One of my side projects I’ve been working on for almost 11 months now is the concept of business directories.

Here you create a directory listing all business within a niche (say fishing clubs) in a particular geographic region.

You then target these companies using offline methods and charge them either a recurring monthly fee or yearly fee to have their business listed in your directory.

Lets say you setup a directory for scrapbookers, and doing research you find their are 500 companies in a particluar area related either directly or in-directly to the craft of scrap booking.

You managed to convince 100 of them to advertise in your site for just $100 a year (an absolute pittance, as that is less than $10 per month).

Now lets do the numbers..

100 companies each paying $100 per year = $10,000 per year!! Not bad hey!

Now lets imagine we got 200 of them involved, and becuase we are give them tons of bonuses (most offline businesses have never experienced the concept of bonuses before) you manage to chareg $500 a year. Thats still just over $40 a month!

Now lets do the maths again.

200 companies x $500 per year = $100,000 per year from one website.

So how many of these $100k website do you want!!

Check out SiteByTonight and start making it happen.

IS YOUR NICHE WORTH GOING AFTER?

So you have a list of interests, and and you’ve narrowed it down to a very specific keyword phrase.

You now have your keyword phrase. Guess what?This doesn’t necessarily mean this is what you’re going to be focusing on for your business.Huh? Did I hear that right?

Yes, you heard that right. See, just because you have an interest in something, doesn’t mean other people are going to have an interest in it. And even if they do, if you’re going to go up against a million other sites promoting the same niche, you are going to have one heck of a tough time getting your piece of the pie. This is why I advise people to stay AWAY from Internet marketing. Why? It’s a jungle. Yes, you can make it work. I did. But why beat your brains against a stone wall when you can find something that is more like hitting a pillow.

So let’s take my own choice of health. I decided to go with the more narrowed keyword phrase “Alternative Treatments For Acne.”

Great, now what?

Well, let’s see what our demand and competition is.

How do we do this?

Well, the competition is easy. Just go to Google and type in, with the quotes YOUR keyword phrase. I’ll type in mine.

I get 37,000 sites coming up with that keyword phrase. Okay, not too bad.

Now, let’s see how many monthly searches we get.

To do this, go to a keyword suggestion tool and type in the same phrase.

I use many. Here’s one of them, its called NicheBot

http://www.hearder.com/keywords

It’s one of the easiest tool to use.

Now, type in your keyword phrase, again with the quotes, and see how many monthly searches you get.

In my case, not too good. My original phrase only got 2 monthly searches. And even the best word in my list, “Acne” only got 1688 monthly searches and it’s not very targeted. What I mean by targeted is this.

Does everybody who types in acne into a search engine want an alternative treatment? Some may simply be looking up what causes it. That’s why you want your target phrase to be as specific as possible.

So let’s see what we have.

1688 searches for a non targeted phrase and over 37,000 sites to go up against. I don’t know about you but I don’t like those odds. Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t pursue this, but if you do, I just want you to understand what you’re going to be up against. It will be an uphill battle.

Ideally, you want to find a keyword phrase where you have about 1000 - 2000 competing sites and about 5,000 to 10,000 searches a month. Believe it or not, these ratios exist. They’re not easy to find but they do exist. And when you latch onto a niche with very little competition and a good number of monthly searches, you’ve basically found yourself a goldmine. The key is cashing in on it.

Just keep repeating the above process until you find a niche that you are happy with. It may take some time, but it’s time well spent.

Every day I get asked about getting my websites to rank better but also asked about getting more traffic to your site.

There’s no point in having a website that has the best sales letter, 7 part mini-course, built in affiliate program and what-nots if the the site doesn’t get enough traffic.

If you have traffic, you can sell just about anything you want.. Traffic is king!

Things to make sure your website has to make it rank high in the search engines :

1. A keyword optimized title. Find your niches hottest keyword and make it the title of your site.

2. If possible use the keyword in your domain name

3. make sure you have a killer website description. It should be a “mini” headline for your site. Someone will read it on the search engine and should be moived to click on your link and come visit your site.

4. make sure you have a keyword description tag. NOTE: Don’t use more than 10-12 keywords and the keywords MUST appear on your page. Don’t go into keyword stuffing, its a “red flag’ for search engines!!

5. Make sure your site has lots of links coming into it.. I mean LOTS!!!  Don’t get too hung up on the whole link relevance myth. Just lots of links from other ranked webpages will give your site a tremendous bost.

6. make sure that at least your top 5 keywords (based on keyword research, not what you think your customers search for) appear on your website . Otherwise you will never get anywhere.

Keep doing the above 6 steps and you will be well and truely on your way to better search engine traffic..

Till next time..

Bruce