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Archive for the ‘ArticleUnderground’ Category

Here’s a lesson on getting ranked for niche keywords.

I was checking my stats the other day on this site and was quite surprised to see that my previous article underground post had gotten indexed by Google.  In fact, as of this writing www.zomoca.com is ranked #4 on Google for the keyword “articleunderground.” 

At first I thought this was an amazing testament to my SEO skills.  However, my feat is a little tempered considering that the one-word phrase “articleunderground” only has 427 competing websites.  The two-word phrase “article underground” however has 43,600,000 competing sites.

I’m still somewhat pleased by my one-word ranking since this shows that if you choose the right niche keyword — the kind without tons of competition — you can get ranked very quickly. 

In addition to the number of competitve sites you also need to consider how often a keyphrase is being searched.  According to the keyword selector tool at Overture, my one-word “articleunderground” gets 0 searches.  Gee, not very good for traffic, is it?

The two-word “article underground” only gets 26 searches a month.  Still not very sought after.  I’m a little puzzled by this considering the high number of websites…

So maybe building a site around the article underground phrase may not be such a great idea.  At least not at this point since it gets so few searches.

Still, the lesson here is to go after niche keywords that do not have tons of competition yet still have enough of a demand that will generate you some traffic.  You essentially want to be the big fish in a little pond.  A lot of little ponds, actually.

In subsequent postings I plan to go over in more detail how you can do keyword research to find out which keywords fit this big-fish-in-a-little-pond criteria.

ArticleUnderground uses a clever approach to providing content for websites. Unlike a lot of software utilities that literally scrape words off of existing websites to create *ahem* original content, ArticleUnderground hires a group of copywriters to write 400 original articles each month that are keyword specific. ArticleUnderground then sells the articles to a limited number of 350 members. Membership is $97 per month so ArticleUnderground collects a tidy 350 x $97 = $33,950 per month. Not bad. Of course, out of that income comes the copywriting fees, marketing costs, website maintenance, etc.

In addition, ArticleUnderground has set up a series of blogs — 20 or more — in which members can post the articles and set up links to their own sites. The linking is probably worth the $97 per month, provided ArticleUnderground content and blog sites don’t get banned for some arcane reason.

In general I see two techniques for this service:

1) You use the articles as a supplement to already existing sites. Hopefully, among the 400 articles each month you can find topics that are related to your existing site and add the articles to create more content pages.

2) You create brand new sites based on the articles. Group the 400 articles each month into related topics and create new sites that are centered around a theme.

Here is a fellow who is using ArticleUnderground as in 2) above. Still too new to claim whether or not it works.

http://www.blogtrafficschool.com/forums/index.php?act=Print&client=printer&f=6&t=161