Earn Online CashEarn Online Cash with Niche Selection
One of the important things that you need to learn when you want to earn online cash is how to identify a niche. This can apply to niche marketing blogs or selling on eBay or through an ecommerce site. While there are some very lucrative markets out there, like credit cards and weight loss, the competition is quite tough and it will take years to achieve good search results placement and thus income. My strategy has been to find lower volume keywords and long tails for high volume keywords where the competition isn’t a tough.
When you’re getting started it is best to look at markets you know. For example, if you’re a baseball fan, you can draw upon your knowledge to identify the related niches. Once you’ve gained some experience selecting niches from your own knowledge base you can branch out. One strategy I use is to start in an general, top level, entry on Wikipedia, eBay or Amazon and drill down into sub-topics. Keyword Elite and Google external Adwords tool can also provide ideas. Remember that you’re looking for a small market, under 10,000 searches a month, with limited or weak direct competition.
You are also looking for buying keywords, not generic keywords. You’ll find it best to get very specific for a particular brand and/or style and include buying trigger words like ‘cheap’, ‘discount’ or ‘price’. To continue the baseball scenario, “National League Batting Records” would not be a buying keyword while “New York Yankees Gear” would be. Remember that you can also catch other, related, long tail keywords from your primary one, for example, “New York Yankees Baby Gear” or “New York Yankees Jerseys”. If you work around a basic keyword you can mix and match buying triggers and related items to create many well optimized titles and even whole articles.
You will need to examine the search competition. In most cases this will be quite low and it will be easy to capture the top position with only a minor amount of effort using Bookmarking Demon and a few other links from blog comments, article submissions and other sources. Occasionally you’ll find that an authority site has a tight grip on the top spot in Google. Use a tool like SEO Elite to determine how strong their grip is on the keyword. If they don’t have links for your specific keyword, then it may be that they’re holding the position on authority alone. In this case, you may be able to capture the #1 position with some quality link building. If they do have links to your specific keyword, it may be best to try a different keyword combination, especially if the authority site is a sales/marketing site, or settle for second place in results, especially if the top spot is held by Wikipedia or other informational site.
Another consideration is if there is a decent market to promote. If you’re planning on marketing eBay items in your niche there should be enough items being sold to justify your efforts. If you’re planning an Adsense niche, you should see a good variety of ads popping up on Google’s search pages for your terms. If there is no ‘inventory’ then you’ll need to look for another keyword or create your own inventory with an eBook if the niche looks promising enough to you.
Remember that the key thing to look for is a low competition keyword where you can easily take the number one position in Google with a minor amount of effort that has enough monthly searches and ‘inventory’ to sustain a marketing effort. When you have this process down and repeatable, you’ll be well on your way to earning online cash.
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Frank,
Nice post. A couple of questions-
1). “Occasionally you’ll find that an authority site has a tight grip on the top spot in Google. Use a tool like SEO Elite to determine how strong their grip is on the keyword. If they don’t have links for your specific keyword,then it may be that they’re holding the position on authority alone.”
- if my keyword is ” newyork yankees gear” and the top spot is occupied by ” Yankees gear.com”. The
SEO elite shows anchor links for that site with: “yankees gear”.
Can I go to top spot if I get anchor links with ” newyork yankees gear” OR I should skip this keyword and go for another one.
2). If I set up the site for ” newyork yankees gear” and then want to include another keyword ” newyork yankees baby gear”, should I go through all research- (search volume, competition, backlinks check using SEO elite) similar to the one I did for my newyork yankees gear OR no need to do this again.
thanks.
On #1, you would probably want to find a different keyword phrase where the authority site didn’t have any incoming links. For example, you might find that while they had links for “Yankees Gear” they didn’t have links for “Yankees warm-up jackets” or other such long tails.
You also need to consider the number of searches for some of these long tails. I’ve done a few where I only get a 100 or so visitors a month which isn’t bad for a free blog on Blogger but might be disappointing for a self-hosted WordPress or BANS domain where you’ve got more overhead.
On #2, I kind of go with what Griz has said about this. Once you’re ranking for a particular keyword, add in the new keywords, based on the search terms people are using to find your site, and see what happens. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. If it does, great. If not, try something else. In a few cases I’ve gotten more traffic for the new keywords and ended up revamping the site around them.
When adding in the new keywords. Are you creating new content by adding new posts? Or are you revamping the posts that are already there and adding the new keyword to them?
Hi Thai,
I usually add a new post with the new keywords I want.
Let’s say I have a blog about a particular character’s collectible comic book. I get hits for it as you might expect. But, I start seeing a few search hits for another character in long tails like “Character A vs. Character B”. So, I write a post or two about Character B’s comic books. Now, I should begin to get traffic for both if all goes well.
Another technique that I’ve used when I’ve forgotten to put a particular long tail term in a post is to add it to the article via a comment. For example, if I wrote a post about how great giving a popcorn tin as a Christmas gift is but I forgot to mention the long tail “gourmet white cheddar cheese popcorn”, I’ll go back an add in a comment under a pseudonym that asks a question about it and I’ll answer it back like it was a regular comment.
another question,
some sites when I check with SEO for firefox shows, y- site wide links and y page links.
Site authority will be passing some juice to the page but which one we should pay attention to: # site links OR # page links OR both.
thanks.
You probably want to look at both.
I’ve found that when a site is passing down a lot of home page authority in a niche it can be quite hard to beat even with solid anchored links unless Google is also giving your site authority in the same niche.
However, if the site doesn’t have any niche authority being passed down, just general authority, then it can be easier to beat.
thanks Frank for the replies.
“However, if the site doesn’t have any niche authority being passed down, just general authority, then it can be easier to beat.”
- what does it mean?
If I am targeting ” student credit cards”,
1)the first position is occupied by a site that deals with financial stuff-
credit cards, loans, mortgages, insurance etc. But that site also has a page or two on ” student credit cards”.
2)Another site: talking about general stuff and has categories like: travel, restaurants, health, sports, credit cards etc.
If I understand you rightly, it will be tough to beat the first site even though it has one page on credit cards, the whole site is geared towards finance.
The second site could be easier to beat as it has again one or two pages on credit cards but the whole site is general in nature.
Did I get this right?
thanks.
Yes, that’s right. Sites with authority in a particular niche usually do better than general sites although you will find exceptions from time to time. My own experience has been that I can take a general site like OpTempo to page one easily in many niches but it’s quite difficult to beat a niche focused site for the top 3 spots on the results page.
Frank,
The above topic is more geared towards creating sites to sell products: eBay or e-commerce site.
If I want to create adsense site, how you use KE elite. and/or Google Keyword Tool.
thanks.
Hi Roger,
It’s the same approach. For example, I might start with ‘attorney’ and narrow down to a good niche in the same way as I did the baseball example. You might go to “DUI attorney” then “Ohio DUI attorney” then “Cleveland DUI attorney”. There are hundreds of services and 1000’s of related keywords where advertisers by Adwords. People often search locally for services plus Google will automatically geo-target ads on more generic niches in many cases.
I may be overthinking.
The procedure I am doing now is:
Project 1:put the seed keyword in KW elite. select Free WT option. set it to 500.
Then transfer the keywords after some filtering to Project 2. I select Google.
I get confused about what option we should select:
allintitle; allinanchor;allintext or just leave all three unchecked.
Each option gives different R/S ratio and KEI. So i am not sure which is better option.
The search # are again different.
So i export project 2 to excel and replace search volume # with the search # from Google keyword tool.
I hope I am not over-complicating this. LOL. just want to be thorough.
If none of the three are checked, the Results # equals the results, we get when do search in Google as broadword.eg keyword
allintitle: gives results as if we do search like this: allintitle:”keyword”
the others similar format.
Though not that important, we usually check competition in quotes: “keyword”.
So for project 1 and project 2 in KW elite what parameters you select.
thanks.
Hi Roger,
Yes, you probably are overthinking a bit.
I usually just check what the most searched keywords are for the targeted niche and don’t dig any further than that. That information is enough to tell me what to write about.
in other words: what is the best way to check for competition in keyword elite.
I use seo elite to check the backlinks but i hear different versions of how to use keyword elite in project 1 and 2. Curious to see how you do that.
sorry Frank, another question.
When you use: google keyword tool, do you set it to EXACT match to test the search volume or leave it on Broad or Phrase match.
I read recently Court says top one site gets 40% of search volume. If we set it on EXACT match, the volume becomes almost 1/3 for majority of keywords.
Final question for the day. LOL.
I just go for the broad match if I use it. Like I said, I don’t overthink it.