So I believe it’s now Day 4 of this year’s Thirty Day Challenge.
The basic wrap-up so far has been:
- Get your tools ready.
- Load up Market Samurai.
- Find 2-3 niches and run them through keyword analysis (<50k competing pages, >80 searches per day).
- Analyse your competition.
So after doing all this… I’ve settled on my niche for this year. Note that the definition of “niche” here is simply the keyword you want to optimise for. I have 3-4 that fall into this range, and plan to to be hitting all of them.
As an aside, I think it’s also useful to discuss scope and workload in terms of the challenge. I know most people will probably be more concerned with “is my niche any good?”, but for me… I took a look at my current workload of having 4 projects running already… so instead of starting yet another one (which would mean less sleep, less productivity and decreased results), I converted the one in its infant stages over to the 30DC framework.
That being said… my main hold up right now is technical, namely that Market Samurai seems to be stuck in bug-land for some reason, so I can’t finish my keyword or competition research. I’m sure things will pick up again once they guys over at Noble Samurai have worked out all the kinks…
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Hi Aaron,
All core functions are running fine at the moment – so we’ve launched pretty bug-free.
There are a few issues people are having related to gathering data.
Google’s data update is affecting users ability to gather keyword data. Closing and opening Market Samurai sometimes helps. There is also an alternative source of data (listed in the Knowledgebase) that users have been using.
This alternative source is actually one of Market Samurai’s core features, and was the way we were gathering keyword traffic data BEFORE Google released their official search stats.
Plus, the change only requires ticking the right box in Market Samurai.
SEO Competition (SEOC) has been hit pretty hard, so occasionally it will only fill partial data – however (again) the solution is very simple – it’s in our knowledgebase – and all it requires is ticking one box.
I hope this helps you to keep moving forwards.
From a technical perspective, Market Samurai shouldn’t be holding you back when there are solutions to everyhing.
Brent