Are you planning to start a new blog soon? If so, one of the most important things you need to determine is your niche. In other words, you have to decide what you will be writing about and who your target audience will be. By honing in on what you will write about and who you will writing it for, you can better determine your topics while also more effectively winning over and retaining readers.

Step #1: Examine Your Personal Interests

The first step you need to take in order to determine your niche is to examine your personal interests. After all, in order to create a successful blog, you will need to post to it on a regular basis. Ideally, you should post at least once per day while your blog is still in its early stages. Therefore, you certainly want to select a topic that will retain your interest and that you will enjoy writing about. So, sit down and create a list of all of the general topics you would be interested in writing about before you move on to the next step.

Step #2: Fine Tune Your Topics

Now that you have an idea of the topics you might be interested in writing about, it is time to start doing a bit of research. Obviously, you want to write about a topic that will be of interest to as many people as possible. That way, you can bring more traffic to your site and you will have a better chance of making money through your blog if that is your goal.

In order to get an idea of what topics are of interest to people searching the web, use a tool such as Google adwords. Here, you can get an idea of the phrases that people are researching on Google as well as the amount of competition there is for those particular words. While looking at Google adwords should not serve as your final determining factor, it can give you a better idea of how to fine tune your niche. For example, if you listed pets as one of your interests, you may find that there is a great deal of interest in organic pet food. In this case, you may want to focus your blog on eco-friendly pet products or on healthy eating options for pets.

By fine tuning your niche, you can really focus on the topic and delve deeply into it, which will help you establish yourself as an authority on the topic. Later, if you want to address more pet topics, you may add another specialized niche topic to your blog or you may create a sister blog to compliment the first one you developed.

Step #3: Do Your Research

Once you have determined some more specific potential niche areas to explore with your blog, you should do a bit of research regarding blogs that are addressing this topic. Do some searches with the major search engines to learn more about other blogs that fall within your niche. Ideally, you should choose the topic with the least number of blogs already in existence. That way, you can keep your competition down, which will increase your chances of enjoying a larger audience.

If there are already several blogs addressing the topic, see if there is a way you can offer a different angle. That way, you will still have a good chance of carving out your share of the market.

What’s more important? Creating sites for users or the engines? The answer is both.

Your favorite thing about having a blog may soon be this – they naturally attract search engine traffic. Blogs already have optimized site architecture. Most are set up with a clear navigation, where every page is set up to link back to the other main pages. They also have the inherent potential to be well-linked.

Primarily a site should be designed for the user, with search engines in mind. Google tends to talk out both sides of their mouth when they say, “Don’t do anything special for the engines”. Yet, they create a webmaster tool center where you can submit a sitemap, and get information about how the engines see your site, errors and what key phrases your site ranks for. That gives new site owners a little bit of confusion.

I like sites that are easy to navigate, pleasing to the eye and that help sell whatever it is you need to. Pages should be set up as landing pages. The great thing about your blog is that it can get so well-indexed that you have the potential to show up for any number of four word phrases that are relevant to your industry. This way you can give the visitor everything they need to make a purchase or fill out a form. At the same time you can optimize these pages for the engines and use the pages for your PPC campaigns. I believe in doing sites this way. It brings the visitor a much better experience.

The perfect site is not only user friendly, but optimized for the engines. You need to target where people go to in order to provide them with the information or product they need. There is nothing worse than having people landing on a page that is optimized for a phrase but offers no information about it… It brings the user a bad experience and you a missed sale or lead. You have a choice. You can target a general high traffic keyword you have little chance of ranking well for and get barely any traffic. Once you have a page optimized, you can streamline the transition from viewing what you have to offer to facilitate a purchase. You can also provide related content and links. This, in turn, will help with you PPC because Google is now checking to see how relevant your landing pages are to the keywords you buy.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Sometimes a site’s structure (the relationships between its content) must be altered too. Because of this it is, from a client’s perspective, always better to incorporate Search Engine Optimization when a website is being developed than to try and retroactively apply it.Make a good quality site that will attract natural links to it in order to obtain any form of long term presence within the search engine results page.Make a good quality site that will attract natural links to it in order to obtain any form of long term presence within the search engine results page.

Pay-per-click, or PPC, advertising is one of the most effective methods for drawing traffic to a website or blog. At the same time, it is potentially one of the most costly methods for marketing. If done correctly, however, the return on investment (ROI) will pay off quite nicely.

A PPC advertising campaign is one that involves paying to have your blog appear among the “Sponsored Links” or the “Sponsor Results” you find on the right hand of the screen when you perform a search with a search engine such as Yahoo or Google. You accomplish this by placing a bid on certain keywords and keyword phrases. Then, every time someone enters those keywords into the search engine, your blog will be brought up in the sponsored results. Every time someone clicks on your link, you will have to pay the search engine a certain pre-determined amount.

As you can imagine, paying for a PPC campaign can be quite costly. After all, even if you are paying just five cents per click and you have 1000 clicks per day, that is $50 per day. That comes out to be $350 per week, which can eat away at your marketing budget rather quickly. Now, paying $350 per week may seem worthwhile if it is bringing you 7,000 new visitors. But, if only one or two of those people are people who are actually interested in your blog, the cost certainly isn’t worth it.

So, how exactly do you make your PPC campaign worthwhile? This is where your marketing research comes in handy. Since you now know the needs of your target audience, you can select keywords for your PPC campaign that will draw in visitors who are interested in what your blog has to offer.

Be certain to select keywords that are very specific in order to bring in the right type of traffic. For example, if you are maintaining a blog about dog training, you should not set up a PPC campaign based around the word “dog,” as this can bring in visitors who were looking for information about dog breeds, searching for dog food, trying to find instructions for building a dog house, or any other possible term associated with dogs. Rather, select keyword phrases that are more specific to dog training in order to bring in the right type of web traffic.

When searching through the various keywords you can select for your PPC campaign, you should look for phrases that are popular while still being within your budget. You should also place a bid on phrases that will allow you to be within the top 5 results. That way, they will be displayed on the first page of the search engine results and will be more likely to be seen by your target audience.

If you are looking for a quick way to boost traffic to your site and if there is room in your budget, PPC advertising is a good route to take. Otherwise, you may want to explore other methods of marketing that are not quite so costly.

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Now, a lot of you may already have your own ways to get indexed in Google fast, but I’m sure there are new bloggers who may be attempting to set up their first self-hosted blogs that need to know the inside track to getting indexed within a day or two in Google.

Yes, it’s possible!

Honestly, getting indexed within a day or two with a new blog is more common than not – sometimes you don’t even have to try. Having said that, I always like to run through the basic routine anyway, just to be on the safe side.

For those that don’t know, let me first tell you why you more than likely will get indexed quick without doing any special routines. First of all, Google loves most, if not all major blogging platforms. Whether you run a self hosted Wordpress blog, a Blogger blog, or a Wordpress.Com blog – Google loves them all (especially Blogger, due to the fact they they own them now). The simple act of posting an article or two a lot of the time is enough to get indexed without thinking about it. Shouldn’t take more than a week tops.

But if you’re looking to skip ahead in line, and jump into Google within 24-48 hours, here are a few tricks that I use that are always successful:

1. Technorati – Get signed up with Technorati, and “claim” your blog as soon as you can. This only takes a few minutes, and is worth it for many reasons. But for reasons above, when your blog is claimed and all set up, make sure to use the “ping” service in your Technorati account after each post you write.

2. MyBlogLog - Adding your blog to your MBL account has often done the trick for me alone, but I combine this with the other steps for maximum exposure. It’s easy to claim your blog – only takes a minute or two of work.

3. Pingomatic – This is a very cool blog pinging service that you should hit up right after you post an article on your new blog. Just go to the site, input your URL, and ping all available services. Spiders from these services will come to your blog pretty quickly, and when they index your site, Google will index them not too long after, which will hopefully help out your cause.

4. Digg + Pingomatic – This little trick has always seemed to work well for me too. When you have a new blog, and after you submit your first post – submit it to Digg, and then get the Digg URL that was assigned to your submission, take that URL and input it at Pingomatic and ping it. Don’t ask me why, but it works!

5. Utilize existing blogs or sites – This is often the easiest and most overlooked way to get your new blog indexed quickly. Do you have an established website or blog that Google crawls often? If so, then just write a new post or add some content with a link or two to your new blog, and that will definitely speed up the process. Using your existing website leverage is my favorite method, and it’s all too easy.

6. Refer to my post about getting traffic to your blog, and use the methods I talk about. It works. Reason being, the more instances of your new blog URL being on sites that get crawled every couple of minutes, the more likely your new Blog will get indexed sooner rather than later. When Google sees your link on all of these powerful sites, it will have no choice but to go crawl your blog, and index it quickly.

That’s really all there is to it! I know it sounds basic, but hopefully, if you didn’t already know these methods it will come in handy for you. I also use the methods above for getting static websites indexed quickly too, which we all know can be a pain in the butt sometimes. I used to work with clients that had sites for months without being indexed, and when I would tell them I would have their site indexed within a few days, they never believed me until the proof was undeniable. It made for some happy clients!