Fact Based Niche Site Building

Be Fact Based.

What the heck does that mean? Well you might not know it yet but this might be the BEST advice you ever get on building niche sites. I was inspired to write this after a recent pass through the BANS forum and found a number of frustrated niche site builders who, despite their best efforts, were not making any money.

One particular post grabbed my attention that is probably a great example of why so many newbies fail to make any money.  In a nutshell this person was asking about optimizing a page around a number of different keywords.  I give him kudos for at least knowing enough to optimize the pages around keywords but the ones he listed looked rather odd to me.

Once you have been building niche sites for a while, you kind of get a feel for how people search the internet. I don’t know why and I sure wouldn’t depend on feel but after running the keyword tools for so long you just get in tune with what kinds of keywords people enter into search engines. The keywords that this poster was optimizing for might make sense in your head but I just knew they wouldn’t produce any search results.  Sure enough, a quick plug into Wordtracker and it returned ZERO results.

What a waste of time….to optimize a page around a keyword that nobody is looking for.

Why Fact Based

I often see this mistake being made….and it’s a big one. People are so confused by what a niche site really is. I think most of them are under the impression that a niche is some whacky little subset of the world where no competition exists. They will build entire sites around a niche that nobody cares about, simply so they can dominate it.

Guess what, dominating a niche that nobody cares about amounts to being the King or Queen of NOTHING. If you don’t have a decent amount of people searching for your product then there is NO money to be made. If you are ranked #1 for fuzzy blue widgets but nobody searches for fuzzy blue widgets other than you, it’s a fact that you will not make any money.

You must be FACT based in your keyword selections and build your sites around keywords that get searched on or you will not make any money. This is applicable to the pages in your site as well. If you are building custom pages for a BANS site, then optimizing for keywords that don’t get searched on is pretty much a waste of time.

That bears repeating.  Build your sites around keywords that actually get searched for, not that sound good in your head.

Traffic Interruption

This may seem simplistic but your goal with a BANS store is to interrupt the traffic flow and insert your site somewhere in the process. The “process” I am referring to is the selling process.  A person will sit down at their computer, type search terms into it looking for the product they want to buy. Google will return some relevant sites, the searcher will check out what they have to offer, evaluate whether they want to buy or not and then either proceed with a purchase or try a different search term.

Your goal is to insert your site into that process and the ONLY way to do that is to optimize around the terms they punch into Google. Once you know what someone is searching for, then you need to tackle the job of ranking well for that search term.

You are building your sites and pages around “fact based” search terms that will bring you visitors. Visitors bring sales and sales bring commissions.

Conclusion

Don’t fall for trying to build a site that you think is pretty or that makes sense to you. You are doing nothing more than rolling the dice by using keywords that you pick out of your head. I invest a lot of time in building my niche sites and I damn sure expect a return on my investment.

If I wanted to roll the dice I’d go to Vegas and gamble. I am building a passive income stream for life and I’d much rather be fact based and ensure I get a return on my investment. If I were to pick the two biggest mistakes people make it would be building a site that is either too broad or too narrow and optimizing pages around keywords that make no sense.

I personally use Keyword Elite for my own keyword work and it serves me well. It’s expensive but I like it, it works and I plan to stick with it. You can use others but at the very least use one and use it well.