And Then There Were Three

Day 8 of the challenge has come and gone and I am now down to just 3 niches, which is okay since I didn't care for most of the others anyway...Of the 3 that are left, one is a subject I am really interested in already, one is something I know absolutely nothing about, and one is something I know a bit about but very little. Both the last two are subjects that I am interested in knowing more about, which certainly would help when it come to gathering information down the track. I know Ed and Dan find the thrill on Internet Marketing in learning about new niches they had previously known nothing about, and I certainly hope that down the track I can find that sort of enthusiasm for anything due to the marketing prospects...but at the moment I know myself well enough to know that I find it hard to get enthusiastic about a subject that doesn't interest me...so I'm glad that the subjects that do remain after all the market research testing are ones that do hold my interest.

So, anyway, I should probably explain how it came to be that my niches have been narrowed by one since yesterday. Ed's lessons for today revolved around getting some sort of confirmation that the number of searches per day that were coming up for my niches in Wordtracker was accurate, or not. It's all well and good for Wordtracker to tell you that you're getting 200 searches a day for your keywords, but apparently there have been a lot of cases where people have used that information to produce a sales site, only to find that they go no traffic whatsoever. As we know, Wordtracker is only an educated "guesstamite" of the searches for a day, and uses a couple of sites to gather this information. Unfortunately, one of these sites is not Google, as that would pretty much clear everything up (as it's Google rankings that we are going after here). Google are pretty tight lipped about the actual number of searches a particular keyword phrase can get in a day so it's was up to Ed and his "lab" - Rob Sommerville, to try and find a way of being able to double check the Wordtracker results. They feel they have managed to do this through Google Trends.

Google Trends is a place where you can see in graph form, just how your search terms have been going. Unfortunately, there are no actual numbers on the graph to tell you how many searches the graph is showing at any particular point, but thankfully the big brains of Ed, Rob and Dan managed to figure out a way that you can get a rough indication. By using a search term with a known about of searches per day as a baseline, we are then able to enter our search term alongside that one for comparison. So using one of Dan's keyword phrases, that of "Male Yeast Infection", where he knew that he was getting 500 page hits per day due to his statistic counter, we are able to see if our keywords get enough traffic to warrant going further with them.

Now, this is by no means an exact science. As I mentioned the graph shows search results, while Dan is only able to gather stats for people who have clicked through to his site. He is in the #2 position in Google for that term so it's safe to say that a majority of the searchers who do click on a link will be clicking on his, but obviously not all of them will. The idea behind this is not about getting exact results anyway, it's simply a test to confirm that there is enough traffic on your keyword phrase to go ahead with the next phase. If Wordtracker was displaying 1000 results a day but Google Trends didn't have anything show up then you would know that, for that keyword, Wordtracker wasn't accurate. Then, to add to the confusion, we find out that Google doesn't usually display results on their graph for search terms that get lass than about 250 searches a day. That seems to throw a spanner in the works as, according to Wordtracker, most of my terms are only getting around 100-150 searches a day. Never fear, says Ed, for below the graph is another section that includes searches by region, by city and by language. It just so happens that "Male Yeast Infection" is only searched for through the English language, so therefore we know that the blue bar that represents the English number of searches is the full amount for Dan's click through stats...that being 500-550 a day. So if the blue bar is 500 searches, and our red bar comparison is only half the length, then we know that there are roughly 250 searches a day. As I mentioned before, this is far from being an exact science. It is merely a tool to double check the worth of your key word phrases.

Now, as so many people at the 30 Day Challenge were using "Male Yeast Infection" as their baseline, it meant that a spike occurred in the Google Trends search results. This then meant that the English blue bar was no longer reading 500 searches, but as Ed points out, if you still regard the bar as representing 500 searches, then you can't go wrong, as if the bar is actually representing more searches then your red bar by comparison is getting more than it would if the bar was only representing 500. Still with me? No, I thought not...

Suffice to say that as long as there is a little bit of red appearing, say 3mm at least, then all should be okay. Luckily for me, two of my phrases actually showed up on the graph as well, one of them being way higher than the baseline, while still only having around 30,000 page matches in Google...so I'm particularly chuffed about that. But, it did mean that one of my niches had to get the arse, so to speak, as it just didn't cut the mustard in comparison to the blue English bar, and when I tried to widen the niche by removing a keyword I found that there were far too many competing pages in Google for it...so it got the chop.

Thanks to Ed, Rob and Dan I'm feeling quietly confident about my last three niches as I move into Day 9 of the challenge.