I am about to disgorge another opinion on the latest and grooviest Internet marketing tool. Understand this is an opinion. Not fact. I have not bought this membership/ software or whatever you choose to classify this thing. I know it galls some people to no end that I have the audacity to wax philosophical about a product that I have not actually bought. I have an opinion about buying tickets to the opera without ever having been to one too so tough shit. Go read something else if you aren’t strapped in to deal with my First Amendment (at least today) right to let the opinion fly.
I decided to pick on Niche Horde today. I could very well be the only person that has seen the demo of this thing that sees no reason to spend $47, soon to be $97, on the thing. Now why is that? It certainly looks cool. You download a piece of software that you install on your computer that communicates with the NH server and it helps build a database of niche keywords. Everyone that participates gets to savor the goodness of everyone’s efforts. The future is now and that future is cloud computing. Wonderful.
Have you ever put a client software on your computer before? Sometimes it’s downright unpleasant. Before you know it your CPU cycles are maxed out. This thing is supposed to work every 60 seconds. Really? I’m going to have a (potential) spike in my CPU cycles every 60 seconds? No thanks. So you say just run it on another computer. That is actually a great idea if you have one to spare. I don’t.
Ok, so maybe sacrificing a fraction of you computer performance is worth it for the greater good. What do you get for the effort? Apparently a shitload of keywords. It goes out and continually pulls in data based on hard coded values for phrases that have no more than 500 competing web sites and gets at least 500 searches a day. It also gives you the Adword bid for that word.
I actually don’t see a downside to that if that is the kind of info you need in your life. If you are the kind of person who constantly looks around for niche shit to write on then by all means you need this tool I guess. But for me, the last thing I need is another 2 million, and growing, list of keyword phrases to fret over to build webpages on.
Ok everyone knows I am taking a break of sorts from creating niche sites and adding content to my few supersites. New one included. Honestly I am not trying to figure out what keywords to write on. At least not every time I decide to start tapping away at the keyboard. I circle around a general topic and write until I’ve had enough. This could be anywhere from 400 to 1,000 words or more. I’m just trying to add content. From time to time I’ll look in the Analytics and see what people used to find my post. If that keyword phrase is a hit then I’ll incorporate it into future posts.
See, I am building my own database that I don’t have to share with anyone. If I need keyword seeds then Google has a perfectly fine search tool to use.
When I was looking at the demo movie on NH I was curious about one of the keyword phrases that popped up. It looked choice. Virtually no competition as far as the numbers go. Lots of searches. So I went to Nichebot to investigate the keyword phrase and the competition. Just about the whole top 10 was PR4s and PR5s. Um the competition numbers may have been favorable but the Pagerank showed a different story. Even if you use this tool you have to check the competition past just how many there are found. Nothing is ever as easy as it seems.
Niche Horde is cheap. If you buy it today it will only cost $47/year. If you are able to sling niche sites super fast then by all means this might be the tool for you. But if you are concentrating on getting a few sites right then you don’t need the added distraction of playing with yet another keyword tool.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Splork… I think you might be slipping a little… I thought for sure would would have twisted the product’s name a little… Niche “HORDE”… Feel good for 30 minutes and then leave dissapointed… and with a lighter wallet… Doh!!! LOL!!!
Designing and writing remote service software was my ‘day job’ until recently. IF it is written correctly the user of the PC won’t even know it’s there. I never got any performance complaints about my software and we had some very finicky users (doctors). I don’t know if Niche Horde is written well or not but it is easy to write this kind of application wrong and make it a pig.
Yea, my day job revolves around managing clients that have been deployed to servers in the enterprise. Typically you would never know it was there. But then again it isn’t doing anything more than sending a “heartbeat” to the the server every minute. And sending small streams of data only if something has changed. I’ve read, and haven’t confirmed, that CPU utilization has increased up to 100% at times with NH. Perhaps the mileage varies.
LOL, I did exactly the same. Initially the program looked interesting and one of the keywords in the video looked a winner and piqued my interest. Low and behold a list of PR4′s and 5′s to compete against. if you’re going to compete against those big boys I’d rather go for more than a potential 500 searches a month.
Yes I agree you can very easily and completely make an opinion and know all there is about something by looking at the video that was done on the prototype. It reminds me of the first talk about Sex when we were little kids. OOhh that sounds awful. Try it and tell me you don’t like it. You have 30 days to get a refund if you don’t like it.
Saw a review on this the other day and I have to admit, I was drooling a bit by the ability to get all this information on niche keywords laid out neatly with the press of a button, but in the long run I don’t think it’d be that helpful either. I’m not building an authority site or anything, but I would rather just focus in on a few niches; the only reason you’d need this is if you were planning on expanding into dozens or even hundreds of niches, me thinks.
And off topic, but Niche Horde + Firepow (or other auto blogging software)= Ultimate Splogging equipment.
I suppose it all depends on what one is looking for.
Niche Horde appears to be a great way to find key phrases that are actually being searched on, how often, what the competition is and whether the key phrase is available as a .com, .net, or .org.
The price, now $97 p.a. appears to me to be a little high given that you can buy a similar product outright for the same price.
For someone who creates a lot of mini sites either for adsense or affiliate earnings, Niche Horde and Micro Niche Finder can save a lot of legwork.
Niche horde analyses competition using the allinanchor operator.Number of pages containing the keyword term is not the real competition