Many seasoned site owners treat online keyword research as an important regular task in developing their sites. In order to do this properly though, it’s important to first understand what keywords are, why research is important and how it’s done.

Defining Keywords and Research

More often than not, keywords aren’t single standalone words. They’re phrases that are related to the topics or niches of websites or blogs.

Not all site owners believe they need keywords so they don’t go into research. Those who do put value on them typically create lists of related keywords to use on their sites. The process followed to build these lists is known as keyword research.

For many site owners, research starts even before they pick and buy domain names. It then becomes a continuous activity before writing articles for posts and pages.

Why it’s Done

From my perspective, I like conducting research because it is one way to find related topics to blog about. For a lot of other webmasters however, research is done so they can find related phrases that can help increase search engine visibility.

Inserting keywords in certain sections in a blog post helps search engines find out what it’s all about. To a certain extent, the use of keywords is one factor that search engines consider to determine whether a site, web page or blog post turns up in search engine results pages for a particular search phrase. Because keywords can potentially be used to manipulate search engine results, there are general guidelines for their proper use and placement.

If the explanation above doesn’t make sense to you now, don’t worry. The section on SEO will explain keywords in greater detail.

How is Research Conducted

There is no single set way to do research. Different gurus have different methods. In general though, the task ideally focuses on looking for phrases that:

• have some profit potential (profitable)
• are searched by a good number of people (good traffic)
• aren’t already used on a lot of other aged, frequently linked to pages (little competition)

You can follow the same basic steps outlined in the section on niche market research for evaluating traffic, assessing competition and determining profitability to come up with a list of possible keywords that are related to your topic. Set these aside for when you’re ready to buy a domain or start writing posts.

In Hinduism, an avatar is the manifestation of a deity as a human. In the online world, the term has come to refer to a variety of other things including the hypothetical individual that is a representation of a market’s collective qualities and characteristics.

In other words, as a blogger, you should consider an avatar to be that person you imagine yourself communicating to when you write a blog post. This presupposes one thing, that members of a market have similar traits and qualities, making it possible for bloggers and website owners to create avatars.

Avatar Importance

Imagine yourself for a moment talking to someone. What can help you keep a person’s interest? What can you say that can convince him to listen and interact with you for hours on end? If you know a person well enough, you’d know exactly what topics and themes to bring up during a conversation. If the person you’re talking to is polite enough, you might occasionally get away with references to yourself or to topics that don’t interest him.

Members of a market are a lot like any person you communicate with except that they’re not often polite. When people go to blogs to read or watch videos, they want to be shown exactly what they’re looking for. Write about a topic outside of their interests and they leave.

You need to have an avatar in mind when you blog even if you don’t intend to sell anything so you’ll always know what topics to blog about that are within the interest of your target market or target readers.

Creating an Avatar

You will find the task of creating an avatar less difficult if your blog topic or theme is one that you are also very much interested in. If you love what you blog about, you already represent your market to some extent and you are therefore your own prototype of your avatar.

If this is not the case, this is when you need to create from scratch which is not a very easy task for a lot of people. This is yet again another reason for you to consider from the very beginning blogging about something of interest to you.

Now even if you are already a perfect example of a member of your own market, you still need to clearly define your avatar on paper. This is to make sure you take into consideration other traits you don’t have that others do and to ensure you never forget who your avatar is.

To help you make your avatar, you need to ask these questions:

• Who would be most interested in your topic?
• What are his motivations for wanting to read about what you blog?
• What are his traits, qualities and characteristics?
• Does he have any fears and apprehensions? What are these?
• Does he have any problems in life that you might be able to offer solutions to? What are these?

Some online marketers who are very precise about avatar creation go so far as to recommend that you also identify the smallest details including, but not limited to:

• Age
• Gender
• Civil status
• Geographic location
• Family composition
• Educational attainment
• Employment status

I would say it is important to be detail-oriented, mainly because, the more you know about your target market or reader, the easier for you to communicate with him and keep his attention. For example, identifying your avatar’s fears and life issues can help you create blog posts geared towards helping him solve those issues.

Online Research

The obvious question you’d ask yourself would be: How sure am I that the avatar I’m creating exists? What if I’m just creating someone in my head and there aren’t people like that? Again, you’d avoid this problem if you already represent your market to some degree.

If you’re having doubts about your avatar, online research is the only solution. Visit sites, forums, message boards and communities related to your topic. What kind of group or groups of people frequent these places? Are they mothers, fathers, single individuals? Are they looking for solutions to certain problems? How do they communicate with each other?

Avatar Example

Here is an example of an avatar for a yoga exercises site. This is by no means a complete representation but it’s good enough for the purpose of illustrating how to create and use an avatar.

• 35 year old woman perhaps nearing quarter life crisis
• on the brink of experiencing health issues because of lack of exercise
• works in a 9-5 job while trying to take care of three kids and a husband
• extremely stressed out and about to lose it
• looking for a way to de stress, relax and be happier and healthier
• with some academic background in physical therapy but shifted to sales and marketing for a pharmaceutical company
• experience in PT convinced her to study yoga

What does this tell you? With this avatar in mind, you know that your avatar’s problem is stress. Hence, when you write blog posts, you’ve got to do so with the intention of helping this individual find the solution through yoga. Since your avatar is around 30 and has some knowledge in yoga and the health industry, you’d also know how to shape the tone of your posts so as not to appear like you’re talking to a total beginner.

This is just a starter’s guide to visualizing your avatar. Use the guidelines here to create your first avatar. Expect however that as you get better at what you do online that you might have to tweak your avatar along the way.

In the last post I gave you a short introduction about this topic and explained why it’s important to do this before you start blogging. I also mentioned the importance of having research objectives. To recap, research should help you see if a niche:

• has enough traffic or interested people
• has manageable competition
• offers profit opportunities

Evaluating Traffic

Start by picking a particular niche you have in mind and typing it into Google.com. Remember, be specific. Do not settle for a single general word. In our example above, specific niches would be polymer clay crafts or polymer clay jewellery.

If there are sites and blogs dedicated to your specific topic, chances are, there will be people highly interested in it simply because other bloggers or webmasters have already started publishing information about it online.

Next, take your specific topic and type it into the Free Google Keyword Tool. On the right hand sidebar, tick “Phrase”, type in the (captcha?) and hit “Search.” Look at the list of words that appear underneath. Your main topic should be listed first. Look at the number under the heading Global Monthly Searches. The figure there is the average number of people who type the exact phrase into Google every month.

Obviously, the higher the number registered under the Global Monthly Searches, the more people there will be who will be interested in your topic.

Underneath your main topic of choice will be a list of other words and phrases. These should give you a clue about other niche topics that could be alternatives to your main one.

Assessing Competition

In a lot of cases, a niche might have a great deal of people interested in it. This doesn’t mean though that this is automatically an advisable niche to pick. This is because you might come across very stiff competition. You should go for a niche where you have a good chance of beating or at least standing on equal footing with the existing competition.

You’ll get your first clue about the quality of competition through the Global Monthly Searches. The higher the figure, the more likely other bloggers and website owners already have web properties that revolve around this topic.

You can confirm this by using a free tool like Traffic Travis. Download the free version of the tool. Open the SEO Analysis section and type your main topic phrase into the “Phrase to Analyze” box. Leave the “Search Location” to US unless your topic is tied to a specific geographic location.

Look at the top ten sites that appear in the results. These are the top sites that appear in Google.com when your niche or topic phrase is typed. This is your competition.

Generally speaking the higher the PR (page rank), Age and BL (backlinks) and the more green checkmarks in the grid to the right, the stiffer the competition will be in your niche.

You can also manually review the top sites that appear in the results. You’ll know if a blog or website is difficult to surpass if it has a solid following as indicated by the figures appearing in social networking follower or sharing widgets published on site.

Determining Profitability

As I mentioned in a previous section not all bloggers choose to go into blogging for the money. It’s still worth looking into the profitability of your niche though just in case you decide to monetize your blog along the way.

The first step is to again manually review the top sites for your niche. You’ll know there’s some money to be made from a niche if related advertisements, products or services are offered in these top ranking sites.

You can also use another free tool like Spyfu. Type your niche topic into the box and click “Search”. If a high “Cost/Click” figure appears and if there are “Advertisers” that register, there’s hope that you might make money in your niche.

Words of Caution

Keep in mind that what has been mentioned here so far is all very basic. Lots of internet marketers have very complicated methods and use powerful tools. These points however should be enough for starters.

When performing research, it’s sometimes not enough to settle for a general market or topic. Many seasoned bloggers enjoy success because they’ve chosen to blog about specific niches.

From General to Specific

A niche market is simply a smaller sub section of a larger market. If you imagine a big circle to be a general market, a smaller circle in it would be regarded as a niche market. You can go deeper than this. If you draw a smaller circle within the small circle, that would be what you would call a niche within a niche market or a micro niche.

Some online gurus take niche marketing to a whole new level, identifying increasingly smaller markets within small markets. Depending on the market or blog topic you wish to pursue, this may or may not be applicable to you.

Why Enter a Niche?

The reasons for going after a niche should be obvious. Because some markets are so big, blogging about every single sub category in it can almost seem like you’re writing about unrelated topics. Readers typically prefer blogs that can focus on a specific topic of their interest. They’ll lose interest when you stray from their points of interest.

It’s also worth noting that people who are interested in a niche usually share a common language, culture or vibe. You’ve got to tap into these to effectively connect with your readers. This won’t be easy if you’re blogging about different sub niches within a market, each niche having different qualities.

An Example

To illustrate, crafts could be considered a huge general market. A smaller market within it would be clay crafts and within this niche would be a smaller niche like polymer clay crafts. You can drill even deeper with a micro niche topic like polymer clay jewellery.

Research Objectives

Keep in mind though that just because you imagine that the topic or niche you have in mind is a good one, it doesn’t mean it is. That’s why you need to do research. Once you start looking into a niche, you should keep in mind a few objectives. Research should help you determine if a niche:

• has enough traffic or interested people
• has manageable competition
• offers profit opportunities

In the next post we’ll look closer into these three objectives.

When you embark on a business project, one of the first things you’d most likely do is to go into market research. Otherwise, you run the risk of running a costly business venture that might not earn you any money.

The problem with many new bloggers though is that they take the stance that blogging is “just blogging.” They think setting up a blog doesn’t cost as much money as establishing a business and therefore does not require extensive research to get started.

My belief is that, you should start to look at your decision to start blogging in a more serious light. Although it is true that you will not be investing a great deal of cash, you will be investing a great deal of time, effort and even emotions into jump starting a blog. If you have to give a lot of yourself into it and if you’ve got clear goals you want to achieve, you’ve got to research.

Depending on your specific blogging objectives, market research can help you:

• determine if there are enough interested people in your topic
• find out the level of competition you’re up against
• establish the profitability of a topic

Before we move deeper into general research, it’s best to clarify what a market is. To borrow from the field of marketing an extremely simplified definition of marketing is that it refers to a group of people interested in a product and has the means or ability to buy it.

In even more simplistic terms, market research therefore involves finding out what to sell and if there are people who will buy whatever you’re selling.

I’d like to expand this definition to include bloggers who blog purely as a hobby and don’t want to have anything to do with sales, marketing or anything that implies selling. Market research for blogging in general involves finding out what your ideal topic is and if there are enough people who are interested in your topic to possibly visit, read your blog and take the kind of action you want them to make, whether this is to leave a comment on your posts or to follow you in Twitter.

General research starts with your seed topic. In the previous chapter we talked about identifying your intentions, interest and aptitude. Also I talked about identifying a topic that you know you’ve got something new to contribute to. Consider this performing internal research. So again you’ve got to ask yourself:

• What are my intentions or objectives as a blogger?
• What is/are my main interests?
• What am I very good at?
• In what specific topic can I contribute something new to?

Once you’ve done this take your seed topic, pop it into Google and take a look at the different sites and blogs that pop up. A seed topic can be general such as crafts, parenting, travel, recipes, cooking, etc.

Because you’re taking a general look at things, it’s likely that you will see a lot of activity and interaction in various sites. Take a closer look at what people are saying in comment sections, review areas and social network pages. Find out what sites and blogs are selling, advertising and publishing.

Again, you are simply doing a general sweep. Once you’ve done this, you’re ready to go deeper into niche research.