Deranged Penguin

There’s a musical called “Title of Show” that is about writing a musical. It’s a meta-musical (could it be anything else?) that focuses on the creation of a musical. There’s a great song in it called “Nine People’s Favorite Thing” –

I’d rather be nine people’s favorite thing
Than a hundred people’s ninth favorite thing

That song didn’t know it, but it was talking about long tail keywords. The development of intelligent search strings that we can leverage is all about becoming nine people’s favorite thing. You want specificity so that your appearance in the search results matches a specific need. You want to directly answer the question posed by a subset of that search audience. If it’s a huge subset, great, but the material point is to be the answer for somebody. If it’s nine people, fine. As the song says,

Those nine people will tell nine people
Then we’ll have eighteen people loving the show
Then eighteen people could grow into
Five-hundred and twenty-five-thousand, six-hundred people
Loving our show

We are building that kind of base for the new niche blog – we want to be hyper relevant to some small sector of the universe, and then grow into a position of prominence. We want the ranking to be organic and real rather than arbitrarily inflated.

Let’s look at a sample search.

This is our competition, at least as far as content goes. Fathers.com has the domain name going for it. Zen Habits is a fantastic blog that pulls lots of views and counts other powerful bloggers among its readership. I didn’t know anything about the Art of Manliness, so I followed the link…and what do you know, the post was guest-written by Zen Habits’ own Leo Babauta. So in effect, Zen Habits has two of the top three. It’s my belief that Leo does things right, and I also think you’re unlikely to unseat anyone on the basis of this keyword. We’re going to need to find some others…

That’s okay, because we’re looking for a more humorous take on the subject. I don’t think you’re going to find a list of tips on fatherhood that has any rational bearing on the situation a given father faces at the time. We’re going to be more tongue-in-cheek about the advice we give. The core concept is going to be that the things you have control over are being awesome, mixing a mean drink, and owning at least one sassy hat. So we’re looking for something more along the lines of:

“Fatherhood is about cocktails”

This is not a great phrase. Sure, Google has no results, but no one searches it, either. One phrase that gets at least sufficient search density is, funnily enough, “Daddy’s drinking up our Christmas,” thanks to a novelty track of the same name. “Daddy’s drinking” adds some more searches, but not enough results to completely swamp our efforts.

Are we seriously going to try to pull traffic from “daddy’s drinking?” Yes, and we’re going to do it in the funny-ha-ha way that the song did. We’re going to be funny and parodic of the classic 50’s dad. And we’re going to provide relevant, topical content.

To cheat a bit, we’ll make it the tagline of the blog.

Now, the other thing we were going to do was leverage food delivery, personal chef service, and other food-related adsense opportunities. Turns out “daddy can’t cook” is pretty excellent from a humor angle, but not great from a search phrase perspective (why are all my best ideas funny?). But when we look into “Cooking for dads” and the like, we find some decent opportunities to leverage search attention on dads and cooking. Interestingly, when you enter “daddy can’t cook” into Google’s keyword tool, all of the suggestions have to do with making money online! A little gender bias, there, in this era of layoffs? I’m not sure, but it’s interesting.

Whether or not we get much traction to our static page discussing solutions to dad’s cooking, it’ll be interesting to see what search terms get people there. It will help us refine our targets later.

So, we have a way to get some keyword density around drinking and fatherhood, and ordering takeout and fatherhood. Time to figure out the monetization next…