Recently a new website owner interested in submitting articles contacted me with some concern that his topic of "Scottish History" just wasn't popular enough to draw in readers to his articles, and that marketing his site was therefore a futile cause. He was thinking that there are certain types of topics that do well on the internet and others that are just too intellectual or purely educational to make it.
Maybe that's something you're concerned about with your website as well. After all, the internet is full of sites that offer entertainment to the masses, self-help tips, and hot products. Can a site that is chock full of information on an educational topic such as history have any interested viewers?
The answer to this is "yes", definitely. People use the internet for all sorts of purposes, and gathering information for educational reasons is a big one. People do research on the internet all the time for school and just for their own personal information, so websites that offer educational content can be extremely valuable.
With that said, there are some topics that will have more people interested in them than others. You don't necessarily need to go for the topics that are the most popular--after all, you might not even have an interest in those topics.
Also, the really "hot" topics on the internet are very competitive. There are tons of websites competing for the people who are searching for information on that topic. Just because a topic is "hot" doesn't necessarily mean that a website on that topic has a lot of viewers.
By the same token, a website that is very niche specific (like the site about Scottish History) may not have as many people searching for information on that topic, but it's likely that there are not that many other websites competing for those readers. If you have a very niche specific site, with proper marketing you could dominate that niche with relatively little effort, because your competitors are few to none.
So, how can you tell how popular your topic is, so that you know what to expect when you start marketing your site?
First of all, let's remember that your articles are always on the same general topic as your website. However popular your website topic is, then you can expect a similar level of popularity with your articles.
What do we mean when we talk of popularity? We don't mean how many visitors your site is currently getting. No, that is something else entirely.
What we're referring to is how many people are searching for information on your topic on the internet.
How can you get this information?
Do keyword research. That will tell you exactly how many searches are being done each month for phrases associated with your topic.
It's important to pinpoint specific phrases and to know how many searches are being done on them. You can have two very similar phrases, but one may be much more popular than another. It can be the difference of just a word or two that separates a highly searched phrase from one that is not as popular (and each phrase is on the same topic).
Then, after you've gathered this information, compile a list of these phrases (called "keywords") and use them in your article submissions.
By taking the initial step of doing keyword research, it allows you to have realistic expectations as to how much traffic can be generated to your articles and to your site. It doesn't really do you any good to set a goal of 10,000 page views a month when your keyword research has revealed that your targeted phrases are only creating 3,000 searches a month.
If you have a website that's on a topic that doesn't seem that popular, I challenge you to do the keyword research to find out what you're dealing with. That's the only way that you'll know what kind of traffic you can expect if you were to have a top ranking site for your keywords. No matter what your topic, you can do keyword research, write articles that appropriately incorporate those terms, and conduct a consistent article marketing campaign that increases the number of visitors to your site.
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Steve Shaw is a content syndication specialist. Do you own a blog? Need content? Join thousands of other blogs and get free high-quality, niche-focused, human-reviewed content from quality authors sent on auto-pilot - and it's all 100% free! Go to http://www.autoblogit.com for more information.
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