Long-Tail Niche Book Publishing - Lessons learned

Just was looking over my books to see if I could apply this to my republished public domain books. Napoleon Hill's name popped up and so I checked just that phrase in Keyword Spider.

Interestingly, each of the keywords checked out in Adwords Sandbox, but then most fell out in Competition Finder. Checking in NicheBot gave me more possibilities.

Turns out Napoleon Hill is more popular than I thought. Even Andrew Carnegie isn't a niche-player (without some additonal terms).

Even used Trellian to find some more words, but only ended up with about 8, which included W. Clement Stone (his partner) and Thomas Troward (his mentor).

Now those 8 terms I can then run through Trellian in order to get useful variations. Because I can take each of these 8 terms and make mini-webs which will show up on one of the top ten Google positions for those terms. 8 mini-webs would make a mini-net for that one author, which might make it move up to a larger niche (as described below).

The next step is to take his biography page and check them out for keyword combinations - if nothing really new or significant develops, then I've already got enough for a mini-net, all to promote two or three books I've republished from his work. And interestingly, I don't have to take over the other sites which are fighting it out to be in the 3rd or 4th page of Google results for their highly competitive keywords.

Another interesting thing hit me, is that I can optimize for a particular key word and then show up in Google with another keyword I wasn't aiming for. Take my Online Millionaire Plan. It shows up in position 15 with "millionaire book". I added the word book when I found that "online millionaire book" was another niche keyword, even though there are several books on millionaires out there. Millionaire book is a bigger niche than I was actually aiming for. All I'd probably have to do to make it move to a top ten spot would be to get some other pages to link in with that text. I wouldn't have to change the text on that page itself, since the keyword is already there - inside the long-tail niche keyword phrase.

So that is an interesting point. Just optimize your pages for your niche keyword and then you may very well be able to take over a larger niche simply by adding in text links through your mini-webs and Squidoo lenses. But really, if you just keep pushing your niche keyword - complete in its whole phrase - you can grab that larger niche with no other work, because they other pages aren't optimized as well as yours.

It still means that you have to have a better-themed page to begin with in order to hold that spot - it has to give better service to its reading public than other pages.

And if you could build such a mini-net above, dedicated to a single set of books (if I didn't have 8 separate products, I could point several of them to the few I do have), you should then start improving your sales - especially if you bring affiliates online to sell for you. After all, Napoleon Hill has so many top keywords, affiliates should find it fairly easy to sell these books...

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Another point - where I've mentioned in earlier posts along this line to go back and check Keyword Spider for your theme words - make sure you are using your complete long-tail keyword (the one you are using for that mini-web) to get your most accurate theme words.

Getting your theme words would be the last step before committing yourself to building that mini-web.

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I don't know right now what sequence to use in promoting these mini-webs. I imagine the smart thing to do would be to link all the home pages to Squidoo lenses (like one which is a review for that book) and then also social bookmark that home page. I'd not SB the sub-pages, as that might be spam as they would all go online at once.

And certainly, if I did a review of my entire section of Napoleon Hill books, I could then link through appropriate text links, posting your review on my blog and then again on Squidoo.

Future looks rosy, finally, in the wonderful world of self-published authors...