Keyword and Niche Research- Is it essential for a bum?

I havn't managed to get any squidoo lenses or blogger blogs up and running yet as I have had a busy couple of days looking after (omg) seven kids. No they're not all mine :), five of them were my sisters.

What I have managed to do is a little niche and keyword research. Is this essential ? Well yes I would say it is. I will explain a little more about this in a moment.

First I should tell you I have decided that I am not going to do three niches in one go, instead I am going to do one niche a week for the forseeable future. However I am still going to do one blogger blog and one squidoo lens for each niche, to test which one converts better.

Anyway back to keyword and niche research. For the first part of my research I went to clickbank to check out their marketplace. I had a thorough dig around all the products and chose one that I would like to promote.

I chose a product in the dog training niche. I know dog training is a popular niche and it may well be over saturated, but as I have a dog myself, and I know how hard it can be to train them I wanted to give this niche a go.

To do my keyword research for the dog training niche a downloaded a free tool called keyword dig. It is a completely free download and if you want you can download it from here.

I open keyword dig and type in my main keyword which is "dog training". Then I click on "gather keywords". Keyword dig then brings up a load of keywords that are related to dog training. Next to the keywords it also shows how many times that each particular keyword was searched for on the search engines.





I don't know how much you can make out from that picture, but you get the general idea right?

Next I click on "Gather Data" and then this tool will show you how many competing websites there are for this particular keyword.

To make good use of my keywords I want to find ones that have a high number of people serching for them, and a low number of competing sites. Keyword dig shows daily figures. So I am going to take note of all the keywords that have no less than 33 daily searches and no more than 50,000 comptitors. For some people these figures can vary they may want keywords with less competitors for example. But this is what I am going to stick with.

I will use these keywords to write articles to promote my my lens and blog.

So that's niche and keyword research summed up for you. My next step is to build my squidoo lens and my blogger blog promoting the dog training product. I will post a link to both when I am finished so you can see exactly how I have set them up.

This has been a rather long post so I'm gonna leave it there, but if you have any questions or have anything to add to this please feel free to comment.