Youtube video transcript
So I got this email from Rajput this morning, one of my viewers, and he was asking me about step seven and step eight from the 60 steps in Project 24. He wanted to know how to approach them more effectively. And of course he’s talking about search analysis. So I wrote him a very detailed email and I gave him four steps that I would take now that I’ve done it quite a few times.
And that’s what we’re gonna talk about today. So let’s get it.
Hello, YouTube and a very special to all my subscribers and particularly rad poop for sending me the email. So he wanted to know all about doing search analysis a little bit more effectively. And I sent him a very detailed email, which I want to talk about today. So the first thing is, if you are new to this, you are thinking about starting a website or even a YouTube channel.
Really important to choose a niche that you are going to like. So when you are picking your niche you can check out the video that I prepared all about this, but just to give you the quick tips, when you’re choosing your niche, you should definitely choose something you are interested in or something that you could be interested in because it’s going to be a long process.
You’re gonna have a ghost town phase that could go on for months. And it’s really important to be interested in what you’re writing about or making videos about. Otherwise, you’re just gonna give up too early and let’s not forget, this could turn into a full-time job for many years. So you don’t want to be stuck producing content on something that you’re just not interested in.
The other thing I would say is you shouldn’t pick any topic that is just for making money in the sense of it’s because it’s a product that’s gonna give you a good affiliate link, or it’s just a niche that brings about a higher amount of money. So definitely choose something you are interested in and that will make you more motivated over time.
The only other thing I would say is. You’ve gotta be prepared to fail. You’re gonna make mistakes. If this is your first time round. So with this in mind, I would always say, go for a kind of a hobby niche for your first website. You’re gonna learn a lot of tricks of the trade. And if you were to do this, your first website with a YMYL kind of topic, something that’s very competitive and involves having to build up authority with Google from the start.
It’s just not gonna be as successful if it’s your first time round, it is possible. People can do it, but I think it’s just more challenging than it has to be. So I would say first site build up a hobby niche site, learn the ropes, and then later on once you know what you’re doing yeah. Apply it to the YM.
Y L kind of so when it comes to search analysis, what we’re trying to do is to match our posts with real queries that people are searching for. That’s all we are doing because in the past people would write about whatever they wanted on their websites. But nowadays, if you want to get traffic, you gotta target what people are actually looking for.
So what I’d said to Rancho is I gave him kind of a four step process that I would follow. And it’s really based on the experience. I. Following the Project 24 program. So the first thing is what I called background research. If you are starting day one with a new website today, there are two situations you could be in: the first one is that you dunno anything about the niche?
This is what happened to me for my first site. So I didn’t know anything about that niche. The alternative is that you are quite familiar with that niche, and you’re going to be writing about something perhaps you’re doing as part of your career or hobby that you’ve had for years. So if we’re talking about someone who knows nothing about the niche, what I recommend is that you really take it.
Several days, even a couple of weeks to just binge watch everything you can find on YouTube and to read as many blogs as you can. What you’re trying to do is to just immerse yourself in the niche, you’re going to learn a lot about it. You’re gonna learn technical terms, some jargon terminology, things like that.
You’re also going to learn a lot of the common problems that people have. And just generally what people are talking about within that niche. Another thing that you can do, which is gonna make you even more effective as a content creator is actually to do that thing. So if it’s a hobby, take up that hobby, if you haven’t done already just do that activity.
And by doing it, by going through the same process, as any other beginner, you’re gonna learn all the pain points. You’re going to really be in the shoes of someone who is actually trying to do that thing, that hobby, that activity, whatever the niche is. This is really important. Not only because it’s going to teach you a lot about pain points, but it’s also gonna make you sound a lot more authoritative about it.
You’re gonna sound like you know what you’re talking about because you do, because you’ve done that thing. You’ve had those experiences and you can build a bit of rapport with your readers. Now, if we’re talking about the other side of the coin, someone who’s going to a niche, but they’re already familiar with it.
And especially if they’re a bit of an expert, the challenge for you. Put yourself back in the shoes of a beginner. And this can be incredibly difficult when you know, a little bit, because there are some things that you just take for granted. Some things that you think are so basic that everyone must know about them, but in fact, those are the things.
You need to target because your competitors are not thinking like beginners, they’re forgetting to talk about the key problems that beginners have now to give you an example of this with coding now. I’m not an expert in coding at all, but I can do certain things. I’ve built up some websites and I’ve coded everything.
From the basic HTML the front end and the back end. So recently I was trying to build something for one of my other projects, the IELTS Grind, where we go through how me and my colleague, Michael, go through how to pass an English exam. So I wanted to look at a system where.
The students could send us essays or writing tasks, we could correct them and send them back. So I needed something to do with transactional emails, so I wanted to use a bit of software called PHP mailer and. The best way to get that to work on the site was to use composer, which is another little bit of software that installs things like this, these libraries that you can get from GitHub and places like that.
Now I’m not an expert. I’ve never done this before. I’ve always tried to do it manually and it never worked. So I tried to install composer and I searched for hours. I could not find how to do it. Every single video. I watched it just mentioned composer, installing this PHP mailer as something that everyone knows how to do, like tying their shoe.
No one told me really where to get it. No one told me the commands that I needed to install it. No one told me the program I needed to install, which was actually a little program where I had to connect from my computer. To the actual server and even that was difficult. It took me hours looking at loads of little videos, lots of little snippets of information, just to get from the beginner stage of not knowing how to even get to the composer installation.
Getting to installing composer and then finally getting onto the videos about PHP mailer. It was so frustrating now that there was a huge gap in that market. If someone had come in and did a video, an entire video, just about those very basic ideas that all these content creators thought that you know was beneath them, that was so easy.
They all refer to it Basically, you should know how to do this. Those are the kind of things that you need to target. And it’s really hard if you don’t put yourself back in those shoes or they begin. Now if you are a little bit further down the line, and you’re a little bit familiar with these topics and you’ve learned them very recently before starting a website, just go back and check your search history.
This can be a treasure trove of information, cuz you were going through the same process as a beginner, not too long ago. So just check that search history. And assuming you haven’t deleted it for some reason, which I’m not gonna judge you about, you can have a lot of information there that you can use for the next part, which is to do with search analysis.
So the second step I actually told Rajput about was what I called canvasing the community or canvas the community. What I meant by this is once you’ve got a bit of a background knowledge of the niche, you immerse yourself into it, go into the forums, go into the Facebook groups, go into YouTube comments, blog comments, and look at what other people are asking about what are their questions, because these are the pain points that they have.
And if you look at them, Start to see trends. This is what you can base your search analysis on. If lots of people are asking the same kind of questions, that probably means there’s a lot of search volume here, but a really good tip here is. , when you are an expert in a niche, you know how to phrase things, certain things have termin terminology, but when you’re a beginner, you don’t know the right word for things, you just describe the problem you have. And you’re trying to find an answer. So look at the way that people are phrasing their questions, because they’re probably not using the right terms, but they’re still looking for that information that can really help you target queries.
Maybe no one else is targeting, although that Google is based on semantic search now, even though if you can get those search terms that no one else really knows about because they’re talking within the terms within the niche, they’re using the jargon. That can be a step up for you for a brand new website.
So of course you can do this in a passive way where you’re just reading through or using the search box within the browser to look for question marks to quickly hone in on those questions. Or you can actively go into Facebook groups and forums and ask people, what were the biggest problems you had as a beginner?
What would you suggest in this situation? This. Really help broaden your mind to what people could be searching for, what issues are related to your niche, because this is what you want to search for when you actually go through and look for queries to match to posts. So once you’ve done your background research and you’ve gone through and you canvas the community, you have an idea of common pain points.
Now, finally, you are ready to do search analysis. So remember, search analysis is a match. The queries to your post are things that people are actually searching for. And also looking at the competition for those queries and deciding what you will write and what you won’t write on your blog or equally for your YouTube channel.
So what I would say here is, again, give yourself lots of time, even several weeks doing this . If you’re limited to only an hour a day, you can take several weeks to do this. As long as you’re doing it. Now, the problem I had for my second site is I did this very quickly. Now I explained this in a video when I was hiring writers.
I had a few be. And put out the ad for the writers, but I didn’t actually have anything to give them to write. So I had to do that very quickly. And to be honest, that site has suffered since I’ve not had enough time to go back and do it again. And as a result, I’m just not really investing in that site anymore.
So make sure you spend a lot of time doing this because it’s the most important part. If you get this. There’s not really any way you can come back from this. So if you are a member of Project 24, at this stage, what you need to do is create a brand plan. And then based on that brand plan, you’re gonna come up with your queries and go through your search analysis.
If you haven’t seen it already, You should go into Project 24. And Jim does a really good over the shoulder version of this, where in real time, I think it’s like over an hour, he goes through a niche and he explains exactly how he goes about searching for queries and why he picks this one and why he doesn’t pick that one.
I’ve actually watched it a couple times and. Every time. I want to do search analysis. I go back and watch it again. It’s just really good because it shows you exactly what they’re doing. And I think when you watch those videos, the whole search analysis videos in Project 24, you’ve gotta watch ’em a couple times to really get it to sink in.
That was certainly the case for me. So if you are not a member of Project 24 I’m not gonna reveal too much about what they teach for brand plans because it’s not my idea and they should really get the credit for it. However, what I can talk about is the alphabet soup method. So Jim and Ricky base the entire search analysis on just using Google search, they don’t recommend that you use any keyword tools at all.
The alphabet soup method, if you don’t. Basically what you do is you put in a query and then you follow it by a letter from the alphabet and Google will give you some auto suggested queries. And you basically just copy those and they go into your list of ideas that you’re going to Later go and check the competition for now.
I haven’t ever done a video on this. If you think it might be useful for you. Just leave me a comment saying that you would like me to do a video on the Google alphabet suit method. And I will do that if there’s enough interest in that. So in addition to just using the Google search, the alphabet super method where you put in your query followed by a B right down to Z, just to see what comes up in auto suggest.
You can also check out two other things on the site you can check out the section that says people also asked, which give you questions connected to that query that comes up, and you can also check at the bottom of the page where they also have some other queries that could be useful too. And another little tip I’d give you here is when you are looking at different queries where they’re quite similar, maybe there’s only one term, that’s a difference between two queries.
You can use Google trends to actually help you figure out which of those queries would be better. So you can go into Google trends. It won’t give you such volume of. But it will give you an idea of what’s more popular. So for example if I was talking about gardens over backyards in the USA backyard would be more popular as a search term than garden.
So to a certain extent, Google knows this, but it’s always better to try and get the exact search term because that’s what people are searching for. Now I said that in Project 24, they don’t really suggest that you use the keyword search tools mainly because people rely a little bit too much on this search volume data that they give you, which frankly doesn’t mean anything.
It’s all made up really to a certain extent. But you can use those keyword tools as inspiration. So there are a couple free ones around, so Uber suggests it’s probably still free as we’re. As I’m talking now, it may not be free in the future. This is just good for inspiration. You should use this as a jumping off point.
So you get your query and then you go back to Google search and you work on it through that and see where it takes you. You shouldn’t just be using keyword tools and just copying and pasting. You do still need to look at each query and try and develop it a little bit. So as you come up with your queries, you can either put them straight onto a list, or you can look at each query and actually check the competition at this stage.
Now it really depends on you as a person. Personally, I like to come up with an entire list cuz I get into the flow of things and then I go and check the competition later, but I think it would work both ways. It really depends on how much time you’ve got and just how you, your brain works. . So once you have a list of queries that you think are connected to your niche and you think probably are things that people are searching for now is the most important thing.
It’s the competition because. It’s really how you rank, because if you have a good query, but it’s been answered already and answered well as a new site, you’re not really gonna have a look at. So for each query, you’ve got to go and check the search results. And what you’re looking for on the cert are things like.
Is every single article that all the 10 articles are on point, are they all connected to the actual query? The user intent, the search intent, if they are well, probably that’s not a query that you want to go after. Also look at the top, three to four results, read the articles. Do they answer the query?
Do they go into enough detail? Is there anything missing that you can see? Something that you could add to improve on that actual result. If there isn’t, again, it’s probably not a query that you want to write on as a new website, possibly later down the line, not for now, it shouldn’t be the first batch of your posts.
Okay. So once you’ve gone through this, which I said could take you a couple of days, you are basing all these ideas on the background research you’ve done and also canvas. The community you’ve once you’ve created a hit list of about 30 to a hundred plus queries, cuz this could last you a long time.
This list. Go back and do it all again, go back through every single query and just check your logic. Is this something based on your background research that you think someone a beginner would search for? If logically, it’s something that they’re likely to search for? It’s gonna have a decent search volume.
The other thing you need to be looking for is in the search results. Again, this is based on doing your background research. If you start seeing kinds of websites coming up all the time they’re probably. The big players within your niche. So to double check that you’re not seeing those big players answering the query very well.
If they give a detailed answer and they’re quite high up in the ranking, you’re just not gonna beat them at this stage. It could happen in the future, but if you see those big players within your niche, in the sub results, probably take it off your hit list, write it later on, or don’t write it. And the other thing you should be checking at this stage is based on your brand plan, you should not be writing all of your articles in one direction as it were.
You should spread the risk, write some articles about different aspects of your niche. That way, if you find that something takes off. You know where to double down, but if something doesn’t work and you’ve written a hundred articles on it, then you might think the niche is just not a good niche. If you spread it out over the entire niche, all different types of topics, you can get a better idea of where to put your attention later on.
Okay guys, what I’ve done is I’ve put all this information and some more tips into a free ebook, which you can download. There’s a link in the description and it’s really just giving you something like a guide you can follow along and refer to as you’re going through this process. And of course if you want to know even more about search analysis and get even more.
The best place to go is actually Project 24. So remember, this is the cool setup by Income School, which will teach you how to build a full-time income within a matter of years. It does take some time. And if you want to find out a little bit more about that, why not check the link in the description, which takes you to the webinar, which goes through all the approaches that they have to build online.
Okay guys, if you’ve got this far and you are not a subscriber, this is what the entire channel’s about. I’m sharing my experience to help you do a much better job than I did in building an online income and doing much quicker than I did. So if that sounds like something that you are interested in, why not subscribe to the channel and hit that notification bell.
If you have any questions at all, why not leave me a. Or you can check the description and you’ll find my email address there. I will see you guys in a future video where I explain exactly how I made the ebook that you can get for free. And I’ll be talking about the program I use to do that. Okay. See you guys later.