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I’ve long been a fan of long-tail searches.  These are those searches in Google that may only result in a handful of visitors each but add up to the majority of your traffic.  For example, your intended keyword may be “Bass Fishing” but your visitors will find you using such terms as “green bass fishing lures” or “best bass fishing spots in Texas”.  Each may only get 1 or 2 visitors a month but there are literally millions of such terms being used in Google daily.   These searches make up at least 80% of my traffic.

These will also often convert far better than more general terms for affiliate marketing.  A search for “buy bass lures” is of more value than a search for “bass fishing”. The first has their credit card out and is ready to buy, the second is probably just wondering what a bass looks like.

Up to now it has been difficult to take advantage of these long-tail searches.  You can go through your website logs but the sheer quantity of them will leave your mind reeling.  Enter Hittail.com

“HitTail is a content intelligence service that reveals in real-time the least utilized, most promising keywords hidden in the long tail of your natural search results. We present these terms as suggestions that when acted on will boost the natural search results of your site. It’s simple, easy to use, and the results are immediate.”

Hit Tail, in beta at the moment, sorts through your long-tail searches and gives recommendations on blog topics.  Topics that your readers are already searching for and, more importantly, topics that will likely result in more visitors.

I’ve been using Hit Tail for about a week now on two of my blogs and the results are impressive.  It has given me some great ideas for blog topics.  It’s too early to say if these will result in more traffic but I’m optimistic.

It’s a bit confusing to see how it all works, so watch their demo and read their blog.

I was planning on having a moan about splash pages and sales videos but  Splork said it so well that you should read his post instead.

There’s a famous quote by Thomas Edison:

Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident. They came by work.

He certainly wasn’t talking about blogging for a living but he could have been.  I’ve posted a couple of approaches to finding blog subjects.  Both of these are valid and will work.  Unfortunately just finding the perfect subject, one with lots of searches and little competition, isn’t enough. The subject is the inspiration, the one percent.  Building and promoting the blog is the perspiration, the ninety-nine percent.

I’ve often been asked how many blogs, and by association, bloggers, make money.  I really don’t have an easy answer to this question.  From my experience about a third of my own blogs go nowhere, a third make so-so money and a third really take off and earn the big bucks. I work hard on my blogs to get these results and still I fail a third of the time and break even another third. 

Often times it’s the blogs I really enjoy writing, like this one, which will probably never earn much.  I do know that the blogs I start half-heartedly, post a couple of times then get bored, rarely make a single cent.  There’s the odd exception but it’s rare.

Blogs need work, they need nurturing, they need promoting.  It can be hard to make post after post and see ten or twenty visitors a day.  Been there, done that.  I posted to one of my hobby blogs for a full three months before it made more than $10 from Adsense.  Man, this is getting depressing.  I guess I’m just trying to say that blogging isn’t easy money.  It certainly isn’t free money.  You have to put in the hours and the work to be a success.  Many of those hours will be learning what works and what doesn’t.  If that doesn’t appeal, go buy one of those get rich quick books.  If any of them work, send me a copy.

I believe it was Robert Allen who once said that the easiest way to make money was to find a school of hungry fish and feed them.  The idea being to find a need amongst the public that isn’t being satisfied. Fill that need to the best of your ability and you will have customers for life.

It can be hard to find those hungry fish with a top-down approach.  Traditional wisdom is to list subjects of interest then drill down and find niches.  For example, you might list your hobbies as:

Fishing
Golf
Reading

You then got to your favorite keyword tool and type in Fishing.  The tool will return a list of keywords and their estimates as to the number of searches per month.  Maybe it returns the following keywords and number of searches:

Fishing             183445
Fly Fishing          56325
Fishing Boat       35399
Fishing Report    21338
Bass Fishing       20101

Still too many searches for a niche subject, so you drill down further with Bass Fishing and it returns:

Florida Bass fishing    2988
Striped Bass Fishing  1727
Bass Fishing Game    1582

If you have decided that around 1500 searches a month on Overture is enough then you check the competition of Google for Bass Fishing Game. 27,000 results returned.  A bit high but it’s good enough and you launch your blog of bass fishing game reviews.  Maybe enough people are interested in your blog, maybe not.  You would probably have to look hard for an affiliate program.

Here’s another approach to choosing a blog subject.

Start by looking for people with problems before you look for the topic.  Go to the same keyword tool and type in “get rid of”.  When I tried this, it returned:

how to get rid of mouse
how to get rid of acne
how to get rid of flea
how to get rid of stretch marks
how to get rid of acne scar
how to get rid of fruit flies
how to get rid of pimples
how to get rid of spyware
how to get rid of cellulite
how to get rid of a hickey
how to get rid of love handles
how to get rid of blackhead
how to get rid of rats
how to get rid of puffy eyes

All with 1500 to 5000 searches a month.  Suddenly you have a list of people with problems.  A school of hungry fish.

“How to get rid of love handles” had 1635 searches on Overture.  The searches from Google will be much higher.  Maybe 20 times as high.  Maybe more, I don’t know.  Google competition was 13,500 results using quotes in the search. 

Thousand of people, I assume mostly women, looking for the solution to a specific problem.  Getting rid of love handles.  This can only increase with new year resolutions.  Maybe you have an interest in weight loss and can research and suggest solutions.  Solve their problem and then send them to a weight loss site with an affiliate program.

Here are some more “problem” words you can use:

How to
How can I
Advice
Review
Best
Eliminate
Fix
Guide
Make 

A few minutes brainstorming and I’m sure you can find dozens more.

I realize this whole choosing a subject thing may be confusing.  A couple of posts ago I was saying that you should only write about your passion.  Now I’m pointing you to making a quick buck by looking for problems.  I guess I see two types of blogs.  One long term, which is your passion, and one short-term to promote an affiliate program.  Or maybe I just need to pay the bills while I write about stuff that really interests me.

The Warcraft blogger.com blog that I created in November has been getting a steady 100 to 150 unique visitors a day since soon after it was indexed. Yesterday, one of the keywords appeared on the front page of Google and the traffic shot up to 573 uniques. Today it’s back down to normal levels.

Sudden jumps in the SERPs are usually either due to Google rearranging its rankings for everybody with a new algorithm, or simple time-based changes for a new site. New blogs get a honeymoon period where they will rank higher than normal then, after a couple of weeks, jump around a little and sink to their permanent positions. Only changes to the site content or increased link value will raise them higher.

Since the chatter level in the Google forums is low, I’m assuming that it’s only the vagaries of a new site index, rather than a Google shuffle. Only time will tell if it’s a taste of things to come or just big G teasing me before it is dropped completely.

Affiliate commissions over the last 30 days have been a total of $422, an average of $14 a day. This average has been very consistent over time. Remember that this blog only took five hours to create and cost nothing. It hasn’t been updated since it was created. If Google is kind to me, there’s no reason it shouldn’t continue to make money for several more months. Let’s say it only lasts another three months. That should net me a total in affiliate commissions of around $1600. Divide $1600 by 5 and you have an hourly rate of $320. Now I realize that this isn’t going to make anybody a millionaire overnight but how does it compare with the average McJob? Work five hours and create one blog a day and it’s a viable full-time job. I’m certainly not suggesting that you, or anybody else, quits their day job and starts creating blogs before they prove it a viable money earner. Start in your spare time. Build two blogs a week and see how it goes. Some will be failures, I guarantee that. Starting out, you will have more failures than successes. If I can give you enough tips on this blog to improve on the success ratio then I’ve done my bit.

Now that Christmas is out of the way, I will start on the blog case study. The idea is to show each step, in depth, on building a money-making blog over a couple of weeks. If you are serious about making a living blogging, or at least some extra cash, follow along and build your own blog. It’s really only by doing that you will learn. If you are going to just read, nod your head, and go back to browsing the web or watching TV then you’ve wasted my time and yours.

If you read any of the many ebooks, websites or forums about making money on the internet you will hear them talk about finding a niche.

A niche is a small, well defined market with, hopefully, little competition.  Breeding Discus fish is a niche.  Treating distemper in dogs is a niche.  Keeping fish and dogs are not niches.

The gurus will tell you how to use Overture inventory to find how many people search for a niche search term.  Then you go to Google to find the competition.  A lot of searches and little competition is likely to be a profitable niche.  Let’s pretend that breeding Discus fish is a profitable niche.  You rush off to your favorite domain registrar and register discus-breeding-secrets.info or something similar. You build up a list of keywords to weave into every blog post.  Maybe you think about a PPC campaign to kick-start your blog.

Then you sit down to write.  You wouldn’t know a Discus fish from a hole in the ground but whatever, the internet has all the information you need.  You go off to Google and find several sites with enough information for a few blog posts and you start typing. You steal some images from other sites.  Three days and four posts later you stop.  Not because you don’t want to earn some Adsense income from your blog, but because you realize you really have nothing new to say about the humble Discus fish.

Of course, neither of us  has ever done anything like this. But we all know somebody who has. 

I was talking to a guy, Dave,  in our local watering hole a few nights ago and we got around to discussing what we did for a living. Dave worked in a bank.  I told him I wrote a few blogs to make money.  “Oh, you are a writer then?” he asked.  “Me?  No I’m a lousy writer” I replied. “My English teacher is probably turning in her grave.”  Dave’s first question was to ask me how he could do the same.  Almost all of his questions were concerning what subjects were profitable to blog.  What should he write about?

The problem is that people are looking outside of themselves for blog topics.  They are focused on making money and not on providing value to others. They let their passion for making money overcome their passion for the subject.

So, how should you choose a blog topic?  Look inside first.  What are you passionate about?  What information can you offer to the world?  What could you happily write about day after day without becoming stale and boring?

Let’s say you are passionate about fishing.  You sit in the office all day dreaming of being on the lake and landing a monster bass.  Fishing is your passion but shouldn’t be the subject of you blog.   NOW you drill down and find your niche.  Go to Overture and Google and find your subject.  Maybe it’s Bass fishing.  Maybe it’s ice fishing.  You still need some interest in the subject and any of the free keyword research tools can provide that.  I use Good Keywords amongst others.  It’s free and it works.  (This is where the other guys give you an affiliate link to Wordtracker or KeywordElite.  Pretend I did if it makes you feel better.) I won’t start a blog unless the niche subject gets at least 10,000 searches a month.  That’s way above the level recommended for most niches.

The big advantage of blogging on a subject that you are genuinely passionate about is that you don’t really care about the competition - one of the key elements of a profitable niche - because you will stomp 90% of the other websites on the subject.  Your passion and knowledge  will show and people will visit and bookmark your blog. 

What if there isn’t an affiliate program for your subject?  I’d be surprised if there wasn’t but here’s an idea.  Create a product.  Write an ebook about ice fishing and sell it for $27. Don’t think you can write a whole ebook?  Have a ghost writer fluff out your blog posts to 100 pages. Be both vendor and affiliate.  Put it on Clickbank and have all those eager internet marketers spend their money on PPC to promote it for you.

Some more free tools:

http://labs.google.com/sets - type in one niche and it will find related niches

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ - searches per month

http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/USm/search/tools/bidtool/ - and their PPC bids