GTrends : The Second Edition

Website Up!

September 17, 2007 on 7:29 pm | In News | No Comments

I’ve finally gotten this site in a more-or-less presentable condition and it’s now open to the general public. There’s still a lot of work to be done, but it’s a start

Getting Started With GTrends SE

September 14, 2007 on 2:56 pm | In Tutorials | 22 Comments

In this post I’ll explain the basics of using the GTrends SE tool. I’m going to assume you’ve already installed it (if you’ve ever installed any software it should be easy enough) and you’ve set up my Firefox extension. The extension is optional, but I recommend you install it because makes using GTrends SE easier.

Okay, here’s a step-by-step guide on how to find a potentially profitable niche!

Think of a relatively broad niche or something that people would search for. “Sausage making”, “speed reading”, various “how to” topics and similar are a good start.

Go to http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/gtrends/, type in your keyword(s) and hit Enter. For the sake of this tutorial I’ll use the search terms “how to resume” (without the quotes), as I already know they’re likely to return some good niches. This search phrase will return keywords that contain the words how, to and resume.

Wordtracker will show some related keywords along with estimated search volume.

Assuming you’ve set up the FF extension and the toolbar button, just click the button!

This will put the keywords in clipboard and launch GTrends SE. It will pop up and start processing the keywords. You can wait for it to finish, or go back to Wordtracker to research more niches and leave it running in the background. If you do another search and click the button again, the newfound keywords will be added to the list and checked, too.

Depending on you Internet connection speed, GTrends configuration and the number of keywords to check, the analysis can take a few minutes to complete.

Hey, look, there are some good niches here! Keywords that match the criteria for “good” niches are highlighted in green. Let’s do a quick overview of the columns here -

Keyword – self-explanatory.

Competition – the number of results returned when searching for “keyword phrase” (with quotes; phrase match) on Google. This is the approximate number of pages you’d be competing against if you tried to get your site to rank #1 for the keyword. The recommended value is no more than 30 000 results.

Searches – actually this is the estimated number of visitors/day you’d get from Google if your page would be in #1 position. Typically this will be roughly equal to the number of people searching for this phrase on Google. The recommended value is more than 100 searches/day.

Verdict – whether the keyword matches the configured criteria. Basically if it’s “Good”, you could get your website on the first page of Google results relatively easily, using the free TDC techniques. You can change the criteria by clicking the Settings button.

Web2.0 – this will say “Yes” if any of the most common Web 2.0 content sites were found on the first page of Google results (phrase match). This is generally undesirable, but a “Good” keyword is still worth a look even if there are some Web 2.0 sites optimized for it.

This is everything you need to know to start finding profitable niches faster than ever before (oh I’m sounding salesy, aren’t I ) The GTrends SE tool has many more features that I didn’t mention here, but that’s beyond the scope of this “Getting Started” guide. I’ll discuss them in another tutorial, some other day. For now, start reasearching and good luck!