In the last post Derek Gehl, of the Internet Marketing Center, was challenged to build a profitable website in a week. So he’s going to do so and let us all watch the process, free of charge. Read the last post for all the details. Here’s how to access the videos.

Here’s an overview of the first video.

After an intro Derek walks us through how to generate ideas for a niche and how to decide what aspect of that niche we’ll build our site around. Of course, he’s using the new BeBiz software, but BeBiz looks to me like a tool which will make your job much easier. I think that’s worth quite a bit just for the time it’ll save and the way it’ll keep us organized.

Derek talks a lot about keyword research. Just in case you don’t know a “keyword” is simply any word or phrase that you might type into a search engine, such as Google. For example: “Golf” is a keyword, as is “how to improve my golf swing” as is “callaway big bertha irons golf clubs.”

What he’s looking for are terms (keywords) that people search on with some frequency that also indicate they’re interested in solving a problem or buying something. He also wants to find areas that don’t have too much competition.

So someone typing “golf” into Google might be hunting for anything golf related, from prety pictures to travel to clubs to tips, etc. Someone searching for “how to…” is looking for very specific info and someone typing in “callaway big bertha irons golf clubs” is looking for a very specific product, probably to buy.

By the way, those last couple of keywords are referred to as long tail keywords. They’re the type of keywords someone enters after going through all the less specific words in their research. Long tail keywords are the terms used when someone is looking for detailed info or to buy something.

All of his keyword research is done within his BeBiz tool, which is cool, but there are other sources for such info.

Now he’s checking on Google’s Adwords for competition info. If there aren’t any adwords then there’s probably no market for that keyword. What are Adwords? If you search on google, for nearly anything, you’ll see ads along the right side of the page, maybe on the top as well. These are adwords. You set up an account with Google, design your ad, tell G how much you want to pay every time your ad is clicked and you’re good to go. You can set up your own adwords to drive traffic to your sites.

Later on Derek will mention “PPC.” PPC = Pay Per Click. You pay for every click someone makes on your ads. Google, MSN, Yahoo, and several other search engines have those programs.

Since he’s looking at bid prices he’s probably looking at buying traffic to his new site, via adwords, as well as seeing if there’s a market for a product.

Competition research. You do want to know who you’re competing against. So you can do it better or cover what they don’t. If there’s too much good competition your job will be tougher. If there’s too little then that might mean that there’s no market. Which isn’t necessarily bad, but you might have to build that market.

This is cool. He failed at finding a good niche on the first try. And his 2nd and third, If he was doing it as a company effort he could probably pull it off, since they have some resources to put into marketing and development, but this is a project for the rest of us.

One of the criticisms that people like Derek G get goes along the lines of this: “Well of course you can do it. You have 400 million fanatical followers who will bite at anything you put in front of them… Normal people don’t have (list of all DG’s advantages…”

So he deliberately chose a niches to research where no one knows him from a hole in the ground and he’s doing it himself, not with his team. And he failed on the first three tries to find a niche.

He does find a niche which fits all the criteria of a good niche with enough traffic and little enough competition. Mountain Bike Repair. Cool.

Next he needs a domain name. He uses www.GoDaddy.com to register the name and after a few false starts grabs one. By the way, here’s a walkthrough of using GoDaddy.

Here’s the link to grab the videos for yourself.

The challenge
Video #2 overview
Video #3 overview