Retire Young and Wealthy

I took a six hour bus trip today from Koh Chang back to Bangkok and re-listened to some of the podcasts from the 30 day challenge. It got me thinking a bit about what Ed is teaching and how I have done my own market research up until now.

One of the main emphasis’s of the challenge is market research. Or more importantly, doing market research focused on search volume. Up until now, I have thought of an idea for a website, looked around for competing sites and thought of ideas of how I could come up with something better.

I haven’t placed much emphasis on researching keywords. This is probably one of the many reasons why the ebooks I have written have performed so badly. What you might think of as a good idea, might not be what people are looking for on the internet, no matter how great you think your book is. I wrote a guide to living in Japan and to date have only sold a couple of copies. It was something I wanted to write anyway and sometimes I think of just putting all of the content on my website and placing Adsense on it. The .net of the domain has a fairly active forum which I just discovered the other day.

If you are looking to making a quick buck, I think you need to do market research, just as Ed is teaching in the Thirty Day Challenge. Typical sales pages for information products will tend to rank only for a few targetted keywords, which is why it is so important to find searches that have a high volume and little competition.

If you want to build a website which has long lasting value, I think keywords are important, but I think you also need to see where you can create value in your website over your competition. If your site has good SEO and gets well indexed by Google, the site should perform well from long tail keyword searches.

If you have read the book on the subject, you will understand the value of the Long Tail. Building a website in a competitive niche can prove successful, if you are prepared to be patient and spend the time promoting and marketing the site.