BinaryDay

Background Note: Approximately 45 days back, I had made a post about my stained glass supplies project. This is a keyword with more than 500$ per month potential. In that post I had noted that I need to be able to move it into the top 10 of SERP to earn the right to write about keyword research in public. Now that it has moved into 7th position, I guess I am at liberty to bore you with my views about keyword research.

On a serious note, what I write below is based on my experience of working with niche sites like the one above. Moreover I am not going to sell you anything/ recommend something with my affiliate link smartly cloaked, so you should pay some attention to the post.

What are keywords

Everyone thinks that he/ she knows what are keywords. I thought so. However as I continued working on niche sites, I realized that the obvious things are obvious to everyone else and hence all lucrative urls are booked and there is an insane amount of competition. That is when fell back on commonsense approach instead of all the jargons that I had picked up till then.

Keyword Research is the process of finding out the terms that users are most likely to use while looking for the product that you are selling.

• For example a USB drive is also known as thumb drive or flash drive. If your website sells USB drives, then you will be interested to know which of the three terms are used by maximum number of users, so that you can concentrate on those words.
• That was a really simplistic case of keyword research. Now ask yourself if you will like to come at the top of Google results when people search for storage device or ways to transfer files from one computer to another etc. Keyword research should help you a large list of such keywords that are being used by your prospective customers and how many of them are using them. I am yet to see any tool that will give you such data.
• Finally people do not simply type in usb drive or thumb drive into Google. You will be surprised by the sort of variations used by a large number of users. This is what is popularly referred as the long tail search.

There are three important terms that we shall focus when evaluating any keyword. These are

1. Volume of search: This is basically the number of people who use the keyword. However as we go along, we shall realize that even this basic definition has many nuances including seasonality, exact match, broad match, wrong spellings etc. We shall look at all these factors in future posts.
2. Competition level compared to our existing strength and potential. That entire sentence is in bold because of its importance. Most guru tell you to go after easy terms. However what is easy for me with a 5 year old blog, lot of experience and thousands of existing income may not be easy for someone who is setting up a blog. As you study the competition level for any keyword, put that into context of the strength of your own blog.
3. Attractiveness of keywords: This is the money making ability of the keyword and will depend on the method of monetization. Some keywords that are highly attractive to people doing affiliate marketing may not be that attractive for people depending upon adsense to monetize and vice versa. Nevertheless, always keep an eye on the money making potential of the keyword that you are studying.

It has been more than three months now since I blogged about my plan of leaving the job for a startup life. In this time I have been working upon a no nonsense search engine for finding and comparing the prices of books across 10 online book stores in India. I am really happy to introduce MySmartPrice.com to the readers of BinaryDay.

If you buy books online then you should use mysmartprice because

1. It is the most comprehensive book price comparison site in India comparing price from 10 stores
2. A google suggest like feature makes it possible to search for the book only in a few key strokes
3. It provides you information about prices of different versions of the same book, helping you make a better decission.
4. Other important decision points like shipping cost and time of delivery is given as well
5. The result is provided in less than 30 seconds for 30,000 top books. If you are looking for an obscure title, then expect a 2-3 minute delay for getting the information. I am working on improving the timeline.

MySmartPrice continues to be a work in progress. I request you to give it a spin and share your views with me.

I am also looking for bloggers writing about books and voracious readers to get their feedback as an end user. I will really appreciate if you can put me in touch with any such person that you know.

Binaryday had been started to act as a place holder for my website about used mobiles. That project did not really take off as expected even though the site has gone on to become the #1 site for second hand mobiles in India. There are not that many people buying or selling used mobiles in India.

Still I continue to be bullish about the potential role of online websites to make real life commerce a lot more efficient and I am working on some really cool idea for enabling efficient price discovery of books. I will ask you for a feedback as soon as the first phase of the project gets completed. Trust me that is one of the best pieces of codes I have written till date and I am really proud of the project.

My theory that a place holder should always be created as soon as you start working on a project that will take more than a month to be completed. That is why I have started a website about prices in India which will work as a place holder for this cool project of mine. This website is going to have pages like Nokia mobile price list in India and Nokia 5230 price in India among other things.

I have a strong hunch that to be truly useful, I need to convert this site to make the prices dynamic. So that post about nokia mobile prices should be able to get the prices updated whenever the price of a model changes, automatically. What do you think is the best way to accomplish the same?