How many times have you heard SEO ’gurus’ congratulating themselves about ranking for keywords with millions competitors? I see it all the time, often on sales pages for SEO consutlancy services or ranking software.

So called experts will usually tell you that the total number of results that a search engine has lists for a particular keyword is a measure of its difficulty or competitveness.

The number of results has long be used as measure keyword difficulty, it’s even been used to form mathematical formula such as KEI or R/S ratios.

They’re all wrong.

I guarantee that you are NEVER competing against millions of other sites to rank for your particular keyword. And I’ll prove it to you right now.

Search for this term on Google - keyword research

I’m getting around 56 millions results in Google. Yours may differ a little depending on where you are.

Next add the following parameter to the URL in the browser window start=990 or just click here:

http://www.google.com/search?q=keyword+research&hl=en&start=990&sa=N

All we’ve done is skip to the 990th result, as you probably know Google will only ever display a maximum of 1000 results.

Now surely if Google really had 56 million viable sites all vying to be #1 for keyword research then they would easily max out the 1000 results. But as you can see Google has decided that only 811 of the results are actually worth displaying. To quote Google directly:

“In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 811 already displayed.”

So Google has decided that all but 811 of the 56 million results are irrelevant, junk or duplicate content sites etc. They’re not even worth displaying to the searcher.

Try it with a few other keywords:

hdtv - 77 million results reduced to 720 ‘real’ results
porsche cayman - 1.9 million results reduces to 602 ‘real’ results
tens machine - 1.6 million down to 701 ‘real’ results

So the next time an SEO ‘guru’ tells you how many million sites he just beat to get the first page just add the &start=990 switch to see exactly how many ‘real’ results they actually beat.

Interesting stuff? Well it defnitely is but next time I’ll explain why your actual competition is much, much lower still.

Okay, I’ve decided to try something new here. Call it an experiment if you like.

So far I’ve done most of my development and earned most of my money behind the scenes. I have a select group of fellow internet marketers who I meet with once a week to discuss ideas, plans and progress but other than that the first time anyone else hears about new developments is when a new product goes live and is announced on BlogPiG.com. This time I’ve decided to go public early and also go into much greater detail about how exactly I intend to monetise the product.

The benefits for me are twofold. By discussing my plans in public I introduce an extra level of accountability that will help keep the project on track and on time. Secondly I’ll get valuable feedback from readers as to whether I’m on the right track. This will be the first-time I’ve attempted this type of project in this particular arena so I’m all ears when it comes to comments and advice.

The benefits for you are that you get a sneak preview into my latest product and maybe even get to play with it if you make it into the beta program. Secondly you get to watch my product launch cycle in real-time and maybe even replicate it with your own product. Assuming all goes as planned!

As you may have gathered from the post title this project is a membership site. The challenge is to develop a membership site with 100 recurring memberships in 100 days or less, essentially 3 months from now.

The membership price will be set at $47/month, quite a high price so it’s going to have to be a good product (and it is!). 100 members at $47/month will provide a total income target of $4700/month for this project. I have other sources of income but I’m ring-fencing this one for this experiment, I think it’s an ambitious yet achievable goal. Depending on which day you look at the exchange rates, $4700/month is around £3000/month which is, coincidentally, the amount my household income is due to drop later this year due to the imminent arrival of my baby son (Woohoo! Very exciting). The goal is to completely replace that lost income with this project resulting in there being no net effect on the family finances.

So that’s the plan but what’s the product?

Introducing NichePiG - The Keyword Reaper. It might sound like just another keyword research tool, but stick with it, this one is very different.

I’ll go into more detail about the exact features of NichePiG over the coming weeks. For now just imagine the total automation of your entire market research process and you’re still not even close to what it can do…

NichePiG is in alpha testing right now. I’ll be asking for some testers for a private beta in the coming weeks so If you’re interested don’t forget to sign-up for membership of the blog as priority will be given to members on my Aweber list.

Okay that’s it for now, stay tuned for more info coming soon…

If you’re using TagPiG to automate your post tagging you may also be using it’s publish feature to display the generated tags on your blog and feeds. It’s a very powerful feature but I’ll go into detail on that more in another post.

Today I wanted to mention one of the issues that can arise when you use the TagPiG publish feature. Increasingly WordPress theme designers are embedding tag code into their templates. If you then go and turn TagPiG publishing on you’ll end up with 2 sets of tags listed below each post.

To get things working correctly you’ll need to take the embedded tag code out of you template first and leave all the tag management to TagPiG. It’s a pretty easy job but you will need to edit a little code.

You can either edit your templates directly using notepad or even you FTP client but perhaps the easiest way is to use WordPress iteself to edit them in place on you blog.

In WordPress 2.7+ Admin area go to Appearance > Editor in the sidebar. Make sure your active theme is chosen in the dropdown box. You will probably see the following message at below the editor screen:

You need to make this file writable before you can save your changes.

The 2 files we need to focus on are index.php and single.php. Go into your FTP client and change the permissions on these files to 777 (CHMOD 777).

Now in the WordPress Editor select ‘Main Index Template (index.php)’ from the list on the right. If you don’t get a large blue update button below the edit window, something has gone wrong so go back and check the permissions on the two files in your FTP editor.

Scroll down through the file looking for the following code:

<?php the_tags( __( ‘Tagged’ ) . ‘: ‘, ‘, ‘, ”); ?>

It may not look exactly like this but it’s ‘the_tags’ you’re looking for really. Once you’ve found it remove everything between and including the nearest <? and ?> tags. Hit the ‘Update File’ button.

Repeast this process for the ‘Single Post (single.php)’ page and remove the_tags element. Don’t forget to the update the file.

Now go back into your FTP and reset the file permissions to 644.

That’s it, you’re done. You can use TagPiG as your only tag publisher, giving you much more control over how they appear and how many are displayed.

Due to popular demand I have decided to start releasing a selection of the BlogPiG plugins under GPL license. The first to be launched is TagPiG our WordPress AutoTagger.

TagPiG is an auto-tagging plugin for WordPress. TagPiG has been designed to overcome the manual bottle-neck by completely automating your tagging process. Here are some of the key features of TagPiG:

• Automatic post categorisation
• Automatic tag publishing
• Automatic tag filtering
• Automatic internal linking of common tags
• Automatic tag rotation

TagPig is simple to install and setup on your WordPress blogs. Once the plugin is activated it will run in the background, silently categorising, tagging and linking your blog posts automatically. With TagPiG installed you get all the great benefits of tagging without any of the additional manual overheads.

You can get an immense amount of benefit from correctly tagging all of your blog posts. Tags not only help you organize large quantities of content, but they also help define your site as a whole. If you post good content and you consistently tag every post you make with maybe 5-10 relevant keywords then, over time, your blog will become a very valuable resource to people interested in those keywords. They can actually come to your blog and get better, more reliable, less spammy, more focused search results than by doing a Google search! While this all sounds very desirable in theory the extremely manual nature of categorising and tagging blog posts has been a major bottle-neck for webmasters who build a lot of blogs and/or post to them frequently.

By Using TagPiG to automate your tagging will:

• Deliver additional keyword density into your blog posts
• Expand the keyword reach of new blog posts
• Get traffic boosts from Technorati and other tag aggregators
• Thematically organise your blog posts
• Provide an intelligent internal linking structure for your blog

TagPig has a comprehensive pdf user manual detailing every aspect of it’s setup, configuration and installation.

You can download TagPiG immediately here…

Google’s SKTool

I promised I would update the new Google Search Based Keyword Tool data here every so often so I’ve just run the February update.

Over half a million keywords with Google Search Queries, Adwords Competition & bid pricing data. Cost to you? Nada..

Enjoy it, I’ll run another update next month and just give me shout if you have any special requests.

Download the 500,000 row keyword list here: *MEMBERS ONLY (Please Login or Register to reveal)*

ps. Inevitably this is a big file, you’ll need Excel 2007 to open 1/2 a million rows or you could use a decent text editor like Ultraedit. Do not attempt to open this file in Notepad or you’ll be there all day…

True Worldwide SEO Hosting

If you interlink sites in your own networks you should already know about IP addresses and the importance of different IP classes. But just in case here’s a quick rundown.

In our example let’s say we have two sites and we want a backlink from site B to site A (don’t reciprical link your sites!). There are a few ways to do this :

Scenario 1 - Site A & B are both hosted on the same shared hosting account and both share the IP address 172.14.34.125. A backlink between these sites would at best be relatively useless as they both have the same IP address and the search engines can detect this immediately. At worst linking in this way may well lower your rankings.

Scenario 2 - Okay, so we’ve found a great host that will give us a unique IP address per site. We get 172.14.34.125 for site A & 172.14.34.212 for site B. The problem here is that, even though they are unique, both IP addresses are from the same Class C pool. Notice how the first 3 sets of digits are identical for each site. Again this a less than ideal linking scenario, little credit will be gained.

Scenario 3 - So now perhaps we’ve found a company offering ‘real’ SEO hosting and giving you several IP addresses from ‘different Class C pools’. 172.14.34.111 for site A & 172.14.35.212 for site B. Straight away we can see the problem - even though our IP addresses are in different C class pools they are are only 1 class apart, 34 & 35.

This is becuase most hosting companies are allocated their IP addresses in sequential pools. It makes perfect sense to do it that way from an IP management persepective but it’s not good for our interlinked site networks. Linking between sequential IPs isn’t the worst thing we can do for your sites but I certainly wouldn’t recommend it for a whole network of sites. We’re not going to stay undcover for very long that’s for sure …

Scenerio 4 - So here’s the dream ticket, imagine a host that offered:

• Unique IP addresses
• 10 different datacentres spread around the globe for you to mix & match your network sites into (US, EUROPE, ASIA)
• Different Class A’s & B’s nevermind just class C’s
• All datacentres registered with different whois records
• Unlimited domains on your account
• Unlimited sharing on each IP for network layering
• Awesome support
• All for just $19.95/month!

Sounds too good to be true right?

Wrong, I’m getting all this and more with the latest hosting company I’ve added to the BlogPiG network.

Here is the link for Worldwide SEO Hosting - *MEMBERS ONLY (Please Login or Register to reveal)*

And don’t forget to use the coupon *MEMBERS ONLY (Please Login or Register to reveal)* to get a 25% discount of your first hosting order….

ps. I also have another host with whom I’ve so far I’ve managed to aquire 94 unique class C IP addresses including lots of unique A & B pools. Stay tuned for more on this one soon…

I’ve just been checking out Google’s latest keyword tool after being tipped off about it from 5ubliminal’s new blog. Google are calling it the Search-based Keyword Tool although I doubt that’ll stick, it’s none too snappy. So SKT it is. Check it out here…

click to expand

At first glance it seems that it could prove very useful, it can use both a URL and/or stem keywords as the seed for the keyword search. You get a nice list of 800 keywords returned with monthly search data, AdWords competition ranking and most importantly the suggested Adwords bid value. This will be great for new niche research either for PPC campaigns, MFA sites or just plain old affiliate marketing.

The whole system can be incorporated into your AdWords account allowing you to filter out keywords that you are already using in your campaigns.

The nicest feature for me personally is the ability to simply browse across all the keyword categories rather than searching for specific keywords or URLs. Google gives you the top 800 keywords for each category and sub-niche. Remember these are real recently searched keywords ranked by search volume on Google.com & .co.uk – powerful stuff. And the best part is NO CAPTCHAS!

After having a quick poke around I soon found a quick way view all the keyword data from each category and I’ve put it all together in a nice neat CSV file for anyone that wants it.  After de-duping the file there are over 52,500 keywords with full data attached. Here’s a sample of the data:

hybrid sports car 1800 6  $2.55
beyern wheels 1800 4  $0.53
pontiac g6 coupe 1800 6  $1.65
yukon xl denali 1800 4  $1.66
new hummer 1800 5  $1.24
flex fuel cars 1800 4  $1.50

And Google’s explanation of the data:

• Keyword -Terms on which you are not currently running your ads, but are highly related to your site.
• Monthly searches - The average amount of traffic a search term receives each month on Google.com (and other Google earch properties, such as google.co.uk).
• Competition - How competitive ad placement is for a particular keyword.
• Sugg. (Suggested) bid - Estimated bid amount that may place your ad in the top three spots of the page.

Here’s the link to download the keywords for December: *MEMBERS ONLY (Please Login or Register to reveal)*

Google say they refresh the keyword data every few weeks so I’ll keep it up to date and post new revision of the CSV here. This actually ties in really nicely with the NichePiG project we currently have in testing…

NichePiG is a keyword research tool with a difference. Instead of you having to bring the keywords to it, NichePiG delivers the keywords to you with the full market research data already attached. You’ll never have to think of a new niche again… Well that’s the plan anyway.

I’ll run the Google SKT CSV through NichePiG to add the additional data like ‘Avg. Page 1 PR’ & ‘Avg. Page 1 Backlinks’ etc. and post the results here too. Make sure you add the BlogPiG™ feed to your RSS or get on our list for more updates.

“Find me a blog that isn’t using tags and I’ll show you an autoblog.”

Tagging is a superb way of theming your blog posts to allow readers and search engines a quick easy way to categorise your content. Until now tags have generally been beyond the reach of the autoblogger simply because categorising your posts takes time.

Imagine adding 10 posts per day across 100 blogs and then having to add 10 tags per post by hand. That’s 10,000 tags! It’s not going to happen!

Because of the manual nature of tagging you won’t normally see tags on any autoblogs. I’d hazard a guess that this obvious difference provides a simple way for search engines to identify and discount autoblog rankings.

TagPiG closes this gap by giving autobloggers a complete auto-tagging solution for their blogs. Simply activate the plugin and you’re ready to go, every new post to your blog will be analysed and tagged with 100% accurate, on-target keywords.

TagPiG is currently available completely free grab it now…

I’m talking about the back-end in the traditional systems sense, rather than the new follow-up-marketing usage now popular.

Anway I’ve spent the past couple of weeks pulling together all the various aspects required to fully launch BlogPiG as the hub for all my upcoming automation plugins. I decided which components I’d need and decided on the following:

• Shopping cart
• Licensing/Delivery system
• Encryption
• Helpdesk
• Forum
• Affiliate system

I’d already started by using Wordpress as the front-end with a modded version the Glossy Blue theme and I wanted all the various back-end components to mimic the overall look and feel.

The encryption piece was an easy decision, it had to be IonCube as I have used it before with great success and it’s something my coder is very familiar with so we could be up and running quickly. Zend is probably more popular but it’s also a lot more expensive and whilst most servers have Zend available NOT ALL do. Also, as far as I’m aware, you can’t pack Zend runtime loaders with your products like you can with Ioncube. Ioncube offers platform independent encryption.

I’d also used my chosen licensing system before, PHPAudit from SolidPHP. It’s a nice simple solution providing easy integration with my chosen shopping cart, PayPal. I might also add Google Checkout at some point too for a bit of variety. The templates for PHPAudit are fairly easy to modify using mostly CSS and tweaking the header/footer files.

Next-up it was the afilliate sytem. I’d heard  a lot of good things about iDev and it looked pretty good on paper so that’s now in place too. Custimisation again pretty simple with Smarty templates et al.

The first helpdesk software I tried didn’t work and there is jsut too much choice out there to waste time waiting for support to respond etc. so I plumped for SupportTrio which seems to offer everything I require plus a knowledgebase which I build-up over time for self-support.

I hate waiting for support to respond to my queries and I always end-up deep in the forums trying to find my own answers so a forum component will be essential to the BlogPiG suite of plugins. I initially tried to get Vanilla working as it seemed pretty and not too bulky but it was returning errors as soons as I tried to run the setup, so that got deleted immediately. Next I tried http://www.simplemachines.org/ which I’ve seen installed on a lot of sites and that went on very smoothly and after loading a suitable base theme I modified it to look like the rest of the site.

One of my pet hates is after I’ve regsitered once for a site and bought the the software I then have to then register again for the helpdesk and then again for the forum! Well that’s not going to happen on BlogPiG.com, it’s beyond my skills but my coder will shortly be integrating all the logon databases across all the various systems so you’ll only need to register once. It’d be nice to get seamless sessions too but I doubt that’ll be possible, we’ll have a go.

So not long now, it’s all coming together nicely and the first paid module, CommentPiG, will be for sale very soon.

As promised here is the first free plugin from BlogPiG. It’s called NukePiG and even though it’s incredibly simply it has proved an invaluable tool to me over the year whilst building my BlogPIG farms.

We all make mistakes, especially when using mass automation apps like the BlogPiG suite of passive income generation tools. Imagine importing over 3000 schedule posts only to find out that you’ve a typo in every affiliate URL. Even with WordPress 2.5’s new bulk deletion feature you could only delete 10 posts at a time, that’s a lot of clicks!

NukePiG allows you one-click deletion of all your blog posts, pages, tags, categories or links, no messing around in the database, just select what you want to reset and hit NUKE! Within seconds you can reset an entire blog or simply just certain content elements, it’s your call.

You can download NukePiG from here: NukePiG