How to Choose a Niche For Your Niche Product Site

Posted in Niche Product Sites Guide on Apr 22nd, 2010 | 7 comments

This is going to be a short post because I’m tired as hell, and this topic is pretty simple. Picking a niche is a pretty simple thing really. All you need is some intuition, some brainstorming time, and some keyword tools. The big goal is to try and find high level, broad keywords, then dig down into those keywords to find high volume exact match keywords to target with your sites.

Finding Niches

Go to WalMart. Seriously. Just go to WalMart and look around. Everything in that store can probably be built as its own niche site, targeted around specific keywords. For example, take sewing.

Sewing is a topic that is nearly entirely targeted at women, and generally, adult women. This is a good thing. These are people who are a good demographic to target for making online purchases. So fire up your keyword tool and just start off by typing in “sewing” and see what comes up.

You want to look for long tail keywords that get pretty solid traffic. You then want to switch down to exact match and make sure that that traffic still holds up. If it does, you’re looking good.

Now, you’re going to want to identify a good amount of solid keywords from this broad keyword. These will be important for the next step, which is choosing a keyword.

What Are The Best Niches?

The niches that you know something about. The site I’m building and writing this guide around is a topic that I know a good amount about. I’m not an expert, but I know enough to have a voice on the topic. (more…)

Goals, Keywords, & Some Specifics About Our Niche Product Site

Posted in Niche Product Sites Guide on Apr 17th, 2010 | 8 comments

Alright, time to get into the nitty gritty of what we’re going to be doing here. When it comes to these sites, at least for me, the goal is to get them built, get them ranked, get them to convert, then let them sit. Then you can just follow the pattern and build out as many as you can until you’re happy.

I’m going to start with the overarching goals and expectations you can expect from these kinds of sites, and then go into the details of how we’re going to get there, and what we can do once we get there. These topics will all be expanded on in detail in the upcoming posts in this series.

What We (Hopefully) Want To Get From These Micro Niche Product Sites (Hopefully)

$10 a day. That’s it. Of course, more is always better, but at the very least, $10/day. Now, we’re not going to be doing this with Adsense or CPA, this will be with selling our own products. So I’ve priced the product I’m going to be selling at $9.99. So that means I need one conversion a day to reach my goal.

How much traffic do I need for one conversion a day? No fuckin idea. BUT, until I have real data, I’m going to say that I’m going to get a 1% conversion rate. So for every 100 unique visitors to my site, I’ll sell one copy of my product. This could be really high, really low, or just right, I really have no idea yet. We’ll find out soon enough though.

So if we know we are shooting for a 1% conversion rate, that leads us perfectly into search volume goals for our target keywords. (more…)

Introducing “The Ultimate Guide to Building Niche Product Sites”

Posted in Niche Product Sites Guide on Apr 14th, 2010 | 5 comments

This is something I’ve mentioned that I want to do a few times now, and am now ready to move forward on it. I’m going to be going through a full niche product site build, from niche and keyword research, to choosing the right domain, designing a theme and coding the site out, creating or finding a product to sell, link building, and periodic status updates after all of that to show you how things are going. I will be showing you why I make the decisions I do as I build out this kind of site. It’s gonna be fun.

Why are you telling people about this?

Honestly, because I like writing about how to do things. I think a lot of things that people wonder about will get covered in this, and I know that most people, like myself, are always dying for case studies instead of hypothetical numbers. So this will hopefully serve as a good place for people to reference when getting started with these types of sites.

No seriously. Why are you telling people about this?

Alright, you got me. There’s honestly two reasons why I felt compelled to put together this guide. The first reason is that I’ve been meaning to kick myself in the ass and get a bunch of these sites rolled out anyways, so what better way to get moving than to write a damn guide about them. 99% of the reasons why people fail at Internet Marketing is simply because of execution. You can be the smartest guy in the world when it comes to this stuff, but if you simply don’t build and test and try, you’ll never make a dime.

Secondly, and this goes along with the last point, is that I’m really not too worried about a bunch of people leeching these ideas and beating me to the punch. Nothing I’m about to write about is ground breaking in any way whatsoever, all I’m really doing is putting a bunch of information in one place and adding in my own knowledge where I can. An industrious individual could find everything I’m about to write in an afternoon of searching. (more…)

The Power of Micro Niche Sites with Exact Match Domain Names

Posted in Case Studies on Apr 9th, 2010 | 14 comments

This is a topic that I’m actually planning on exploring in some case studies very very soon, but there was a post on Hacker News a few days ago that served as a great example of this topic so I figured why the hell not, let’s start there.

What I’m going to go over here is how truly effective an exact match keyword domain name can be when used on simple micro niche sites. I guess I’ll first go into what both of those concepts mean, then I’ll jump into the subject of this analysis.

What is an Exact Match Domain Name?

This is simply a domain name that has the EXACT keyword that you want to target in it. That’s it. No extras “the” or “at” or extra words at the beginning or end of it. Simply the exact keyword someone would type in at Google to come to your site, without the spaces. Technically, hyphens don’t count either, but sometimes domains with them can work out well.

So if you wanted to rank for “sunflower seeds”, having the domain www.sunflowerseeds.com, .org, or .net would be the exact match domain name. Something like www.sunflowerseedsstore.com wouldn’t cut it.

You might have seen people talk about the advantages of an exact match domain name around different forums and blog posts before, so this might not come as a surprise, but having your exact keywords in your domain name can give you a HUGE boost in the SERPS. Google eats up sites like this, and in low to moderate competition niches, you can pretty easily rank on the front page with minimal backlinking. Additionally, if you see an exact match domain name in the top ten, you better be prepared to really beat them in terms of linkbuilding and on page SEO, because they will have an inherent advantage over you because of the keywords in their domain. (more…)

How To Write Your First Ruby Web Bot In Watir – Scraping Weather.com

Posted in Automation on Apr 4th, 2010 | 24 comments

Time for the fun stuff now. The holy grail for a lot of Internet Marketers is automation. This can be obtained through simple iMacros scripts, some PHP scripts on a server, or with a little tool called Watir using the Ruby programming language. All of these combos have their own inherent advantages and disadvantages, but that’s not something I’m going to go over here. I like to use Watir for a lot of botting needs, so that’s what I’m going to show you how to do today.

Why Ruby? Why Watir?

For anyone who has had the joy of switching to Ruby from other languages, this question should be a no brainer. Ruby is a fun language, it’s clear and concise, reads like English, and has a great collection of plugins (gems) that allow you to significantly expand the capabilities of your apps. Ruby obviously came to fame because of Rails, which is a really nice and powerful framework, but is a whole different beast from web bots. Ruby is a great general purpose language that can be used for a lot of different projects. (more…)