Continued from Page One.
The other labels (Supply Site Info, Possible Partners and Ideas for Content) allow you to do even more research. Clicking on Supply Site Info will bring up information about sites that use the site concept keyword combinations that you've researched. As you scroll through the list below, you can click on the Possible Partners or Ideas for Content headings to make notes about potential alliances or to jot down ideas for articles for your site.
You can use the SBI Manager as a serious brainstorming tool, researching literally hundreds of site concepts at a time, to make sure you find a concept that the public wants.
Brainstorming Profitable Topics for Your Affiliate Site
After you've determined your overall site concept, you'll need to come up with "topic keywords" to be featured on your site -- which will determine which pages you create on your site, and terms for search engine marketing to promote it.
Accordingly, with a click, you then use SBI to generate topics related to your concept. SBI returns a list with several screens of information about how some of the keywords will fit your site concept, while others may seem trivial or irrelevant. Note how this page differs from the earlier list. One of the first things you'll notice are the yellow checkboxes, which you can uncheck if the keyword isn't relevant or isn't profitable -- helping to concentrate the focus of your site on the most useful topics.
If you find a high-profitability keyword in your list that is very closely related to your site concept keyword, clicking on the little Brain button allows you to do a supplemental Brainstorm and Research session. This gives you the opportunity to tweak your original site concept with sought-after phrases.
In fact, the supplemental Brainstorm and Research sessions could generate some unexpected surprises -- and might take you in a different direction than you had originally thought. It might even return keywords that are better concept than your initial one. That happened to me when I was researching the keywords "photoshop tutorials."
When my topic results came back, one combination was "photo shop tutorials," which had a much higher Profitability. But what really caught my attention was the Demand/Supply ratio, which was 29,709/224. This was a clear indication that using these keywords (in combination with great content) would likely get me a high search engine ranking.
Further Notes on Keyword Searches
Once you have the keyword list in front of you, you need to decide which ones are relevant. To do, click on the Profitability and Demand labels. But be careful here. In my initial research, some of the Profitability numbers were quite high for a given keyword combination and I thought I had a real winner until I checked out the Demand/Supply labels and found that the Supply was more than the Demand, which is the exact opposite of what you want -- because this signifies that the market will soon be saturated for that concept.
If you do all of these brainstorming sessions and you're still not getting the results that you're after, clicking on the Start Over button at bottom of the screen erases all the keywords and allows you to start over. Another option is the Continue Later button, which you use if you don't want to do all your brainstorming sessions at one time. You can shut down the SBI Manager at this point and all your work will be saved.
Assuming that the topic phrases you've come up with are what you want, click on the Send to my Master Keyword List button, which sends all the checked keywords and their data to your Master Keyword List for your site-in-progress.
The process is easy enough, but some sticky problems exist. Once you accept the keywords for your site, the Brainstorm & Research tool actually shuts down and you will be unable to do an intensive search for another seven days -- a feature designed to prevent abuse of the system. However, during one brainstorming session, when I clicked on the Start Over button, a dialog box popped up, telling me that the B&R tool had shut down and I couldn't do any more brainstorming for another week.
Also, at some point, you'll want to print out a copy of the keyword list. To do so, click on the domain name heading under the Master Keyword List heading. However, if you're brainstorming ideas and you don't want to send them over to your Master Keyword List, you can't print the list. A workaround to this problem is to use a screen capture utility like Snag-It, which works really well.
The next step -- which we'll cover in an upcoming piece -- is determining how to sign up for revenue-generating affiliate programs based on your concept.
Nathan Segal is an associate editor for ECommerce-Guide.com's sister site, WebReference.com.
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