Analyzing Competitors

So you have selected the best Website concept. It's time to professionally research your competitors and partners. The goal is to grow your keyword list ever bigger, ever more profitable. This will yield the raw material for new keyword-focused content pages.

Add two new columns to your table of keywords...

• IDEAS FOR CONTENT
• POSSIBLE PARTNERS.

Use one of Top search engines or directories (Google, Yahoo, etc.) to search for each of the highly profitable keywords from the table.

You can also use very interesting meta search engine Ixquick. On Ixquick, a website gets one star for every major Search Engine that scores it in their Top 10. So it's a fast way to check all the major search engines at the same time. Websites with three stars or more really know what they're doing and are not there by accident.

Review top sites

Review at least the first 10-20 websites from the top search results. As you get into this in-depth research, you'll notice three types of sites...

• Irrelevant - for whatever reason they just don't fit. If your search on a keyword returns many websites that seem inappropriate, it's likely that this keyword won't bring targeted traffic to your website. You want targeted traffic unless you are paid per impressions of ad banners.
• Merchant - enter in POSSIBLE PARTNERS what kind of merchandise they sell. If they have an affiliate program that fits your concept, enter the URL of the join page for the affiliate program of that merchant.
• Content - these websites are your direct competitors. They make money through banner ads and affiliate programs.
  Browse the website, drilling down into the content. You may get some great ideas for content on your own site. Enter these ideas into the IDEAS FOR CONTENT column. You can even find an absolutely new amazing idea for your website and loop back to analyzing this new concept.
  Click on the banner ads and text links, following these links out to their destinations, to see what kind of merchants they have chosen as affiliate partners. If a given merchant fits your concept and has an affiliate program, enter the kind of merchandise it sells, and the URL of the join page.

Continue on for the remaining keywords, until you have completed all columns for all of your highly profitable keywords. As a result, you'll have lots of good content ideas for the website and a list of merchants who have affiliate programs or need pay-per-click advertising, automatically organized according to each keyword - so you are already arranging in-context text links for your keyword-focused content pages.

While visiting the websites have a look at the META KEYWORDS tag within the HTML source code. Most browsers will view the source code of a Web page by right clicking your mouse, and choosing something similar to VIEW SOURCE from the menu.

Many websites make a common mistake of listing tons of different keywords. You can get some good ideas for broadening your own list of keywords from your competitors.

Check the effectiveness of new added keywords (see previous step: Choosing Keywords), remove unprofitable ones and loop back to analyzing search results for these keywords.

Repeat this process of adding highly profitable keywords until you're getting only duplicate words - that's the sign that you've exhausted this technique.

Here's the comprehensive resource that describes the above process in more detail - Ken Evoy's Affiliate Masters course (new 2006 edition). It's probably the best single resource on building a successful website... at any price... and it's free! There's no charge - you're not even asked for your email address.

After doing all of this, you're super-ready to start building your own theme-based content website! You have found your perfect site concept and tons of raw materials. Your keyword list contains a lot of highly profitable relevant keywords and for each of them it...

• shows POPULARITY and NO. OF COMPETITORS data - to help to start writing pages about words with the highest profitability
• contains INFO about websites that rank well
• gives you IREAS FOR CONTENT - possible topics to write about
• suggests POSSIBLE PARTNERS - merchants who offer affiliate programs or pay-per-click advertising.

Now that you have all this stuff, go to the next step... Site Structure.

• Overview
• Site Content:
• Optimal Niche
• Choosing Keywords
• Analyzing Competitors
• Site Structure
• Search Engine Optimization
• Web Design
• HTML Codes
• Web Graphics
• Domain Names
• Web Hosting
• Online Website Builders