November Newsletter

Introduction

Welcome to the first issue of the Start a Niche newsletter! Just like you, Rich and I have become BANS addicts. We just can’t seem to get enough of the Build a Niche Store world. A few months back we even partnered up to start offering a service to BANS users to get them started on their journey. We install, setup, research keywords, customize the template, add content, add our exclusive mods, and more. We have provided this service since June of this year, and have setup stores for more than 50 people, many of them had us do more than one store too. Enough about us and on with the good stuff.

Tip of the Month
Keyword Research

I will let you in on how I do keyword research. Some people can have you do so much trying to find keywords you run out of time to write the content. This is the way we start out our sites and the sites we create for our customers. In the beginning we focus on the low hanging fruit. Something we can rank for easily and get on the first page of the search engines and get a little targeted traffic.

First we go to Google’s keyword tool: (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) and perform a broad keyword search. Then I like to start with the most volume so I click the Approx Avg Search Volume link. I like to find keywords that have more than 1k/month volume. If the keywords shown don’t have 1k in volume I try to find another phrase. I then go through the list and copy each keyword and paste it into Google search. We put the keyword in quotes (“keyword”) to pull only sites that have the exact phrase. This tightens the results to only sites that you will be competing with. If the results are under 1k we go to the next step checking the “Commercial Intent” of the keyword.

Commercial Intent is MSN’s factor of telling if the person searching for that keyword is in a buying frame of mind. Go to Adlab’s Commercial Intent checker from MSN (http://adlab.msn.com/OCI/oci.aspx). We try to keep the keywords with at least 80% commercial intent. If the keyword passes those tests we say it’s a keeper and write content for it. With the right keywords, content, and promotion you will have a successful site. Remember, this is how we start our niche sites; in the future we will have a little more authority with the search engines so we will go after the more competitive keywords.

Mod of the Month
ezRSS

This month’s featured mod is our own ezRSS mod. This script creates an rss feed for your BANS site. With this mod you can add links to your rss feed from many rss directories. For a list of rss directories to submit to please check out http://startaniche.com/rssdirectories

You can download the RSS Feed mod for FREE if you are a newsletter subscriber.

Be sure and browse the readme file for installation instructions. If you run into any problems you can contact either me or Rich and we will be glad to assist in any way. You can contact us at http://startaniche.com/contact-us