The Beginning of My SEO Venture

For some time now I have toyed with the idea of starting an SEO marketing campaign just to see if it could really work.  Could I really make money on the internet?  However, I didn't feel I had the requisite knowledge nor the time to make a go of it.  Taking that attitude, of course, meant that I would never give it a try and find out.  The busyness of my job and family quickly pushed the idea into the recesses of my mind.

A couple of weeks ago I took part in a webinar about SEO and niche marketing.  I found the content interesting and even learned a few things.  The desire to try an SEO venture was quickly rekindled.  By chance I bumped into friend a few days later that was into internet marketing and he offered to give me a few tips.  He told me how you have to take advantage of the markets and opportunities as they arise.  He went on to discuss seasonal niche market oppoturnities such as Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc..  This coincided with the information I had heard during the webinar.

The key he said was to define your niche market to one that has high interest but not a lot of competition.  Then he volunteered to help me to come up with a niche to market.  As Halloween was already upon us and Thanksgiving just a month away those opportunities were already past.  There was not enough time to get into those niche markets this year.  However, Christmas was still over 2 months away.  Not a long time but maybe enough time to give it a shot.

So we brought up Google as started searching for key words.   I wanted to find a Christmas-related product or products(s) to market without too much competition.  Naturally, we thought of Christmas ornaments.  However, if you Google "Christmas ornamnents" you will get over 5 million hits!  Not much chance of me dominating that market.  That's a pretty large niche!  So we narrowed it down more.  Angel ornaments (539,000 hits), reindeer ornaments (76.500 hits), snowman ornaments (69.500 hits).  Now we were getting somewhere.  We found some other niches with fewer hits but they weren't traditionally popular kinds of ornament.  We thought it better to stick with something popular.

So, snowmen ornaments it was.  The first thing I needed to do was secure a domain name that included my key words.  The first rule of SEO is to have a domain name the includes your key words.  A quick jump to Godaddy.com, my current web host, revealed that snowmanornaments.com was already taken.  Drats!  However, snowmanornament.org was still available.  Ideally the .com address is better but the .org and .net domains are next best.  The .biz, .tv and .info domains should be avoided whenever possible.

Ten bucks later that domain name was mine.  Fortunately, the hosting package I already have allows for multiple domains to be hosted under one account and for unlimited bandwidth and disk space.  Cool!  I was going to be able to try this experiment at minimal expense.  My next task was to locate a source of product to market.  I'll talk about this in my next posting.  Until then!