There are several ways to get backlinks by commenting on Squidoo lenses.

Firstly you will need to locate Squidoo lenses in your niche. Put the following into Google search:

KEYPHRASE + site:squidoo.com

Next you can either click on the highest ranking Squidoo lens and scroll down the lense to the comments section. Then you can leave a comment with your Website URL.

Alternatively you could check which Squidoo page on the first page has the highest PR. You could do this with SEO Quake for example. Then use the NoDoFollow plugin for Firefox to check whether your comment will be a nofollow or dofollow link. When you find a lense with a high PR that allows DoFollow links you simply add your comment with your URL to get a high PR backlink.

Remember when commenting on blogs or Squidoo lenses, always be genuine. Never spam!

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James and I at Fast Web Formula 1

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Dean and I at Fast Web Formula 1

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For many beginning internet marketers, finding niche markets is the hardest part.

It’s easy to get stuck with the question what is the best niche market, and then never progress any further into the world of internet marketing. Many people spend weeks looking at different market niches, being undecided and trying to do more research.

If this is your very first start in internet marketing you probably really want to get this right and you end up being paralysed by all the options. You might even find yourself doing niche market research for weeks yet feeling undecided.

Well, let me tell you something: To identify niche markets should only take you a few minutes. An hour max. Once you’ve decided on a market you can spend a little bit of time researching the people in the market and their problems, and finally deciding on an offer you’d like to promote (or even creating a product yourself).

The number one criteria for finding your niche market should be this question:

Are other people already making money in this market?

If the answer is yes, you can jump straight in and do your research for this niche market.

The reality is even if the market doesn’t work for you and turns out to be a dud, you might not be able to recoup the cost of your website and traffic generation efforts, but it would be even harder for you to get the 4 weeks back you could have otherwise spent on market research.

Here are some simple ideas to get you started to find a niche within 5 minutes:

• What do people spend money on? (Tip: Think about what you’ve recently spend money on!)
• What are people’s goals? (Tip: Think about what your goals are… get fit, earn more money, travel, etc)
• See what already sells (Tip: Look on Amazon, Ebay, Clickbank, etc they all have a list of best sellers)

I hope this helps you get your ideas opportunities rolling!

Once you have found a niche, check out my post on how to research a niche market in 5 easy steps and how to research your niche market using Survey Monkey.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to add them below.

Many beginning internet marketers are a little bit confused about the difference between keyword research versus market research.

Your market research indicates whether you’ve found a ‘hot’ market or niche. This means a group of people who are interested in a particular topic and are willing to spend money on products or services relating to this topic.

Your keyword research then indicates which exact words people are using to find information in this niche. For your keyword research you should consider things like SEO competition, how many searches a keyword gets, how much traffic a website would get from these searches, etc.

Your research should look something like this:

Market Research
1. Find niche markets
2. Determine whether it is a ‘hot’ niche market (Tip: If other people are making money in this niche, it should be possible for you too!
3. Find offers in this niche market
4. Plan how to enter the niche market (blog, squeeze page, PPC, SEO, etc)

Keyword Research

5. Do some broad keyword research (also called lateral keyword research)
6. Swipe your competitors keywords
7. Analyse each keyword (including number of searches, SEO competition, PPC cost, commercial intent, etc)
8. Decide on your primary and related keywords for each of your online assets (blog posts, articles, squeeze page, etc)

I will be posting in more detail about each of these steps in the near future. In the meantime, please leave comments or questions below.

In my recent post on free keyword research, I outlined some simple strategies on using the Google search engine to do keyword research.

In this post, I want to show you how to use free keyword research tools to find out even more keywords for your niche.

One of the most powerful methods of creating is to gather ideas from your environment, including your competitors. It follows the saying “To criticise is easier than to start from scratch.” In marketing and copywriting speak, this is called swiping.

Swiping your competitors keywords is a very powerful technique to get your own keyword research started, and even to confirm and benchmark your existing research. (Just remember that you can always raise your standards and go beyond your competitors benchmark too!)

Using the Google Keyword Research Tool

Firstly, make sure that your competitors website is actually optimised to ensure you’re choosing someone who actually sets high standards for themselves. To do so, quickly look at the title of their website and their heading and see whether they are using keywords.

Then go to the Google keyword research tool www.googleeasysearch.com.

Check Website Content in the box on the left hand side, and paste your competitors URL in the box on the right hand side.

You will now see a results page that displays keywords according to different groups. Don’t worry too much about the search volume data of each keyword – I will cover more advanced keyword research in a future post.

You can now pick and choose the keyword groups that are applicable to your project.

You should now have a much longer list of potential keywords for your project.

Be sure to add these to the txt file where you are collating your keywords and to group them so you can easily identify the separate groups of keywords.

This will come in handy when choosing which main keyword and which related keywords you can use for a blog post, for your article marketing, etc.

Leave a comment below if you have questions or you have other great ideas for free keyword research tips.

Hubpages is a third party page similar to Squidoo. You can create an account at http://hubpages.com.

The reviewers at hubpages are quite strict and often don’t allow you to publish content that already appears elsewhere on the web or promote products or websites. That’s why many people ask can you post previous submitted articles on hubpages.

Although it’s difficult to post articles you’ve already submitted elsewhere, it is well worth your time to create a few Hubs with these sneaky tips:

1. Do your keyword research before you start. Like creating a Squidoo lense, the purpose of a hubpage is to rank highly in Google and channel the traffic to your money site (or list building site). Also add as many related keywords as you can so your hub can be found through other hubpages.
2. Re-write and re-structure content if you’re using an article that has already been published elsewhere. You can also combine two articles into one hubpage.
3. Add pictures and graphics to make your hubpage more interesting.
4. Create a keyword rich summary description.
5. Add your articles together to form Hubgroups which make it easier for visitors to find other related hubs (only add your own, otherwise you lose traffic to someone else).
6. Do NOT add any links when first creating your hubpage. Add your link later on, once your hubpage has been approved by a reviewer. Once the first link has been approved try and add a second link a week later.
7. Build links to your hubpage to increase its search engine ranking and traffic.

Do you have any other tips and tricks to get your hubpages going? Please leave your comments below!

Doing a website audit is an essential part of making the most of your online assets. Website audits are like a SWOT analysis of your website, you want to find out what its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats are.

It would be too much to cover all aspects of such an audit in this post, so I am simply starting with the main aspects of an SEO focused audit. This means you will be looking at whether your on-page optimisation is fit for the search engines and whether it will contribute to better search engine rankings.

Keywords

Keywords are the beginning and the end of your SEO strategy. Once you have done your keyword research and decided on the best keyword, you will need to include it in your website. As a rule of thumb, you want to include it in about 2 percent of the website text, meaning you mention your keyword twice in every hundred words. Your keywords or key phrase should also be included in your websites title tag, description and meta tags.

Internal Links

A very powerful, but often disregarded strategy to increase search engine rankings is internal linking. You should include as many internal links as you can, while still keeping it natural. A good goal might be to have three internal links for each webpage or blog post on your site. Make sure the internal links spread out to all of your pages and blog posts rather than just your homepage. You also need to pay attention to the anchor text, which is the text that people click on that links to another page. You should use the keyword phrase you have used to optimise each individual webpage and blog posts to link to that page. For example, you click on the word ‘swiss watches’ from one of your web pages and you land on another page that is optimised for the keyword ‘swiss watches’.

Sitemap

Building on the importance of internal linking, you should include a sitemap on your website. A sitemap helps the search engine robots to understand what content is on your site. In addition it creates internal links which help with your SEO ranking.

Search engine friendly URLS

When someone starts their own website, they often pay a lot of attention to the domain name, and rightly so. If possible, the domain name should include your core keyword in it. But unfortunately, this is often where the attention to the URL stops. In many cases, subpages of the domain are simply named with IDs and other code, such as example.com/index.php?id=19 To increase your chances of higher search engine rankings, and make your own website audit complete, you should change these links to include your keywords and look like this example.com/keyword-phrase.html

If this sounds a little bit complicated to you, you can decide to use a well-established SEO software to do your own website audit for you. The audit will be done in minutes and give you a great step-by-step program to increase your search engine rankings.

Doing proper keyword research is essential to your success online. Spending a little bit of time understanding what is involved and how to get it right will pay off hundredfold later on.

In this first article in a series on keyword research and analysis, I will introduce you to some free keyword research tools, such as Google.

Getting Started With Free Keyword Research

To get ready start a txt file in which you can cut and paste the keywords you collect. Start with a keyword that is central to your business. Let’s use the term “life coaching” as an example.

A lot of people use word documents to store their keywords but I would advise against this, as word automatically corrects the spelling and sometimes we want to have keywords that are deliberately mis-spelled.

Finding relevant keywords

Enter this keywords into Google and take note of the suggestions that Google gives you. These suggestions will come up automatically when you enter a keyword into Google and wait a few seconds without hitting enter. Note these keywords in your txt file.

Doing free keyword research with Google.

Now press enter and do Google search for this keyword. At the bottom of the search results you will see related search terms. Also note these in your txt file.

How to do lateral keyword research with Google

Try Some Lateral Keyword Research

Keywords aren’t always just variations of one term, finding some lateral keywords can really help you to get more traffic.

A good tool is the Google wonder wheel. You can access it by going to the search results page and then clicking ‘Show Options’ right underneath the search box. You will now see a menu of options on the left hand side. Under the header Standard Review, click ‘Wonder wheel’. Add those keywords that aren’t on your list yet, to your list.

Lateral keyword research with Google Wonder Wheel

Go through the list and delete any keywords that are not relevant to your project.

You should now have a list of at least 10-15 keywords to start with. In the next post I’ll be describing how to analyse your list of keywords to find the best ones. In the meantime, please leave a comment below.

Squidoo Lenses are a super-easy way to create a basic website with lots of backlinks to your websites, videos, articles and other projects. You can create Squidoo Lense at http://www.squidoo.com.

The site can be a little confusing at first, so here are 8 tips to get you started, a little beginner tutorial Squidoo:

1. Use a good article as the main content – it could be a variation of an article you’ve already submitted to Ezine Articles or other article submission software.
2. Use photos or other pictures – they should be royalty free photos to which you’ve bough the rights, for example from Istock Photo. Otherwise you can get royalty free photos from Wikipedia or Flickr.
3. Add an RSS feed for another one of your websites or blogs to add additional content and create backlinks to your sites.
4. Add a video from your YouTube Channel where appropriate – this creates additional content and increases the views of your video if your Squidoo lense gets lots of traffic.
5. Do not mention any topics that are forbidden on Squidoo, these include debt, finances, sex, and more. Check the Squidoo Terms and Conditions to be sure.
6. Make use of the “health” button at the top of the page as this will give you some clues to improve your lense while you create it.
7. Don’t forget to add links back to your blog by adding in
   

   < a href="http://yourdomain.com" > keyword < /a>

   There is no obvious way to add links but using the html code works after you hit the publish button.

8. Add tags that relate your keywords in the right hand column.

What are your favourite Squidoo Lenses Tips? Leave a comment below

You have found a hot niche – lots of searches and traffic – now you need to find out what to sell them. Here are 5 ways how to research a niche and find out what people really want.

Create a Survey

Start a Survey Monkey survey. It offers a free version. If you’re not sure what to write in your survey, check out my recent video on how to create a survey.

Now you need to direct traffic to your survey, so you can get as many people as possible to answer your questions. Here are some tips how to do this:

• Post a link to your survey in forums (some forums have sections for media research that get a particularly good response rate)
• Email your survey link to your database. If you don’t have a database yet, send it to friends and family who fit into your niche.
• Post a link to your survey on relevant facebook groups

Forums

There are forums for just about every single niche market you can imagine -from “underwater wrestling” to “how-do-you-know-if-you’re-a-Vampire”. You can usually browse these forums, without needing to register. It’s called lurking.

This way you can find out what problems and frustrations your potential customers have, and whether they actually spend money on this niche. When researching a niche, I saw someone posting “I buy every book I can find about [XYZ].” That’s when I knew that I had a market that would buy my product.

Yahoo Answers

Yahoo Answers is a fantastic tool to research what your market wants. Why? Because people actually go there to ask questions! Browse or search your niche topic and see how many questions are being asked, what kind of questions they are and what kind of responses people post.

Hardcopy books

Print books are an amazing research tool for you. Publishing a book normally costs thousands of dollars and the publishers want to make sure they meet market demands as much as possible. You can either go to the book store and scan the index pages of books in your niche, or you can go to Amazon and use the ‘Look Inside’ function, to browse through the index, foreword and cover of the books.

Magazines

Like the book industry, magazine publishing is also a million dollar industry. To make sure readers keep buying, the editors and publishers of the magazines do constant market research. They also need to determine what the market wants.

You can either browse the shelves at your local newsagency (newsagencies near airports and train stations usually have the biggest selection), or browse online subscription services (such as www.magazines.com) to see what magazines are available. If magazines continually cover the same topic (something like ‘Get a bikini body for summer’), you have found a great angle for your niche market.

Which methods do you use to research niche markets? Leave your comment and share your experiences.