This is the second part of my Keyword Academy Case Study series – if you missed the initial post you can check it out here.
Keywords are everything in this business – start with the wrong keywords you will fail – I can prove that – been there done that – either failed to rank the site at all – or got to #1 – only to discover no money in the keyword!
I have my own take on keywords – the Keyword Academy videos focus on looking for products – but personally I prefer services.
Will I reveal the niche or the site. No – sorry not going to happen. The reasons why are quite simple:
- if I reveal the site people will help by sending me links – invalidating the experiment;
- if I actually start making bucket loads of cash from this site – I will suddenly have a whole lot more competition!
So no hard feelings – I will tell you this about the niche:
- its a 3 word phrase describing a business need;
- its a service that businesses pay good money for;
- its nothing at all to do with Internet Marketing or Making Money Online
- its not something I know a whole lot about – yet – but its something I have some interest in – I will become absolutely fascinated in it if starts making me a regular income!
According to the Keyword Academy tools:
- it has 3600 exact searchs a month
- an Adsense cost per click of $11.35
- a “difficulty” of 200
- potential income $204 (month) from Adsense – but more on that later…
- and the top four sites are all PR3 – they consist of a double listing from a relevant directory, and 2 relevant businesse neither of which use my keyword phrase in their ranked urls.
According to Lissie’s approach to keyword approach
- the top 4 sites are all old 10 years plus. In fact the only site on page 1 which is younger than 4 years old – keywordphrase.org – which is a few months old.
- sites in position 3 and 4 may like to buy my site for a tidy sum if it starts to affect their own ratings – I could also offer advertising to them if I was outranking them – cut out the middle man of Adsense (Google) and save them money and make me more. With a CPC of $11.35 I should be getting as an Adsense publisher about 1/3 of that – so there is quite a lot of potential upside to direct sell to the advertiser.
- there are a bunch of very,very low (definition ezinearticles or hubpages in the first 4 positions) low tails related to this keyword. Google claims there is not traffic but I don’t believe it – the phrases make sense – this site has a lot more potential for $204 “official” estimate.
Registering the Right Domain
My preferred domains are gone:
- mykeywords.com – is parked at godaddy.com
- mykeywords.net are parked at godaddy.com
- mykeywords.org is ranking #7 as noted above – with 14 Yahoo backlinks, no PR, 14 pages indexed.
Exact matches aren’t part of the TKA approach but in my experience they work wonderfully – unfortunately this not finding the exact match available is a common situation. The ranking of the dot org also however tells me having some keywords in the domain is going to help a fair bit.
Because I am looking in future at maybe either selling the site or selling advertising direct on the site I am avoiding all other domain TLDS (biz, info etc) – credibility is key here and com has it in spades. Because most of the money appears to be in the US for this business I am looking for a US domain name
I am not doing hyphens for the same reasons as above.
Looking at extra words to add I found I could register prefixmykeywords.com – where the prefix is also part of a long-tail – think if I was after green widgets and new green widgets was a related keyword I got the domain which is newgreenwidgets.com
Costs: $7.67 – domain registration (Godaddy using discount code emma30 )
Hosting: free as I already have a Hostgator reseller ($5-$7 for others)
For more on choosing the right domain name check out this video from the Market Samurai people
Next time I am going to talk about the details of getting links with Postrunner.
21 replies on “Case Study: Choosing Keywords – Installing a Niche Site”
Very interesting that you choose prefixyourkeywords.com. I have always been told to never use a prefix on your main keywords, rather, use a suffix. Have you ever experienced which way works better? Do keep us posted on how your site is doing. Thanks.
I think all in all suffix works best – but I couldn’t make a useful longtail with the suffix but I could with the prefix – so the prefix+longtail = longer tail which is worth rnaking for if you see what I mean!
I get so fascinated with this whole process. I’m on the edge of my seat. Is your keyword: Anti-Laser Hair Removal? lol
Nope not even close on that Richard LOL
Hi Lis
A newbie question. How tough are keywords beyond 200 in terms of backlink? Do they need like for example 200 contextual links or more?
No one knows – not all links are the same – I can give your site a blogroll link from this site – it would show up 200 links over night – would it be the same as one well anchored link from a relevant site in top of the same niche – nope. If you are new keep the recommendations which is below 200
@Lis,
>> I could also offer advertising to them if I was outranking them
Actually, as long as you can get your site to page 1, you should be able to sell the real businesses advertising even if you do not outrank them. You could also sell advertising to those businesses listed on page 2 and page 3 of the SERPs for those keywords.
Getting interesting Lissie.
That adsense click rate is great, 11 bucks a click is not to be sniffed at. 😉
Will be interesting to see how long it takes to outrank the top sites in the serps, if you do outrank them that is.
Good going Lis, go knock their socks off! 😀
Congrats on getting this started Lis. You can not help but succeed .. either the site will take off as you want it to, or you will learn a ton more about ways to make the next one do even better … for pretty low tuition, compared with what places like community colleges and trade schools charge (for info that is often horribly outdated).
One thing to remember, though .. I know you likely know this but probably wanted to hold down the word count. Don’t get too enthused about the $11 dollar clicks .. or the ~1/3 share to the publisher. Google pays much less than the maximum in most cases and the share the publisher is often much lower than 1/3 .. especially until you gain that all important front page rank.
I am _not_ being negative here, I applaud what you are doing, but I already see in a few of the commenters eyes “dollar signs” which may not come, at least for along time.
Example .. I recnetly wrote some articles on a keyword that was showing as $35 something dollars per click in AdWords. I got a few site visits based on that keyword …and apparently some AdSesne clicks … but they were a dollar or so. A friend targets the same keywords but has a niche site built mainly around that keyword .. he gets a lot more per click … so travel forward hopefully but take those keyword prices along with a very large grain of salt. (BTW, the keywords I am mentioning have _nothing_ to do with the make money online niche … but have a lot to do with a certain event many Americans dread that takes place in exactly 15 days ;-).)
Yeah there is a notice change in the payout when you get the front page for the better paying kws. I usually base it on 25% – but you’re right it will be probably $1 a click up unitl then. It does mean though that it gives me the idea that the advertisers in the niche have good money to spend on direct advertising 🙂
Hi Lissie,
You are revealing some great money making information here.
Keywords rule and saying that is not enough. It takes a while to penetrate the subject and get some real understanding.
With your help right here your readers will benefit immeasurably.
Vance
Did you consider putting an offer in for the domains that were parked? As a domainer turned affiliate marketer, I find things so much easier to get going with the perfect domain to start with.
No I didn’t though they were just Godaddy parked pages so they might not have been too bad. If I can get the niche to convert I might go back and persue them
Thanks for all the great info! I have a current business set up that sells t-shirts paired to a charity and then half the profit goes to the charity. It’s still in ‘beta’ but I’m working on getting more and more traffic via SEO tactics. I learned about your blog through University Kid and it looks like there’s a lot of good info here that I can use. I’m curious on your opinion, though. I’m starting another website that sells goods via a dropshipper and have the option of going with http://www.domain-name.com or http://www.domainname.net. Which do you think would be better for search engines?
I’m afraid that a .net looks not as credible as a .com, but I don’t like separating the word like I would have to for the .com domain. Keep in mind, this will be a secondary domain name…my ‘real’ domain name would be http://www.domainnamesuffix.com. I’m only using the secondary domain name to re-route to the main domain because it is a good search engine keyword.
Any advice? I’m off to subscribe….keep up the great work with the blog! It will be exciting to see where your experiment takes you.
From an SEO point of view definitely the exact match dot net – even for humans they don’t like the dashs either. Whos got domainname.com – is there a site on it? One issue with the net is that people may accidently type in yor competitor’s name
Hey! Thanks for the quick answer. I will go with the .net domain name then. That is what I was leaning towards, just wanted to make sure I was on the right track. Domainname.com is fortunately for sale, but unfortunately for $1880! Although my niche will be profitable, I do not think it will have a good ROI if I invest that much money (which I don’t have!) for the domain name. As the particular keyword only gets 2,000 hits a month, I don’t see anybody buying this domain name for the foreseeable future. Thanks again!
Yeah you get a lot sites sitting around for that sort of price – its all good imagine what someone may pay for your domain particularly if it actually ranks well LOL
I have a 2 word dot org which sits at the top of the serps and consistently gets 500 uniques a month – the dot com is parked 4 sale at $40k LMFAO. So far I have turned down $2000 for my site – but if they get up to 5 figures I will get interested – incidentally the site makes me about a $1/day so the domain name will actually make me far more than the valuation based on the actuals sites revenue – sometimes domains are like houses – people fall in love with them and pay over the odds.
Well, the $40,000 price tag puts my $1880 to shame! That’s a lot of money, but you made a very good point about if a site like that – which has no content – can sell for that price, then think about how much your site will sell for once you actually rank. I never really thought about it like that before and I certainly never thought about a domain name like real estate. You made some very valid points. Thanks for the advice!
Domains are beter than real estate (you don’t have the get the lawns mowed!) – seriously you can subdivide and make more land – but once you own a domain no one else can – unless you forget to renew it I should write a post on it.
Lis good to see you are doing so well!
I have to disagree on not using hyphens in a domain “keyword-keyword.com”
If the other “keywordkeyword.com” is parked.
A hyphen.com trumps anything except non hyphen.com if you are just building a content site to rank well and produce a residual.
I agree totally with you on the no hyphens if the site is to be promoted by word of mouth.
Some of my best producers have hyphens..
Hey,
Since I am a newbie in these kind of stuff I can only appreciate what you are doing and what I have learned by reading your post, Thanks!
Warm wishes,
Stephan