If you have a pre-hacked backup of your system, the easiest fix is to revert to that backup. But that’s not always an option. At this point you’ll need to start looking at the PHP files that run your WordPress blog, looking for hacked files. (If you’re not techie, this is the time to engage the help of one of your techie friends.)

Check the Theme

Start by looking at the files included with your current WordPress theme. Hacking the footer.php file is a favorite option, for example, or the sidebar.php. You can quickly look through these files directly from the WordPress dashboard using the Editor option under Appearance.

Not There? Check the Plugins

If you can’t find anything in the theme, it’s probably a problem with a plugin. WordPress has a nice extension mechanism that lets plugins add content directly to the generated HTML. Chances are good that one of your plugins has been hacked and is injecting its links via one of these “hooks”.

Grab a copy of the wp-includes/plugin.php file from your site and stash it somewhere safe as a backup. Then make a second copy. Now open that copy with your favorite text editor and look for a PHP function called add_action that looks like this:

function add_action($tag, $function_to_add, $priority = 10, $accepted_args = 1) {
	return add_filter($tag, $function_to_add, $priority, $accepted_args);
}

Insert three lines so it looks like this:

function add_action($tag, $function_to_add, $priority = 10, $accepted_args = 1) {
      echo "\n\n";
      return add_filter($tag, $function_to_add, $priority, $accepted_args);
}

Save the changes and upload the modified file to your blog, overwriting the existing plugin.php. Now reload one of the pages in your browser and view the source to the page. You’ll see a bunch of HTML comments inserted into the generated HTML, like so:

<!-- add_action
Adding akismet_cron_recheck
#0  add_action(akismet_schedule_cron_recheck, akismet_cron_recheck) called at [/home/memwg/public_html/wp-content/plugins/akismet/akismet.php:495]
#1  include_once(/home/memwg/public_html/wp-content/plugins/akismet/akismet.php) called at [/home/memwg/public_html/wp-settings.php:190]
#2  require_once(/home/memwg/public_html/wp-settings.php) called at [/home/memwg/public_html/wp-config.php:77]
#3  require_once(/home/memwg/public_html/wp-config.php) called at [/home/memwg/public_html/wp-load.php:30]
#4  require_once(/home/memwg/public_html/wp-load.php) called at [/home/memwg/public_html/wp-blog-header.php:12]
#5  require(/home/memwg/public_html/wp-blog-header.php) called at [/home/memwg/public_html/index.php:17]
-->

This shows you exactly who is adding a specific hook into the system. The example above shows the Akismet plugin adding a hook. It’s probably OK. There are a lot of hooks that get added, so it may take a while to find the offending plugin. You’re looking for something suspicious like this:

<!-- add_action
Adding echo_links
#0  add_action(wp_footer, echo_links) called at [/home/memwg/public_html/wp-content/plugins/duplicate-content-cure/duplicate-content-cure.php(79) : runtime-created function:402]
#1  __lambda_func() called at [/home/memwg/public_html/wp-content/plugins/duplicate-content-cure/duplicate-content-cure.php:80]
#2  include_once(/home/memwg/public_html/wp-content/plugins/duplicate-content-cure/duplicate-content-cure.php) called at [/home/memwg/public_html/wp-settings.php:190]
#3  require_once(/home/memwg/public_html/wp-settings.php) called at [/home/memwg/public_html/wp-config.php:77]
#4  require_once(/home/memwg/public_html/wp-config.php) called at [/home/memwg/public_html/wp-load.php:30]
#5  require_once(/home/memwg/public_html/wp-load.php) called at [/home/memwg/public_html/wp-blog-header.php:12]
#6  require(/home/memwg/public_html/wp-blog-header.php) called at [/home/memwg/public_html/index.php:17]
-->

What’s suspicious about this? First of all, the name of the hook is “echo_links”. Second, it’s coming from the Duplicate Content Cure plugin. Third, it’s a “runtime-created function”, which is definitely unusual. So it’s worth a look.

Luckily, the backtrace dump above — the list of all files and functions that were called by PHP in order to add the hook — points me to the file duplicate-content-cure.php on line 80.

To quickly see if this is the culprit, restore the plugin.php to its original state (upload the original you had stashed away somewhere safe) and then disable the plugin in question from the WordPress dashboard and see if the offending content disappears from your site.

Secure Your Site

Once you’ve found the bad plugin, delete it from your site. You may want to install a replacement version of the plugin or find an alternative plugin with similar functionality. Only install plugins (and themes) from sites you trust.

After cleaning your site, be sure to harden your WordPress installation in order to prevent this kind of hacking from occurring in the future.

Thank you for your email. Your site ‘burnthefat.com’ has been flagged for Unacceptable Business Practices and was consequently disabled. Because this is considered as a serious violation, your Google AdWords account has been suspended. As a result, your ads will no longer run through the Google AdWords system and that any newly created accounts may be subject to the same suspension.

What struck me about this is that they’re complaining about a site that I promoted (unsuccessfully) as an affiliate in the past. I don’t own burnthefat.com. It’s the site for Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle, one of the most (and maybe only) legitimate weight-loss programs available on ClickBank. There are a lot of sketchy things for sale on ClickBank, but I don’t think this is one of them. That said, I wasn’t successful promoting it — weight loss is a very competitive market to break into.

I’m not sure what BurnTheFat.com has done to get itself flagged for “Unacceptable Business Practices”, but apparently I’m collateral damage now. Looking through my AdWords account, I can’t see anything wrong with the ads I placed, which were all similar to these:

• Burn The Fat
  Most Powerful Fat Loss System
  - Official Site
  BurnTheFat.com
• Burn The Fat
  Feed The Muscle!
  - Official Site
  BurnTheFat.com

These ads are nothing special (no Cleos for me!) but I don’t think they’re deceitful. I was doing simple direct linking.

Later in the email they said this:

In a review of your account history, we found at least one submitted site that violated our Advertising Policies. Although you may have removed these sites since our latest review, advertisers that have a history of promoting these types of sites are still subject to account-level suspension.

Again, I’m surprised that burnthefat.com was the trigger and not some of the other ClickBank sites I’ve promoted. Very odd, I wonder what they did? A quick look through the Warrior Forum shows that I’m not the only one who’s had their AdWords account suspended.

After exchanging further emails with Google, it appears that there is no appealing this decision, and they also make it clear that opening a new account will just result in that account being banned as well. So it looks like I’m out of AdWords entirely at this point, which is a bummer. I always liked reporting on the AdWords side of things when talking about AdSense because they’re two sides of the same coin.

It seems draconian to me to be punished for being a past affiliate of a site. Google’s always had a love-hate relationship with affiliate marketing, and now it looks like they’re doing their best to discourage its use with AdWords, especially direct linking.

My recommendations:

• Get a new account: If you’ve promoted affiliate programs in the past, you might want to close your current AdWords account and get a new one in its place. That seems to be the only way to get rid of the historical aspects. Use a different credit card to be safe.
• Avoid affiliate marketing: Probably the safest thing you can do is only promote things you own and create. And make sure your sites are compliant with AdWords policies.
• Don’t direct link: If you must use affiliate marketing, don’t link directly to the vendor’s site. Create your own landing pages and make sure they are compliant.
• Avoid sketchy or controversial topics: Again, if you must use affiliate marketing, stay away from topics like “weight loss”, “gas from water”, etc.

Again, I’d be curious to hear from other advertisers who’ve run into the same issues. It’s too bad they don’t give you a warning first!

Your Google AdWords account has been permanently suspended for repeated violation of AdWords or Landing Page and Site policies in this or a related account.

I was pretty surprised to see it, given that I’ve had no active campaigns on AdWords since June. 0 impressions, 0 clicks, all campaigns deleted or paused. Then this message.

I can only assume it has to do with deleted campaigns. One thing I’ve always disliked about AdWords is that nothing actually gets deleted. If you create an ad and then delete it, it still stays in your account, it’s just marked as “deleted”. Same thing for ad groups, campaigns, etc. I’m pretty sure I have old ads in there that go to domains that I no longer own. Maybe that’s the problem. If there was a way to “flush” the old stuff out of the account then I’m sure I’d be OK.

The only way to contact AdWords is through a form. Let’s see if they get back to me on this. Very weird, I’d be curious to hear from others who’ve been in this boat before.

Normally, you see, when you park domains with a company in order to make money from type-in traffic or residual search engine traffic (due mostly to incoming links to a domain that was previously owned by someone else), the parking company makes it really easy to do the parking. There are essentially two steps: (1) you register your domain with the company and (2) you use the parking company’s nameservers for the domain. Easy-peasy.

Not if you’re Google, though. You couldn’t just set the nameservers, you actually had to go and modify your DNS (domain name service) records by hand, hopefully without screwing it up. It was complicated, complicated enough that Google even gave you detailed directions for several of the big hosting services — because, of course, everyone has a different web interface for managing DNS entries.

Someone finally clued into the fact that no one really wants to go to all that trouble. Sure, there are some advantages to managing the DNS yourself, but they’re pretty minor and most customers wouldn’t be interested in them. Now, though, you can simply modify your nameserver settings and be done with it. The old way’s still available if you need to be a geek, but the new way is so much simpler. Thanks, Google, for doing this.

Be sure to read 10 Ways To Benefit From Your Surplus Domains for more ideas about what to do with those domains you have sitting around collecting dust.

If you’re an AdSense publisher with significant earnings from America visitors, though, chances are that the Thanksgiving holiday has an effect on your earnings. Every year I see a drop in earnings, which I attribute to people spending less time at the computer and more time interacting with others and/or going to the malls to the shop. With the new AdSense interface it was very easy to plot the earnings for the months of October to December going back to 2004 and for me there’s definitely a dip on and shortly after Thanksgiving. What’s your experience been?

Too Many Remotes

How many remote controls do you use to watch TV? For the longest time, I was using 3 remotes: one for the TV, one for the DVR, and one for the Blu-Ray player. (Why didn’t they call it “BluRay”?) My wife always complained because she said if I died she’d never be able to watch anything. (Not true: our daughter knows how to work the remotes, so it would take a double tragedy to stop the viewing. It’s nice to have a purpose in life, though.)

For some reason, I decided to make myself more expendable by configuring a single remote to control everything. I sat down and looked up the code to hook up the DVR remote so that it could control the TV, after first looking up the keypad sequence to program the remote. I then spent 20 frustrating minutes trying to find the equivalent code for the Blu-Ray player, to no avail.

So now I have 2 remotes. Better than having 3, not as good as using only one. Although sometimes I still have to use that third remote for the more obscure items, so it’s really more like 2.5 remotes…

The point of this story is not that I should buy a Harmony remote, though that may be a good idea. The point is that for the longest time it was easier for me to use those 3 preconfigured remotes than for me to spend the the time figuring out how to reprogram everything. Why? They just worked.

AdSense is like a Preconfigured Remote

That’s what I like about AdSense: it works right out of the box. You choose an ad format, generate some JavaScript (or do like I do and steal it from one of your other sites), paste it onto your page/template, and you’re done. Your page content is analyzed and relevant ads are shown pretty much right away. You get access to a wide variety of ads across all kinds of niches and in various languages and geographies. You can choose to display text ads only, images/video ads only, or a mix.

Is AdSense the most lucrative advertising program for your site? Possibly not. In some niches it’s possible to do better by promoting affiliate products or CPA (cost-per-action) signups. But you need to do the research to find an appropriate ad program, apply for it (in some cases — and you may get rejected if your site is too small or doesn’t get a lot of traffic), and learn how to use it. Not hard, but it can take some time.

It’s really all about where you want to put in the effort. When I develop a new site, AdSense is usually my first choice because it takes no thought to implement, which lets me focus on content and traffic development. Especially the latter — a site with no traffic is worthless, no matter what ad program you’re using. Later, when a site has been running for a while I may look at alternatives. Or not… depends how busy I am. The alternatives are rarely much better.

Like I said, AdSense is easy, and in most cases it’s good enough.

Today I thought I’d discuss creating “microniche” AdSense sites. Longtime readers of this blog will be somewhat familiar with the concept because of my recommendation to purchase the XFactor Micro Niche AdSense Course. What I’m going to do here is discuss essentially the same concepts and ideas presented in the course but with my own twists. I hope you find it useful and informative.

None of the information presented here is new, you can find it sprinkled throughout the Web. And if you don’t take action, nothing will happen, no matter what you read here.

Part 1: Background

Let’s start with some background information as to what we’re going to do and why we’re doing it.

1.1 What is a Microniche?

A microniche is a small and very specific niche market. Think “battery-powered lawn mowers” instead of more general topics like “lawn mower” or (even more generally) “garden tools” or (even broader) “lawn and garden”.

Microniches interest us because they are often underserved by existing websites. For example, there are lots of sites that about web hosting services in general, but fewer about virtual private server hosting specifically. Similarly, someone looking for red tennis shoes isn’t interested in general tennis shoes — they’re already past that. They want more specific information: what styles of red tennis shoes are available (pictures would be good!), and who has them in stock?

1.2 Why Do Microniches Exist?

There are probably good reasons why a microniche is underserved. The most likely reason is that’s it’s too small a market to interest the existing players. For example, say only 2 people a day look for red tennis shoes in the entire United States. That’s a very small market.

(Aside: That was a total guess… Out of curiosity, I checked the AdWords keyword tool… apparently 260 searches are done per month in the United States for the exact search term red tennis shoes, which equates to almost 9 searches a day. It’s likely a bit higher than that, in fact, so it’s more than I thought it would be.)

The other reason is that a microniche is not a paying market. Maybe people who search for red tennis shoes change their mind and never actually buy red shoes, opting for black or white ones instead because the red ones are just too dramatic a statement to make.

1.3 Why Do We Care About Microniches?

Some microniches are underserved because they’ve been overlooked by others, or not considered interesting or important enough to pursue. This means that no one has gone through the effort of created content tailored for the niche and applying specific search engine optimization (SEO) principles and techniques to a site in order to get natural (“organic”) search traffic to that content, even though the microniche is potentially profitable.

Which is where our opportunity arises. If we can create the right kind of content to tap into the small stream of searchers interested in a profitable microniche, we can make some money, either by placing advertisements (from AdSense or other programs) on the site, directing visitors to affiliate sites, etc.

1.4 The Top 10 Results Are All That Matter

The technique I’m describing here is all about getting pages from your site or sites to rank in the top 10 results for specific keywords. Getting listed on that first page, ideally at or near the first result, is key, because it’s the top 10 results that garner the lion’s share of free search engine traffic.

In competitive niches those top 10 results are dominated by expertly-tuned Big Sites with a large number of backlinks. It’s essentially impossible to compete with those sites unless you happen to have a Big Site of your own.

In a microniche, though, chances are good that many of the top 10 results are not Big Sites. The more specific the niche, the greater the probability that you can create a site that will rank in the top 10. Whether there’s actually any traffic in that niche that can be monetized is a separate question — not all microniches are profitable.

1.5 Where Do You Start?

So where do you find microniches? Well, to start with you need a broad topic/niche. Use your imagination. Did you purchase something recently? What are the top sellers on eBay selling? What are manufacturers advertising?

The XFactor course recommends specifically going after products, like the “red tennis shoes” I mentioned above. Stuff that people are searching for, that they want to buy.

Of course, the more interested you are in a topic, the easier it will be to write content for that topic. Best not to stray too far out of your comfort zone when creating your first site or two.

1.6 Caveats

Microniche marketing is not a quick path to riches. A single microniche site won’t make you a lot of money. It’s only by building a network of microniche sites that you’ll start to see real income develop. A lot of trial and error will be involved. You’ll create sites that won’t make you squat, while a few will perform exceptionally well.

Creating these sites will take time and effort on your part, at least if you’re planning on using whitehat methods. You’ll find no blackhat techniques here, look elsewhere if that’s what interests you.

Some money will be required to get started. Not a lot:

• You’ll need to find and register domains — an important part of the microniche strategy is to create your own pieces of “virtual real estate” that you can own and develop for the long term. You can register .com/.net/.org domains for less than $10 each from a reputable domain registrar (hint: search for coupon codes). Note that domain registrations are public, so if you don’t want your personal information available to everyone, register your domains with privacy enabled — usually at extra cost, although some registrars offer it for free. Shop around!
• You will need a hosting account capable of hosting multiple domains, so don’t get the cheapest plan that limits you to a single domain. Most hosting services offer “unlimited” domains at some level. (Try to go for a reseller account, it can make it simpler later if you want to sell the site to give each site its own cPanel. I’ve used HostingZoom with good success. HostGator is another good choice that I’ve used.) You should be able to find good hosting service for $15/month or less.

Later you may also want to purchase a keyword tool like Micro Niche Finder to speed up the keyword research process. But when you’re starting out you can do all your research using Google’s free keyword tool. So your initial outlay is just the hosting and the domains. And your time! Be prepared to dedicate at least one hour per day to this endeavor.

Part 2: Keyword Research

“Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.” That’s what Alexander Graham Bell said, and he was right. You can’t be successful at microniche development without preparation, and most of that involves keyword research.

2.1 What is Keyword Research?

When a person uses a search engine like Google to find things on the web, they enter in a series of words that describes what they are looking for. The search engine uses those words to find the sites that it thinks are most relevant to the user’s query, listing them in order of relevance. These “key words” are therefore very important.

(Note: the term keyword is often used as shorthand for keyword phrase, i.e. a keyword may be two or more words strung together to form a complete query.)

Keyword research is all about determining which keywords are used for searching. Everyone is different, and so everyone uses different keywords when searching. The variety of keywords used is astounding. This makes keyword research particularly challenging, because what you would type into Google to find something isn’t necessarily what others would type.

2.2 Why Do Keyword Research?

Content publishers perform keyword research to answer two very important initial questions:

1. What do people search for?
2. How much will advertisers pay?

This is the first phase of keyword research, to find keywords within a niche that meet or exceed specific criteria for search volume and average per-click payout.

But the research doesn’t stop there! The second phase of research involves taking the keywords found in the first phase and determining the competition levels for those keywords. In other words, how easy it will be (or not be) to “crack into” the top 10 results for each keyword? As a small publisher, you’re not going to be able to bring together the same linking resources that the Big Sites can use to muscle their way onto the first page. You have to pick and choose very carefully.

2.3 Where Does Keyword Data Come From?

Ultimately, all reliable keyword data comes from the search engines. They’re the only ones who really know what people are searching for.

These days, most of the keyword data comes from Google, either directly through Google’s own tools (developed primarily for AdWords advertisers) or indirectly via third-party tools that scrape the data (or, in rare cases, obtain via legitimate means) from Google’s tools. (Yes, this includes Micro Niche Finder.)

Some keyword tools do use data from second-tier search engines. But those search engines have a tiny percentage of the total search volume in comparison to the big three (Google, Yahoo! and Bing — although really it’s Google and Bing now) that the numbers they release are extrapolations based on a tiny sample set.

2.4 Preparing the AdWords Keyword Tool For Research

The first phase of keyword research is done using the AdWords Keyword Tool, a free tool from Google that is available to everyone.

When you open the tool, make sure that the country and language settings are what you expect. If you plan on targeting Americans, for example, make sure the that “United States” and “English” are selected:

If not, click on the “Advanced Options” link and adjust the settings appropriately.

Now click on the “Columns” button on the right-hand side:

In the resulting popup, make sure that “Estimated Avg. CPC” is checked in the left column. In the right column, drag “Estimated Avg. CPC” to the to top:

Then press “Save”. This ensures that average per-click data (which is AdWords advertiser costs, NOT the per-click values an AdSense publisher would see — more on that later) shows up in the list.

Now in the “Word or phrase” box type in one or more keywords for the niche you want to target:

Press the “Search” button and wait a few seconds. You’ll see a bunch of results appear.

Stop! Before you do anything else, you need to tell AdWords you’re only interested in “Exact” results. Find the “Match Types” box on the left side and quickly uncheck “Broad” and check “Exact”:

This is very important! The Exact match type shows results only for searches that were done for the exact keyword phrase shown, with no other keywords added, no synonyms used, and no alteration in the order of the keywords. The other match types are best ignored.

After you change to exact matching, the keyword tool will reload its data. You should see all the keywords it generates surrounded by left (“[") and right ("]“) brackets — that’s what indicates an exact match:

If you don’t see those brackets, check your settings. And ignore any row of data in the table that isn’t exact match.

Now you’re ready to research!

2.5 The First Phase of Research

In the first phase of research you find keywords that meet your specific criteria for search volume and average CPC. This is done quite easily by clicking on the “Advanced Options” link and creating filters:

The filters I created above are:

• Global Monthly Searches >= 300
• Estimated Avg. CPC > $1.00

So I’m looking for keywords that have exact search values of at least 10 per day (10 * 30 = 300) with an estimated average cost to AdWords advertisers of more than $1 per click.

Why 300 searches per month? If your page ranks in the top 10 for a non-phrase exact search query (the keyword phrase not in quotes), chances are good that with 300 exact searches per month (which is a conservative estimate on Google’s part) you’ll get a few clicks per day. The more searches, the better, of course. There’s no hard rule here. You may have to settle with keywords that have as little as 100 exact searches per month.

Why $1 per click? The CPC values shown are the costs to advertise on Google’s search network, i.e. the search results page. Advertisers can and typically do pay much less to advertise on Google’s content network, i.e. AdSense sites. Plus AdSense publishers get 68% of what Google charges the advertiser. So if you go below $1, chances are good that you’ll be seeing clicks worth only a few cents. The cutoff is pretty arbitrary, though, and is something you can play with.

Once you’ve set your filters, press the “Search” button again and the keyword tool will remove the keywords that don’t match the filters from the list.

Now click on the “Global Monthly Searches” header to sort the data by search volume:

At this point you have an initial list of potential microniche keywords. In my case, I have 136 potential keywords. But many of them aren’t actually microniche keywords. Some are too broad — like “tennis” or “mens shoes” — and some are clearly off-topic — like “tennis racquets”.

Now what you do is run through the list of keywords and select the ones that are truly related to your chosen niche. After you’ve selected the keywords that seem appropriate, select the “Download Selected” dropdown menu:

Select the right type of download, which is probably “CSV for Excel” (CSV = comma-separated values, a portable spreadsheet format):

What you’ll actually end up downloading is a ZIP file containing the spreadsheet:

The spreadsheet is inside the ZIP file:

You should be able to open it directly from within the ZIP file, don’t bother saving it until we’ve determined it’s worth saving:

You’re now ready to move to the second phase of keyword research.

2.6 The Second Phase of Keyword Research

In the second phase of research you assess the competition levels for each keyword in the first phase, discarding the ones that are too competitive. It is possible and likely that all the keywords you found in the first phase will be too competitive, at which point you’ll need to restart the process with a different root keyword and/or adjust the minimum search volume you’re willing to accept.

Gathering the keywords is actually quite straightforward. Determining competitiveness is a bit of a black art.

The first thing you’ll want to do is see if there are any exact match domains available for the keywords you’ve chosen. An exact match domain is a domain name in the .com/.net/.org top-level domains (or in a country code domain like .ca or .fr if you’re targeting non-US or non-English searchers… some people will even use .info and other domains, although results may be mixed on those) that exactly matches the keyword you’re assessing. It’s been shown that Google gives a ranking boost to exact match domains, so it’s worth checking out, and it only takes a minute to do. In your spreadsheet, select the “Keyword” column and copy it to your clipboard:

Now move to your browser. Go to the GoDaddy Bulk Domain Registration page (don’t worry, you’re not registering anything, we’re only testing for availability here) and paste in the contents of your clipboard:

Make sure you select the “.com”, “.net” and “.org” domains on the right side and then press the “Search” button underneath the text box. The tool will automatically remove all non-alphanumeric characters from the keyword list to create a domain list and return a list of available domains:

In this case, this is what’s available:

REDCONVERSESHOES.COM
REDCONVERSESHOES.NET
REDCONVERSESHOES.ORG
TENNISSHOESONLINE.NET
TENNISSHOESONLINE.ORG
SHOESFORTENNIS.NET
SHOESFORTENNIS.ORG
TENNISCOURTSHOES.NET
TENNISCOURTSHOES.ORG
REDTENNISSHOES.ORG
LADIESTENNISSHOES.ORG
CONVERSERED.NET
CONVERSERED.ORG
BOYSTENNISSHOES.NET
TENNISSNEAKERS.ORG
CHEAPTENNISSHOES.NET
WHITETENNISSHOES.ORG
MENTENNISSHOES.NET
MENTENNISSHOES.ORG
BUYTENNISSHOES.ORG
TENNISSHOESFORKIDS.COM
TENNISSHOESFORKIDS.NET
TENNISSHOESFORKIDS.ORG

Quite a few, actually, although mostly .net or .org domains and most of them (if you refer back to the spreadsheet) have low search volumes.

What if none of the keywords have exact match domains available? You can proceed, or you can abort. Many microniche developers only use exact match domains for their sites. Others will simply try to find domains that include the keyword in question. Even if you go that route (I favor EMDs, by the way) you should consider the keywords with EMDs first because they’ll be so much easier to rank.

Now to test for competitiveness. Testing for competitiveness is something where a software tool can help, but you can definitely do it on your own with a bit of patience.

Order the keywords by EMD availability and then by search volume. In other words, all the EMDs are first, then the other keywords. In our case that means ladies tennis shoes is first because the .org is available and it has 1000 exact searches per month. Next would be converse red, boys tennis shoes, etc. (This is dreary stuff, absolutely… No wonder people buy tools to cut down the drudgery…)

Now run each keyword in your list through a series of simple test. First, do a sanity check on the keyword itself. Does it incorporate a trademark? If so, you might want to skip it (like “converse red”) to avoid legal hassles later. Is the keyword truly in your niche? Is it something you think you could develop a site about?

For keywords that pass the sanity check, open a Firefox browser window. Install the free SEO for Firefox add-on (plugin) if you haven’t done so already, and restart. Select Tools / SEO for Firefox / Options… to configure the add-on. Make sure that the following Info Blocks are set to “Automatic”: PR (PageRank), Y! Links (number of links to the domain in Yahoo) and Y! Page Links (number of links to the page in Yahoo):

Navigate to Google — be sure to use the right version of Google for your target country and language (you may have to use a proxy to do this). Make sure SEO for Firefox is enabled.Search for a query using phrase matching, i.e. put quotes around the keyword phrase. For example, search for “ladies tennis shoes”, not ladies tennis shoes:

At the top you’ll see how many results match the query — 79,700 in this case. For exact matching you don’t want to go above 100,000 — I think below 50,000 is better. Then for each of the top 10 results looks at the values shown for PR, Y! Links and Y! Page Links. If the average PR of the sites in the top 10 is high (most sites PR of 3 or higher) or most of them have lots of direct links to the page, it’s probably too competitive.

Also look at the titles and URLs shown in the search results. Well-optimized sites will include the keyword in their titles and URLs and will be much harder to beat. If most of the sites are already optimized, move on.

Tools like Micro Niche Finder (MNF) will also have their own ways of measuring competitiveness. MNF has a “strength of competition” (SOC) value that is derived from how many sites have a given keyword phrase in their titles and URLs. Everyone has their own “special” way to do this, it seems.

As you can see, there’s no absolute formula or algorithm to any of this, it’s more like what works for you through trial and error and also “gut feel”. Looking at actual search results is critical, even if the initial indicators give the green light. If you see Amazon and other generic shopping sites ranking for a specific search query, chances are good that they’re there because of the sheer authority of the site and not because their content is specifically tuned for the query. So they can be beat if you try hard. (More on that later.) But if you see a lot of smaller, niche-specific sites and they have lots of links going to them then you may want to skip this keyword, because they’ve obviously been designed to rank well for that keyword.

Don’t forget: if an exact match domain is available, you can loosen the criteria somewhat because of the natural ranking boost they get. An EMD is not critical, though.

At first glance the ladies tennis shoes keyword looks not too shabby: the last 6 results have no PR and no direct page links. The #1 and #3 results are generic shopping sites. There are definitely a couple of sites in there (including an EMD) that are optimized for the term, but it should be possible to get in the top 10 results for the phrase query.

But what about the broad (non-phrase) query? Most searchers don’t use quotes, after all. Go back to the top and repeat the search, this time without the quotes. Look at the results. It should be more competitive, but hopefully not too much more. In this case it still seems pretty good, because a lot of the sites that rank for the phrase query are also ranking for the broad query. There’s a good chance we can displace one of those sites and land on both search results pages.

Do these steps for all the keywords that interest you. Keep track of the results. Yes, it’s tedious, deal with it.

2.7 Decide On Your Microniche

After you’ve finished your keyword research, it’s time to decide which microniche to pursue. Chances are that you’ve uncovered several potential niches in your research. For example, we started with red tennis shoes but it looks like ladies tennis shoes might be a better bet because it has more search volume. (In fact, red tennis shoes just barely falls outside our minimum search levels.) But both have EMDs available and are not too competitive.

Again, there are no set rules here. One problem with ladies tennis shoes is that it’s not really a microniche, it’s really just a synonym for womens tennis shoes. It’s actually an offshoot of a broad topic. But if no one’s optimized content for it, why not target it?

Colored tennis shoes, though, would be a microniche. Most tennis shoes are white. Red, blue, green, yellow… you could build a site or sites targeting each of the major colors. If you run the numbers, there’s an EMD available for each of those colors. Individually, each color doesn’t get a lot of searches, but together they can add up to a decent amount of traffic.

The following queries have small exact search values that add up to over 1500 searches per month:

• black tennis shoes
• blue tennis shoes
• brown tennis shoes
• gold tennis shoes
• green tennis shoes
• orange tennis shoes
• pink tennis shoes
• purple tennis shoes
• red tennis shoes
• silver tennis shoes
• yellow tennis shoes

Don’t concern yourself with just the numbers, though. You’re going to need to write content for your chosen niche. Can you do it? If you can’t, move on. (The XFactor course recommends sticking to product-related niches because there are generic product descriptions available from manufacturers that you can use as the starting point for your content.)

Once you’ve settled on the main keyword for your microniche, create a list of related keywords for that niche. Use the AdWords tool to get more ideas, or use tools like my Google Suggest Explorer to get more long tail keywords. These keywords will be the basis for additional pages of content.

Let’s create a site based on our research so far. Personally, I don’t feel I can say much about ladies tennis shoes, but I do think I can come up with material about colored tennis shoes. Famous players like Rafael Nadal wear brightly colored shoes. Kids always like colors, too.

So our microniche is colored tennis shoes.

Part 3: Site Creation

The keyword research phase is really the hardest part of this. Once you’ve chosen your microniche and have collected a set of niche-specific keywords, you can focus on creating the site itself.

3.1 Your Own Virtual Real Estate

First, a short digression. Why register a domain and create a brand new site? Why not just use an existing (and free) blog hosting platform (like Blogger) to host your site?

What you are doing when you host your own site is building your own “virtual real estate” portfolio. By hosting the site yourself, you control what goes on the site and what happens to the site. You can sell the site later, for example — that’s one quite legitimate business model (create a site, build it up to attract traffic, sell it). You won’t lose the site suddenly is someone complains (legitimately or not) about the content on your site. Lots of good reasons to keep control of things.

3.2 Find a Good Domain Name

One of the things you should consider is whether you’re building a brand or not with your site. Most microniche sites aren’t branded, they’re focused exclusively on getting long-tail search engine traffic and that means an emphasis on keywords for ranking and using generic names that anyone can use. Building a brand for the site will have long-term advantages, but it will be harder to get the site to rank unless the brand itself includes a relevant keyword.

If there’s an EMD available for a keyword with decent search volume, though, consider doing without a brand, as the ranking boost you get from the EMD is quite significant at this point in time.

If there’s no EMD available or you want to use a branded domain, you’ll probably have to do a bit of searching for the right domain name. If you want help finding suitable domains, check out my Find Me A Domain tool. Or just spend some time exploring at your favorite domain registrar.

As it turns out, coloredtennisshoes.com is available if we want to use it for our microniche. Notice, however, that this keyword wasn’t on our list. The search volume is

Now coloredtennisshoes.com is available and the competition for colored tennis shoes , but the exact search volume is terrible so we won’t get much benefit from this EMD. But it fits so well with the niche, let’s give it a go anyhow.

The alternative is to make a separate site for each of our keywords, because there are EMDs available for each. It’s more expensive and more work.

So what we’ll do is compromise. Let’s build a the more general coloredtennisshoes.com site and a more specific yellowtennisshoes.com. (I’m going with yellow because I think it looks like some tennis pros wear yellow tennis shoes, so there will be more to talk about.)

3.3 Host the Domain

Time to register the domain and setup hosting for it. How you setup the hosting is very specific to the hosting service you’re using, so I won’t go into specifics about that. But do keep these things in mind:

• Create the hosting account first. You can create the new hosting account (if you’re using a reseller account or a VPS) or add-on domain (for standard shared hosting) before you actually register the domain. Then if you map the domain to the IP address of your server by editing your local hosts file you can accevs the site before you’ve registered the domain.
• Put up some dummy but related content. Once you register the domain, it won’t take long for Google to find it, even if no one links to it. It’s a good idea to prepare a dummy page of keyword-oriented content and place it as the root index.html file on the new site. Then if Google comes along before you finish the site (say you get interrupted and have to leave for a few hours) at least your initial listing in Google will be relevant to your topic.
• Register the domain and set the nameservers. Once you’re ready, register the domain. Ideally you want to set the nameservers for the domain during the registration process, or shortly thereafter, but not all domain registrars allow this.

3.4 Install WordPress

Now it’s time to install WordPress. Yes, we’re installing blogging software on these sites. But we’re not going to create blogs. Rather, we’re using WordPress as a “content management system” (CMS). WordPress 3.0 has some new features that make it especialy good for CMS work.

I won’t go over how to install WordPress, as the details will vary depending on your hosting service. Most services will offer Fantastico, however, and that makes it very easy to install WordPress. There’s a decent tutorial on using Fantastico to install WordPress here.

3.5 Configure WordPress

Once WordPress 3.x is installed, login to the administration console. You’ll want to change the default configuration.

A. Remove the default links. Delete the defaults under Links:

B. Remove the default post. Delete the post under Posts:

C. Rename the Uncategorized category. Change its name to News:

D. Change the Permalinks format. Change the permalinks format to /%postname%/:

3.6 Install Plugins

Now it’s time to install a few free WordPress plugins. These plugins will make your life easier. Best of all, you can install most of them quite easily directly from the WordPress console, just go to Plugins, click Add New and then search for the following plugins:

• Google XML Sitemaps to general a search engine sitemap
• SEO Ultimate to optimize page titles and so on
• Advertising Manager to insert AdSense ads into content

You may also want to install my free Privacy Policy plugin to automatically generate an AdSense-compliant privacy policy page for your site.

All of these are totally optional, of course. You’ll need to activate these plugins and then configure the plugins appropriately, which I’m not going to describe as this post is long enough as it is…

3.7 Install a Theme

The default WordPress 3.0 theme is a lot better than the previous default theme, but you’ll want to install a different theme. The XFactor course recommends a simple look like the one on this chainsaw sharpener site and there are theme designers who will sell you such a theme if you do a bit of looking. Or you can use one of the hundreds of freely-available themes available from the WordPress dashboard:

The set of choices can be quite bewildering, but remember these key points:

• Choose a widget-enabled theme. Widgets have always been useful, but new in WordPress 3.0 is the ability to transform a custom “menu” into a widget. This makes it extremely easy to create custom lists of pages and posts.
• Keep it simple. You don’t want to overwhelm the user with too much information or too many links. Your ads (or affiliate links) need to be front and center.
• White background. It’s more readable, goes with the simplicity theme, and makes ad blending easier.
• Use images. Images are great way to attract the reader’s eye to the page and can make a site more visually appealing. You don’t have to add images right away, but make sure it’s something you can easily do at some point.
• Turn off all ads. Some themes have built-in ad support (in which case you won’t need an ad plugin like the one I mentioned above), but you’ll want to turn it off while you’re working on the site. Best not to have the AdSense bot visit the site until you have content on it.

Don’t fret too much about the theme at first. I know it’s easy to spend time perfecting the theme — I do it myself. But the theme can always change later. It’s more important to get the site up and running than making it look good.

Part 4: Content Creation

At this point you have an empty site. It’s time to fill it with content.

4.1 Pages For Content, Posts For Announcements

A WordPress blog has two types of content, pages and posts. The main difference between the two is that posts get listed in the blog’s feed while pages do not. Otherwise, they are essentially identical from an external point of view.

The basic strategy we’re going to use is use put content on pages and announcements on posts. I know a lot of people do it differently by putting everything in posts, but you’re just making it easier for others to grab and duplicate your content.

For a non-blog site (which is what you’re building here) keep the content out of the feed, either by putting it on pages and creating announcements that link to those pages or by using summaries in the feed. Either approach will work, really, but I prefer the content-on-pages approach. Why? Because with WordPress you can make any page the blog’s front page with just a few clicks. You’ll see what I mean shortly.

4.2 The Announcements Page

First, though, you’ll need to create a new page for displaying the blog’s posts. Normally this is the front page, but we’ll need to create a separate page for this. All you do is create an empty page, but give it a descriptive title like “Announcements” or “Blog” or “News”.

4.3 The About Page

Next, modify the default “About” page to something descriptive about the site. Installing a contact form (use one of several plugins available for this) is a good idea. Adding a street address ads credibility, too, but most people don’t want to do this.

Try to be unique. A lot of people who read the XFactor course went and created sites whose “About” pages literally cloned the example site in the course, which makes them quite easy to find. If you don’t believe me, try this Google phrase search (it’s actually two phrases) and you’ll find a large number of sites:

“we do not endorse any specific product” “give the consumer a choice”

I guess that’s one way to do microniche keyword research!

4.4 The Privacy Policy Page

Don’t forget that your site must include a privacy policy if you show AdSense ads on the site. The Privacy Policy Plugin I listed above makes it easy, but it’s certainly not the only choice.

4.5 The Front Page

Preliminaries aside, you’re ready to create the content for your front page. This will be the home page for your site, the first page most visitors will see. It should be focused around the main keyword for your microniche. Ideally, it should be unique content that you wrote yourself.

Don’t go overboard with using your keyword. One or twice will be enough, as it’s already in the domain name. Use it too much and the page will be flagged as spammy by Google.

4.6 Configure the Front Page

With the front page and announcements page defined, go to the WordPress dashboard under Settings -> Reading and configure WordPress to use pages for the front page and the posts page:

You may have to play with the front page title a bit. Don’t forget you can use the SEO plugin to change the title displayed without changing the actual title.

4.7 Create a Custom Menu

This is optional, but it adds a lot of flexibility: Create a custom menu (go to Appearance -> Menus). On the menu you can add all the pages you want and you can give them different, shorter titles. You can then create a widget that gets its list of pages from the custom menu.

4.8 Make the First Announcement

At this point your site is essentially up and running, so it’s time to tell the world about it. You do this by creating a post that announces the site. You can write it like a press release if you want, or just make it a paragraph or two. Make sure you insert a link or two in the post that links back to the home page with your main keyword as anchor text.

After you publish the post, a ping will be sent by WordPress to various services and you’ll get crawled by at least one of the search engines (Google, probably) within the hour.

Now is a good time to turn on the ads. You’ve got content, so enable the ads.

4.9 Add More Content and More Annoucements

Now repeat the cycle over the next few days… add more content pages, each focused on one of your other related keywords. Create an announcement for each page. You can even do it all in one sitting if you use WordPress’s scheduling feature.

4.10 Promote the Site

Once the site is up and running, you can start promoting it. Essentially this means getting links to it from other sites. There are a zillion ways to do this, but the typical things you can do are:

• Submit a press release about the site — Lots of free press release sites to choose from, submit to a few and if you can use good anchor text in the link back to your site. (Not always possible.)
• Bookmark the site — Submit your site to various bookmarking sites like Delicious.
• Submit to feed aggregators — This gets a few visitors and some links back to your site.
• Submit articles — Write content and submit them to article directories like EzineArticles, GoArticles, ArticleDashboard, etc.

One key point is to avoid using your keywords in titles for content you submit elsewhere. You don’t want the website that links to your site to rank higher than yours. So if you write an article, make sure your title doesn’t include the keyword phrase you’re targeting. Instead, use that phrase as anchor text within the article bio box.

Keep building links over time. Use whitehat techniques only, please. You may wish to outsource some things (like directory submission) to others in order to save time. But in the early stages it’s best to do everything yourself. (One danger of outsourcing, BTW: you’re revealing your niche!)

Conclusion

I hope you’ve found this discussion useful. If you have any questions, please leave a comment below and I’ll be happy to answer them. (Note that all comments are moderated and I’m pretty aggressive about deleting comments that essentially say nothing!)

If you did find this useful, a link or bookmark back is always appreciated!

One of the other things I’ve been doing is developing a website for the KW Lightning Girls Basketball Association, part of an experiment I’m doing on using WordPress to host sports club websites. (KW Lightning is a club focused on girls basketball in Waterloo and Kitchener, Ontario.) Also some interesting tidbits to share with you about that, although not sure where I’ll post them yet as it really has nothing to do with AdSense… overall it’s a pretty good platform, though, and much more flexible than a dedicated sports hosting package offered by various companies. (Cheaper, too, as long as you’ve got someone techie to handle it…)

Lots of stuff to do. I may even have an AdSense tidbit or two to post here in the near future…