Anyone can start a blog on any topic.  The problem is, if you actually want to make money with your blog, then you need to select a topic that will have an enthusiastic audience from day one.  That means you need to do your niche research. 

Your first step is to brainstorm topics you might enjoy writing about.  You can look at your own personal interests, or you keep your eyes open for topics on TV, in print publications, and online.   

Once you’ve lined up several potential topics, it’s time to determine if there’s a market.  One way to do it is to go to Wordtracker.com (or your favorite keyword tool) and enter the search words your market might use to find you. 

For example, your keywords might be something along the lines of “how to lose weight” or “how to housebreak a puppy” or “how to crochet.” 

While each individual keyword might not get a lot of traffic, ideally you’re looking for a niche that gets at least a few thousand searches per month across all those keywords. 

For example, one keyword may get a couple hundred searches per month, another might get a few thousand, and dozens might only a few dozen.  But collectively you have a niche that’s being searched for thousands of times per month. 

Once you’ve determined there’s an audience, your next step is to check if people are willing and able to spend money in the niche.  Go to Google and Yahoo and enter some of your keywords.  Are other marketers buying pay per click ads?  If so, good – that likely means there’s a market buying goods and services. 

Finally, you can confirm the profitability by going to Clickbank.com, Amazon.com, CJ.com and similar.  Are their products and services catering to this market?  If other people are selling to the niche, then the niche must be buying.   

If no one is selling to the niche, don’t assume it’s an unexploited niche.  Quite possibly no one’s selling because there’s not a market buying anything, and thus not worth a marketer’s time. 

The methods employed to increase your search engine rankings may seem like rocket science to you, so you have probably avoided dealing with this issue. The time has come to face your website! A high search engine ranking for your website is so essential that if you have the slightest desire to actually succeed in your business, there is no way you can continue to avoid this issue.

At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on the Internet find websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pages for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers to your site who will be more than likely to make a purchase. The higher your page comes up in search engine results, the greater the traffic that is directed to your
website. That’s what search engine optimization is about.

You can immerse yourself in all the technical information available online to figure out how to optimize your web pages to achieve higher rankings. Or you can look at a few simple items on your pages, make some small adjustments, and most likely see improved rankings quite rapidly. The first item you should examine is the title bar on your homepage.

The title bar is the colored bar at the top of the page. Look at the words that appear there when you access your home page. To increase search engine rankings, the words on your homepage’s title bar should include the most important keywords or phrases, one of which would include your company name.

Then click on all your links and examine the title bars on the pages you access. Each title bar on every single page of your site should contain the most important keywords and phrases taken from the page itself. However, avoid very long strings of keywords, keeping them to six words or less. Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title bars, and make sure that identical words are not next to
each other.

The next item to put under your microscope is your website content. Search engines generally list sites that contain quality content rather than scintillating graphics. The text on your site must contain the most important keywords - the words that potential customers will be typing into search engines to find your site.

Aim to have around 250 words on each page, but if this is not desirable due to your design, aim for at least 100 carefully chosen words. If you want to achieve a high ranking on search engines, this text is essential. However, the search engines must be able to read the text, meaning that the text must be in HTML and not graphic format.

To find out if your text is in HTML format, take your cursor and try to highlight a word or two. If you are able to do this, the text is HTML. If the text will not highlight, it is probably in graphic form. In this case, ask your webmaster to change the text into HTML format in order to increase your search engine rankings.

Next we come to what is called meta tags. I know this sounds like something out of science fiction, but it is really just simple code. Many people believe that meta tags are the key to high search engine rankings, but in reality, they only have a limited effect. Still, it’s worth adding them in the event that a search engine will use meta tags in their ranking formula.

To find out if your page is set up with meta tags, you must access the code. To do this, click the “view” button on the browser menu bar, and select “source.” This will pull up a window revealing the underlying code that created the page. If there are meta tags, they usually appear near the top of the window. For example, a meta tag would read: meta name=”keywords” content=. If you do not find code that
reads like this, ask your webmaster to put them in. This may not do much for your search engine rankings, but any little boost helps.

Lastly, we come to the issue of link popularity. This is a factor that is extremely important in terms of search engine rankings. Almost all search engines use link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the quality of the sites you have linked to from your
links page.

If you type in “free link popularity check” in a popular search engine, the search engine will then show you what sites are linked to your site. In the case that there aren’t many sites linked up to yours, or that the sites that are linked up have low search engine rankings,
consider launching a link popularity campaign. Essentially, this entails contacting quality sites and requesting that they exchange links with your site. Of course, this requires checking out the rankings of the websites you want to link up with. Linking to popular, quality sites not only boosts your search engine ranking, but it also directs more quality traffic to your website.

Search engine rankings are extremely important for a successful Internet marketing campaign. Before you go out and hire a search engine optimization company, try taking some of the simple steps listed above, and see if you can’t boost your rankings yourself. Don’t ever ignore this all-important factor in Internet marketing. Remember, the higher your search engine ranking, the more quality customers will be directed your way.