As I spoke about in my last niche site update I have switched gears because the previous niche was wrong on a couple of levels for me.
As a result, I am changing up my report to reflect my new niche site and in this post I am going to detail how I chose the market and some of the activities up until this point where I am today.
First of all, I am focusing the creation and strategy behind the Google Sniper (affiliate link) course by George Brown. If you haven’t seen this course, the main focus is on creating small niche sites that are focused on one (and only one) keyword. This concept is nothing new but the way in which you narrow down the potential keywords is a bit unique.
Product Selection
After selecting a product in your preferred affiliate network, you begin to research the potential keywords that one would search for. There is a whole section on choosing a clickbank product and I assume that the same concepts could be applied to any affiliate network or offer. I found a couple products in the Computers / Internet: Software section. According to Google Sniper’s criteria, they are a little behind on the minimum gravity level, but close enough that I felt fairly confident that they could still be profitable.
Now onto the Keywords
I won’t go into the full details – they are all spelled out in detail in his course – but the main point of Google sniper is to focus on keywords that get a minimum of 3000 phrase match searches per month according to the Google Keyword Tool. The higher the phrase match result in the keyword tool, the harder it is going to be to find a low enough competition level on the results page and, more importantly an exact match domain.
For whatever reason, the keyword tool varies greatly and is pretty inaccurate in my opinion. I am not sure why it can be so inaccurate. Seems like around 3000 is a pretty good place to start. I usually begin looking for potential keywords to focus the site around in the 12,000 – 13,000 range and work back from there. As you can see from the screenshot, I found the keyword “speed up my internet” had around 8100 phrase match searches per month.
Now time to check out the phrase match competition in google.
Phrase Match Competition
Also the course states that you should shoot for a phrase match competition level to be around 13,000 max. I found it extremely difficult to get close to 13,000 on nearly every keyword I searched for, but I got pretty close on the one that I chose. It had a phrase match competition level of around 15,400.
The next step is to check out the competition on the broad match results and see what is there. If you see a lot of major authority sites (things like wikipedia for example) it is time to begin all over again. If, however you see sites that are less authority type, then it is time to find the right domain.
Exact Match Domain
The best way to boost your chances of getting ranked in google at a very high spot is through the use of an exact match domain. For example, my site is focused on the keyword “speed up my internet” so I need to find a .com, .net or .org domain that is an exact match. I found speedupmyinternet.org.
SIDE NOTE: I am not a huge fan of godaddy, but they have one tool there that I really like. It is the bulk domain registration tool. It allows you to search up to 500 keywords to see if any of them are available. I use this all the time and then take the available domains and see if any of those meet the above criteria. I will make a post on this in the future and even a video. I guess it may be possible that other domain registrar’s have this tool as well but I haven’t taken the time to look and see.
Any thoughts?
The next step is to get a domain name with WordPress installed on it with a simple theme. I personally like the Thesis theme because of the customization and hooks that are available. There are other themes that work fine so don’t get too caught up on the theme but be smart and think about your visitors. Obviously if you have decided on a niche that is focused on wedding day photos, you don’t want a theme that looks dark or edgy.
Conclusion
Once the above steps are complete and research has been done, it is time to begin to fill the site with some content and get the site indexed. I’ll cover that in the next update.
Most sites take several weeks to get indexed, but I can consistently get sites indexed in a couple days or less. I’ll talk about how in the next niche site update.
Til then,
Brandon
PS. What success have you had with niche sites? I would love to hear about anything that works for you