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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.