First: PICK A TOPIC YOU KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT AND WRITE ABOUT IT. I have even been guilty of building sites trying to get into some higher paying niches, but the fact is if you don’t know about it, things will take you 10x longer to write, ideas will be 100x harder to think of, and your content will be 1000x more painful to make. I made a site about snowboarding a while ago and it was BRUTAL. I couldn’t write my own content and ended up just taking it off the product I was promoting’s site.

If you don’t know about a topic how are you going to find a niche? Using any search information software you’ll get screwed because they always have crappy not-real search terms in them. “OH WOW! ‘Forex for your mom with banana syrup’ gets 1000000 searches a day!” it happens and makes it very painful when you build a nice site, get a #1 ranking for your keyword, and then get 1 hit a week.

**Revised Aug 13, 2008 – Now Google is releasing search numbers so you can get much more accurate results about related keywords here; however, still write about stuff you know about.

Second: PICK A TOPIC THAT YOU LIKE. It can be a bad idea is blogging about your job (especially if you hate what you do). This is strange advice for me to give because I am a law student and I frequently make blogs about the law, but hey, I like the law, I talk all day about the law, and when I go home I watch TV about the law and think about the law.

If you have a hobby write about it. If you like it so do other people and you can make it work.

Today was sort of a touchy feely topic, which I don’t love, but it needs to be said. Check back over the next few days when I’ll write about “Keyword Research”, a topic that mystifies a lot of people.

So the question becomes how do you get top SERP rankings, effectively “beating” google? Well there are 2 keys: 1) Content and 2) Backlinks. As a tool for building effective sites for this type of project I’m going to outlay a 18 step plan over the next month or so that should help you build a site in around 4 or 5 days if you work at it. This type of site can easily make $1/day, if not $10/day if done right. This might not seem like a ton of cash but they key is to build literally hundreds of these smaller sites. If you have 100 sites each making you $1 a day while doing nothing more that is a nice little chunk of change.

I’m going to encourage people to take up a new project. Build a new site along with this guide and track your results. If you follow this guide along with any other SEO knowledge you have there is no reason why by the end of the project you won’t have a successful site. Give it a shot, work hard and you WILL be successful.

Check back in throughout the week for updates and participate in the discussion. I’m far from being the utmost of authorities on the subject, all I can tell you is what worked for me.