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Case Study

Case Study: Choosing Keywords – Installing a Niche Site

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.

Wellington on an unusually still day!

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.

Categories
Case Study Lis Recommmends

Passive Income Online’s Keyword Academy Case Study

OK you horrible lot. This is it I am going to prove that this works.  You can build websites – rank them in the search engines and retire to the beach to live off the earnings.

I’ve been reading for ages that people love case studies – I know I love reading about case studies to – it sure beats working –  but I have resisted doing them because basically I saw them as a lot of work – they are in the discipine that I have any qualifications in – science. In science a case study is an experiment and you learn with experiments whether they prove or disprove the hypothesis.

Internet marketing case studies are different.

If an Internet Marketing case study fails – I make no money But there is really no downside in this experiment – I seriously doubt that I am going to fail to make money. I know that I can rank a site from ziltch to a page 1 in Google within 6 months if I chose the right keywords. If I do that I know I will make money from it (also sadly lacking in many science experiments). So what’s to lose? I will need to be slightly more organised than usual – but that wouldn’t be bad anyways!

So this is what I am goingto do:

  • start a  niche site  on a new domain using the Keyword Academy method.
  • rank it by ONLY using the keyword academy’s guest posting system. Now this is NOT the currently recommended approach in their core videos – but I have a hunch and I know that Mark, one of the guys behind TKA is trying the same thing. I am going to acquire around 25 links/month for the site from GPS.

Report back here every month or so on progress.

So how we are going to measure progress –  scientist hiding in my back brain somewhere! Lets try this

  • number of pages in Google
  • number of backlinks showing in Yahoo
  • ranking for main keyword in Google
  • ranking of  related keywords in Google
  • passive income earned
  • expenses incurred

It may vary depending what I forget to record from month to month!

The site will start off as a bog standard WordPress site set up as a niche site with arount 5-10 pages of content – I’ll probably launch it on the last day of the month just to keep the figures neat. Well my last day – I’m normally a day ahead on account of the time different and given that I will be away over  Easter that will have to be close enough.

In my next post in the Keyword Academy case study series I’ll talk about chosing the right keywords and domain.

Here’s my challenge to you. You can read my every world, hang out on this blog waiting for the next episode – or you could build your own site. No matter how many mistakes you make chosing your keywords and setting up your site  and promoting it – you will probably still make more money than if you just read my posts…

The difficulty with these types of case studies is that the biggest variable is niche – its just plain harder to rank in some niches than others. I am only covering one niche in this study. You could cover a different niche. Why not start your own new site (or indeed kickstart an old one you have been ignoring). If you want to report your progress regularly on your blog – drop a comment here and  I will link to your posts. Or if you don’t have an appropriate blog – just drop a regular comment here with your  progress. What’s the worst that can happen – you make money?

Update: Check out my competition!

Loreecee from Postrunner Review

Tiffany from Passive Income Goals

Alana from Beginner Blogger

Hospitalera from Making Money Online