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If you’d missed the first part, please check it out here.

Traffic is the life line of a Blog or any type of online media for that matter. Only when you have traffic can you start thinking about ways of monetizing it, which will lead us to the next step - Analyze the Profit Potential of your Niche. You can be writing the best content in the world but if no ones visiting you, it’s as good as staying home and throwing away your house keys.

Step 2 – Analyze the Traffic Potential of your Niche

There are generally two types of traffic – organic and paid. We are only interested in organic traffic here – traffic that is brought to you when people search for information on a topic. The reason why you should be very interested in this is that you don’t want to be focusing on a niche that is inherently limited by poor organic search traffic. The size and potential of this traffic is directly proportional to the number of people searching for information relating to the topic. The goal here is to determine if the niche topic has at least a moderate amount of search volume to justify pursuing it any further. It is however not an exercise on finding and targeting keywords for your niche.

There are many useful tools available to help you estimate the search volume for a particular topic. The one that I find most useful is Trellian’s KeyWord Discovery Tool. I like this tool because it is very comprehensive with very well designed user interfaces which do not overcrowd your screen with a million things. Instead, it offers you the option to drill down to more details if you need to.

For instance, if my niche topic is “Sydney” and I’m interested to know how many people search for information relating to “Sydney”, using this tool it will display a list of all search phrases using this keyword in descending order of the number of searches performed. From this list, you can also derive at the overall search depth of this niche topic. This is important because it gives you an indication how big your blog can grow with this niche, and the number of keywords you can use with it. From the figure below, the total number of searches for “Sydney” is 63,453 which is prominently displayed at the top of the box. Tabulated inside the box are search phrases displayed in descending order with action buttons for analyzing trending and market share information.

The figure below shows a detailed analysis of “Sydney Hotel” drilled down from the first page. The first 2 entries are going to be tough to compete in with about a million web pages already using the keyword term, and only 10 are going to be ranked on first page of the search results. “Sydney luxury hotel” which has a pretty decent KEI, is much easier to compete in since it only has 127,00 web pages competing for top 10 positions. It will be much quicker to rank with this keyword then “Sydney Hotel”.

There are other freely available tools on the internet, but my absolute favorite one is “SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool”. This not only gives you the average number of searches broken down by 3 major search engines, it also provides convenient links to “Google Insight”, “Google Trends”, “Trellian keyword Discovery Tool” and others.

At the end of this step, you should have a pretty good idea how much traffic each niche topic can expect to have and the ideas around how to monetize this traffic will come to fruition in the next step - Analyze the Profit Potential of your Niche.

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