I’ve been intrigued recently by a case study that Courtney Tuttle did about what he calls keyword sniping. It’s a terrific concept, and I’ve been hard at work finding new niches to work in. But I’ve run into something of a glitch, and it’s because of ugly people from Pennsylvania.

Here’s Court’s idea in a nutshell: You find a tightly-focused sub-niche, of a high-revenue niche, where there are a limited number of results and a reasonable number of searches. It’s an excellent series of posts, and I don’t want you to miss the meat of his work by posting a sloppy digest of it here … go and take a look.

The example Court uses is Colorado Lasik Surgery. In other words, he’s taken a huge niche that would be hard to crack — lasik surgery — and found a sub-niche by limiting it to a state.

So, because I’m remarkably quick on the uptake, I started doing some research by plugging state names into the free WordTracker tool. But it turns out someone may have beaten me to it. WordTracker estimates search traffic from smallish samples, and comes up with an estimated daily search number. I believe they look at the previous 30 days data, although it might be the previous calendar month.

Here’s the first few results from a search I did for “pennsylvania”:

691 pennsylvania lottery
647 university of pennsylvania
569 pennsylvania and gaming
562 map of pennsylvania
462 colonial pennsylvania
417 pennsylvania house furniture
343 pennsylvania department of education
326 pennsylvania map
264 pennsylvania department of transportation

OK, that makes sense I guess. But let’s look a little further down:

245 pennsylvania plastic surgeon
236 pennsylvania cosmetic surgeon
234 pennsylvania colony
227 pennsylvania plastic surgery
225 pennsylvania state police
220 pennsylvania cosmetic surgery

and then a few positions below that:

165 pennsylvania facelift
164 pennsylvania liposuction
164 pennsylvania newspapers
162 pennsylvania breast augmentation
162 pennsylvania breast enlargement
158 allegheny county medical society in pennsylvania
156 pennsylvania breast implants

So according to WordTracker, of the top 60 or so daily searches that include the word “pennsylvania”, 25 of them are related to cosmetic surgery.  There are only two conclusions to draw.

Either enough people are doing niche keyword research that the WordTracker results are getting skewed, so it pays to double- and triple-check your results before building new sites or … there’s an awful lot of ugly people looking for plastic surgery in Pennsylvania.

Every blog, even low-profile ones like Job is a Four Letter Word, is a potential target for scrapers. For those unfamiliar with the term: Scrapers take advantage of a site’s RSS feed to reproduce the content on their own site. Why? Usually to try & attract a bottom-feeder quantity of
AdSense clicks.

Joost de Vaalk, SEO maven and author of several very helpful Wordpress plugins, has just released RSS Footer. As he wrote:

It was actually a plugin requested by Shoemoney, who wanted to make the scrapers work for him too, by getting some more backlinks from them.

It simply adds a link back to your site at the bottom of your RSS feed. Optionally, you can also add an additional link to the specific post using the post title.

If someone’s going to rip off your content, which is almost inevitable, you may as well see a little benefit from it.

Skellie, a stalwart of Problogger, has launched a new blog of her own called Anywired. Billed as a place to learn how to work the hours you want from anywhere in the world, it looks very promising.

One of her first posts is a list of ideas to help you start working online. Excellent ideas, with several I’d never have thought of (but with my art skills or lack thereof, a web comic really isn’t in the cards). My only criticism? I find the font very hard to read … it’s fine for headings, but not for running text.

Do take a look at Anywired … I think this one’s going to be a keeper.

Life, work, and everything in between has stopped me writing on this blog for over a month. It may be time to reconsider my commitment to it, hmmm?

But if I can’t post, I can at least comment on other blogs; so I’m taking Lorelle up on her challenge to start commenting more.