In my last post, I encouraged you to write down 10 passions, interests, skills that you have.  If you haven’t done that yet, do it now, before proceeding.

Let’s set the stage.

I have chosen the topic of ‘babysitting’ as the passion/skill/strength that I want to build a blog about.

What should I write about?

I can think of a number of things off the top of my head…

• Babysitting rates
• How to find a good babysitter
• Babysitting safety skills
• Etc.

Although I can write about dozens of subtopics on ‘babysitting,’ wouldn’t it be better to write posts that address actual questions/problems/challenges that folks are having with ‘Babysitting?’   You bet.  Why guess when we can know for sure.

Did you know that search engines keep track of each of the search phrases that people type into them?  Yahoo does, Google does, MSN does — they all do. 

Okay, So What?

When people search for something in a search engine, what are they actually doing?  They are looking/searching for something – hence the word ’search’ in search engine.

Some people are just doing casual research because they heard a friend talk about ‘xyz’ and they want to get more information.  And, some are searching because they know what they are looking for — they’ve got a need, a problem that they need answers for.

Think about it this way.  A search phrase represents a question asked by a person or group of people.

Let’s take the search phrase ‘babysitting rates’ as an example.

What is the underlying question the phrase ‘babysitting rates’ represents?

How about:

‘What is a good and fair babysitting rate?’

So for any search engine phrase, try substituting a ‘question-type’ prefix before the phrase to make it more clear to you what’s being asked.

Here are some ‘question-type’ prefixes:

What is/are…
How is/are…
How do I find…
How do I make…

Do you see the pattern?

In our next lesson, I am going to take you through the research process with a FREE tool, widely available on the internet.