Always Back up your Keyword Research!
By: John Elder posted in SEO
Hello good people!
So I was sitting in Starbucks for a good couple of hours this morning sipping coffee and relaxing. This is what I call a “Business Starbucks” because even though it’s before noon, the place is crammed full of business people; suits, briefcases, rushed conversations, piles and scatters of financial looking papers on the tables as colleagues discuss them with heads together.
And then there’s me. I’m sitting here in my favorite corner with an old pair of jeans and a t-shirt, sipping my coffee, relaxing, and alternating between reading the paper and glancing at my handy little netbook computer at a spreadsheet of keyword research that I’ve been working on for the last day or so for a side project.
I’m not very professional looking, I don’t own a briefcase, or a suit for that matter, but I wonder if I don’t make more money than every single one of these professionals in the coffee shop. Thank God for Internet Marketing!
Anyway today I want to tell you about something crappy that happened to me yesterday and warn you so that it doesn’t ever happen to you!
If you’ve been reading MarketingFool.com for long, then you know my Keyword Research process of how I find keywords that are super easy to rank under yet still bring in decent amounts of traffic.
If you’re new here, basically I start with the the free Google Keyword Research tool to drum up a list of potential keywords and their search count, that is, how often they get searched for each month.
Then I import that list of keywords into the Micro Niche Keyword Finder tool and it tells me how easy it will be to rank for each of those keywords. SOC it calls it, just their terminology for how competitive a keyword is. An SOC of less than 20 tells me that it shouldn’t be very difficult getting ranked under that keyword because other sites aren’t really trying to rank under it.
Then I take those keywords, and save them into a spreadsheet, you can use excel or open office calc, or Google docs or whatever.
Once I get a page or so worth of those easy to rank under keywords, I start to build my web site around those keywords.
So I’ve always got a spreadsheet of keywords open in front of me, it seems.
Well last night I had a nearly completed keyword research file that’s been open on my computer for several days. Since its been open all that time, I guess I just assumed that I had saved it.
Somehow I didn’t.
Last night my computer started acting really slow, so I restarted it. And somehow didn’t save the spreadsheet file. I think I know what happened. I think I just got frustrated and hit the reset button on my computer box itself without closing all the files and restarting by clicking the Windows restart button like your supposed to.
But anyway, all that keyword research vanished. Now I have to start all over again which isn’t devastating, but its definitely a pain in the backside and a waste of a lot of time.
So the moral of the story, always be sure to save your keyword research spreadsheet file, and save it often.
Do you have a similar horror story? Comment below!
-John Elder
The Marketing Fool!
