niche site blueprint

148 Pages·2015·9.82 MB·English

N I C H E S I T E B L U E P R I N T
BY: C HRIS LEE
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NICHE & KW RESEARCH
Niche and keyword research is one of the most complicating things to do correctly.
I’m going to simplify the entire process and show you step by step my entire process
from niche research up to site launch.
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SECTION 1
INTRODUCTION
Before we do anything, we have to decide on a niche for our site.
BUT… before we select a niche, we have to understand the WAY niche selection works for the
TYPE of site we’re aiming to build.
The problem today is: All the resources out there on how to properly select a niche is outdated.
Google has changed completely in the last couple of years, and the way to rank a site long-term
has changed as well.
This book is about building an authority site to thousands per month. It’s not about building micro
sites to $100/month.
So… our niche selection has to fit properly with that goal.
The OLD way of building niche sites
In the past, building niche sites was a fairly easy way to get to $100/month in a short amount of
time. As long as you avoided big competition and went after long-tail keywords, it was easy to rank
your sites quickly and get a good amount of traffic coming in.
Try using that same approach today, and I see people full of frustration.
Long-tail searches are not so easy anymore. The search results are full of authority sites no matter
how small the search volumes are for the keyword.
And aside from competition, small keywords won’t get you to $10k per month. It won’t even get you
to $3k per month. You can’t build a niche site around a few 500-1000 searches/month keywords
and expect it to make you thousands of dollars.
Instead, we have to approach our niche sites accordingly with our goal: building a long-term
business.
The NEW way of building niche sites
We first have to realize just how much weight is being given to big brands and trusted authorities
now.
We can build all the micro sites we want. If we don’t build any authority to it, it won’t rank. It’s just
that simple. Search volume is irrelevant.
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We have to move away from the mindset of:
“How can we throw up some Adsense sites and quickly make a couple hundred bucks?”
AND INSTEAD, move towards the mindset of:
“How can we build out this site into a REAL business that makes 6 figures a year, and will be a
SUSTAINABLE, LONG-TERM business model?”
The good news is that the conditions are better now than ever to do exactly that.
What it takes to build a site to $10k/month
This book is designed around building ONE site, NOT multiple sites.
Growing a single site to $10k/month is so much easier and faster than building a batch of sites that
add up to $10k/month.
And this is a break down of the model we’re working towards…
The way we’re going to approach our authority sites is:
1. Target the biggest keywords in the niche.
2. Consistently build links to these pages targeting the big keywords.
3. Build out the site with inner articles.
4. Pull in tons of long-tail traffic.
5. Not right away, but eventually our rankings will rise for our big keywords.
That’s the model in the most basic description.
And I’m going to explain throughout the book exactly what goes into building it out and how to build
the proper backlinks to establish powerful authority to your site.
In the long run, this approach to building an authority site will result in the following:
1. Our site will rank for the biggest keywords in the niche, and every variation of the phrase.
2. It will have great content that people love.
3. It will have powerful links from relevant external pages/domains.
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4. Because of our built authority, our inner pages targeting long-tail keywords will rank almost
instantly. Our site will be given so much extra weight over our competitors.
5. We will start getting traffic to our site from tons of long-tail searches which will eventually out
number the number of visitors who come in through our biggest keywords (even when we’re
ranking #1).
THAT’S THE WAY THE AUTHORITY MODEL WORKS.
Benefits of using this strategy:
1. It’s sustainable and long-term. You don’t need to worry about spam updates demolishing your
traffic overnight.
2. It’s passive once you build authority to the site, especially when using Adsense. I frequently take
3-4 weeks off and income stays the same or even increases. The beauty of Adsense.
3. You build a REAL business. $10k/month is a real business. We’re going to be driving a lot of
traffic to our niche site and you have a lot of opportunities to grow.
4. You have an amazing valuable asset. A site making $10k/month can be sold for around
$250,000-$300,000. Especially with the type of links and the amount of authority we’re going to be
building to our site, that alone makes the domain extremely valuable.
That’s exactly what we’re going to learn in this book.
Everything starts with niche selection.
Let’s move onto the next unit, where I’ll show you HOW to choose a niche, and HOW it should be
built into your overall site planning.
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SECTION 2
FINDING YOUR NICHE
Now, let’s get started and choose our niche.
There are many moving parts to niche selection: Are there plenty of good keywords within the
niche? Is it profitable? What is the CPC like? How competitive is it?
Forget all those things for now.
Let’s just narrow down a list of your interests to start.
Let’s get started
I’m going to take you through a few sources you can use. These are my favorite sources to use
when doing niche selection.
While you’re browsing the lists, just write down on a piece of paper or notepad app a few niches
you might be interested in.
Try to keep it between 5 to 10.
BROAD OR TARGETED? It doesn’t matter at this point. For instance, you can be as broad as just
saying “basketball” or you can be as targeted as saying “jumping higher for basketball players.”
You can be as broad as you like or narrow it down as much as you want. We’ll get to sorting out that
part in the next step.
My favorite source: StumbleUpon
Open StumbleUpon
If you haven’t been using StumbleUpon for niche selection, you’re missing out. It’s probably the
best resource on the internet for finding niche ideas.
So let’s go ahead and make an account if you don’t already have one. It’s free, it’s fast, and there’s
no verification or anything required.
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Finding the list of niches
After you’ve made your account, click on your profile on the top right.
That should cause a new nav bar to slide down below it. Click on “Add Interests”
Once you do, you’ll be brought to their list of interests. Click on “All” and you’ll see a HUGE list of
niches.
There’s nothing quite like this list. It’s organized in alphabetical order, there are images for better
visualization, and there are a ton of topics to choose from.
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Scroll down the list. As you do, note down any that might be of interest to you.
I browse through this list frequently even if I’m not planning to build out a site. It’s impossible to
scroll down this list without coming up with any ideas for niche sites.
Other Sources
If you went through StumbleUpon’s list and didn’t find everything you needed, here are a few more
great sources.
1. RedditList – Ever wonder what the hottest trending topics and sub-reddits are on Reddit? This
website shows you in real-time. Although a lot of Reddit’s sub-reddits are not niche-site topics, you’ll
often come up with some great ideas browsing what’s trending.
2. About.com’s A-Z List – About.com is probably one of the biggest content farms on the internet.
They write about every topic you can think of, just using their enormous domain history and
authority to rank for virtually every keyword out there. This list is their A-Z list of all the topics they
write about.
3. Udemy – Udemy has high quality courses on a variety of topics. If people are willing to purchase
a course about it, chances are it’s a pretty popular topic. You’ll come up with a lot of great ideas
browsing through their courses. Go through different categories and skim through what types of
topics people are creating topics on. It’s a great way to spark ideas for your niche site.
4. Barnes & Noble – Just a giant list of book categories. One of my favorite places to find niche
ideas is at the book store. The section you find yourself going to most often is probably going to be
a good idea to start your niche site about since you have an interest in it. Well, this is the probably
the most extensive list of categories you’ll find.
Do you have your list of niches?
So by now, you should have around 5 to 10 niches written down that are worth analyzing. In the
next section, we’ll go through each of them to see which one would be the most profitable.
Let’s move on.
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SECTION 3
ANALYZING YOUR NICHES
So now that you have a few niche options selected, it’s time to examine them further and determine
what the search traffic potential is for each niche.
What we’re going to do is come up with a few seed keywords for each niche.
What we’re looking for here are BIG keywords. Are there good keywords within this niche
with a big enough search volume that will make pursuing this profitable?
First, go to Google’s Keyword Planner
Link: https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner
This is the main tool I use for all my keyword research, and it’s what I’ll be using throughout this
example.
Although using the Keyword Planner might be something you’re already familiar with, I’ll really go
step-by-step through this in case you don’t have much experience with the Keyword Planner.
Enter in your keyword, along with any variations that
you think of
I’ve chosen “potty training” as an example, along with some variations that I thought of.
I got these results. These are the search volumes for
these keywords.
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And these are the additional keywords that the tool suggested below.
There are about 800 in total that Google’s Keyword Planner brought back.
What exactly are we looking for here?
My criteria for keywords at this age is:
Over 50,000 searches
50,000 is the minimum that I would target as a main keyword.
This can be added up with similar phrases. For instance, ‘Potty Training’ gets 74,000
searches/month. But ‘Potty Training’ is pretty much in the same topic as ‘Potty Training Tips’ and
‘How To Potty Train’ along with several others.
Add them all up and you get over 100,000 searches per month.
Why over 50k searches/month? Because these are our main, biggest keywords. We want to build
our sites in the beginning with the plan to get as much search traffic as possible. If our biggest
keywords are only getting 10,000 searches per month, it’s not worth the effort.
Although I like to go after keywords with over 50,000 searches per month, anything from
30,000 and up is fine if you have trouble finding them. We’ll go through how to combine the
biggest keywords together in just a little bit.
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