Adsense 101 Bootcamp Week 2 – Are my Xfactor sites dead in the water?
Adsense 101 Bootcamp Week 2 – Are my Xfactor sites dead in the water?
Mar 06
This week in the Adsense 101 Bootcamp we moved onto keyword research and site structure. Steve did a great job of walking us through the keyword research from seed keywords through to the long tail and how to find the gold nugget keywords that would not only bring in money but also be relatively easy to rank for. He then showed us how to use those keywords to build a website structure.
My keyword tool of choice has always been Micro Niche Finder – but Steve uses Market Samurai. Now this piece of keyword research software has been around for a long time, and I have used a demo version before but never really gave it much attention. I decided to download the latest demo version so that I could follow Steve’s videos step by step – and boy have I had a revelation!
Market Samurai looks quite amazing – it has so many modules, from keyword research to SEO competition analysis to backlink reviews and promotional tools – oh and a rank checker.
So I plugged in some keywords and started to investigate the competition levels and numbers of daily searches. It’s really hard to find those gold nugget keywords!
Today I decided to feed in my Xfactor keywords… and now I wish that I hadn’t! Of the ten sites that I built based on MNF results let’s say only a handful of keywords are even worth trying to compete for and a couple of the sites appear to be dead in the water. Goes to show that you have to invest almost as much time into the keyword research as you do into building the sites.
So where do I go from here? I don’t really want to try and build backlinks to sites that are not worth trying to rank for – so I’ve dug up some fresh keywords for six of the ten sites and for now I’m going to just abandon the other four. I’ll concentrate on these six and then see what happens.
As I type this MS is running in the background processing keywords for the other domains I have lying around and I’ve come up with a few decent finds.
I want to test some things out in MS – like whether I should concentrate on SEOCTRs with low percentages and ignore the number of results, or whether I should limit the number of results too. I’ve picked a range of keywords to target and I’ll monitor them to help really whittle down the filters to find the easy to rank keywords for future sites and pages.
I think I’m going to raid my PayPal account again and invest in this software – it’s currently selling for $147 but if you sign up within six days of downloading the trial then it’s just $97 – which given the power of this tool looks like a bit of a steal!
Here’s the link if you’re interested in the free trial: http://www.marketsamurai.com/
Even if you’re not interested in the software the Keyword Research videos are definitely worth watching http://www.noblesamurai.com/dojo
Do you use Market Samurai? If you have any tips to share I’d love to hear them!
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I love Market Samurai, I started using it when they first opened up the beta version for it back in August 2008. I followed the 30 day challenge at that time and could get the software for only $69 (quite a steal for what it costs now). Off course lots of modules weren’t working at that time yet, but I knew it was only a matter of time.
One thing I really love is the monetize section and being able to write a post on the product you find and submit it directly to your blog. Easy as hell.
Leslie´s last blog ..Building A List With Imnica Mail
I haven’t even got that far in exploring the modules yet – but I’m about to drop that $97 before the price goes even higher when they release the last module.
I am hearing so many good things about MS. Do you think it is much better than Micro Niche Finder, then, in terms of finding the ‘money’ keywords? I am thinking about getting it, but I know when I do I’m going to need to set aside a lot of time to get to know how to use it properly.
Ruth – Web Career Girl´s last blog ..Keep Yourself Accountable Each And Every Day
Hi great blog and my two bobs worth on market samurai.
can you break a computer program by over use ? because if you can then i need to worry.. like really worry because it is the best right hand man tool ever invented.. Can i say more.. not without disclosing if i have an affiliate or other connection to the team at market samurai.. well i don’t.
I just use the program all the time.. any likely niche or possible keyword just goes into a notepad list and i open up the sam and dump the list as a keyword list.. and there goes 2 or 3 hours and out comes more niches and keywords than you can believe.
i think that some people over think the whole keyword finding thing.. let the samurai and google tell you what are worthwhile keywords. and if they are backward to how you would use the phrase or if they are misspelling for a word. the believe the samurai.. bewary of this as more people are using the google suggestion “did you mean to search for” but i have some great domains based on misspellings – differences in uk and us english.. both have similar traffic but one often has one tenth of the competition.