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.

Click Through Rate Matters

A few years back, AOL released a shit ton of search data. From that data, people were able to calculate the average Click Through Rate for each position on the front page of the SERPS. So using the graph on the left, if you rank number 1 for a keyword that gets 100 exact match searches a day, you can expect about 42 visitors. If you’re number 2, that drops down to about 12 visitors.

Now obviously, these numbers are dependent on a lot of variables. If you have more compelling meta data than people above you, you might snag a few more clicks. But for the most part, this is spot on.

So what does that mean for us? It means that we can work backwards and find the minimum daily searches we want to shoot for to make $10 a day from our sites.

Let’s Calculate Our Minimum Monthly Searches We Need

Yay for math time. Here we go.

We need 100 unique visitors a day (not pageviews, actual visitors). Knowing that, and knowing the average CTR of the front page of the SERPS, that means that if we rank #1, we will get 42 visitors for every 100 searches.

So to get to 100 uniques a day, we would need to rank #1 for a keyword that gets about 240 exact searches per day.

42/100 = 100/x

42x = 10,000

x = 238.09

(Remember Algebra?)

Ok, so that’s all fine and dandy, but what about if you can’t get to #1? Well, then you’re going to need a keyword that gets about 850 searches a day. That’s definitely doable if you dig deep enough, but it’s significantly harder than if you ranked #1.

Now this is all assuming there is one single keyword that you could ever receive traffic for. The beauty of SEO is that you get ranked for all of the related keywords as well, so you’ll oftentimes get a lot of traffic that you weren’t even expecting. But for simplicity’s sake, we’re just going to go with 240 as the minimum searches a day that we’re shooting for.

I’m Cheating For This Though

The keyword I’m basing this series off of actually only gets about 150 exact searches a day. It’s not that big of a deal, I just need to either a) raise my conversion rate or b) get more traffic. Or else I can expect to make $10 every other day.

You’re not always going to find the right domains/right keywords/right volume. Cut corners and be smart and you can make up for it in other ways.

What’s the Site Going to Be Like?

So for this project and site, I’ve built out a long landing page style home page, with about 3000 words of content on it, all highly optimized. I’ve also added about, privacy, and contact us pages, that are all linked to in the footer. I’m also going to include about 4 or 5 articles that are linked to throughout the page to increase the content site wide.

This site is fully geared towards sales, so it has large calls to actions and is very optimized. I’ll be posting a wireframe of where I put things on the layout so you guys can get an idea of how it looks.

I’m going to be using Buy Now buttons that go directly to a PayPal Buying page. Quick and easy, and well trusted by mostly everyone online.

Where’s the Traffic Going to Come From?

Organic SEO all the way. Standard link building rules apply here, I’m going to utilise a variety of sources and shoot for very high quality links at all times. Here’s an overview of what I’ll be using:

  • Social Bookmarks, from red_virus at Wickedfire. This guy is just damn amazing, does great work
  • Link wheel with full bookmarking, RSS submissions, etc
  • Profile Links
  • Lots and lots of links to each hub of the link wheel (if you catch my drift)
  • Really high quality blog comments

The blog comments stand to give the biggest boost. I have a system down where I can scrape a huge amount of blogs, then filter the list down to High Page Rank, Low Out Bound Link Blogs. Those are the perfect targets for getting comments on, so in order to make them work as best as possible, I’ll be manually posting comments. Probably about 10-20 a day, depending on how many blogs I can scrape total. I’ll cover all this later.

What’s Getting Sold?

A 20 or so page book. It’s a how to guide, something that women/moms will probably enjoy a lot. It will delivered as a PDF with their name and email stamped on the bottom so they are afraid to share it with friends. It is actually very high quality and probably pretty valuable to people who want to learn how to do what it is about.

I designed a 3d cover for it using a template I found online, and am just formatting it in Word. Basic formatting, table of contents, nice cover, border, image on each page. Nice big colorful fonts and pages. Easy stuff, like you’re writing a report for school.

Coming Up Next

Alright, so I need to figure out how to nicely tie together all of this posts for easy browsing. All blog post series plugins suck, so I’ll hack something together later to use.

Next I’m going to write about how to pick a niche. After that, we’ll do some keyword and competition research. Then it’s on to how to build the site and how to get it ranked high.

Til next time,

D



8 Responses to “ “Goals, Keywords, & Some Specifics About Our Niche Product Site”

  1. emp says:
    April 22, 2010 at 12:52 am

    An ebook… hmm, that is going to be interesting.

    Are you setting a pricepoint or are you distributing it for free to gather readers?

    ::emp::

    Reply
    • admin says:
      April 22, 2010 at 1:03 am

      An ebook… hmm, that is going to be interesting.

      Are you setting a pricepoint or are you distributing it for free to gather readers?

      ::emp::

      Trust me, I’m not the biggest fan of traditional “ebooks”, just like most of us marketers. BUT, I’m just using that product for this example site for this guide because I wanted to try it out. You could use your own product, no matter what that is. It could be yo-yos, a membership/subscription, wordpress themes, or even an actual printed book through a fulfilment printer. Hell, you could even substitute out an affiliate offer if you want. The ebook I’m using for this site is pretty nice, very informative, and is an endpoint. There are no upsells or affiliate offers in it.

      This time around, I’m starting off with going for the hard sell, with a $9.99 price point. I want to case study another site that goes for the soft list building approach, but that will be later.

      I just strongly believe in promoting and selling your own products. Cut out all of the middle men, increase your margins, and maintain a lot of stability. Even if this site isn’t that profitable, there are a lot of techniques in here that should be useful to people.

      What do you think? I’m up for any suggestions at all man. Hit me up any time.

      And thanks for reading!

      Reply
  2. emp says:
    April 22, 2010 at 11:11 pm

    Oh.. I comnpletely misread this.

    Sorry, bout that, I thought you wanted to sell us an ebook on how to build niche sites, etc…

    Peddling ebooks to the masses is A-OK.

    IMHO eBooks are a viable media format. Only ebooks I hate are the “get rich quick” 4-page idiot documents.

    But even those have their market.

    ::emp::

    Reply
  3. Derek says:
    April 23, 2010 at 10:22 am

    Have you had experience publishing and selling ebooks before? Are you going to be creating your own Paypal/vendor setup or going through a 3rd party like Clickbank?

    I’m sure you’re going to answer these questions later in the series, just curious.

    Reply
  4. Mike says:
    April 28, 2010 at 9:35 am

    I’m doing a bunch of research trying to find some good keywords, but I want to make sure I am looking at the right data. If you are using the google keyword tool what match type would you set it to (borad?exact?etc.?) to find out the correct number of searches for a given term? I think I might have some possibilities for a good niche site, but it depends on what match setting I am looking at. Thanks for any help.

    Reply
    • admin says:
      April 28, 2010 at 10:25 am

      Broad match can be deceiving :)

      I tend to only check volume with exact match, simply because I find it to be much more realistic. I’m actually planning on covering both the differences between broad, phrase, and exact match search volumes, as well as how to do keyword research with Market Samurai.

      The keyword research will be next, probably in a day or two.

      Reply
  5. Mike says:
    April 28, 2010 at 10:37 am

    Thanks for the clearing that up for me. I was getting pretty pumped up because I found an exact match domain that had 135,000 local searches on broad, but when I switched it up to exact it dropped to 4,900. So now I am just going to look at exact. I will definitely keep an eye out for those upcoming posts, sounds like some awesome stuff!

    Reply

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