show up. You could do a post like this: Mike Tyson vs. Royce Gracie: Who Would Win? I don’t know about you, but I think that one has a shot on Digg. You might also be able to get some links from popular boxing and UFC websites… which leads us into our next topic. Researching Related Websites to Market Your PostBy now, we have lots of ideas for popular posts… but who is going to link to them? It’s an obvious question, but lots of bloggers miss it. Once you’ve settled on a post, you should do some research into which websites might be interested in linking to it. Let’s say we are writing the “UFC vs. Pride: A Side-By-Side Comparison” post. Who should we contact for links? The websites that rank in the search engines for “UFC” and “Pride” would be a good start. In the front page listings for “UFC,” all of the sites in purple would be perfect:
The search results for “Pride” are mixed with unrelated sites, so I searched for “pride fighting” instead and came up with better results. Based on the traffic counts, you’d still be better off focusing on the UFC sites, but it’s still worth e-mailing the Pride sites. I won’t go into the details of it, but I also did searches for “UFC blog” and “Pride blog” for websites to target. Without even working at it, my friend could e-mail two dozen blogs about the post, probably scoring a handful of links. Is Traffic Enough?If you do everything we’ve talked about so far, you should have a decent shot at getting lots of traffic. You’ll get links from authority sites, you’ll have thousands of daily visitors, and you’ll actually be writing about stuff that people want to read. But is that all you want? Traffic is great for the ego, but it doesn’t do much for paying the bills. At some point, you’ll be in the middle of writing a post when the power turns off. Then, sitting in the dark, a new question will hit you: “How can I make money from this?” Once again, keyword research can help. Read the next section to find out how. Next: Keyword Research Can Help You Make Money From Your Blog Back to Keyword Research for Bloggers. |
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