Starting A New Niche Site Step By Step

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Most of the internet marketers out there aren’t really internet marketers.  They just teach it, but don’t really do it.  It’s because it’s easier to find customers for IM products, courses, and training than it is to actually build a website with quality content, get traffic to it, and make money with it.

Is This Online Marketing?

I read this analogy somewhere and don’t remember where, so I can’t give proper credit, but I thought it was great:  during the gold rush in California during the 1800s, do you know who made alot of money?  The guys selling the pick axes, shovels, and gold pans…not necessarily the guys out there and actually digging for the gold.

This is because there was a hungry market out there looking to make money, and they needed tools to do it.  Internet marketing is no different.  Sure some of the gold diggers made a ton of money, but not all of them.

The gold diggers that made money were disciplined, smart, dedicated, and hard-working.  And the truth is that making money online is not easy, but of course many marketers will tell you that it is.

It takes both time and money, and any promises of success without investing either time or money or both are either extremely short-lived or just plain bullshit.

I’m going to start a series of posts about a new niche site we are going to build.  This site will have product reviews and sell Amazon products, which is something we don’t really do.  I did add some random amazon links here and there on some niche sites, but it was only kind of testing things out.  We make less than 10 bucks per month right now from Amazon, just to show you how little we’ve gotten into this area.

While the commission from Amazon is terrible, the conversions are awesome.  At least that’s what I keep hearing, and it makes sense.  They sell physical products, are very trusted, and people who end up on Amazon are flat out looking to buy stuff.

I’m not going to publish the keywords or the domain we’re using, but I am going to give you as many details as I can without giving too much away.  These posts will hopefully help some people out there to stop analyzing and start taking action, and it will also help me to keep track of what I’m doing with this domain.  It will be a very good learning experience for not just you, but me too.

Step One:  Find a product

Now the first thing we did was choose a product to promote.  Normally, I would recommend you only try to promote high-priced items that sell for at least $100-150.  Actually at least $200 is even better.  You also want to look for products that have alot of good reviews.  The product we chose was cheaper than that, at just under $50, but the search volume and lack of competition made up for that (I’ll get into that later).  It has over 30 reviews, with an overall rating of over 4 stars.

Step Two:  Check for keyword search volume

So, the product chosen is in the beauty niche.  Once we found a product, we just checked for the search volume in Google’s keyword tool.  I would recommend you find related keywords that you optimize for  that combine for at least 2000 exact US searches combined.  So if your product is “Snark SN-2 All Instrument Clip-On Chromatic Tuner” you want a variety of keywords to add up to at least 2000 exact US searches per month.  For example, keywords like ‘snark tuner’, ‘snark instrument tuner’, ‘instrument tuner’ all need to add up to at least 2000 exact US searches.

Our product brand name keyword has 33,000 EXACT searches per month IN THE UNITED STATES.  And I keep saying EXACT and US searches because these are two critical things…you want exact searches, and you want them to be in the US for Amazon products.  Here is the Google keyword tool results for this keyword:

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To give you an idea of what kind of keyword this is, let’s say the Amazon product is actually a “Preperation H 3 Pack”.  Now, everyone knows what Preperation H is for.  It’s a brand name but it does something specific.  It’s not like Maybelline…yes Maybelline sells makeup, but it sells blush, lipstick, powders, and lots of other stuff.   Preparation H sells hemorrhoid products, and everyone knows that.  So I can safely assume that if people are searching for ‘preparation H’ or ‘preparation H review’ or ‘buy preparation H’ then they will surely be interested in the 3 pack of it that I’m reviewing on my website.   Hope that makes sense.

So, the keyword I am going to try to rank for first will be the brand name of the specific Amazon product.  I will also try to rank ‘brand review’ and ‘buy brand‘ and a few other keywords.  And because my article will be very long and thorough, I expect it to rank for a bunch of other related keywords as well that I’m not even going for.

Step 3:  Evaluate the competition

Now the question remains, can I rank it?  Once you find a product and some keywords with some search volume, you can look and see if it’s possible to rank in the top 3 in Google for them.  Of course I want to rank number 1, but top 3 is the main goal while number 1 is the ultimate goal.  With alot of keywords you are going to choose, there just aren’t enough searches to justify being anywhere else…you just won’t get much traffic unless you are top 3.  I am pretty sure I can rank well on the main keyword with 33K searches within a few months.  Here is a screen shot of it’s analysis in Market Samurai:

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I won’t go into all of this stuff in this post, as talking about competition evaluation is a huge post or multiple posts in itself.  I will write something up about that later.  Just know that based on the Market Samurai evaluation and also it’s SerpIQ score (49) I think I can rank it top 3.

Now I think I can rank it.  And I also realized it’s a pretty good niche in that there are probably alot of other products I can put up on the site as well.  In the end this site will be around 20-30 pages long.

OK so far we are good to go.  To recap so far:

1.  I found a product to promote on Amazon and checked the keywords for it

2.  That product has a keyword (the main brand) with 33K exact searches per month in US

3.  I think I can rank it top 3 in Google, and it’s a nice niche that can include a bunch of other products on the site too

Step 4:  Find a domain

So now I need a domain name.  I just went to instant domain search and started looking for some possibilities.  Ideally I wanted something with an exact match of another keyword that is searched that is highly related to the product.  Using the same Prep H analogy, I found the domain hemorrhoidproducts.com (again this is not my domain but I’m using the analogy).  And this keyword I found gets 500 exact US searches per month in Google.  This is a bonus of course.  If I couldn’t find an exact match that is related like this, I would have just bought a branding type of domain instead of an exact match domain.

Step 5:  Get the content started

The next thing I did was order the review article for this product.  Now, you can write it yourself if you like of course.  I did not spend alot of money on a top-quality writer…at least not yet.  I just purchased a run-of-the-mill 700 word article on the product.  The writer knows how to write product reviews, and is reasonably priced.  Once I get the site ranked, I will improve the article either myself or hire another writer to really beef it up.  In the end I want these reviews to be extremely thorough, well-researched, long, and ideally with a video or two.  At least 1000 words at a MINIMUM, with somewhere around 1500-2000 even better.

While I waited for the article, I started on the next steps which are to start to build the website as well as look for other products and keywords in the same niche.  Once I have them, I’ll order the content.  I am going to start with 5-7 product reviews, and like I said earlier it will grow slowly into 20-30 total pages.  Not a huge site, but certainly nothing too thin.

As this post is already on the long side, I’m going to stop here and in the next post go into the WordPress theme I used, the plugins I installed, and other details of the site.  I will also show you the keyword evaluation of the other products I am going to add to the site as well.  Stay tuned…

Bill Zimmerman

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