Content Research & Planning

Now that you have all of your page topics planned out, you need to do more extended research for your niche and your exact page topics so that you can actually write relevant and helpful content on your site.

The goal here is to simply learn about your niche and products. If you happen to already have this knowledge, you may be able to skip along to the bottom of this chapter to the Content Planning section. However, it could still be worthwhile to learn this information because you will likely need to perform this type of research for sites you build in the future.

In general, if you do not consider yourself to have above average on your products and niche then you should be doing additional research until you reach that point. After all - how can you expect to build a useful site about a topic unless you know more about it than the average person? The good news is that the effort put into this step does not go wasted because you will be building a great site that has longterm earning potential, assuming it is done correctly.

There are tons of sources of information that you can use for this research. The way you go about the content research for your site can actually depend a lot on your niche choice and product targeting.

Instead of walking you through the exact research that I will do for this website, I want to talk to you about this step in more general terms so that you can have a variety of ideas to use for your own content research.

Research with Amazon

The most obvious place to find information about your niche, on Amazon itself, is something that I already discussed in previous lessons. However, I still wanted to be sure to mention it here.

By simply browsing through listings for products that you may promote on your site, you can really learn quite a lot about them and your niche.

Vendor provided information here is always a good source, but be sure to pay special attention to actual customer reviews as well as the customer question and answer section (when available). This customer information is VERY important, especially when you see multiple customers that essentially say the same thing about a product (good or bad).

This type of research is great to learn about your niche in general or the products that you will want to promote on your site. You will also be able to learn about special points of interest for your targeted consumers.

Research with Google

When it comes to learning specific information about a keyword phrase that you'll be targeting on a page of your site, you may be best going to Google itself.

Go through each of your page topics for your site, search for each on Google, and then read through the pages of the top few listings to see what type of information they are providing for the topic. Here are some questions to consider about the listings as you read:

Do they contain different information on each page/site or is it essentially the same information?

-With different information on each page, you could simply learn all of the information and create your own, unique page that essentially offers all of it in one place.

Do they briefly talk about particular things without explaining much about them?

-If so, you could easily do additional research about other relational topics to be able to provide even more information all on one page.

Do these pages seem user-friendly and/or do you feel like they could be done better?

By seeing what your direct competition for a particular keyword has to offer, it is much easier to gauge how to beat them. Think about the user and the search engine rankings will follow, so all you need to do is make a better page than your direct competition. When I say “better” here, I'm really talking about the actual, useful information being provided on a subject and/or the way it is presented - this has nothing to do with the flashiness of a page, so don't feel like you need to have better graphics than the competition or something like that.

This research alone on Google can often be enough to be able to write about your site topics in a way that will actually help your site visitors.

However, still consider other options to try to gauge what may work best for your niche. After all, if you can come up with additional information on the topic that isn't found on the competitor sites, then you can truly set your site apart from all of them.

Phone/Email/In-Person Research

The next research tactic that I want to discuss with you is a bit sneaky but really quite an easy way to obtain information that you may not be able to quickly find with a Google search.

This simply involves taking advantage of helpful customer service and/or sales representatives at various companies.

The great thing about this tactic is that it can be done with online companies from the comfort of your own home or you can even do it with real brick and mortar companies in person.

For online companies, simply find some kind of major retailer online that is selling the product you want to know more about. Then email them, call them on the phone, or even use live chat agents on their websites.

For brick and mortar companies, this is best done in person but can sometimes be accomplished over the phone (just depends on the company and who ends up answering the phone really).

The trick here is to pretend to be a real customer that is interested in the products you want to promote on your site. Ask specific questions you may want clarification on or even ask them to tell you some of the important things about the product(s).

If you go into a retail store in person, you can even bring a pen and notepad with you.

For my niche, I could simply go to a department store that has real beds set up. Start looking around at some of the down comforters and wait to be approached by a friendly sales person.

I could even just approach someone with my pen and notepad and say something like “Hi, I'm interested in finding out more about down comforters. I've never bought one before, so I don't really know anything about them, but my wife wants to get one and wanted me to come check them out.” Then, you can easily sit there, take notes, and ask a lot of questions without them thinking twice about it. You also have an easy excuse to not actually buy anything, since you need to discuss it all with your wife/husband/girlfriend/boyfriend/etc before making the actual decision (don't claim to be married without a ring on your finger, lol). After an in-person visit like this, you could easily soak up and/or have notes on tons of great information for your site.

Content Planning

Now that you have all of this great information about your niche, products, and the topics you've planned for your site, you need to figure out a plan to present that information to your site visitors in the best way possible.

The key here is to think of easy navigation to find the information they want to get to on your site and learn. You also want to consider how you will work all of that into promoting products on your site, which I'll be discussing more next.

My best recommendation for you that could apply to any niche is to revisit your planned page topics and add more detail. Go through each topic and essentially give a summary or brainstorm of the information that you would like to discuss on each page. If you already know how you want to present the information on each page, you could simply write a note about this for each topic.

Once you have the summaries for each topic, go back through the list to try to visualize this information laid out on a page on your site. Would the information be best presented as an article with a few different headings, pictures, graphs/charts/tables, lists, videos, or even a combination of all of these? Ultimately, it is impossible for me to simply tell you to do this a specific way, but you should be able to get a general idea of what may work best for your topics at this point (since you will know a lot of information on these topics now).

I have gone through and done this in my Notepad file that I showed you previously. Note what I've done for each of my planned page topics here. There are five different pictures to show you here, which actually contains quite a bit of information, but I thought it would be worthwhile to show you all of it so you can see my thought process behind planning DownComforterGuide.com.

Once you have completed the content planning for each of your page topics, you really start to get to the point where you have an excellent guide that you will be able to use as you progress through building the site and writing the content for each page. In addition to that, since you are thinking all of this out ahead of time, you'll really be in the best position to present the information to your visitors in a way that is best for them and also for your purposes as an Amazon affiliate.