So, I was crusing around on Spyfu.com today, and I saw lots of listings involving mesothelioma. Now, to be completely honest with you, I did not know that mesothelioma was the disease that you get from asbestos. Go figure. It is a high cost keyword (from an Adwords point of view) - no doubt because some well-meaning and some slimy lawyers are building huge lists of class action lawsuit clients. In fact, spyfu.com say it can pay as much as $50 per click.

So, I said to myself -- "Self, what would Micro Niche Finder say about this?" As it turns out, it says that there are some long tail keywords out there with very low competition. Now, I remember what happened with HistoryOfElvis - I was able to rank easily for a silly long tail keyword -- Elvis Aaron Presley Collectible Necktie because there was zero competition. So, I said to myself -- "Self, let's put up a long tail page about mesothelioma just to see what happens." I agreed with myself, so my next post will be a long tail keyword targeted post about mesothelioma.

I'll see what happens over the next week and blog about the results.

Now, if my millions of readers go out and do the same thing, it will goof up my experiment. Instead, I recommend you run your own experiment with Micro Niche Finder in a non-mesothelioma area and comment here with your results.

Thanks,
Mark

Update on Micro Niche Finder Experiment

I threw this initial post up rather quickly. Then I threw up a post about mesothelioma just as fast. It was a completely worthless 300 word article targeted at the keyword phrase that I had selected. So, I go to thinking -- here I am, adding worthless content to the internet so I can capture a click from some pour soul whose husband or wife has this terrible disease. After reviewing the search results pages in Google, I quickly discovered that this particular keyword and groups of similar keywords are very abused. In fact, the mesothelioma group of keywords initially appeared on a list of high CPC that has been floating around the Internet for almost 4 years!

So, I called my friend Garry Conn. I have really not known him all that long, but I respect his opinion a great deal already. In fact, he designed this WordPress Theme for me, and has given me advice on several occasions. (By the way, you can actually call him directly yourself -- the number is on his blog). Anyway, I asked Garry -- what's my blog about? He had a really strong reaction that confirmed my gut feeling. This blog is not about MFA pages and other trickery designed to game the system (and neither am I).

At this moment, I am very interested in using Micro Niche Finder; however, I am quickly learning that some keywords can be detrimental to the health of my conscience an my blog

So, I am out of the mesothelioma business after about 3 or 4 hours. Sorry for the distraction.

As always, your comments are appreciated.

Thanks,
Mark

So far on our journey to build the Niche Super-Site we have discussed:

• Definition of the Niche Super-Site case study
• List of Niche Super-Site design goals
• How to select your niche
• Choosing your keywords.

Remember, our overall goal is to build a niche site that returns $2/day in residual income.

Today, we pick a domain name.

I think that domain names are of limited importance for SEO. Why do I feel that way? Search for "California Surfing" in Google. What do you see? You see none of the page 1 results contains both california and surfing in the domain name. Some have surf or surfing, though. So, while it can be helpful to get some keywords in the domain name, it does not seem to be critical to get them all.

I think that Dosh Dosh has this about right. To select a domain name, you need to:

• Determine what kind of blog you will have (we did that)
• Research keywords (we did that too)
• Brainstorm for domain names
• Check availability
• Register an available name

You will recall that our keyword search showed that people want to know about history of Elvis -- they are searching for elvis presley "history, born, death, funeral, etc.". Some quick brainstorming get you stuff like historyofelvispresley.com. As expected, a quick domain name search reveals that "historyofelvispresley.com" is not available.   Like Dosh Dosh, I tend to use either AjaxWhois or DomainBot to check name availability.  I tend to buy my domains from ServInt (they host this blog), and you can also check domain name availability there.   More on hosting tomorrow.

For now, we need to check some other names.  And, as if by magic, historyofelvis.com is available. Or, it was available. I own it now.So, based on our results, we have spent about the right amount of time selecting a niche domain name: http://www.historyofelvis.com. It has two of our keywords (history and elvis). In a few days, that will be up and running with our new niche site.

See you tomorrow, when we can talk about registering our domain name and choosing a web host for our site.  For that, we're going to rely heavily on Caroline Middlebrook's excellent eBook on building niche sites.

So far on our journey to build the Niche Super-Site we have discussed:

• Definition of the Niche Super-Site case study
• List of Niche Super-Site design goals
• How to choose your Super-Niche

Remember, our overall goal is to build a niche site that returns $2/day in residual income in the Elvis Presley niche.

Before we rush out and buy a domain name, we need a keyword strategy. Now that we have settled on Elvis Presley, let's hop over to Wordtracker.com and see what they have to say about The King and his Keywords.

If you sign up for the Wordtracker free trial you can access their competition search tool. If you enter the starting phrase elvis presley, you can then pick your 30 favorite phrases returned for further analysis. The 30 phrases come from analyzing the keywords from 100 other "elvis presley" webpages.

The results are very interesting.

Based on the KEI (a measure of the goodness of the keyword), people want to know about history of Elvis -- they are searching for elvis presley "history, born, death, funeral, etc.". So, for now, let's decide that our main keywords are:

• elvis and elvis presley (these are implied but very competitive. We will not try to rank for these. Some day, if our page rank is high, we might make the first page for these (but not any time soon).
• history of elvis and history of elvis presley
• elvis born/birth/death/funeral
• elvis presley born/birth/death/funeral

As a note, let's remember the other top keywords (KEI greater than one with some traffic) and try to create a page for each phrase. More on that later. Also, note the misspelling of Presley (as Presly).  We are also going to want to add some keywords specific to the affiliate programs that we will be offering (like eBay through phpBay).

See you tomorrow when we'll talk about registering a domain!