Today has been a busy day of promoting and learning – more about that a little later in the post…

The Next Step

If you recall from yesterday’s post, I recommended that you:

o Make and inventory of your skills and hobbies
o Download Good Keywords and get familiar with the demand for keywords which represent your skills/interests.

Let’s move on to the next step.

With Good Keywords, we looked at the keyword ‘train’ and saw that over the last month, there were over 147K searches.

Now, let’s talk a little economics for a second. Do you remember the laws of supply and demand? Let’s, in our mind, think of the number of searches returned by Good Keywords as a representation of demand. Does that make sense?

Now what about the supply? Well, here is the cheap way (not necessarily the easiest) to get this information. (I generally recommend that you do things the hard way the first time, so when a tool comes along to automate the process, you have a greater appreciation for it.) An easy way to get the supply numbers is from a search engine, like Google.com.

Open Google.com and type the word ‘train’ in the search box and press the “Google Search” button.



















Notice the words just above where you typed ‘train’. They say “Results 1 – 10 of about 448,000,000 for train”. That 448 Million represents the number of pages that searching on ‘train’ returns. That number is your supply.

So what we are going to do now is divide the Results by the Searches or the ‘Supply’ by the ‘Demand’.

What are our Results (Supply)? – 480,000,000

What are our Searches (Demand)? – 147,000 (approximately)

480,000,000 / 147,000 = 3,265.31


Now, let’s play a ‘what if’ game for a second.

What if these were the numbers?

Results (Supply) – 240,000,000

Searches (Demand) – 147,000


Our demand stayed the same, but our supply has been cut in half. What does that mean? Well, if the demand is the same and the supply is cut in half, that means there is less competition, right? Right!

Let’s put this in our equation:

240,000,000 / 147,000 = 1632.65.

Did you notice what happened to our resulting number? It was cut in half.

So, we can say that the lower the resulting number, the less the competition, right? Do you understand?

If you are not following this, then reread this section.

So, what you are going to do next is figure out which keyword combinations have the lowest resulting number of our Results/Supply formula.

Look down the list of your keywords/keyword phrases in the Good Keywords tool and for each phrase that is appealing to you, do this calculation. In addition, you should set a minimum traffic goal – say 10K searches per month. If you get too low below 10K searches, you run the risk of there not being enough demand for your topics. However, 10K is completely arbitrary – that’s just the number that I use.

In the next posting, I’m going to show you how you can run some estimates to give you an idea of the money making potential of a keyword/keyword phrase using Adsense.


Assignment

Run your keywords through the R/S equation and determine which keywords/keyword phrases you should focus your time on.


A summary of yesterday’s activity:
o Yesterday, I solicited about 40 more link exchanges in Link Metro (http://www.linkmetro.com/). I’ve got about 100 exchange offers outstanding that I’m waiting to hear on. I had 8 successful link exchanges yesterday. Most of all of my exchanges are with Pet related sites.

o I posted to my favorite groups.google.com forum.

o I uploaded a new Kitten Picture – you can see it at http://kitten-pictures.com/.

o I setup and article page and added an article to it: http://kitten-pictures.com/articles -- the article that I wrote is “An Introduction to Pet Photography”.

o Added to the top of my site a note that let’s people know that I am interested in exchanging links with them.


Today’s activity plan:
o Solicit more link exchanges in Link Metro (already started)

o Write this posting (almost complete)

o List more articles off of the article page (done – a total of nine so far)

o Start working on another pet-related article

o Make a post into my favorite groups.google.com forum (done)

o Upload a new Kitten Picture (done) (www.Kitten-Picture.com)

Here are my search engine standings for “Kitten Pictures” as of this morning:

http://kitten-pictures.com/:
Google: not found
Yahoo: not found
MSN: not found

http://kitten-pictures.blogspot.com/ (this site redirects to http:Kitten-Pictures.com):
Google: not found
Yahoo: not found
MSN: 3

Still not seeing much movement in the search engines. Everything that I’ve read seems to suggest that I’m doing all of the write things – advertising my site on forums, publishing original content articles, actively seeking link exchange partners. I believe it’s just a matter of time, especially for Google, which is tougher to get ranked on.

I may also want to start thinking about publishing some content along with my pictures – just to give the search engines something to grasp onto. I’m going to looking into that.


Tomorrow’s Plan:
o Pursue Link Exchanges

o Post to my favorite Google Groups

o Work on my original-content pet-related article

o Work on this sites next post

o Do a lot of reading on various forums.


Questions? Comments?
I welcome them. You can either post the question in the comments section at the bottom of this posting, or you can email me at Stan -@- StanBeck.com. Please feel free to tell others about this blog or my Kitten Pictures site.


Until next time…
Make it a great day!