Examine Your Potential Competitors - STEP 4

If you're considering building a site about hiking boots, type "hiking boots" (using quotation marks) into Google and Yahoo! and carefully examine the top 10 sites which appear in the search results.

They're your real competitors. See what they are doing and how they are doing it, can you create a better, more interesting, more useful site than theirs? Can you think of a new angle, a new approach outside what they have done?

Do those top 10 sites all have high Page Rank - say 6 or more? If so, you'll have to work really hard to get in the top 10.

Let's say the top 3 sites in Google are Page Ranked 8, 7 and 6. If so, you'll probably have to work harder for a couple of years or more to outrank them. I'm not saying it cannot be done and in less time, but it will require either a great deal of work, or a very innovative, eye-catching approach.

You can quickly check the Page Rank of your potential competitors by using Seochat's free online tool - http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/pagerank-search . Type in "hiking boots" or whatever your interest is and you'll be able to see the Page Rank of the top 10 sites to do a case study.

Do those sites all have the phrase in the title? (The title is the words that appear at the very top of your screen when you visit a site.) If not, you may be able to beat them.


How many links do your potential competitors have?

Do your potential competitors all have thousands of links to them? This is important, because links are important to search engines. You need good, relevant links to your site. To find out how many sites are linking to a site, use the free Yahoo! Site Explorer. Go to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com - and login (set up a free account if necessary).

Type the URL of the site you want to explore.

Click on "Explore URL".

Click on "Inlinks".

Modify your search to make it more useful. Select the options to show Inlinks "except from this domain" and "entire site". This will exclude internal links and show you all external links that Yahoo! knows about to ANY page of the website.

If your potential sites have thousands of links to them, they're likely to be very tough competitors.

Don't decide definitely on a niche topic until you've taken the next two steps...



Research Affiliate Merchants - STEP: 5



Before you make a firm decision on a topic you desire for your site, you will need to do research on the availability of the product to see if there are suitable affiliate products which match your topic or area of interest, if there are not at all then switch to something close to the topic and research again until you find merchants that sell such product.

You also want affiliate merchants that have excellent products, excellent reputations and sites that look as though they're good at selling. You can search the Affiliate Programs Directory for ideas.


Consider aiming for lifetime commissions.

If you're lucky enough, you'll manage to select a web site topic that has affiliate programs which pay lifetime commissions or residual commissions - the sort reviewed at LifetimeCommissions.com.

You'll earn repeat commissions when "your" customers make more purchases.

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