Checking Your Competitors
You read and hear all the time that you should not target big niches or niches with tons of competitors, but how do you really know? The whole idea behind finding a work at home website niche that has plenty of searches and little competition is so you can make rankings in the search engines and get traffic. Most people go to Google and do a search for the keyword they are targeting and assume that the numbers brought by Google’s query are what they have to complete against. They then check the Google Keyword Tool and see how many searches are done on Google for this keyword and use those two numbers for deciding on their niche.
This is a dangerous game and can bite you down the road. How do you really know that you can rank on the first page for this keyword? Is it because there are not that many competitors? I prefer to know exactly what I am up against before I spend the time building and setting up a website targeting a specific niche. I always run the numbers and ask these questions.
How many backlinks and how much work will it take to be on the first page of Google?
What kind of visitors can I expect?
Is the amount of visitors going to be worth the amount of work it will take to get on the first page of Google?
These are questions that you need to be asking! I myself have made the mistake of not running the numbers. It is pretty disappointing to put up a website and never get visitors or make sales. Like I said above most of you understand finding a niche and understand how to find if this niche can be profitable, but you are not checking your competition realistically. Just because there are few competitors doesn’t mean that the competitors that are on the first page of Google don’t have tons of backlinks. Measuring the amount of backlinks your competitors have will give you an idea of how much work you will have to do to possible get on the first page.
Example: You find a keyword that gets a decent amount of searches every month. You find a product that you can create a website around that fits this keyword. You search the keyword in Google and go off of the query results it brings back, leaving you thinking that there is not that much competition and that you can make first page. Your numbers tell you that you won’t retire off of the money you will make, but if you make first page you will make a decent amount of money every month.
This is figuring that 1 in 100 visitors will buy the product or at 1%.
The problem is that you didn’t check and see how fierce you limited competition is. You see other people have found this niche and set up websites. They have had their websites up for over a year accumulating thousands of backlinks. Had you checked this you would have known that in order to make the first page of Google you will have to beat the lowest two sites on the first page, which both have at least 8000 backlinks. For you to get in the top 3 on the first page of Google for this keyword you would have to have around 10,000 backlinks which is what the top three websites are showing. To get this amount of backlinks takes a great deal of time and work. Realistically to get 10,000 backlinks you would have to work your tale off for over 6 months. Now this depends on the niche, but generally backlinks are hard to come by. You also have to realize that while you are playing catch up, your competitors are accumulating even more backlinks.
So if you are a one man or woman operation, this site is going to take all your time in order to see organic traffic. Then the question has to be asked, is it really worth the effort? Meaning are you going to be able to catch you competitors and are you going to make enough money to make up for all the time spent and all the money spent getting this kind of massive backlinks?
These are things that can kill your online work from home efforts. What is the point of putting up a website if no-one will come and see it? You must know exactly how much effort it will take to rank on the first page of Google if you are going to make your money on organic traffic and most people starting off have to hope for organic traffic, because they can’t afford advertising for traffic.
So now you understand how important this is, you need a solution. The easiest way to check how many backlinks your competitors have is by going to Yahoo’s http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com This tool will allow you to check any website’s total backlinks count giving you an idea of what you will need to compete. You can also go through the backlinks manually and check and see where they are coming from.
Example: You might see that the #1 result has 9000 backlinks and the #2 has 12,000.
This tells you that your top competitors are pretty fierce but you need to dissect this even more. You need to know what extensions their backlinks are coming from. Meaning, .com, .net, .org, .edu, .gov and so on. The #1 site could have quit a few .edu backlinks which could explain why it is ranking better with less links. Now like I said you can go through each individual link from Yahoo siteexplore, which takes forever when a site has 10,000 backlinks, or you can use a better tool for dissection like SeoElite and get the total from Yahoo. SeoElite won’t tell you the total number of backlinks accurately, but it will tell you the breakdown and trace .edu and .gov backlinks. This is important in understanding why this competitor is ranking so well and what you will have to do to beat that website in the rankings.
Appling this method will give you an edge and keep you from entering niches that have fierce competition. Now I am not saying stay completely away from fierce competition. I am saying that you need to run the numbers and be realistic about what it will take to get to the first page and top search engine results. By knowing this you can set your budget and time and see if this will be worth the effort to get there!
The Best Program For Making Money!
These are the kind of credentials that make a great work from home program.
1. Tons of great information!
2. Information put together to educate a beginner or advance online business individual.
3. Step by step video tutorials
4. Proven, consistent, secure system that produces income everyday
5. No Stuffing Envelops
6. No Surveys
7. No Telemarketing Phone Calls
8. No Personal Selling
9. Revolutionary Program and Business
I am a big fan of affiliate marketing and putting up tons of websites around affiliate products. That is how I have made a ton of money online, but this program is something different. I do believe it is a great way to make money if you have the money to invest in this system. Normally we see program after program and website after website come and go, all promising to make us rich. Generally when you buy them you find useless recycled information that may have worked years ago, or never worked at all. It gets really frustrating spending hard earned money for work at home business programs that never live up to a quarter of their price. That is why I stated at the beginning of this paragraph that I am a fan of doing it yourself by marketing affiliate products and building websites or blogs around these affiliate products. I and a group of other friends even decided to build this work from home website showing top true products and giving affiliate marketing and SEO advice to try to help people not waste money on programs not based on affiliate marketing and all out scams. With all that said, this is probably the one program that is the exception. Meaning this is the one program that is different, not recycled crap, and even though it is based on a different theory, actually works. So if you have the money to buy it, I would definitely add it to your work from home arsenal. I will still tell you that along with this program you still need to be making money on other fronts, making sure all your eggs are not in one basket, but this is a great income making program that can get you revenue coming in and put you ahead of most buy giving you extra cash to finance the other parts of your work at home business. Come check this program out HERE!
4 Things To Increase Online Success
Some simple ways to get the word out on your products and programs plus get massive backlinks. I am going to talk about two fairly new websites and two that have been around for a bit. These websites can help get you massive backlinks, get you some traffic, and are essential for your work at home efforts.
1. amazines.com
This site has been around for a while and should be used every time you write and submit an article. You will receive backlinks to this site, which has a pretty high page rank and your articles can be grabbed by other webmasters and blog owners. These webmasters and blog owners will put your article on their sites, giving even more backlinks to your website and traffic from people reading the article and following the links. This site and method are new to a lot of you, but some of you have heard of article marketing before. This site is a key to that article marketing and one of the main places you need to place your article for your work at home business. The site is free to sign up and place articles on.
2. scribd.com
This site has also been around for a while. This site has the same importance as the one above, in the fact that it is a must for submitting articles. It is also free to sign up with and submit articles for your work from home business. The only difference is this site only accepts articles in certain formats. This can make it tricky when placing you links on your article. The best method for this site is to write or copy the article in Word. Microsoft Word will allow you to hyperlink your keywords you are targeting in the article. You then save the file and upload it. The hyperlinks will stay in place giving you backlinks in the article and allowing readers to follow the link back to your websites, products, programs, and so on.
Most of you are not new to article marketing. If you are new then article marketing is absolutely necessary for your work at home business, if you want traffic and to make sales. Some of you who are not new might be using article submitting software. A lot of these types of software do not hit these two sites. You need to take the extra time to submit to these two sites if you want any benefit from your article marketing effort.
This site is fairly new. This is a great system for getting backlinks, exposure, and some traffic. It is free to sign up, although they have an advanced membership that is even better. What is does is take you article you wrote and submit it to tons of blogs. This gives you backlinks, and the traffic from people reading these blogs. Now the difference is they are not submitting to blog farms that they own. People with blogs in all kinds of niches sign up to receive free content. So you win by getting links and the blog owners win by getting constant content. If you are a blog owner, this is a great method to get content relevant to your niche. They screen articles very closely to make sure duplicate content is not being submitted. They also teach you methods of spinning your article to avoid the same exact article being posted on multiple blogs. I won’t get into to many more details on why this is important for your work at home business because they have great tutorial videos on their site explaining what they are doing and the value of it.
This is another great fairly new website. This site does cost a monthly membership fee, but they give you the first month free so you can see the value of using this system for your work from home business. This site’s methods are revolutionary SEO. This system can and will help your site by drastically increasing you backlinks in a safe, search engine friendly way. I would definitely suggest trying the 1st month free offer to see what I am talking about. Once again I will not go into much detail, because they explain the whole system and its benefits on the website.
Now these last two sites are fairly new and as with any new sites they are still fixing and adjusting different things, but they are cutting edge ways to gain a huge advantage over your competition. If you are serious about a working at home business, then these 4 things will get you well on the way to success.
