In our last installment, we talked about how crucial niche selection was to our success. In this installment, we’ll pick a niche and show how to make money with it. Let’s get to the niche selection.
I will select a niche that has tons of products to promote. My niche will be digital cameras. This is a nice niche because people buy digital cameras all the time. They buy them before vacations, before major holidays, before birthdays and major events like graduation ceremonies. Digital cameras also make great gifts. All these reasons make digital cameras a perennial favorite. There’s also a lot of competition in this niche for the very same reasons.
Now that I’ve chosen my niche, let’s go after some keywords. We will use Google’s own tool, the external keyword tool. Here’s the link for the old interface which I like much better: Google’s Keyword Tool. Type in your keyword, in this case “digital cameras”. The tool will return lots and lots of results. These results will be very competitive for the most part. If we want to rank for anything, we’ll have to narrow the field down a bit.
So how do we narrow the field down? Well, first off, we want to change the results in the keyword tool from “broad” to “exact”. Next, we look at the “Global Monthly Search Volume”. Click on the heading to sort by volume. I like to start with the results that have around 2,000 searches per month or so because they’re usually low enough competition-wise to make them worth the effort.
So how do we ascertain how competitive a keyword phrase is? Well, through lots of research. For this, I recommend a tool like the SEO Toolbar for FireFox. It’s a free download. Once you install it, go to Google.com and search for your keyword phrase. Look at the top 4-6 results. If they have a PageRank of 3 or more and have the keyword phrase in the title and url, move on. This is a lot of work, so patience is a virtue here.
Monetization also plays a role in your keyword selection. In our example above, Google’s tool will return generic results like “digital cameras”, “digital camera reviews”, “waterproof digital cameras” and so on. Before researching those keyword phrases, you want to consider how you will make money from the traffic. Let’s say you want to use Adsense. If so, you want to look at the CPC. That is the Cost Per Click for that keyword for the top position of the paid results. I like to say that our cut would be around 20% of that. So if a keyword has a $1 CPC, then you’ll probably get around $0.20 or less. This is fine if you have enough volume. For example, if 1,000 people click on your Adsense ads, you could potentially make $200 from that traffic.
There’s another viable approach. This approach makes use of specific product model numbers. Those model numbers are buying keywords. That is to say, people are looking to buy when they type a camera’s model number into the search engines. So, how do we find those model numbers? Here’s one way we do it. Go to Amazon.com and go to the photo section. You will see a section called “best sellers”. Currently, those results are:
- Canon PowerShot S90
- Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS7
- Canon PowerShot SD780IS
- Panasonic Lumix DMC-FH20
- Polaroid t1031
Let’s put those numbers into the keyword tool. After much research, we find that this keyword phrase looks promising: “canon powershot sd780is 12.1mp”. It has a search volume of 480 searches per month and the number 3 and 4 spots have a PageRank of one. The CPC is a whopping $0.05! That means no Adsense. Since this is a buying keyword phrase, you can monetize it with Amazon.com’s affiliate program. So, for each sale that means a commission of aprox. $169 x 4% or $6.76. Hey, that’s not bad! Keep in mind that buying keywords have a much higher conversion than a keyword like “camera”.
So, if we pick Adsense, we go with generic phrases of low competition with over 2,000/month exact phrase searches and decent CPC of $1 or more. If we pick Amazon.com’s affiliate program, then we can target model numbers with lower volume because they convert well and we get a decent number for each sale.
Does this all sound like a TON of work? Well, it does because it is! That’s one reason we offer our services and pick niches and build sites for people just like you. That’s also why automated keyword research tools are all the rage. That’s all we have time for! See you next time.
To Your Success!
Thomas C. Gajdjis
About the Author
Thomas has a highly trained team of authors, webmasters and SEO professionals. His team has built over 4,000 niche websites and they know exactly what it takes to get a site ranked and making money. Our Platinum membership takes all the pain and effort out of making money online. If you want to start making money RIGHT NOW, then click on the link here to get started -> Sorry, you missed it, offer closed.
