Hunting the Perfect Niche Site

Are you new to the world of making money online?  Have you heard of niche sites but not quite sure how to find the right one? 

Do you want to generate a passive income that requires little or no work on your part? 

Have you spent several hundred dollars paying for crap sites from sitepoint that haven’t earned you a nickel yet?  If any of these apply to you then keep reading.

The article below is geared to beginners, so you veterans will not see anything that you likely don’t already know.

This article will give you enough insight to put you on a level playing field with most, and ahead of the thousands of other newbies that you are competing against.   I surely don’t claim to know everything, but I will share with you what I know and discuss my approach to niche site selection. 

Niche sites are becoming an increasingly large part of my revenue, and I expect that to continue.  I am fine tuning my process and I am growing both the content and selection of my sites weekly.  Currently the most effective niche site that I have is earning me approximately 500 dollars per month. 

 That alone doesn’t sound so remarkable, but bear in mind that it is a site that it is only 2 months old and has yet to be fully developed.   Look at it from this perspective, 500 per month from one site is 6k per year.  If you can duplicate that  10 times, then you have a 60k dollars per year passive income.  If you can duplicate it 20 times……?  Got your attention now?

 Common Pitfalls 

Many first time “nichers” fall into the trap of thinking you can just load a site up with some ads, put some Ezine articles on it and kick back and wait for the adsense checks to start rolling in. 

I see disappointment in their future.  

Other rookies make the mistake of picking their niche based on something that interests them or something that is immensely popular.  This, at first glance, is not necessarily a bad strategy as popular topics like these will bring a lot of organic search traffic.  The pitfall is that popular topics will likely already have a TON of competition. 

 Still others will succumb to the temptation of just buying a niche site on SitePoint or Digital Point.  I am not saying you cannot find deals out there but a word of caution, the only ones who typically make money with “turnkey” $100 dollar sites are the sellers.  If the sites have as much potential as they claim, then why would they be selling it?

If you don’t have the ability or the experience then these are easy mistakes to make.  Anyone who has stuck to this game long enough has made the same ones, so don’t feel bad.  It is easy to succumb to the tempations that the “gurus” offer with their sales pitches.  they promise to teach you the ropes, they promise you a fortune, they promise it will be easy, they just don’t offer you anything without you paying them first.  Never forget the old addage……”a fool and his money are soon parted.”

Here’s the honest truth, and it’s free, you can be way ahead of a lot of your competitors if you learn a few, simple techniques. 

You should know that it will require work on your part, it will take time and you won’t get rich overnight.  In time you can build a passive income but it won’t be easy and it won’t be quick.

If you’re still here then you are more committed than most.  At the first mention of work they’re out of here.  At the end of this article you will be surprised how easy it is to identify a high potential niche.  What you do with that information is up to you.

Choosing The Right Niche

A carpenter has his tools, a doctor has his, a mechanic has is.  If your trade is going to be building niche websites then you will need your own set of tools and the first is a good keyword tracker.    A number of these exist on the net but the one I use most often is WordTracker.   

They offer a free version and they are currently running a free trial of the paid version.  If it were me, I would sign up for the free trial to get a look at the paid version and if it doesn’t meet your expectations then you can revert to the free keyword tracker.  The free version will suffice for the purpose of this article.

Regardless of which you select, you are going to use the keyword search tool to identify certain attributes in your potential niche site.  I have two things that I look for when searching for a niche.

• Volume - I want at least 300 searches a day.  You can tweak your number up or down but 300 is the number that makes me happy and will yield approximately 10k potential hits per month.
• Competition- How many sites are already there.   A common number that I have seen used is 1,000,000 pages as a cut off but the lower the number the better.  I would greatly prefer to see the competing sites be less than 500k but I have seen and heard of others having good results with the 1 million mark.   You find the competitors by doing a search on your keyword in the google search box but put quotation marks around it.  Type “your keyword” into the Google box and look towards the upper right hand corner, you will see a number of returned sites…that’s your competition.

These definitely aren’t hard and fast rules and they aren’t the only things to consider but I would stick to them until you get confident enough to make more informed decisions on your own.  

“Las Vegas Coupons”

Let’s try a real example…..coupons can be a pretty popular mover on Ebay so let’s try one.  I’ve selected Las Vegas as my coupon of choice.  Vegas is a very popular tourist destination and has the reputation as a “coupon friendly” type city. 

 So I take and plug Las Vegas Coupon into Wordtracker and this is what I see.

I am only showing the top 10 returns so it can fit on the screen but as you can see the keyword Las Vegas Coupons would meet our requirements so far. 

 The number at the top is the number of keyword searches per day.  As you can see, in the case of our example, it is 2080 searches per day that contain the words Las Vegas Coupons.   The potential seems high so far, 2100 searches a day is over 60k searches a month. 

We aren’t done yet though…..we need to check out the competition.  So let’s move on to Google.

The screen shot might be tough to read but feel free to try this keyword search on your own and see for yourself. 

As you can see it returns 157k competitors.   That seems like a lot at first, but once you have more experience doing this,  then you will see that this is a fairly small amount of competitors for the number of searches performed.

 I found this keyword in about five minutes. If you invest some time then you can find thousands of keywords that will fit the criteria.

So far we have accomplished our first two goals, we have identified a niche that draws a minimum of 300 searches a day and we have a very lean 157k competitors.  Nice.

Now What?

The next step is to set up your website.  When you buy a domain to build this site around, you should keep a few things in mind.  A domain name with your keyword in it will really help you to get ranked faster and even better would be to buy a used domain with the keyword in it.  If you have to choose between the two, I’d take the used domain over the keyword as long as the domain still is somewhat appropriate to the topic.

A used domain has a number of advantages, it might have backlinks and PR already out there on the web and you won’t have any Google Sandbox issues to deal with.  You can read more about buying used domains  here and you definitely will want to consider my 15 must have tools  article.  I wrote this as a how to article when buying websites but many of the same tools would apply with a used domain.

As for the platform that you use to build your site around, I use either Wordpress or the Build a Niche Store  Ebay Affiliate Software.  I’ve been using BANS for a few months now and the results are promising.  In the Vegas Coupons case I would probably use BANS as you have the extra benefit of being able to monetize through the Ebay affiliate program as well as  Google Adsense or other similar ad network.  

You can certainly use a traditional HTML template based site but the inherent SEO benefits of Wordpress are hard to beat.  The maniacal user support when it comes to plugins is just another added benefit and I personally won’t use anything other than Wordpress myself. 

Content Gold

At this point, you have identified your niche and purchased your domain.  Now you need to get a site up and draw traffic to it.  You are going to need content, quality, keyword rich content and how much of it depends on a couple of factors.

Competitors - the more you had for your keyword then the more content you will need to be able to outrank them.  Content is still king.

Advertising budget - If you can afford to run an ad campaign then the content won’t be quite as critical, as you can simply “buy” clicks.  This might not be the way to go for a beginner as PPC advertising is a complex topic all in itself and get quite expensive if you make mistakes.  I will be addressing this topic in the weeks ahead.

A good starting point would be at LEAST 10-15 pages of keyword rich, quality content on your site.   Adjust up or down as you see fit but no less than 10 in my opinion.  You are likely competing with some automatically generated sites that have hundreds if not thousands of pages of content.

Outsourcing?

 If you aren’t capable of, or not wanting to write 10-20 pages of content, then you might consider outsourcing your initial article requirements.  A number of sources exist for PLR (Private Label Rights) content or you can write it yourself if you think you have the ability.   If you aren’t familiar with PLR, it is basically content that you purchase the rights to from the original author.  You can essentially treat it as though it were your content.

If you elect to outsource then you can find freelancers all over the internet and a great place to start is at Ezine articles.  You can find a thousands of freelancers who post there regularly.  I won’t go into detail on PLR content, as it is not the subject of this post, but if you type “PLR content” into a search, you will find no shortage of opportunities.   Be weary though, you get what you pay for and the auto generated stuff still leaves a lot to be desired. 

A word of caution, do not just cut and paste content that you find on the net, you will be penalized by Google and might even be delisted because of it.  If that happens then you have a disaster.

When setting up your pages, a good practice is to make sure you link back to your homepage using your keywords.  This is very important to start building your inbound links and will give you a headstart when it comes to being indexed as well.  I accomplish this by putting a link into the footer of my page with both my keywords and my homepage linked.   I also make sure that I take advantage of all of the SEO benefits that Wordpress has to offer.

You also want to make sure that you install a SiteMap to make sure that the Google Bots can find each and every page that you have.  The sitemap and the links working in conjunction will make sure that your pages are indexed and available to the public.  If  you are using wordpress, this is a snap.

Page Rank and Inbound Links

If you expect to out-rank those other 157k sites that we saw in Google then you will have to rank higher than they do for the keyword search Las Vegas Coupons.  This by itself is a very complex topic that I won’t go into depth on today but let’s cover some basics:

• Use your anchor text in your links. 
• Submit articles to the major article directories.  I use Ezine Articles for mine.
• Use your site in forum signatures.
• Buy Text Links from relevant high ranking PR sites.  (Travel agents etc.)
• Write about your site on your blog.
• Comment on other related sites linking back to yours.

Again…these are just the basics…this topic alone could fill a 50 page e-book and I will be writing another article on it in the very near future.

What to Expect

The amount of time it will take you to get ranked will depend greatly on the amount of competition out there for your particular keyword.  The less competition that you have the better, sometimes you can see results in just a few short weeks.  The more competition then the longer it will take.  

The more relevant content that you can generate with the proper keyword density then the better, however make sure that you aren’t sacrificing quantity for quality. 

That’s it….all I know about niche site selection.  I know I breezed over a few topics that you will need to know more about and I will be writing on them in the very near future.  I will also share one of my latest niche sites that I am creating using the BANS software.  If you are interested then make sure you subscribe to my feed. 

My goal today was to cover the basics of niche site selection and I am confident that we’ve covered the basics for those who are new to the game.  I know many of you will be experimenting with the keyword tracker to see what kind of niche sites that you can find, but if anyone makes a fortune off Las Vegas Coupons then I want a cut.