To continue the thought process from the last post about building a blog empire, here are a few blogging tips on how I would go about starting up a new niche blog.

This may on the surface seem very basic information. Even the most experienced blogger can sometimes get something new (or be reminded of something) from these tips. I’m showing you how to get started so you avoid the analysis paralysis that sometimes accompanies a new venture.

I’m going to assume that you have done some keyword research beyond the ones you get from the Niche Friday Gifts. If not, read the article HERE about what a keyword is and about some of the free or paid software available to accomplish your research. Any niche will have at least a couple of hundred keywords. When you get more specific and more targeted, you can come up with thousands.

Now is the time you start investigating your competition. There are some *sneakier* software applications that even spy on the keywords in use on your competitor’s blogs or websites. I usually make up a word document for every niche I’m thinking of entering. All of this information I research is entered there for easy reference later.

Search your keywords in your search engine of choice. I search once for websites and again for blogs. For each of the major keywords I’m going looking to use, I look at how much Adsense appears on page one. I make note of what the offers are because this can often help you find affiliate programs to locate and join. Lots of Adsense is a good sign. It means that there is money to be made in the niche, you just have to get in there and get your piece of the pie.

I look at the number of results for the keyword. The numbers are sometimes daunting, but I’m going to show you how to figure out if the competition is really as stiff as the numbers say. Scroll down– at the bottom of the page are the following page numbers. If you hit the last number available a couple of times, the results number can often drop dramatically. When you do this, the search engine begins weeding out duplicate material, and you can see how much competition is real. Sometimes, it is quite a surprising drop.

Then, I take a look at each site appearing on page one. I make note of the URL on each one in my cheat sheet. Eventually, I will visit each one. I will look at what kind of ads they have. Is is all Adsense? Or do they have CPA offers and affiliate links? They’ve already found these offers…you know where to look now thanks to their earlier work. Yes, some sites have big name advertisers. Often, those sites have a single page devoted to the content of your niche.

Some of the ones I’ve seen the content and/or presentation is very poor. It would never rank that high unless the big site was behind it. I make notes on that too. It is quite surprising to find in most cases for each keyword there is at least one entry on page one that you can envision knocking out of that spot with your content rich blog.

After I’ve done all this busy work, ahem…I mean research. :) I try to evaluate what all my competitors are doing—or much more importantly not doing. What can I do that will make my blog unique and stand out? This is where I really begin think about how I can get in there and compete. Tomorrow, I’ll talk about other uses for this information we’ve gathered today.

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