Wow!  I’m having so much fun in doing the exercises in the 30DC (and one of my sites was hacked) that  I haven’t had the time to write up what I’ve been doing.  Just a quick recap on what we saw in the earlier parts of Day 2.  Hopefully we should now be aware of the definitions of the terms Market, Niche (or Nitch depending upon your orientation to the Atlantic Ocean, LOL) and Micro-niche.  If you remember, to represent a Market, a keyword will have over a million competing pages in Google (using the phrase in “quotes” – phrase matched).  A Niche will have between 30,000 and 1,000,000 pages (phrase matched) and a micro-niche will have less than 30,000 (again, phrase matched).

If you remember, traffic is also a consideration.  You might not have that much competition, but there might be a reason for that – nobody is looking for it, i.e. the keyword has no traffic.  And I did say that the guy who shot the video explaining this had used a tool called market Samurai to find this information out.  So what is Market Samurai?

Well it’s a very powerful tool which works on many levels.  If you were to use to just do keyword research, it would be worth every penny.  And for the purposes of this post that’s all I’m going to discuss.  As we go on through the 30DC, Market Samurai (MS) will be demonstrated to its full potential, so let’s not run before we can walk.

Using the definitions of Market, Niche and micro-Niche the trainer enters what he estimates to be a ‘Market’ sized keyword into MS and runs a keyword search.  This throws up all the related keywords that there could possibly be (well it seems like it – LOL).  Now using this list he is able to analyse the keywords in order to see how they may or may-not fit the criteria for Niche or micro-Niche. He then drills down to find a good set of keyword phrases which meet the suggested criteria of having at least 80 searches per day (broad matched), less than 30,000 competing pages (phrase matched) with a Phrase To Broad ratio (PBR) of at least 15% (in essence the PBR is what sets a search to either phrase- or broad-matched).

An awful lot of the initial research is intuitive. The trainer is able to pick a good market sized keyword, e.g. saxophone in his case, because he’s had practice.  When I first started doing this I was too prescriptive in what I was looking for as a market keyword, so much so that by the time I’d run things through MS, I was left with an half decent keyword that had no related keywords.  So, my best advice is to be broad (small b – remember the definitions of Market, Niche and micro-Niche) in your initial searches, don’t funnel yourself too early, you can become disheartened if all of your great ideas turn out to be no good.

To access the 30DC training on the 30DC website, click here.

OK, so I’ve given you a start on what Day 2 has to offer.  Basically, it takes the possibilities that you generated on Day 1 and analyses them in order to find out if they can be used to make you money.  What the Challenge uses to do this is a fantastic piece of software called Market Samurai.  They do offer you a 40 day free trial through the 30DC and it is well worth your trying it out.  In a nutshell, Market Samurai is a tool which on the basic level can tell you which keywords are potential subjects for a money-making website.  It offers much much more than this, suffice to say Day 2 only uses the analysis tool.

If you remember, in Day 2 (Part 1) I mentioned that we need to define what a market is and what a niche and a micro-niche is.  I also explained that this is done using cold hard statistics.  Where are these statistics from?  Market Samurai?  Well yes, but ultimately the stats come from Google.  So how does the 30DC define these three terms?

Market

A market is a group of people who are interested in a particular area of interest, which have money to spend on that particular area of interest and most importantly, are motivated to buy something.

Niche – Micro-niche

Drilling down to the next level, a niche (or nitch as the Americans call them) is simply a sub-set of a market. The 30DC uses the example of people being interested in Leica = market. Then the niche is people interested in Leica cameras and finally the micro-niche is Leica Digital Cameras.

OK, so far so wordy. I promised you numbers. The 30DC defines these terms by looking at the number of pages Google produces when a particular search is carried out. Using the 30DC example, the keywords would be ‘Leica’, ‘Leica camera’ and ‘Leica digital camera’. For a market, the number of pages returned would be in excess of one million (1,000,000). For a niche, we’d be looking at between 30,000 and 1,000,000. A micro-niche would return less than 30,000 pages. Please note that these are ‘phrase matched’ searches, that is the terms appear exactly as written on the pages which Google returns. So, in the 30DC example, ‘Leica digital camera’ appears as a phrase on a page, rather than separate words, ‘Leica’, ‘digital’ and ‘camera’ somewhere, in any order, on our page.

You can go to Google and do this analysis yourself. Type in Leica, just as it is and you’ll come up with many millions of competing pages. A market keyword then. Now type in Leica camera, without any speech marks and you’ll turn up another handful of millions of pages. Now put a ” at the front of the phrase Leica camera (“Leica camera or “Leica camera” – both mean the same) and see the number of pages drop to the small hundreds of thousands of pages. Finally take your phrase Leica digital camera and stick that in to Google. No quotes gives you almost 2 million pages. Now let’s add those quotes and Bingo! the number of results drops to around the 25,000 mark. There’s your micro-niche… well it’s a micro-niche based upon the number of competing pages. Because the 30DC team member who delivered this element of the training used Market Samurai to check the likely traffic for this keyword, it also fits under that criteria too. So as far as both Traffic and Competition are concerned we have our keyword. However this additional analysis is to come on Days 3 and 4.

So that’s the end of Day 2 Part 2. Soon, I will write up the other parts of Day 2 for you (intro to Market Samurai and some more definitions – theme keywords, category keywords and the distinction between broad- and phrase-matched keywords). If you can’t wait, why not head on over to the Thirty Day Challenge to sneak ahead of me!