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When you’re researching keywords for a niche, one very common technique that you will have picked up if you’ve read any guru ebooks will be to start off using Google’s Keyword Tool to find phrases that get say over 100 searches a day and then search for those in double-quotes to find the number of competing sites. Any keywords coming back with less than around 30,000 results mean you’re onto a winner, right? Unfortunately it isn’t that simple…

You see, that figure only gives you the total number of pages that happen to contain your target phrase. It doesn’t tell you whether those sites are there by luck or because they’ve been optimised for that particular keyword. For a fuller picture you’ll need to do a little more digging. One way you can do this is to use the inalltitle: option in Google. This returns the pages that have all the words you specify in the page’s title. For example, allintitle:pink flamingo costumes would return all the pages that had each of the words “pink”, “flamingo” and “costumes” in the title. As a rough estimate I’d say that anything under 1,000 results is excellent, 1,000 – 10,000 is fair and over 10,000 is competitive.

Even this doesn’t go far enough. So far we’ve been asking “how much competition is there” rather than “what is the competition?”. To illustrate what I mean, imagine you’re thinking of opening up a burger joint and had asked about the competition in the neighbourhood. You might be told that there’s only one other burger place nearby. This doesn’t tell you whether it’s a massive 24 hour McDonalds or Burger King, or whether it’s just some guy that only works part time selling burgers out of the back of his van. Obviously there’s a world of difference between these two competitors to your potential business and the same principal applies to your competition online. You need to be asking “how strong is my competition” rather than “how much of it is there?”.

One way you can do this is using the excellent SEO for Firefox extension. This handy Firefox extension gives you access to a lot of useful information when you perform a search in Google. It can show you things like the pagerank of your competitors, how many backlinks the page has and so on. If the #1 result in Google is a PR0 then it’ll be much easier to overtake and get your site up to the top than it will if you’re trying to beat a PR7 page.

For those of you that have liked my posts about different ways to automatically syndicate your blog posts you’ll be glad to know that I have another tip for you. Thanks go to Leona Baker for bringing this to my attention in a comment she posted on one of my older posts.

The site we will be using this time is OnlyWire.  I heard about this site a few years ago but wasn’t overly impressed with it at the time as it wasn’t all that reliable and failed to submit to a lot of the sites it was supposed to. That was a long time ago though and since then the entire service has had a major overhaul and after doing some testing with it I found that it has improved no end.

In case you haven’t heard of it, OnlyWire is a service that will automatically submit your bookmarks to 27 different social bookmarking sites. The majority of sites are handled automatically but some sites like Digg and Mixx require captcha confirmation. What happens with these sites is that OnlyWire creates a link inside your OnlyWire account area that you click on to complete the submission to that particular site. This semi-automatic approach is still much faster than manually submitting your bookmarks to each of these times and you’ll find it a great time-saver.

When you sign up for OnlyWire you can either choose to pay a low monthly fee to use their service or instead you can use their bookmarking plugin to promote their site from your blog. The bookmarking plugin seems to do pretty much the same thing as the AddToAny plugin I recommended in a previous post so there’s no reason not to use it.

As well as the official OnlyWire plugin you should also install the Onlywire Multi AutoSubmitter plugin. This takes OnlyWire to a whole new level as every time you post to your blog it will be automatically submitted to OnlyWire and in turn will be automatically submitted to all the bookmarking sites you have set up in your account. This plugin also allows you to enter up to 5 OnlyWire accounts making it very easy to get a whole heap of backlinks in next to no time.

Another benefit of the Onlywire Multi AutoSubmitter plugin is that as it only needs to submit your site to OnlyWire the impact on your web server is insignificant. If you’re familar with Auto Social Poster then you’ll be aware that the plugin does all the submissions rather than a third party service which puts a much greater load on your web server. If you’re on shared hosting then this is definitely something you need to bear in mind.

Since OnlyWire and Ping.fm are designed to do similar jobs there is obviously some overlap in the sites that they support so to avoid duplication I’d recommended just setting up the sites that both support in just one of them. There are still plenty of sites only supported by one of the services so it’s definitely worthwhile using them both. It will take you a little time to create all the social bookmarking accounts but remember that you’ll only need to do that the once and then you’ve got your automatic syndication network in place every time you post to your blog.

In my “Blog Syndication Made Easy” post I told you about a simple method you  can use to automatically syndicate new posts to your blog to a whole host of Web 2.0 sites. In this post I’d like to expand on that and give you another sneaky method that you can use to automatically generate backlinks.

The basic idea of the method in my previous post involved using a combination of TwitterFeed and Ping.fm to get your posts syndicated. When you add a new post to your blog it will be picked up by TwitterFeed, sent off Ping.fm and then blasted all over the place – all on autopilot.

For this method, grab yourself a domain name and install a copy of PHPDug on it. In case you haven’t heard of it, PHPDug is a free script that lets you create a Digg-style social bookmarking site where users can submit stories as well as rate and comment on stories posted by others. Behind the scenes, however, it has one very powerful feature which we’ll be making good use of.

So what is this feature? Well, inside the PHPDug admin area you can add RSS feeds that stories are automatically imported from. So if you add your blog’s RSS feed then every time you post to your blog it’ll automatically be bookmarked on your PHPDug site giving you an extra link back to your site.

It doesn’t stop there though. You can take this further by taking advantage of the fact that PHPDug itself produces a RSS feed of all the latest posts. This means you have submit it to RSS directories and if you’re feeling especially sneaky you can syndicate it using the TwitterFeed and Ping.fm method for even more link juice.

Since it has been some time since I last posted about WordPress Plugins I thought that it would be a good idea to give you a quick summary of which plugins I now consider essential for any WordPress blog.

AddToAny – This allows your blog readers to easily share your blogs on various social bookmarking sites, via email or add a bookmark to their browser. This plugin is responsible for the Share/Save button you see at the end of all my posts here.

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator – This plugin allows you to create a sitemap for your blog which gives your visitors an easy way to find exactly what they’re looking for.

FeedBurner FeedSmith – If you’re using FeedBurner to manage your blog’s RSS feed then this plugin will automatically redirect all requests for your RSS feed to your FeedBurner-managed feed so that you can easily keep track of your subscribers.

Google XML Sitemap Generator – This creates a XML sitemap for your blog which is supported by major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN Live Search and Ask.com.

Platinum SEO Pack – This is a replacement for the popular AllInOne SEO Pack plugin and includes a lot more options to help optimise your blog for the search engines.

Privacy Policy – This plugin creates an Adsense-compliant Privacy Policy page for your blog.

Scoutle – If you’re using Scoutle to attract more readers to your blog then this plugin will allow you to add your scout as a widget in your sidebar.

Twitter Tools – This allows you to easily integrate your blog with Twitter and includes options to automatically post tweets whenever you make a blog post, automatically post your tweets to your blog and the ability to show your latest tweets in a sitebar widget. Personally I use TwitterFee and Ping.fm to syndicate my blog posts as I described in my previous post and just use this plugin to display my latest tweets on my blog.

What Would Seth Godin Do? – This plugin allows you to display a customisable message to new visitors to your blog which is a good way of encouraging new readers to subscribe to your RSS feed.

WordPress Popular Posts – This allows you to show your most popular blog posts in a widget such as the one I am using right at the top of this blog.

More Blog Posts About WordPress Plugins

• Best WordPress Plugins
• Most Popular WordPress Plugins
• WordPress Plugins Essentials
• 21 WordPress Plugins You Must Use
• WordPress Plugins – Five most useful WordPress Plugins for your website

In this post I want to share a simple tip that can help get more readers to your blog on auto-pilot. The idea involves linking together a number of Web 2.0 services so that whenever you make a new blog post it is automatically syndicated to many different sites.

If you’re a fan of Twitter then you might be familar with TwitterFeed, a service that will take your blog’s RSS feeds and automatically create a new tweet every time you make a new post. A recent change to TwitterFeed is that in addition to being able to automatically post to Twitter you can now choose to post to Ping.fm instead. This ability opens up a whole world of new possibilities for syndicating your content since Ping.fm has the ability to post updates to over 30 different social networking sites.

To start using this technique all you need to do is head over to Ping.fm and sign up for a free account. Once you’ve done that, take the time to work through all the supported services and either sign up for them or add your existing account details if you already have an account with any of them. This part is quite a laborious task but fortunately you’ll only have to do it once. When you’ve finished linking Ping.fm to your various social networking account simply head over to TwitterFeed and use that to link your blog’s RSS feed to your Ping.fm account. Now, every time you post to your blog TwitterFeed will pick up your post and pass it to Ping.fm which in turn will automatically send it to all your social networking accounts.

If you want to increase your syndication even further take a look at MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog and FriendFeed which all have the ability to aggregate updates from a number of Web 2.0 sites.

I’ve been meaning to update my blog for so long but for one reason or another I just haven’t got round to it. I apologise for leaving it so long between posts and will try my hardest to start posting more regularly. I’ve also decided to give my blog a bit of a fresh lick of paint so you can be forgiven for not recognising it as my blog when you got here. Personally I think that this new layout is a lot cleaner than the previous one and looks much better too. I still have one or two little tweaks to finish off but what you see now is pretty much the end result.

One reason I haven’t been posting is that instead of writing blog posts about strategies that I use to generate an income online is that I have been researching and experimenting with different methods and techniques. Of course, keeping them to myself would defeat the purpose of this blog so I’ll be sharing what I’ve learnt over the last few months in some upcoming posts. Since my previous posts of WordPress plugins were quite popular one thing I definitely will cover soon is what I consider to be the latest “must have” plugins since it’s been several months since I made those posts.

Anyway, I just wanted to post a quick update to let you know that I’m still alive and well and haven’t forgotten about this blog. Like I said, I do have a few ideas on topics to blog about but if you there’s anything you’d like to learn more about feel free to post a comment and I’ll try and put a post together covering it. Don’t forget that I’m also available on Twitter so feel free to follow me there as well.

One problem that many Internet Marketers face is coming up with ideas for niches to target in their online marketing. This can be equally true for both newcomers to Internet Marketing and also seasoned Internet Marketers looking for a new niche to complement their existing niches.

Fortunately there are a number of very useful websites that you can use as part of your niche research process. I have compiled a list of 20 such sites which should make your niche research much easier in the future.

What Are People Currently Searching For?

One way to gauge whether a niche is popular or not is to use some of the analysis tools provided by the search engines. These sites all use live information directly from the search engines to determine which topics are being searched for the most.

• Google Hot Trends – This is a very useful site for finding out the top 100 topics that people are actively searching for on Google right now. It’s updated hourly and you can dig deeper into each topic to see related news, blog posts and web pages which gives you a clearer idea about why the topic is currently attracting so much attention.
• Yahoo! Buzz – This gives you a list of the top stories that people are currently interested in. There’s also a very useful Top Searches panel that is updated hourly with the top 10 searches on Yahoo!
• Lycos 50 – Another round of of top web searches. This site is updated weekly with the top 50 searches from Lycos.
• AOL Hot Searches – Shows you what is currently hot on AOL Search.

What Are People Currently Interested In?

Another way to gauge what is popular right now is to look what people are interested in reading about. These sites provide you with information about the top stories and blogs that people are reading.

• Digg - I’m fairly sure Digg needs no introduction, but it can be a very useful gauge in determining what people are interested in reading about.
• Technorati What’s Popular – This gives you a very useful breakdown of the top blogs, searches, videos and news stories from the blogosphere.

What Are People Buying?

Obviously for a niche to be profitable you need to be sure that there is a hungry crowd of buyers waiting to spend their money. The following sites give you an insight into what people are buying:

• eBay Pulse – This gives you a list of the top 10 things that people are searching for on eBay. Since eBay is one of the biggest marketplaces on the Internet you can be sure that anything listed here is currently something that a lot of people are interested in buying.
• eBay What’s Hot – Another useful resource from eBay where sales data is combined with information from trade magazines and predictions from industry experts to give you a list of some of the hottest products for the current season.
• Amazon Best Sellers – The most popular items on Amazon.com, updated on an hourly basis.
• Shopping.com Top Searches – This shows you the top 100 products in each of Shopping.com’s many categories to help you determine which products are hot right now. The information is updated every two weeks.
• mySimon Top Searches – Very similar to the Shopping.com site. This gives you details of the top searches performed by mySimon members in many different categories.

What Affiliate Programs Are Available?

In addition to looking at the trends of search engine users and online shoppers it can also be useful to look at affiliate program directories. These sites have many different products listed in a directory format. Examining both the categories that make up and directories and the products themselves can give you some good ideas for niches to consider. There are also very useful when you have already decided on a niche and would like to find a suitable affiliate program to promote.

• AssociatePrograms.com Affiliate Program DIrectory – This site has information on over 10,000 affiliate programs allowing you to easily research suitable affiliate products to promote to your niche market.
• AffiliatePrograms.com Affiliate Program Directory – This site is similar to the AssociatePrograms.com directory although there are not as many affiliate products listed here.
• AffiliateGuide.com – Another useful directory of affiliate programs.
• LifetimeCommissions.com – This directory lists affiliate programs that can pay you repeatedly, whether from recurring monthly fees or every time a customer buys a product from a merchant rather than just a one-off sale.
• ClickBank Marketplace – Allows you to search for information about digital products offered for sale on ClickBank.
• PayDotCom Marketplace – Another marketplace for digital products.

What Are People Reading About?

Another way to determine popular niches is to look what magazines are available. If there are several different magazines available for a given niche then there is a good chance that there will be a lot of people interested in products for sale within that niche.

• Magazines.com – A very useful site to help you find different magazines covering a variety of different topics.
• Amazon Magazine & Newspaper Subscriptions – A comprehensive directory of all magazines that can be subscribed to via Amazon.
• Google Catalogs – Allows you to search for catalogs that are available for viewing online. All available magazines are organized into a very useful directory allowing you to quickly find magazines relevant to your niche,

Now that you are armed with this list of niche research websites you should fine it much easier to research and select a niche. If there are any other websites that you use as part of your niche research feel free to share them by posting a comment below.

More Blog Posts About Niche Research

• Affiliates! – How to Pick a Niche You Can Really Sell To!
• Five Tips On Niche Research
• Niche Marketing Research is the Key!
• Why Niche Research & Competitive Analysis Are Essential To Online Success
• 10 Reasons for Niche Research – Know Your Market Or Crash & Burn

Whether you are starting up a new blog or building a landing page for a niche affiliate product, one of the most important things you need to get right is your keyword research.

One of the most popular tools for keyword research is the Wordtracker free keyword suggestion tool. This allows you to enter your base keyword and returns a list of keyword suggestions along with the estimated number of daily searches.

One problem with this tool is that the search estimates are based on results from lesser known search engines rather than major search engines like Google. For more accurate results you could try using Wordtracker’s GTrends tool instead. What this does is come up with a list of keyword suggestion but uses Google Trends to calculate the number of estimated daily searches.

Now you might be thinking that Google Trends doesn’t provide you with the actual number of searches, just a graph of the keyword’s popularity over time. This is true but one thing you can do with Google Trends is to compare the graphs for two or more different keywords. If you have a keyword with a known amount of daily searches then you can use this as a baseline to estimate how many daily searches other keywords get by comparing the height of the lines on the graph.

The good news is that Wordtracker’s GTrends tool automates a lot of this for you. When you search for keyword suggestions you will notice that each suggested keyword has a little graph icon next to it. When you click on this you will get a popup window showing the Google Trends graph for the keyword along the the estimated number of visitors you should expect if you ranked #1 in Google for that keyword and the number of competing pages. The best keywords are those that return under 30,000 competing pages and have enough search volume to get over 100 hits daily.

One downside of Wordtracker’s tool is that you still need to go through and click on the icon for each keyword individually which can still be a time consuming task. Fortunately, software developer Janis Elsts have come up with an easy to use, inexpensive tool called GTrends SE that automates the process even further.

Once you’ve installed GTrends SE and the associated Firefox plugin all you need to do to research and analyse keywords is this:

1. Go to Wordtracker’s GTrends tool and get a list of suggested keywords.

2. Click a single button (provided by the Firefox plugin) to automatically send the list of suggested keywords to GTrends SE for analysis.

3. Let GTrends SE analyse the suggested keywords and tell you which are the best keywords to target.

That’s all there is to it.

Janis has deliberately chosen a low price point of GTrends SE so that the tool is accessible to almost everybody. This low price point coupled with the sheer convenience of being able to perform keyword research by clicking a single button and the hours of tedious, repetitive work that it will save you really do make this a must-have tool.

Since I made my previous post about WordPress plugins I have started to use a few more and thought it might be useful to share them with you.

• TwitThis – This plugin places a ‘TwitThis’ button at the end of every post making it easy for your blog readers to share your posts on Twitter.
• WP YouTube – Makes it easy to embed YouTube videos in your posts like I did in my last post about Scoutle.
• Subscribe To Comments – Adds a check box to your comment forms allowing commenters to get automatic email notifications when further comments are posted. It’s a great way to encourage people to come back to your blog and keep the discussion going.
• Show Top Commentators – Allows you to display a list of your top commenters in the sidebar encouraging more discussion on your blog.
• SezWho – Installing this plugin fully integrates your blog with the SezWho community which allows readers to discover new blogs that they may be interested in, commenters to gain recognition for their contributions across different blogs by using universal profiles and site owners to attract more traffic and build a community of readers. Installing this plugin fully integrates your blog with the SezWho community.

If there are any plugins that you use and would recommend to other people go ahead and leave a comment.

More Blog Posts About WordPress Plugins:

• 35 (New) WordPress Plugins for an Effective Blogging Experience
• May 2008: WordPress Plugins Used On This Site
• WordPress Plugins That Add Value
• Top WordPress Plugins For The Smart Blogger
• A Must Have WordPress Plugins

I have just discovered a new website called Scoutle that promises to deliver “Automated Social Networking” to bloggers. The site lets you create “scouts” that you place on your blog or website which then crawl the Internet to find other scouts with similar interests and link you up with them. I’ve added a scout to this blog and you can see it in action right there on the sidebar.

Here is a short video explaining exactly how it works:

The advantage of using Scoutle is that everything is automated. All you really need to do is sign up, create your scouts and add them to your web page and then check back to see if they have met any other scouts that you are interested in.

If two users find each other sites interesting they can create a Connection. The more Connections you have the more points you will earn which in turn will mean more visitors.

There are also Networks that users can either join or start a new one of their own. The websites within a network are continually ranked allowing you to easily find the most appreciated sites for your niche.

Scoutle relies on people finding other websites interesting for them to get a high ranking so it should be difficult to manipulate and since most of the work is done for you there really is no reason not to try it out.

More Blog Posts About Scoutle:

• Scoutle: Automated Social Networking For Bloggers
• Playing with Scoutle
• Scoutle – Automated Social Network for Bloggers
• Blog Promotion With Automated Social Networking
• Automated Social Networking for Bloggers