Research and Discoveries: Bloggers Lab Tutorial for Newbies Blogger

This article was written for members of the Bloggers Lab Group. I was one of the volunteers chosen to write on the topic of research and discoveries. I felt it would be useful for you, especially if you are a newbie wanting to go into blogging. You can Research and discovery-bloggerslab and read it at any time.

Below is the article, so enjoy it.

I was so delighted when Peter Creativewritingmachine asked me to write on research and discovery, and I also want to thank Jide Ogundanya, other volunteers, and all members of this group.

Although it is a little bit lengthy, it is highly educative and informative, and I have taken time to dive a little bit into my own story, how I failed to research, which resulted in failure and low earnings.

HERE WE GO!

Have you been wondering why some bloggers are doing great and you or someone else is not?

You may be tempted to say or believe that they have so many ideas, skills, are well-trained, lucky, or are technically sound. No! Not at all!!

These people are not lucky or successful by chance; they merit it because they have worked tirelessly on their niche/business and therefore deserve to be successful.

Although it seems like a daunting task, research and discovery should be a task to which you should devote time and resources because it will determine if you are going to be successful or not, and it is not as difficult as you think.

SO WHAT IS RESEARCH?

Research is all about planning or laying the foundation for your blog/ business, and whoever fails to plan is planning to fail.  Everything in life requires planning, and so does your blog. When you want to get to somewhere, you will say to yourself, How do I get there? How much money can I go with that will cover my journey? What mode of transportation…”?

Because you have asked yourself those simple questions: how to get there… and you discovered that going by bike is faster; going with N5,000 will cover all my costs; you will also discover that that journey or assignment will be very easy to accomplish.

This simple explanation applies to blogging as well. In fact, if you ever make it as a blogger, research and discoveries will determine.

Therefore, research and discovery is an effective way of creating a powerful blog. You will never lack ideas of what to do, what content to add, or how to generate traffic, among other things.

At this point, let me dive into my own story. When I first started my first blog (http://www.NaijaJobsLink.com) in 2008, I did not spend much time or any time at all researching. I focused so much on the money I would be making and posted rubbish just because I understood the importance of content. That was why it took me more than a year to make $108 after spending more than $500 going to cybercafes and other things.

At one point, I was frustrated,d abandoned blogging and faced my misery labourer work. My turning point came when I read Steve Pavlina’s article about blogging. He said you should forget about money first, take time to research your ideas, see how you can make your writings a last bus stop for whoever is reading them, add value to your readers, build reputation…… and money will keep flowing.

The questions that most newbies ask are: how to research? What to research? Where to research and so on and on?

SO WHAT TO RESEARCH?

Good, you asked that question!

There are so many things to research on when starting a blog. You have to research the:

1)      Domain name

2)      hosting

3)      Keywords

4)      Niches

5)      Contents

6)      Traffic

7)      Search Engine Optimization SEO

8)      Social media

9)      Blogging platform – free blog (e.g Blogger.com) or self-hosted blog (e.g wordpress.org)

10)   List buildings and a whole lot of them.

I know almost all of what I mentioned above has been thoroughly explained by various volunteers, so I won’t spend much time explaining them except the most important ones like content, traffic, SEO…

RESEARCHING ON YOUR DOMAIN NAME AND HOSTING

Choosing the right domain name for your blog and hosting is very important for your success. Sometimes, you might want to build a blog and you are short of name to give to your blog, the best way to choose a domain name is to research your niche and keywords, discover whether it has high traffic (that is people are looking for it) and understand if it high paying keywords. Write down your keywords and choose your domain from the keywords. Choosing from your keywords is very important for your search engine ranking.

Your domain should not be more than three keywords and it should be easy to memorize.

Choosing the right hosting for your blog is also very important because you will not like a server that goes off intermittently. This will affect your site, and your search ranking as crawlers won’t be able to access your blog. So effective research will lead to awesome discoveries.

RESEARCHING ON YOUR KEYWORD AND NICHE:

If you are going to set up a blog to make money from Google Adsense or other contextual ads, keywords, and niches play pivotal roles. Not all niches you should blog on. Some niches are high-paying, but very competitive.

My failure to research my keyword led me to earn so little and I was always unhappy. I got so many clicks, but the earnings were just too small. I will have at least 50 clicks, earning per click EPS of 0.09 = 50×0.09 = €4.5. €4.5 for 50 clicks is rubbish considering the time and resources I spent.

Before you can see that 50 clicks, you should be getting 1000 visits. Keep in mind that less than 10% of your visitors a day will click on your ads. This varies, sometimes; you can get above 10% which is normal. But what is not normal is, that if more than 10% of your visitors a day click on your ads continuously for some time, you should know that your AdSense account is in danger and you should investigate your traffic immediately.

My earnings improved when I saw that so many people were looking for Post-UTME info, and admission info and I decided to add a sub-domain to my blog and post on education kinds of stuff. I was taken aback when I saw clicks from the channel added to that education sub-domain earning €1 – €13 per click.

The following year when post-UTME and admission stuff started again, my earnings skyrocketed from between €250 – €300 per month to €850. I got so many visits then because my site was always on top, but now, panda has changed the way we blog which has affected my traffic by over 50% – this is because I failed to research when I heard about Panda.

I decided to research using Google Keyword Tool and I discovered that job vacancy and career keywords were worth between $0.20 to $1.9 per click, while education keywords were between $3 to $22 per click. I also discovered that technology, server, web design/development, insurance, mortgage, grant, and loan were paying very high up to $100/click.

I blamed myself for not researching and discovering the right keywords to blog on. It is always very important to research your keywords.

RESEARCHING ON YOUR CONTENTS:

Some people say content is king when it comes to blogging, while others say traffic is king.

I will ask you this question, which one do you think is the KING – contents or traffic?

No doubt, content, and traffic are chiefs when it comes to blogging. If you are going to be successful, unique and quality contents are surely the key as well as quality traffic from reliable sources. It is even better to focus more attention on creating quality content, before embarking on setting up your blog so as not to be short of content or ideas.

Now that you have understood that quality content is the key to your success, how do you now ensure the continued flow of content? That is where you have to devote time and research. Getting ideas for your content is very easy and I will explain more when I get to the HOW TO AND WHERE TO RESEARCH SECTION.

Your contents should be the last bus stop for your readers. Make sure when they get to your blog, your articles should solve their problem so that they will not have to go elsewhere. Unique and quality content will make your readers come back, bookmark, and also subscribe to your blog.

Use your writings to build a good relationship because people only deal with people they believe can deliver.

RESEARCHING ON YOUR TRAFFIC:

Did you know that traffic is like blood running through your veins? And once blood is not flowing through your veins, you are a dead person.

Therefore, traffic is the blood that keeps your blog alive! Without traffic, you are just wasting your time, and it won’t take long before you call it quits.

It is of utmost importance to research how to get quality traffic because not all traffic is suitable for your blog. Some traffic can get you in trouble! You need to study where they are coming from, landing pages among others.

RESEARCHING ON SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION:

If you want to rank well in search engines, you have to research and map out the best way to research and optimize your pages for high ranking. Since most of the traffic will be from search engines, it is crucial to learn how to optimize your pages to rank top and beat your competitors.

SEO is a big industry and keeps growing and expanding because companies now understand the importance of search engine traffic as it is targeted and converts more.

There are a lot of ways to optimize which should be one of your research tasks.

HOW TO RESEARCH AND WHERE TO RESEARCH?

DOMAIN NAME AND HOSTING:

Choosing the right domain name can be a daunting task. I understand how difficult to choose the right domain because as a web designer and a blogger, most of my clients end up choosing the wrong domain or domain that has been taken. When this happens, am now saddled with the responsibility of choosing the right domain for them.

So how do you research and choose the right domain for your site?

I use this website http://www.stuckdomains.com/ to choose from expired domains because it helps with ranking.

I Research their keywords analyze and choose from there.

As for web hosting, you can use a review site or forums to research to know if such a hosting company is worth putting your site on its server. You should also make Google your friend and use it often and often.

KEYWORD AND NICHE:

Before I blog on any niche now, I will first of all check using the available tools to determine if the niche and keywords are worth dying for. Since your niche determines if you are going to make it big, there are need to research if people are looking for such information, the volume of traffic, and many more, it is of utmost importance to research it first before diving into it.

The following tools will help you to do good research.

Google Keyword Tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Google Insight: www.google.com/insights/search/

Google trends: www.google.com/trends/

Google search engine: google.com

Other tools are: http://www.alexa.com, http://www.wordstream.com/, http://www.seobook.com/ amongst others.

It will help you determine if the niche and keywords are profitable or not.

For example, research conducted on JOB vacancies and web design and choosing Nigeria and USA as the country using Google Keyword Tool shows the following results:

Country: Nigeria

Keyword: job vacancy, Competition: High, Global Monthly Searches: 1,830,000, Local Monthly Searches: 40,500, Approximate CPC: $0.21

Conducting the same search and choosing the USA or Canada:

Keywords: job vacancy, Competition: High, Global Monthly Searches: 1,830,000, Local Monthly Searches: 49,500, Approximate CPC: $1.09

Let’s choose another keyword and do the same research for both Nigeria and USA

Country: Nigeria

Keyword: web design, Competition: High, Global Monthly Searches: 7,480,000, Local Monthly Searches: 14,800, Approximate CPC: $0.66

Country: USA

Keyword: web design, Competition: High, Global Monthly Searches: 7,480,000, Local Monthly Searches: 2,240,000, Approximate CPC: $7.00

Comparing the results above for the USA and Nigeria, you will agree with me that targeting US traffic is far better than Nigeria, and also blogging on web design is far better than job vacancies. That is the essence of research which leads to a lot of discoveries.

CONTENTS

The best way to research your content and discover quality ideas is to ask questions using http://answers.yahoo.com/. With Yahoo Answers, you will get lots of content and ideas for your articles. You ask questions and people answer you.

Google and other search engines: Google is pivotal to your blogging success. You can get a lot of fresh ideas by searching for your keywords, taking top articles that show up reading and understanding, and then writing your own.

WebAmswers.com: I use Web Answers a lot. If I want to write a post on maybe Antivirus, I will just ask questions there and answers will keep dripping in. You also earn money directly into your AdSense account by answering questions.

Article Directories and Others: Using article directories especially ww.ezinearticle.com will help you a lot.

TRAFFIC AND SEO

Did you know that the traffic is at the top?

According to some research and studies, almost 90% of web searchers never make it to the second page of the results.

Do you know what that means for your site? Quite Simple! If you’re not ranked high on the search engines, you’re missing out on the majority of the traffic.

So researching your traffic sources that work is vital.

So beating your competitors in the game of SEO should be your optimum priority. That is why you have to do a lot of research on that.

BLOG PLATFORM:

There are lots of blogging platforms, but the most popular ones are Blogger.com and WordPress.org.

I will not dive much into this because it has been covered already.

Your effectiveness will largely be determined by the blogging platform you choose. As for me, WordPress.org is the best. Using a self-hosted blog makes you look professional, you can customize your site to suit your needs among others, and you will never be banned like a free blog. It is always better to research to know the right platform for you and also consider the cost.

I could have to continue writing, but when it is too much, it becomes boring.

I will be putting this on my blog for you guys to read and also be able to download it as a PDF.

Thanks a lot for your time.

Utibe Etim

www.UtibeEtim.com

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