Creating a profitable information publishing business

Do you dream of information publishing, but you’ve been going it alone with niche research, website building, and online marketing?

We all need a helping hand in this area. I certainly do! Before handing over $1,000, $2,000, or even $5,000 to digital people (SEO, design, dev, copy), it pays to get a minor education in these areas.

I got my initial digital marketing education through the training tools at Site Build It (SBI!)  Three years later, I am adding to that education with Inbound Marketing training at Hubspot Academy.

To gain a partly-passive income from information, you need to MASTER Keyword Research. As a copywriter, I used Market Samurai (2009-2013), a software tool for research of all kinds. But even I was surprised at the depth of knowledge that was missing to interpret data, like keyword competitiveness and numbers. So I looked around for a better niche research tool.

The success of most information publishing websites rests on keyword search numbers, and I’ll tell you why. If you don’t have adequate keyword search numbers or you’re simply saying the wrong words on your site, you’re missing out on:

a) profitable niche markets, and
b) thousands of dollars worth of ‘free’ search traffic.

Four Tools for Keyword Research of Niche Markets

SBI’s tool “Brainstorm It!” — and video action guide — is the most impressive video training system (considering it’s included free with product) I’ve ever seen. The guide’s cheery voice prompted me through the hard yards of keyword number-crunching, passion finding, and profit/monetisation assessment.

It was actually fun to go through Brainstorm It, even if I did realise that what I THOUGHT I might write about did not have the requisite searchers or depth.  Luckily I happened to remember my passion for ‘self-development books’ is also other people’s passion. Ah, but that’s not the words people mainly use when searching. I went on to make a site about positive thinking.

Another way you can do research for free, is to use AnswerthePublic to research general questions people ask in a specific topical area.

BuzzSumo is also useful, to check on the number of shares for certain topical articles (using two keywords works best). They offer a 14-day free trial (with credit card imprint), but like me you may get billed before you have used it much, so take a note of whether you would get some use from it. Finding easily viral content is your aim with this tool.

For Kindle book authors developing a business around a niche, they need the best Amazon research to prosper. Actually, even fiction authors have used this next tool to target better categories and keywords for books they prefer to write. Dave Chesson’s Kindle Publisher Rocket is the tool for you if you just want that one-off access and keep using the analytic information year after year. Affiliate (if you click the link Jennifer will gain a commission, but you pay the same price as everyone else) :

Go to Publisher Rocket