Corporate Wiki

When I first started publishing on the web with my first site over 2 years ago, I was pretty clueless about how to get traffic coming my way. I subscribed to the theory that if you have great content, visitors will show up. Some did, but not as many that I hoped for or wanted. I spent the last 2 years learning about what drives traffic and how to get search engines to send traffic to my sites.

Do These 3 Basic Things Right and Search Will Send You Traffic

1. Keyword Research – Produce content that people are actively seeking for,
2. Page Optimization – Structure content in a way that shows the search engines that it is relevant to what the users are searching for, and
3. External Links – Show the search engines that your site is to be trusted

This is true for organic search traffic but if you are looking to buy traffic through pay-per-click advertising, these principles are still true and will help in reducing your costs and improving your conversions.

In this post, I will talk about Keyword Research and will pick up the other two topics in later posts.

Most Free (and Some Paid) Online Keyword Research Services are not Effective

There are many excellent keyword research tools that one can use to find what people are actively searching for. For the longest time I have used Google’s free Adwords keyword research tool. It works great and provides tons of useful data. However, I have a sneaky suspicion that Google’s tools are designed to manipulate advertisers and publishers in a way that optimizes revenues for Google and may not provide the real search data. Besides, it misses quite a bit of long tail search information. And lastly, it obviously cannot provide information on what people are searching for on Yahoo, Bing or any other search engine.

There are other commercial keyword research service, some of which have free (and maybe limited) options. Wordtracker has good reputation. Wordstream has many free tools that can be used for keyword analysis. Both of these are worth a try.

Just remember that most sites that are serious about SEO are using one of these 3 free tools. Which means that they end up going after similar keywords, mostly focusing on the ‘head’ keywords (those one or two word phrases that have the most traffic potential, although their conversion potential may not be great).

Now why would you want to target keywords that

1. are already ultra competitive
2. have more competition coming in every day, and
3. provide traffic that is not ready to buy and does not convert well?

What I really needed was a tool that creates a unique keyword database for me, provides for a way for me to group the keywords thematically, and captures the actual long tail traffic that have reached my site (meaning my sites already are considered credible for these terms), so I can use this research to develop post ideas that are relevant and help me eventually rank for some of the more competitive head keywords. This is great since the visitors who ended up at my sites with very specific search are more likely to find the content relevant and so are likely to come back, or convert better.

Until now, to do this was complex and time consuming. Sure, the information existed. Google Analytics provides a history of the actual searches that resulted in the visitors to my sites and also the conversion data. Google keyword research tool gives me the initial keyword research, and one could use spreadsheets to segment and group keywords (or develop one’s own database). This works in the beginning when a site is new but after a while becomes quite a chore when the keyword database grows to tens or even hundreds or thousands of keywords.

All this is now changed with the recent release of Wordstream for SEO product.

How WordStream Keyword Management for SEO Helps?

WordStream for SEO is the first product I have found that has been developed to help the site owner through all of the tasks of researching and managing keywords for the site. Sure, you can do keyword research similar to what other tools provide. Even in this case, the WordStream keyword research appears to provide better and more accurate information than Adwords or Wordtracker. But where WordStream really shines is in its ability to help you (with auto suggestions and rule definition) group and segment keywords on an ongoing basis. I said ongoing, as Wordstream continuously pulls in new keywords from your Google Analytics account or if you prefer, by installing a tracking code on the site. This means that over time, your keyword database becomes your own proprietary keyword database, which is highly relevant to your site. To top it all, Wordstream offers a free Firefox Plugin that you can activate when you are writing new content and it will automatically pull keyword research, make long tail keyword suggestions and keep a track of the keywords that you have used in the content.

Many of the components of this product are offered for free, and you might want to check them out to get a flavor for what to expect. However, the full power and benefit of the product only become clear when you start using the Keyword Management for SEO product, which is a paid monthly subscription (comparable in cost to what you might expect to pay for other competing products). I have signed up for the paid subscription for all my sites and have been using it for the last week or so and let me tell you, it has been working beautifully. And the support is top notch, with tons of online training videos and articles.

I have not yet tried the PPC version of Wordstream. It is much more expensive but when it appears to me that the benefits will outweigh the cost I might decide to upgrade one of my accounts for ppc keyword research.

I do not want to term this as a launch. A launch smacks of frenzied activity and clenched buttocks. This is neither.

In more than one way, it is a recast of my own classic, Arohan’s investing life, which I am going to retire soon.

Story of Arohan’s investing life

As my first blog, I have to say it taught me a lot. It also became the place to experiment for everything new I wanted to try out. Which meant that my subsequent sites were much more refined and met with greater successes.

Unfortunately, experimentation also meant many mistakes were committed. For example, after gaining Google PR 4 in just a few months of existence, the site subsequently dropped to 0, I suspect permanently. I figured my over-zealousness in monetizing the site was the reason.

I was also not happy with the disparity in the domain name and the site name. An unhappy accident of my inexperience (at that time) in migrating the blog from blogger to self hosted wordpress environment.

All this meant that over time my search traffic ground to a halt.

And I polluted the niche subject matter of the site with my political ramblings. Can’t say it drove any of my readers away, and may have even won me some new readers, but it did cause the focus to slip.

Enter Value Stock Guide

My goal was to turn Arohan’s investing life into a hub for value investing where investors come to get new ideas and socialize. Over time though, I determined that this is better done with a new site. That will give me the opportunity to rectify the mistakes of the past and give the new site the best chance of growth.

So I am now starting Value Stock Guide.

The site will probably spend a few weeks to a month maturing and saying hello to various search engines, and collecting searchable articles while I add all the features that I am planning to add. This will also give me time for introductions to the new readers or reacquaint the old ones.

And than I will slowly ramp up the marketing.

Of course, you never are really done succeeding. There is still so much more to do.

In the same way, you do not really fail. You learn. Sometimes this learning costs a lot. But invariably in such cases, it also teaches a lot.

Failure is an Option

Take for example my earlier foray into franchising. Start a franchise, I thought, and you are following a template for success. As it turns out, it is not true. You end up doing the things, at times, not knowing why.

You can of course make a comfortable living if you do well with a franchise. But as I realized, I do not want all the responsibility with no say in the important decisions in how to run my business. Was the cost of failure worth this realization? At that time, it did not seem so, but now I can say absolutely.

More so when I think I did well to cut my losses early, rather than limp along for a few years before dropping out. Cheaper that way, and I got more time to do the next thing.

Which brings me to my key learning.

If You Fail, Fail Fast

Slow failure costs time. Extricate yourself from the sinking boat. If you do it quick, maybe you can escape with your wits around you (and some rations). Do not hope you can fix things unless you have a definite plan to do that and you are certain that everything will work the way you planned. Not hopeful, but certain.

If you are not, get out and move on. There are a lot of other things you can do, and now maybe do them better. Within a few years, this will be history. Failure is forgotten, but successes are not.

You Never Truly Succeed Unless You Fail

If you have never failed, you are just not trying hard enough or aiming high enough. Push the boundaries, see what works and what doesn’t. Explore new ideas. If you falter, pick yourself up and keep moving.

That is how it all works. Entrepreneurship is no different. Great successes are preceded by great failures. Or in other words, failures inspire new successes.

Welcome! I was wondering when you will show up.

This blog is an attempt to chronicle my personal adventures through entrepreneurship as I try to build a business empire from scratch. You can follow along my journey. I plan to write more than just about entrepreneurship. Whatever is on my mind, really, although it is likely, more often than not, what is on my mind will be business.

Why am I calling this blog Corporate Wiki?

Great question. Wiki, as is now used to mean, is a sort of collaborative information store with version control. Wiki, as I am using here to mean is an abbreviation of What I Know Is. And since this is about my business, the name Corporate Wiki works for me.

If you are a purist, or for some reason disagree with my usage of the name, all I can say is the hell with it! This is my blog.

That settles this question then.

Moving on …