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21 Unconventional, Yet Insanely Profitable Niche Ideas for AdSense
Publication Date January 2012
The author shall have neither liability nor responsibility to any person or entity in respect
to any loss or damage caused directly or indirectly by the information covered in this
report.
Trademarks. Any trademarks, service marks, product names or named features are
assumed to be the property of their respective owners, and are used here for reference
only.
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Introduction
You either already know or will soon find out that the key to building niche sites with
AdSense is niche selection.
If you are just starting out with the program, you might be tempted to go after the “High
CPC Keywords”, the ones like “Mesothelioma Lawyers Houston” or “Cash for Annuity
Payments” that promise CPCs of $75.66 and $49.81 respectively.
The problem with this approach is that the search volume for such keywords is typically
incredibly low, the competition is fierce, and rarely will you receive the exact published
CPC figures.
Iʼve been building niche sites for quite some time, AdSense in particular, and I have
found that certain niches convert much better with AdSense then others.
This report is a culmination of the many niches I have tested in the past, and what is
presented here is only the niches that I have seen make a decent income with
AdSense.
During that time, I learned a few things in regards to AdSense. Here they are in no
particular order:
I know this because I spent a lot of time doing just that and not making a dime.
I would much rather go after a niche that gets 8,000 searches a month at $0.50 a click
then one that has 1,000 searches a month at $3.50 a click. 8 times more traffic means 8
times more people potentially clicking an ad.
Where the search volume is higher, it is less crucial to be at the number one position in
the search engines. When the traffic is high, there will be overflow from the top, there
will be people looking for different things, there will be those who donʼt like the first
search result and want the second search result, etc.
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Overall, higher search volume means more opportunity.
When I was first starting out, I was so concerned with finding niches that were “low
competition” that I ended up spending all my time researching and not doing, passing
up some viable markets in the process.
The problem was, I didnʼt really know what low competition meant — was it the number
of competing pages? was it the PageRank of pages on the top positions? Was it the
thousand other factors spouted by SEOs to determine the competition of a niche?
Iʼve been able to outrank high “authority sites” (Wikipedia included) with ease. Iʼve also
had a hard time trying to outrank 5 page micro niche sites that were put up a week
before mine. I never would have known either of these things if I didnʼt try it out for
myself.
The moral of the story is, if you see a niche you want to get into — do it.
Personally, I see competition as a good thing — a really good thing. Competition means
there is interest, and where there is interest, there is money to be made. Competition is
good because it tells you what to do, and conversely, what not to do.
When you enter a niche that has competition, you have a blueprint to follow. When in
doubt, just do everything your competitor does, plus a little more. 9 times out of 10 it will
get you to a top spot regardless of what the latest SEO trick du jour happens to be at
the moment.
Now, the tides are slowly turning to building “authority-style” sites, 25+ pages of content,
bigger niches; all supposedly because the “Panda update made micro niche sites
obsolete”.
The truth is, both models work, and both models work quite well.
There are pros and cons to each model, but I have found the most important aspect in
determining your success in a given niche is to become the de-facto authority on that
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topic. What that means is that for anyone looking for information in your subject area,
make sure that they will be able to find it on your site.
For some niches that task will require 1 page, for others, 100 pages.
For example, if your chosen niche was “Weight-Loss Diets for Pet Australian
Sheepdogs”, one or two pages is fine. However, if your niche is “Coffee,” youʼd better
have more than one page.
The important thing is to have the most complete information for that niche, relative to
the other sites in that space. By becoming that resource, you will draw the links from
people writing or sharing on that topic.
Will you benefit from having the exact match domain? Absolutely. Should you ignore a
niche because the EMD isnʼt available? Absolutely not.
The reason why exact match domain names get a preference in the search engines is
for two reasons.
First, 26% of all searches on the Internet are navigational, which means people type the
name of the website into the search engine rather than the address bar.
Just to give you an absurd reference, every day, there are 9 million searches for the
term “google” in Google.
Second, starting with the January 2009 “Vince” algorithm update, the Google search
results have become increasingly more “brand focused.”
This means that unless google has algorithmically associated a brand with a particular
keyword, itʼs next best bet is to associate the domain name with the keyword, because
chances are, if your were to name your site after the keyword, there is a good shot
thatʼs what your siteʼs about.
Now, I say you get an advantage, and that is still true, but it is not the only factor.
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On the first page of results, only one result includes the term “onions” in its domain
name (onions-usa.org). It ranks #3.
The point being, is that in the grand scheme of search engine rankings, having the
keyword in the domain is a single check in a very long checklist.
The research could look good. The site could look good. The content could be great.
You could rank #1.
It happens. When I was just starting out, it happened a lot. It still happens now.
There are a lot of subtle factors between a site that is a success and a site that is a flop.
Who knows why certain sites fail? But more importantly, who cares?
Unless you dedicate two years of your life writing an encyclopedic site on “salted
pretzels” (a bad move in my opinion), one of the best things about the AdSense niche
site business model is that you can get a site up and running in a day, and even if you
outsource everything at a premium, it wonʼt cost you more that $300.
While the mantra from Matt Cutts and friends has been “make great content,” no one
has been able to define what “great content” means without employing a set of equally
vague synonyms.
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It can not judge how great a piece of content is.
The only way an algorithm can get a gauge on how “great” something is, is by relying on
other signals, signals sent by those that can judge things — people.
This can be measured in a number of ways: the bounce rate and site behavior provided
by google analytics is one, user data collected from logged web history and the Chrome
browser is another, social signals from Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus is a third,
but the most tangible measure — the one that Google was founded on — is votes from
other websites.
When building out niche sites, or any site, dedicate 20% of the time to writing content,
and 80% to building backlinks.
In some niches, monetizing with AdSense is not the best option, in others it is one of the
only options.
Some niches do better with a nicely designed theme, in others, the uglier the better.
There are few hard and fast rules to building out niche sites. You have to do what
makes sense for your market.
Another reason having competition is beneficial, is you get to see what others have tried
and get an idea of the results. If they keep doing it, it is probably working out well for
them. If they stop doing it, then it probably isnʼt.
However, the only way you can truly know is from the last, but certainly one of the most
important things I have learned by publishing AdSense sites.
This idea can lead to sites taking an extremely long time to create to try to make
everything perfect (as it was in my case when I first started) or for sites that dramatically
underperform from their potential.
You have the incredible ability to exercise an infinitely granular amount of control over
your site and from the data you collect.
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Use it to your advantage.
My goal now is to get sites up, attracting traffic, and earning money as quickly as
possible, even if it is incredibly small.
By getting your work out there, you have the benefit of seeing what actual visitors do on
the site, and collecting real data rather than just speculating.
Even if the plan is to build an authority site in a particular niche, Iʼll start a site up with
two pages of content, just to see how the traffic reacts.
From there, Iʼll continuously test everything from ad placements to colors to content
styles.
Iʼve doubled my earnings with small changes and have done entire site re-designs with
little to no effect.
The moral here is that real data is much more value than speculation.
There are many more lessons I have learned through the trials and tribulations Iʼve had
in trying to carve out a little slice of the Internet for myself.
For those of you that are sitting there reading this not making any money yet. I want to
offer one more piece of advice:
If you read my headline and you havenʼt made 5-figures with AdSense (which really isnʼt
that much), youʼre probably like “Yeah right, this guy is full of it.” And thatʼs okay.
Perhaps Iʼll go into the story another time, but for now, I want to say that for a while, it
was hard — really hard.
I did a lot of things without seeing any results and I took a lot of stabs in the dark only to
watch them blow up in my face.
Iʼm not sure how to articulate how it happened, or exactly what happened, but it seemed
that where I was once frustrated and confused, It suddenly made sense.
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Not only did I know what to do, but how to do it.
I was able to make more money and more success in two months then I was able to
make in the past two years. The struggle had finally paid off.
So, keep at it. If you donʼt get it now, it will all come rushing to you eventually.
In fact, you canʼt do anything with this report on its own, and it was intentionally made
that way.
This report was made as an easy to use starting point to begin or expand your AdSense
portfolio and a foundation to build your AdSense empire.
What this report represents are time-tested and proven niche markets that myself and
many others have been using to make a killing with AdSense.
These are broad markets with many sub-niches for you to build sites around. These are
markets that are not going away soon and are large enough and include enough sub-
niches that it would be nearly impossible to saturate.
To use this guide, I recommend you start with one of the niches and drill down till you
find something broad or narrow enough to fit the type of site you want to make.
To expand, you can keep building sites within these markets, covering the various
aspects and facets and build an entire network on the topic, or you can move down the
list and build one or two sites in each area to diversify your AdSense portfolio.
Now, you can never have the excuse that you donʼt know what to build your site
around.
On to the niches...
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1. Mobile Game Fan Sites
Mobile technology will be the big trend on the web for at least the next 5 years.
Androids, iPhones, and Blackberries (or whatever other smart phone comes out) will be
what people will be using, and talking about for sometime to come.
VisionMobile, a market analysis strategy firm, recently compiled figures that smartphone
adoption has reached nearly 30% globally while 63% of North American and 51% of
European cell phone customers use smart phones.
Two reasons: search volume and social signals. The search volume you can get by
building a site around a popular mobile game fan site is enormous, and unlike other
niches, it is very easy to get people to share your content on Facebook, follow your
Twitter account, and join your fan page.
Donʼt let the Google trends graph fool you. Each of these games gets a huge search
volume, Angry Birds just happens to be massive.
Below is some of the broad search volumes on some of the most popular iPhone games
in the iTunes market.
Another great thing about this niche is that new games come out all the time, and if you
keep your ear to the ground, you can catch onto a game that turns out to become wildly
successful.
How to Implement
The best games to tackle in this niche are the ones that are extremely popular that
contain multiple levels and require the use of strategies and secrets that can be
unlocked.
What contributes to the large number of searches for Angry Birds is not only is it wildly
popular, but the fact that the game can be quite difficult to beat.
The addition of the golden eggs hidden throughout the game are also driving people to
the search engines to look for walkthroughs, strategies, and hints for the game.
While a game like Kick the Buddy is wildly popular on the iTunes market, the nature of
the game (torturing an animated character) doesnʼt drive people looking for strategies.
The best way to implement AdSense in this niche is to build a strategy, walkthrough or
game fan site.
A great approach would be to make (or find) video walkthroughs of various levels.
In regards to new and fresh content, set up a Google Alert for your game title and write
brief summaries on news items that come through the feed.
Finally, the most important aspect to this niche is to include a social aspect of the site.
Related Sub-Topics
There are just too many sub-topics within this niche to list. Keep an eye on the iTunes,
Android, and Blackberry marketplaces. They will let you know which games are
becoming popular. You can either build a site around a game that is already popular
such as Angry Birds, or look for a newer game that has potential.
My prediction is that the next breakout game for the iPhone and Android markets will be
Cut the Rope by ZeptoLab.
The game involves using physics to maneuver a piece of candy into the mouth of a
green cartoon dragon. The game is simple to play, yet insanely addicting.
The multiple levels, numerous objects, star-based leveling system, and constant
updates make this game a perfect candidate to build a niche site around.
The broad match CPC for the gameʼs title is $0.73, but the game was only released in
October of last year for iOS devices and even more recently released for the Android
platform.
I anticipate that as the game becomes more popular, advertisers will drive the bidding
price up.
Keyword Variations
To find keyword variations within this niche, look to walkthrough, cheat, and strategy
type keyword combinations, as well as anything game-specific. Examples include:
Also, depending upon the nature of your site, you may be covered under 15 U.S.C. §
1125(c)(3)(B) of US Trademark Law reserved for News Reporting and News
Commentary as well as 15 U.S.C. § 1125(c)(3)(A) under “Nominative Fair Use” if you
make it clear that your site is neither sponsored nor affiliated and is not an “official” site
by the trademark owner.
However, I am not an attorney, and you should seek your own legal counsel if this is
something you want to do.
Another approach is to choose a domain name that has something to do with the game,
but is not the title of the game.
Also, in the mobile games niche, you may be tempted to attempt to monetize with gift
card offers and electronics discount signups.
Experience has shown me that these offers do not convert very well, however, Google
Display Ads and Google AdSense for search tend to convert just as well, if not better
then the text ads.
A powerful tactic with this niche, especially to help boost social media following, is to run
an occasional contest. The prize does not have to be big and could be as simple as an
iTunes gift card. Iʼve used this tactic a few times with great results.
Finally, the amount of competing pages for these terms can be intimidating. Donʼt let it
scare you off. Rarely is the competition highly SEO optimized and the huge search
volume can still let you capture a lot of visitors. Also, social media can do a lot to bring
visitors from outside the search engines. If you see a lot of competition, itʼs best to dig a
little deeper and see which ones you can overtake.
The temporary dip in traffic from that month is counteracted by a spike right after the
New Year (New Year Resolutions). This is because most vocational and trade schools
offer rolling admissions, meaning every month, a new class starts. In addition, education
is one of the industries that actually does better during a poor economy as people look
to upgrade their skills to ride out the recession.
Classically, the programs in the allied health and medical fields (medical assisting,
dental assisting, radiology, medical office, nursing) are the most popular for enrollments
as well as search volume. Additionally, criminal justice and trade programs also do very
well.
How to Implement
Look at this niche from the perspective of the student. You can focus on anything from
how to pick a program to how to pick a school, how to pay for an education, preparing
for school, managing schoolwork and family, study guides and aides.
Post graduation, many of these fields require certification from the state or other
governing body. You can build your niche around test prep, practice questions, study
guides, to general information about the various certifications needed.
Look for acronyms related to the niche. For example, a medical assistant is often
referred to as an MA, a pharmacy technician is often referred to as a PT, and a heating,
ventilation, and air conditioning technician is often referred to as an HVAC Tech.
The certifications also often go by acronyms. For example a CNA is Certified Nursing
Assistant, the Radiation Health and Safety Exam, a step to becoming a Certified Dental
Assistant (CDA) is known as the (RHS) and the agency that administers the test is the
DANB, or Dental Assisting National Board.
Using the acronyms in your keyword research and titles can open up a whole new set of
keywords and traffic.
Related Sub-Topics
The way to find sub-topics within this niche are to look at the programs offered by the
big career colleges, such as Everest, DeVry, Kaplan, ITT Tech, University of Phoenix,
and others.
Keyword Variations
about <job title> job <job title> <job title> jobs <job title>
administrative <job title> jobs as a <job title> jobs
salary jobs for a <job title> <job title> jobs salary
become a <job title> jobs in <job title> <job title> <job title>
become <job title> jobs <job title> <job title> online
becoming a <job title> <job title> career <job title> online classes
careers in <job title> <job title> careers <job title> online course
certificate for <job title> <job title> certificate <job title> online program
certificate <job title> <job title> certification <job title> online
certification for <job title> <job title> certification programs
certification <job title> exam <job title> pay
certified <job title> <job title> class <job title> position
certified <job title> exam <job title> classes <job title> positions
certified <job title> test <job title> classes online <job title> practice test
classes for <job title> <job title> college <job title> program
clinical <job title> <job title> colleges <job title> program online
clinical <job title> jobs <job title> course <job title> programs
college for <job title> <job title> cover letter <job title> requirements
courses for <job title> <job title> cover letters <job title> responsibilities
cover letter for <job title> <job title> degree <job title> resume
duties of a <job title> <job title> degrees <job title> resume
employment for <job title> <job title> description examples
example of <job title> <job title> duties <job title> resume sample
resume <job title> education <job title> resume
how to become a <job <job title> employment samples
title> <job title> exam <job title> salaries
job description for <job <job title> job <job title> salary
title> <job title> job description <job title> sample resume
job description <job title> <job title> job descriptions <job title> school
job description of a <job <job title> job duties <job title> schools
title> <job title> jobs <job title> technician
job description of <job <job title> jobs california <job title> test
title> <job title> jobs in ca <job title> training
job duties of a <job title> <job title> jobs in
job for <job title> california
The best way to get content in this niche is to find someone already in the field who can
also write, so your site content will be accurate and have more authority. Fortunately,
none of these professions make exorbitant amounts of money, so finding reasonably
priced article writers should not be too difficult. The best place to find writers in this
niche is to post Craigslist.
Design is not necessarily an asset in this niche. It is best to go with basic, clean web
templates that do not have many, if any, design features. Deep, cool colors perform best
in this niche such as blue and purple.
In addition to AdSense, educational CPA offers are a great way to add additional
monetization to these sites. The sales or rather “admissions” pipeline to these
organizations is reliant on capturing leads. As a result, the commission for form signups
can be quite high ($3-$18 per lead), especially since tuition for some of these programs
can be more than $30,000.
This niche will always spike around Christmas, which makes sense. Itʼs interesting to
note that while the term “cheap” takes the bulk of the search volume in this category, it
has been trending down for the the last 8 years, while the terms “coupons”, and “deals”
have been steadily trending upwards.
As mentioned below, Iʼll sometimes combine AdSense and Amazon affiliate offers, but
for this niche, AdSense is my primary form of monetization.
Hereʼs why: Even if Amazon has the lowest price, Amazon is not perceived as a
discount retailer, so a visitor looking for a deal will often pass up Amazon in favor of
something else.
In fact, thatʼs why these niche sites do so well — itʼs because visitors arenʼt looking for
the big box retailer sites, they are looking for a secret deal they canʼt find elsewhere.
Niche 3 Discounts! 20
How to Implement
Pick a product or a product category and combine with a keyword to target a bargain
shopper. You can get very specific in this niche and a good technique is to target fairly
specific products, things like “discount adirondack chairs” and “discontinued flatware
patterns”.
With this niche, there are a number of ways to approach it and a number of ways to
monetize. In addition to AdSense, you could add Amazon or Overstock products and
collect the commission as an affiliate.
In my experience, it is best to include your AdSense ads above the fold and the Amazon
ads at the end of the articles. I do this because while Amazon and Overstock often have
the lowest prices on new merchandise, itʼs rarely considered discounted.
There are also a number of WordPress themes designed specifically designed for
displaying coupon feeds. My favorite is CouponPress because it has many of the same
features as the huge coupon sites, an attractive admin panel, and an obscenely large
number of free child themes. Another WordPress theme made specifically for coupons
is WP Coupon, which has many nice features, but is much more expensive than
CouponPress.
In a site like this, the highest paying and most trafficked keywords will often be
derivatives and permutations of the same seed keyword. You can either include them all
into one post, or create a separate post to target each term. A strategy I have been
using with great success is to write a big post on the homepage (700-1000+ words) that
will serve almost like a Table of Contents for the inner posts.
The home page content is the easiest to write, because itʼs simply an introductory
paragraph, a closing paragraph, and a paragraph summarizing each of the other articles
you have written (or plan to write). Then, using the primary anchor text, link from the
homepage to the article page. For the article pages, treat them like a series, and
interlink between each article (think Wikipedia-style).
Niche 3 Discounts! 21
Related Sub-Topics
Instead of products, you could also target the stores that sell them. Donʼt limit yourself
to just the big box retailers of physical products, you could also look at discounts for
online merchants, services, attractions, and even categories of merchants. Examples
include “boohoo discount codes” or “greyhound discounts.”
Finally, you could also target not only the products or stores, but the types of people the
discounts apply to, things like military discounts, senior discounts, student discounts,
NHS discounts, or look to take the niche local.
Keyword Variations
Here are some keyword variations you can use. Combine these with your niche or use
them to drill down and mine other keyword ideas.
Niche 3 Discounts! 22
Example Sites
A lot of this niche is dominated by the Micro Niche style websites that were insanely
popular during late 2009. This is a good place to start, but if you find a niche that works,
it is best to quickly build it out to an authority site.
Tires on Sale
www.tiresonsale.org
Established: Dec 2009
Monthly Visitors: 28,140
Monthly AdSense: $1,378.33
Website Valuation: $16,300
Furnace Deals
www.furnacesdeals.com
Established: July 2010
Monthly Visitors: 1,860
Monthly AdSense: $168.20
Website Valuation: $1,848
Niche 3 Discounts! 23
Notes to Consider
As with the Mobile game niche above, it will be tempting to register a domain name
using a retailer or brand name, something like walmartcoupons.com or
verizondeals.net. While youʼll probably see a lot of sites that do this, there is a high
probability youʼll wind up getting a cease and desist order from the trademark ownersʼ
legal team and possibly end up having to pay damages or legal fees.
This is not a good place to be as it wastes time, energy, and money, so it is best to stay
away from trademarked domains to save yourself the hassle.
There is a lot of competition in the niche, mostly because it converts so well. The key
here is to not try and become the next DealNews or RetailMeNot and try to take over an
entire market, but to niche down and consider building a few dozen sites in the micro
niche category.
Iʼve personally had great success with that model because the sites themselves need
minimal content, and data feeds help give the appearance that the site is being
constantly updated and active. This makes them easy to build, once you have your
keyword research lined up, and can setup 10-20 in a single day if you wanted to.
Also, in this niche, pay close attention to yours earnings per click (EPC) and make sure
you block any low-paying advertisers. Groupon, for example, is notorious for filling an
entire website with low priced ads, so youʼll want to keep an eye out for it.
Niche 3 Discounts! 24
4. Complaints
Ever have a good experience with a company or a product? If so, youʼve probably
smiled, felt good about it and maybe told a friend or two. Ever had a bad experience?
You tell EVERYBODY. You tell them in person, on Facebook, on Twitter, while waiting in
line at the supermarket — youʼll even call a friend up specifically to tell them how
horrible so-and-so is. This niche looks to capitalize on that.
Competitors will often target keywords that have anything negative to do with their
competition in the hopes of pulling some unhappy customers over to their product or
service. This is where you can profit. By creating a sounding board for folks to air their
frustrations, you also get them in front of competing advertisers that will pay top dollar,
as they have already been proven to use the particular service.
Niche 4 Complaints! 25
You can also target folks looking for consumer feedback on a particular product or
company. How often have you looked for complaints about a product before you
bought? I know I have.
This niche is sort of reminiscent of using the word “SCAM” in your headline, a practice
that was incredibly popular for affiliates, particularly those promoting Clickbank
products.
If you take a look at some of the broad keyword research above, you can see that even
on a broad term, all of these have pretty good CPCs and some (e-mail complaints) has
a ridiculous $39.92 CPC. Occasionally youʼll find a product or service that is particularly
hated, or has ambitious competition and the CPCs around that term will be enormous.
An example of this is Walkfit Insoles. The CPC on the term “Walkfit Complaints” boasts
a CPC of $339.41!
How to Implement
The best way to tap into this niche is to start by using a revenue sharing properties to
vet your niches. Start out with HubPages, Bukisa, InfoBarrel, Squidoo, or Wizzley.
Test a few topics there to see which ones get the most traffic and conversions before
building a full niche site. No need to write multiple articles on the same topic at multiple
services at this point, just pick one to test the waters.
Squidoo and HubPages have always been my personal favorite for this purpose (pre
and post Panda). Bukisa and InfoBarrel are original content nazis, so these sites arenʼt
Niche 4 Complaints! 26
too popular among internet marketers that like to use spun content, but for this
operation these services will work great.
Once you have your niche site built, you can go back and edit your original article and
add a link to your new site.
Related Sub-Topics
The best way to find sub-topics within this niche is to start from personal experience. Iʼm
sure youʼve dealt with a company, product or service that made you so mad that youʼve
wanted to start a petition or write your local representative. Here is your sounding
board.
Another good resource if youʼre strapped for ideas is the Ripoff Report and Complaints
Board. These sites have new posts almost every few minutes with people complaining
about everything from their bank to their dry cleaners, to their apartment complexes.
Or, you could just start with a list of credit card companies and go down the list. I
guarantee there is someone that has something bad to say about every one of them.
Keyword Variations
Start with a company, a product, or service and add these complaint related
permutations. You can also go local with this niche.
Niche 4 Complaints! 27
Example Sites
Here are some examples of what can be done in the complaint space. Many of the top
sites are larger authority sites, so there is an opportunity for a tightly SEOʼd niche site
to take over the space.
Pissed Consumer
www.pissedconsumer.com
Established: Nov 2006
Monthly Visitors: 854,138
Monthly AdSense: $5,034.60
Website Valuation: $122,510
iRipoff
www.iripoff.com
Established: May 2007
Monthly Visitors: 18,452
Monthly AdSense: $450.17
Website Valuation: $6,061
Niche 4 Complaints! 28
Notes to Consider
Like many of the brand related topics, you want to be careful about using brand names
in your domain. The Citizen Media Law Project has two great articles; one on
Trademark Infringement and another on Cybersquatting. There have been a few cases
both for and against the use of a trademark within a complaint site, however the most
fascinating is the blow-by-blow account of Hank Mishkoff, who was sued in 2001 by the
Taubman Company at his website, www.taubmansucks.com.
Niche 4 Complaints! 29
5. Pet Problems
For many, owning a pet is like having another member of the family, so when your pet is
ill, you want to do everything you can to ease their pain and suffering. Pet health
problems represents a good niche because it combines a highly passionate and distinct
group (pet owners) with a desperate buyer niche (health problems).
A topic like dog skin allergies can give you an exact match search volume of 1,900 with
a CPC of $3.70. The overall big winners in the CPC category are obesity related pet
problems, with CPCs that top $5, and the winners in terms of search volume are
diarrhea for dogs and vomiting in cats.
While you will get your highest search volumes with dogs and cats, there are numerous
pets and health problems to choose from, so if you have an interest in animals, this is a
virtually unlimited niche to get into.
Recent tests have shown that is not the case—the search volume is high enough to
sustain many within the niche, and the competition is weak enough that it can often be
overtaken.
How to Implement
With this niche, the best approach is to take on problems where the owners might not
know the cause. For example, “dog skin problems” would be a better niche then “dog
folliculitis”.
Youʼll loose out on the extra $0.70 that keyword promises, but “skin problems” has 500
times the search volume, and there is nothing stopping you from creating a folliculitis
article within your skin problems site.
The strategy that has the best success in this niche is to build a medium sized site
based around a symptom or an ailment, and then use articles to further narrow down
diseases, causes, and treatments.
Start with a pet and then research the most common health problems, drilling down until
you find something that interests you and has the appropriate search volume and CPC
to warrant building a site.
Related Sub-Topics
At the top I talked mostly about dogs and cats, but there are many other pets you can
get into.
When selecting your niche, make sure that the ailment you pick occurs in that animal to
a high degree. For example, urinary tract infections are a big problem with cats, but not
as prevalent (with the exception of some breeds) in dogs.
The reverse is true with heart worms. While cats can an do become infected, it is
typically an ailment specific to dogs.
Keyword Variations
While the keyword list you can generate in this niche is quite long, there arenʼt many
keyword variations, and the variations are pretty straight forward:
Dog Diarrhea
www.dogdiarrhea.org
Established: July 2008
Monthly Visitors: 14,021
Monthly AdSense: $125.70
Website Valuation: $1,809
Diabetes in Dogs
www.diabetesindogs.net
Established: Nov 2008
Monthly Visitors: 10,740
Monthly AdSense: $90.30
Website Valuation: $1,442
Dog Constipation
www.dogconstipation.org
Established: Dec 2008
Monthly Visitors: 8,220
Monthly AdSense: $69.00
Website Valuation: $1,131
The design for these sites follow the basic micro niche formula — a narrow content
wrapper using one side bar to display navigation and AdSense skyscrapers.
One feature that you could adopt is to include a picture slideshow of symptoms,
something that has been implemented with great success in the authority sites within
this niche.
Unless you are planning to build a large authority site around a particular genre of pet
problem, the most you can expect in this niche is roughly $1-$5 per day. However, since
the information in this niche will rarely change, this a great niche to take on a micro
niche approach and build a set of sites within this niche to make a considerable monthly
income.
Since typically larger advertisers will bid on these keywords as well, the headlines and
copy have been thoroughly tested to convert, meaning your click-through rate can be
higher even for advertisements that arenʼt specifically targeting in the recipe niche.
Interest-based advertisements can also help this niche perform. Interest-based ads
(IAB) are advertisements that follow a visitor from site to site based on things they have
searched for in the past.
Niche 6 Recipes! 35
So, consider the scenario: you get home from work, you look at some shoes online, but
then you start to get hungry, so you start looking at recipes for something to make for
dinner.
When you arrive at the recipe site, thereʼs an advertisement for the shopping site you
were just on. It makes for a very compelling click.
As you can see above, the CPCs for these keywords are not insanely high (but nothing
to scoff at either), however, the search volumes around recipe related keyword are
ridiculous.
From an advertiser perspective this is a golden keyword to bid on, especially if you are
marketing a “lifestyle” brand. The CPC is low, but you can make some assumptions
about the visiting demographic, and the large amount of visitors make sure there are a
lot of eyes on your brand.
How to Implement
This is about as easy as it gets. While you might be tempted to build a massive recipe
site with every recipe under the sun, the better approach is to build a recipe site around
a particular ingredient or cuisine. You can also apply modifiers to your niche; things like
easy, quick, or healthy.
Niche 6 Recipes! 36
Think about it. Thatʼs how I search for recipes, and I am guessing thatʼs how you search
for them too. We rarely look for recipe websites as much as we look for “healthy thai
recipes” or “spinach salad recipes.”
Related Sub-Topics
This is another niche that has almost an infinite number of niches and sub-niches to get
into. You can build a site around a type of cuisine (Mexican, Italian, Vegetarian), or an
ingredient (chicken, rhubarb, scallops), a cooking method/utensil (cast iron, microwave,
blender), a lifestyle (healthy, easy, lactose-intolerant), or even a niche site around a
single dish (carbonara, fish tacos, cuban sandwiches).
Keyword Variations
While the sub-topics and avenues to take with this niche are nearly infinite, there arenʼt
that many keyword variations to this niche. Once you find a cuisine, style, ingredient,
lifestyle, or dish you want to target, the keywords should come about naturally, its just a
matter of doing a little research to make sure you are getting the search volume and
CPC you want from them. Some keywords that you can use as modifiers are:
easy dinner
cheap brunch
fast appetizers
quick desserts
microwave party
low-carb tailgate
high protein dinner party
vegetarian bbq
organic barbecue
healthy under $20
family under $10
in under 30 minutes under $5
restaurant date
by ingredient Christmas
diabetic 4th of July
lactose-intolerant Halloween
low-fat Birthday
for weight loss cast iron
for muscle gain dutch oven
for bodybuilders food processor
for runners gluten-free
for kids vegan
for babies kosher
breakfast low calorie
lunch low sodium
Niche 6 Recipes! 37
Example Sites
Unless you attempt to make a massive recipe database, making $100 per day would be
a stretch with these sites. However, the ones that do best are tightly focused niche sites.
Margarita Recipe
www.margaritarecipe.org
Established: Feb 2008
Monthly Visitors: 10,673
Monthly AdSense: $225.60
Website Valuation: $4,100
Dolsot Bibimbap
www.dolsotbibimbap.com
Established: Aug 2007
Monthly Visitors: 11,970
Monthly AdSense: $100.50
Website Valuation: $1,966
Niche 6 Recipes! 38
Notes to Consider
When building in this niche, it is a good idea to structure your pages using the hRecipe
microformat specification. Google recognizes this format for recipes and it can give you
an added SEO benefit.
For those that are unfamiliar with microformats, basically it is a semantic structure mark-
up that allows users and search engines to easily index and classify your content. While
there are many proposed microformats, not all of them are widely adopted, however, the
hRecipe format is perhaps the most developed, and Google has stated publicly that
they use that structure when indexing recipe sites.
You can learn more about the hRecipe format from the microformats specification wiki
and there is a hRecipe WordPress plugin that will help you format as well.
When designing the layout of a recipe niche site, both image and text advertisements
will convert, however, one of the most effective layouts is to use a leader-board ad in
the header of the site, a 300x250 rectangle in the sidebar, and a 336x280 text ad above
or below the post positioned next to other related recipes.
For template design, you can use just about any free or premium theme with a color
palette that will match your niche, and ThemeForest has two nice recipe themes,
FoodPress and Time for Food With WordPress, which have been high performing
options.
Finally, to increase your chances of success in this niche, you want to make it as easy
as possible for visitors to share your recipes with others. Social bookmarks are an easy
start, a dedicated sharing and re-tweet box are even better.
To help with content creation and social media exposure, it may be a good idea to allow
visitors to submit recipes and to hold the occasional contest for the best recipe
submission.
Niche 6 Recipes! 39
7. Database Sites
This isnʼt exactly a niche, but more a style of site. Database sites are sites that use a
database to derive the bulk of their content. If youʼve ever used a site like IMDB.com or
Last.fm, then you have used a database site. While every WordPress installation
technically uses a database to store its content, the difference is that these sites focus
not necessarily on articles or blog posts, but the ability to search and pull data on a
particular topic.
Whatʼs great about these sites is that they are easy to put together and you can have an
extremely large number of pages on your site with little effort. Basically, you acquire a
database, format the database for your site and configure the content as pages.
Now, I can already hear you whining, “What about duplicate content?!???!”
Hereʼs the deal on duplicate content. Duplicate content alone is not what is going to get
your site de-indexed. What is going to get your site de-indexed is duplicate content
PLUS scrapped content PLUS poorly spun and barely readable content PLUS poor
What gets article directories and autoblogs de-indexed is when they pull all of their
content from a single source at a high rate and that content is not laid out well or
particularly readable to begin with.
Social factors, link authority, domain age, and bounce rates have also been proven to
be a large factor in determining the staying power of websites in the index. If you have a
brand new site that has 10,000 posts and large majority of your visitors on on the site
for less than 10 seconds, then you you have something to worry about.
However, if you have a domain that has some age, some authority backlinks, and
content that mixes sources and is laid out to provide value to the user, then there is
nothing to worry about.
Above is some keyword data pulled for a baby names database, an easy and popular
niche to build a database site around. With a database site, you have enough content to
target all of these keywords and the CPCs coming from these keywords is quite high.
How to Implement
The key to implement a database site is to start with a good database, combine multiple
sources, provide value-added features, and implement original content where you can.
Database sites work particularly well as a foundation if you plan to build a large empire
of niche and authority sites. Since they have a large number of pages, and are easy to
put up, they are a great conduit for getting links to your other niche projects. Eli from
Blue Hat SEO wrote a seminal post on the topic in SEO Empire — Part 1. It was his
post on these methods that highly influenced the structure and building of my original
SEO foundation.
When building these sites, it is important that you are able to classify the information in
a very usable manner and it is worthwhile to build a few original posts using the data in
original ways.
For example, if building a baby names database (still a very profitable endeavor) it is
important not to just classify the names by boys names, girls names, and letter, but also
by ethnic origin and meaning.
Finally, spend some time to build a social following around your site. Let visitors write
reviews, share stories, and submit their own entries for consideration. It will go a long
way in generating original content for your site and keep visitors engaged in the siteʼs
content.
Related Sub-Topics
There are many sub-topics and niches to go into when considering this type of site. The
thing to look for here is not necessarily a high CPC, but a large search volume. It is also
better to choose a highly themed sub-topic. For example “love quotes” with trump the
singular “quotes”
Keyword Variations
The keyword variations with this type of site will be very niche specific. When building
content youʼll want to optimize your entries with the things people will you to try to find
your content.
For example in a lyrics database, the visitor might not always know the name or artist of
the song, but will know a verse or a few lines. In a quotation database, the visitor will
want to find a quote that either they heard once and canʼt remember the exact phrase,
or a quote to try and illustrate a particular concept or feeling.
If you can target common variations in your copy and SEO, you will gain a tremendous
advantage over the competition.
Babynology
www.babynology.com
Established: Dec 2003
Monthly Visitors: 640,680
Monthly AdSense: $5,383.80
Website Valuation: $66,405
Tricky Riddles
www.trickyriddles.com
Established: Jan 2006
Monthly Visitors: 137,370
Monthly AdSense: $1,154.40
Website Valuation: $50,968
Bus Songs
www.bussongs.com
Established: May 2003
Monthly Visitors: 143,700
Monthly AdSense: $1,207.50
Website Valuation: $18,809
When working with a database, it is best to use a script to help import and drip-feed the
content over time. The most successful database sites use this method to bulk load
thousands of posts and have them added periodically to the site over the course of a
few months to a few years.
There are many WordPress plugins that will import database and CSV files to your site,
however the best is CSVPig.
CSVPig is the best because it allows you to input large database files in CSV format,
schedule the content, and map the content headers to different custom fields within your
WordPress installation.
You can update existing posts with new CSV files, so if any information changes, it is
easy to update.
You can also disable the on-publish events such as ping and trackback, something you
donʼt want to do if you are building a lot of posts quickly. However, what I like most
about CSVPig is that it is one of the most stable CSV importing scripts available to
WordPress.
When experimenting with different CSV importers, I found that many either wouldnʼt
import the CSV files properly, would cause a lot of errors to the blog, or would go
haywire and start rapidly making posts or not posting at all.
The downside to the database site model is that if your database does not import
properly, it is a real pain to fix, and most times it ended up being easier to delete the site
and start over then to try and fix things. Fortunately I have not had such problems when
using CSVPig.
Seasonally, this niche remains relatively stable, however, you will see it peak during the
summer months.
This niche is also great because in addition to AdSense ads, there are a number of
products on the Clickbank marketplace that target particular pest problems.
How to Implement
The classic niche content site is the best approach to this niche. Visitors are looking
primarily for information, identification, and remedies to their problem. By creating a
content strategy that targets a pest thoroughly from identification to solutions, you will
be able to target a wide variety of long tail keywords related to this niche.
Related Sub-Topics
The most common pests in the United States according to the National Pest
Management Association are cockroaches, mice, rats, termites, ants, carpenter ants,
fleas, dog ticks, spiders, and silverfish. However, donʼt neglect regional pests that reside
in a specific geographical area. For example Fire Ants are a large problem in the
Southeastern US, and Boxelder Bugs impact the Northeast, Midwest, and Northwestern
states.
Keyword Variations
Many keywords exist in this niche, however the micro niche approach of targeting a
specific segment has proven to be the most profitable. While the search volume will be
lower, the higher CPCs and the availability for exact match domains make the micro
niche approach best.
Boxelder Bugs
www.boxelderbugs.net
Established: March 2011
Monthly Visitors: 5,538
Monthly AdSense: $46.20
Website Valuation: $713
Additional monetization in this niche can take the form of Amazon and Clickbank
products, and if you are able to target a local market, you can offer advertising space to
pest control services in the area.
That being said, this niche is one of the more straight forward ones where the basics
really apply; create good content, get backlinks from strong sources, and monetize with
a simple design.
One of the most profitable sub-niches that I have found within this space is for best man
toasts and speeches. A lot of men are unsure what to say at the wedding and combined
with the fear of public speaking, providing wedding speech ideas has been a very
lucrative niche to get into.
Classically, the wedding season lasts from June to October. However, since much of
this niche is in the planning of a wedding, and engagements can last over 18 months,
the traffic remains steady nearly all year long. Instead, this niche operates on more of a
monthly cycle depending on the aspect your site focuses on.
Niche 9 Weddings! 49
For example, wedding invitations tend to spike at the beginning of the month, while
bridal showers and bridal shower related topics are more prevalent in the middle of the
month.
How to Implement
Advice sites and picture galleries tend to be the most profitable features in this niche.
Utilizing list style posts (e.g. The 10 Tips for a Perfect Summer Wedding) tend to do
exceptionally well.
Since this is a well established industry, it is best to niche your site focus down to a
subset within the wedding niche, such as “Japanese Wedding Customs” or “Celtic
Wedding Invitations”.
Use the numerous wedding magazines to help generate headline and article ideas. On
the internet, one of the biggest authority sites in the wedding niche is The Knot, which
publishes The Knot Magazine, as well as a number of niche wedding sites.
Unless you want to host wedding related tools like interactive wedding checklists or
budget planners, the most straight forward is to build in the blog style with posts on a
frequent to semi-frequent basis.
Related Sub-Topics
When it comes to the wedding niche, wedding magazines are going to be a goldmine
for niche research. There are many aspects of the wedding you can get into from
Niche 9 Weddings! 50
wedding rings to wedding invitations, to wedding gowns, to bachelor parties and
wedding menus.
Keyword Variations
In this niche, start with a seed keyword and start drilling down until you find a niche that
has an acceptable level of traffic and cost-per-click. Some aspects in the wedding niche
include:
Niche 9 Weddings! 51
Example Sites
These are some sites that have done well within the wedding niche, tackling different
levels of scope:
Niche 9 Weddings! 52
Notes to Consider
Website design is an asset in this niche. Having a clean, well-laid out appearance will
help.
Catchy headlines and clever copywriting is also a tremendous asset. Remember, you
are competing against established wedding magazines with editorial staff in this space,
so strong writing is a must.
If you have a hard time writing, or are unable to hire someone that can write, then this
will be a difficult niche to enter.
Strong photography is also a plus. In this niche, I have been able to draw a lot of
readers with a single strong image. Fortunately, there are many fantastic wedding
photographers, and many will be happy to let you use their images with a link back to
their site.
Niche 9 Weddings! 53
10. Travel Guides
Traveling to a new place, whether for business or pleasure often requires a lot of
research. Where to stay? Where to eat? What to do? By providing answers to these
questions, you open up a lot of possibilities to enter a niche with a lot of opportunity.
While there are certainly dominant forces within this niche, the large search volume and
the plethora of topics can support a large number of competitors.
How to Implement
In this niche, it is much better to be a resource for one geographic location or even sub-
niche within a geographic location (e.g. Golf Vacations in San Diego) then to try and
tackle the huge travel industry as a whole.
Depending on the keyword, competition can be fierce. However, if you do not solely
target keywords such as “Florida Vacation Homes” or “Disney Vacations”, the market
opens up.
Many of the large competitors in this space (TripAdvisor and Yelp for example) have
focused on the user-generated review aspect, which is a great strategy, but there is a
lack of strong editorial content for vacation destinations outside of the major vacation
spots such as Florida, Las Vegas, or New York.
If you are a local to any area that has a tourism industry, you have a major competitive
advantage, as a lot of people want information on spots outside of the typical tourist
traps.
Related Sub-Topics
You can focus on a destination, such as the Bahamas, Costa Rica, Nashville, or you
can focus on a particular group, such as Golfers, Surfers, Skydivers. By drilling down
Keyword Variations
There are many keywords in this niche. Here are some of the keyword variations to the
term “travel guide” that can be paired with a destination.
Travel Vista
www.travelvista.net
Established: July 2006
Monthly Visitors: 45,840
Monthly AdSense: $385.20
Website Valuation: $5,499
Tropical Paradise
www.tropicalparadise.net
Established: Oct 2010
Monthly Visitors: 89,700
Monthly AdSense: $753.90
Website Valuation: $9,249
For that reason, I like to not put all of my efforts towards promoting this niche into SEO
and look to drive traffic in other ways.
You can do really well in this niche by not emphasizing solely on the search engines but
by gaining traffic through other methods such as social networks and, one that has
proven to be extremely effective, joining link exchange networks.
Mgid is one network that has been instrumental in driving a lot of traffic to sites I have in
this niche, but for Mgid to be effective, catchy headlines and really interesting pictures
are the only way to go.
Iʼve also had really good success using other forms of monetization in addition to
AdSense. Expedia offers an affiliate program through the Expedia Affiliate Network that
is worth looking into. I like that through their program, you can brand the offers to match
your site, and they offer a number of tools your your audience.
A technique I have used in a few other niches is the use of contests. I ran a photo
caption content on one of my travel sites about 8 months ago and nearly tripled my
traffic.
Likewise, this niche has the ability to be tightly focused by either industry (Healthcare
Jobs), career level (College Jobs), or geographic location (Nashville jobs). Your primary
advertisers in this niche will be recruitment agencies, job boards, resume writing
software, and other career planning services.
How to Implement
In this niche, job seekers are looking for a competitive advantage, or at the very least,
effective strategies to help them in their job hunt, so the emphasis should be on
providing that type of content.
Unless you have access or interest in writing news or publishing facts around the job
search and recruitment industry, blog-style sites are less effective in this nice. The better
approach is to to build a resource portal with evergreen articles and tools for those in
the job market.
Providing resume and cover letter samples is a very effective method to bringing a lot of
traffic.
Related Sub-Topics
While you will see the bulk of your traffic around the the terms resume and cover letter,
there are various sub niches within this niche; such as using social media for job
hunting, networking, negotiating a better job salary, the recruitment process, etc. You
also do not need to focus solely on the act of getting a job. You can target those who
are looking for advancement in their careers, or even those looking to leave a job.
That being said, there are some options to monetize in addition to AdSense in this
niche.
Some job boards offer a monetized search widget that you can embed on your site and
some have a CPC program similar to AdSense, but for job listings. Indeed has a nice
selection of tools for this purpose.
Demand Media filed its IPO in January of last year and its stock price has consistently
plummeted — currently trading at 65% below its initial offering price. While Richard
Rosenblatt, the companyʼs CEO has maintained Demand Media is profitable, the
company has been in the red since at least 2009, $22 million in the red, and that is even
with Demand Mediaʼs creative accounting practice of amortizing the cost of content
creation over 5 years.
This sounds like a really bad case for the How-To niche, but in fact the opposite is true.
Googleʼs penalization of the content farm has opened up search engine result spots that
Hereʼs a quick look at the CPC keywords related to the term “DIY”. Home improvement
items will dominate this area, mostly because of the choice of search term (DIY is
strongly related to home improvement projects) and because even doing-it-yourself,
youʼll still need a number of tools and materials.
How to Implement
For one, donʼt copy eHowʼs business model.
Instead, if you want to get into building a How-To site, focus the site around one task or
related group of tasks. In the example sites below, it shows just how niche you can get
and make a decent profit.
When choosing a sub-niche within the How-To genre, look to niches that require tools
and materials. As stated above, home improvement is great for this, as well as anything
craft or hobby related.
One mistake I see a lot in this niche is to outsource the content to your typical content
farms and random freelancers. This was the kiss of death for eHow and caused Yahoo
to rebrand Associated Content as Yahoo Voices.
Instead, if you donʼt know anything about the topic yourself, find authorities on your
subject and commission articles from them. Your cost will not be as high as you think.
Finally, a model that I have not tried, but have been closely watching, is the WikiHow
model and applying it to niche sites.
The owners of WikiHow, Jack Herrick and Josh Hannah had owned eHow prior to
selling it to Demand Media in 2006. WikiHow, as the name implies, takes the
collaborative nature of a wiki and combines it to a How-To site.
Xconomy recently did an interview with Jack Herrick and WikiHow which is very
enlightening to the whole story around both eHow, WikiHow, and the content farm
approach came to be.
Related Sub-Topics
There are almost an infinite number of places to find sub-niches within the How-To
category, however the best way is to start with the things you know how to do.
Start by sitting down and listing everything you know how to do, even if you think
everyone knows how to do it, chances are there are people out there that do not.
Do not edit and do not go back until you have exhausted yourself of things you know
about. Then, go back through the list and highlight the most interesting or most valuable
skills you have. Do some keyword research on those topics and see which ones have
the most potential.
If you still canʼt think of anything good, you can check out a website devoted to things
people want to accomplish 43Things. Their Zeitgeist is particularly helpful, and every
year they track the most popular New Years Resolutions.
Keyword Variations
The best keywords in this category are question based combined with the subject. For
example, keywords such as “How To”, “DIY”, “Guide”, “Instructions”, and “Advice” all
work well.
Pure Lessons
www.purelessons.com
Established: April 2008
Monthly Visitors: 14,520
Monthly AdSense: $756.15
Website Valuation: $31,500
How to Pickle
www.howtopickle.com
Established: Aug 2006
Monthly Visitors: 8,130
Monthly AdSense: $68.40
Website Valuation: $1,132
I was watching some old episodes of The Ali G Show the other day, and I noticed
something very interesting.
When Ali G would ask some of the foremost experts in the world some of the most basic
questions in their subject, such as asking a primatologist “What is an animal” — they
had a hard time answering him.
There has actually been quite a lot of study in the cognitive science field around this
paradox of expertise, but to sum it up — since experts have progressed far beyond the
basics of a skill, they have a hard time explaining the basics to someone new.
A better approach, is to get writers that are competent (but not experts) in the skill, or to
document the process as you learn it yourself.
This niche is about as set and forget as it gets. Unless you are publishing up to the
minute pricing guides, the content will always be relevant.
This niche is also fantastic because it is nearly untouched by internet marketers. This
makes it incredibly easy to rank, and unlike, say the insurance niche where there are a
million Made-For-AdSense Blogs that all look the same, this niche has few sites that are
well monetized, so visitors are more receptive to ad placements.
How to Implement
Content. Most people want to know one of two things in this niche: Where can I find
collectibles in this area, and how much is what I have worth.
Related Sub-Topics
The great thing about this niche is that people collect all kinds of things from cast iron
pots and pans to crystal chandeliers.
Keyword Variations
In this niche, just pick a type of antique or collectible and go from there. Here are some
common variations related to antique watches:
Antiques Navigator
www.antiquesnavigator.com
Established: Jan 2006
Monthly Visitors: 86,400
Monthly AdSense: $726.00
Website Valuation: $8,973
Collecting Autographs
http://www.collecting-autographs.com
Established: Apr 2009
Monthly Visitors: 10,051
Monthly AdSense: $84.60
Website Valuation: $1,221
The people that run sites in this niche can also be a bit strange. I once did a site on
antique masks, and I asked one of the site owners if I could use some pictures they had
with a link back to their site.
After explaining what a link back was, and why that was a good thing, the owner finally
agreed.
A few weeks later, I went to check on the site and the account where I hosted was
suspended due to a copyright claim, which I thought was odd, because this was back
when I was writing most of the content myself, and I knew I hadnʼt copied anything from
another site.
A few hours later, I get a nasty e-mail from one of the visitors of the site I used the
images from, calling me all kinds of nasty names, and how I was a thief and liar for
stealing these images, and that they took the liberty to make sure I was “deleted from
the internet”
Nevertheless, after a few e-mails, the situation was cleared up and the site was
restored.
I laugh about it now, but I was extremely pissed off at the time. Itʼs obvious that this
woman was a special kind of insane, but itʼs the only niche where I have had such a
thing happen.
Moral of that story is the folks in this niche can be a bit overzealous and clueless when it
comes to the internet. Like everything, there are pros and cons.
You would think with all this competition — photography, digital photography in
particular, would be a difficult niche.
However, for every blogger that says, or actually starts a photography blog, there are
thousands more interested in photography that do not.
Niche 14 Photography! 73
In addition, many of the bloggers who start photography blogs have absolutely no idea
what they are doing.
Like the hobbyists, they treat their blog as something fun to do, but lack the both the
technical and marketing skills to actually make their blogs successful.
Instead, what you have are scores of bloggers looking for content, content that they will
readily link to and inadvertently promote, because they have run out of their own ideas.
What would seem like competition, are actually allies you can leverage.
The highest paying keywords in this niche tend to revolve around photography courses
and schools. A lot of people get these digital cameras as gifts and donʼt really know how
to use them, or are caught up in the glamour and want to live the rockstar photographer
lifestyle themselves.
How to Implement
There are three primary techniques to building a successful photography site: creating
posts that go viral, garnering a following among other photography bloggers, and
knowing how to effectively monetize.
While I couldnʼt tell you what makes certain memes go viral, creating explosive traffic in
the photography niche is relatively easy. There are two ways to do it. The first is by
Niche 14 Photography! 74
writing, what Corbett Barr of Think Traffic calls “epic shit.” These are posts that could be
feature magazine articles in themselves.
While I donʼt always believe in the Field of Dreams “if you build it they will come”
philosophy, Corbett got me to link to him, so it says something for “epic shit”.
Jim Harmer, the blogger at Improve Photography implemented the epic approach in his
post 22 Things You Can Do Today to Change Your Photography Forever, and exploded
his traffic from a few hundred visitors a day to over 7,000 visitors a day.
Social media went crazy over the post, and it has since been shared 2,452 times on
Twitter, 6,000 times via Facebook, been recommended on Google+ 399 times, and has
had over 82,000 likes on StumbleUpon.
The photos donʼt even have to be yours, but make sure you credit the original
photographer, preferably with a link to his or her site.
The obvious bad karma aside, most blogs have trackback notifications, so the blog
owner will know when you link to them and you could potentially bring in a new reader
or get a post written about your blog.
The second is garnering a following among other photography bloggers. Now, you could
always go the guest post route, offering posts on highly trafficked blogs for a link to your
site. That approach works, and it works very well.
However, there is a far easier way to get other blogs to link to your post, without having
to write all this content on sites that ultimately donʼt directly enhance your bottom line:
Itʼs absurd in its simplicity, but sometimes, simple works. Donʼt be a jerk about it, and
the soft sell is the best approach — something along the lines of:
“I just wrote a big post on (Name of The Blog Post) that I think would be of interest to
you and your readers. Iʼd love for you to check it out, but if not, no worries.”
Thank them for their time and leave it at that. If you get a link, great, if not, (like it says in
the email) no worries.
The biggest accomplishment you can get is more than a link to a post, but a blog owner
that you are able to develop a professional relationship with.
Niche 14 Photography! 75
Meaning, not only do you have an ally in the niche, but someone who will promote some
of your posts occasionally, and someone whose posts you can promote so you donʼt
have to drive all of the content solely by yourself.
Not every niche is as community driven as the photography and some of the other art-
related niches, so it is nice when you have the opportunity to work with other site
owners to ensure mutual success.
The third factor in building a successful photography blog is in its monetization. In the
hobby niches in particular, visitors are very sensitive to advertising, and this is one of
the few niches where I would say less is more.
In this niche I will often shift the sidebar to the left hand side of the page, include one
AdSense Ad in the Sidebar and one AdSense ad below the post, and thatʼs it. I will use
an image ad for the sidebar and a text ad below the post, next to the related or popular
posts.
Next, I will often build two pages into the site — One dedicated to workshops/courses
and another dedicated to photography gear. These are my primary methods to monetize
the site. The courses section is the opportunity to promote ebooks, workshops, and
other affiliate offers, while the gear section outlines a number of product reviews with
affiliate links to both Amazon and other merchants.
Finally, while you may have heard a lot of marketers say “the money is in the list”, this is
one niche where this is particularly true. Visitors will happily sign up for your mailing list
in this niche especially if you can offer something in return, be it a downloadable ebook,
or special members content that is only delivered by e-mail.
Once you have the list, you can be a bit more aggressive with sales; Iʼll often keep my
list in on the loop of sales that are going on, latest product releases, or new educational
products as I learn about them.
Related Sub-Topics
When it comes to photography, there are a number of styles, techniques, and
equipment you can build a site around. For example, you can build your site around
Nikon Photography, and talk about what is happening in regards to Nikon users, or you
could focus on nature photography, or you could focus on career advice, such as how to
become a fashion photographer.
There are also levels of photographers you can focus on: such as the hobbyist, the
amateur, all the way up to the professional.
Niche 14 Photography! 76
Keyword Variations
There are many different areas within photography. Some of the few include:
Niche 14 Photography! 77
Example Sites
Here are some sites that have monetized well, that are not Digital Photography School.
DP Shots
www.dpshots.com
Established: May 2010
Monthly Visitors: 139,740
Monthly AdSense: $1,174.20
Website Valuation: $15,604
Photography Course
www.photographycourse.net
Established: Sept 2000
Monthly Visitors: 72,090
Monthly AdSense: $605.70
Website Valuation: $8,525
Picture Correct
www.picturecorrect.com
Established: Feb 2004
Monthly Visitors: 521,670
Monthly AdSense: $4,383.90
Website Valuation: $53,912
Niche 14 Photography! 78
Notes to Consider
Sadly this is not an overnight, get-rich-quick sort of niche. While you can accomplish a
lot in a short period of time, especially if you are able to create some epic content up
front and early on, youʼll need at least four months in this niche before you see a return
on your investment.
While the viral strategy is incredibly effective, itʼs results are fleeting. Your first viral
posts will give you a huge boost of traffic for roughly 2-3 days, and then the traffic will
simmer down.
However, each time you are able to pull off a post that goes viral, your overall traffic
levels will stay higher after the dip. If you can maintain one largely successful traffic-
pulling post a month, you can have a respectable site that maintains a decent audience.
If it is not obvious, design in this niche is incredibly important. While you can get away
with a blank Thesis theme or one of the other MFA themes in other niches, youʼll
destroy your audience with a theme that doesnʼt look good. Themes from WooThemes
or Theme Forest are great for this niche.
Niche 14 Photography! 79
15. Sports Streaming
Live sports streaming have become a past time for many, particularly those out of the
United States. Live sports streaming sites can either host feeds of sporting events, or
provide a directory of where to find such feeds.
It is important to note that this niche caters (at least for the time being) primarily to an
international audience outside of the US, therefore the most popular sports are the ones
that are popular in other countries. For example, for US readers, football in this instance
does not apply to American football, but to the game internationally known as football,
soccer.
During a championship or major tournament, you can see explosive traffic in this niche.
For instance, I couldnʼt include one of the most popularly streamed sports, cricket,
because it received so much traffic for the India vs. Pakistan Cricket World Cup match
that it would have made the other search terms hard to read.
How to Implement
By far, the country where sports streaming is most popular is in Pakistan. Pakistan has
a very sports-centric culture and the most popular sports in Pakistan are typically sports
adopted from the British empire such as cricket, field hockey, polo, squash, football
(soccer), badminton, and Australian football.
Other sports that make for a good niche are either niche sports that do not get much
mainstream television exposure except for major international events, such as billiards,
boxing, and tennis; or sports which are particular to a country or region that have expats
unable to watch from the countries in which they reside.
Outside of this criteria, formula one racing and ultimate fighting championship matches
also bring a large streaming audience.
There are two main way to build sites in this niche. The first is to build a site that has
embedded feeds from live streaming providers. Livestream, Ustream, and Justin.tv all
have embeddable feeds you can use.
8Bit recently released a WordPress theme designed for live streaming called
LiveTheme which hosts a lot of features that are catered to the niche, and Press75 has
released a number of themes where video support is included, such as OnDemand,
Debut, Videly, Video Flick.
Keyword Variations
Many of the keywords in this niche revolve around the terms “live”, “streaming”, “online”,
or “free” combined with the name of the sport. Here are some suggestions:
Stream TV Guide
www.streamtvguide.com
Established: Jan 2008
Monthly Visitors: 130,140
Monthly AdSense: $1,093
Website Valuation: $13,425
However, you can do very well by becoming a resource of where visitors can get the
authorized feed as well as highlights of past games as HockeyWebCasts has done.
The same cannot be said for other niches, like advice columns, where visitors can
actually get annoyed that their are advertisements on “their” content. Fortunately,
visitors looking into business software are anticipating a purchase, they are just looking
for some solutions and recommendations.
This means that if you can place your ads well, youʼll see a higher CTR then other
niches.
If you write a really good post now, unless all the software you talk about becomes
obsolete, it will remain a good post.
The downside to this niche is that the search volume can be much lower, considering
the specialized nature of some software. However, in this niche, I will often lower my
traffic standards, because as you can see, the CPCs can justify it here.
Articles are typically easy to write in this niche, as it often involves learning a little bit
about the software titles, what they offer, and how they work for end users. All of this
information can be found either by quickly demoing each piece of software, or learning
about it from the developers site.
How to Implement
The micro niche site does really well in this niche. You increase your chances of
success by making a 5 page site on “CRM software for florists” then to make a site
around accounting software.
Editorial articles work really well here, and incorporating a rating system of sorts can
give a tremendous benefit.
Definitely get screenshots of the software. There is nothing more annoying to read a
review of a piece of software and not have any images of what the software looks like.
You can get a lot of viewers just by properly SEOing your images when they show up in
a google image search.
You can either take screenshots of the software yourself, or if you donʼt own the
software, ask the developer for some screenshots. They will be more then happy to do
this.
I once had the President of a software development company offer to write an article
and do an interview with me for a site I hadnʼt even built yet and was upfront that I was
making nothing more than a small 5 page site. I guess they figure any press is good
press.
Related Sub-Topics
Consider the functional areas of business and the software to support it. Also consider
specific industries and company size. For example a local freelance graphic designer
will have much different needs then a 10-person real estate office.
Keyword Variations
When looking into this niche, you primarily want to look at the different types of software
genres available to business. A great place to start sourcing types of software,
particularly online software is through the Google Apps Marketplace. The major
categories of business software include:
What is ERP?
www.whatiserp.net
Established: Apr 2009
Monthly Visitors: 33,900
Monthly AdSense: $285.00
Website Valuation: $3,973
Youʼll rarely get much social media interaction in this niche, so it is not worth your time.
In fact, youʼll rarely get repeat visitors, since the user is looking for what software to use
and move on.
This puts you strictly in relying on your SEO skills to rank your sites, however especially
if you niche down, ranking well for these terms is rarely that difficult.
You may think writing about open source software or even devoting your entire site to
open source software would decrease your bottom line, however you can often draw
more traffic with the open-source keywords, and visitors will still click ads because
open-source software is not always stable or specialized enough to meet the needs of
most businesses.
As always, experiment with your ad placement, but typically you can be very aggressive
with advertising in this niche.
Tumblr is mostly noted for the various meme blogs that have been published using the
platform such as Kim Jong Il Looking At Things, Lesbians Who Look Like Justin Bieber,
and Texts from Bennet.
Most Tumblr sites donʼt have any monetization whatsoever, and those that do, feature
maybe a banner.
Niche 17 Tumblr! 90
The niche is not building on Tumblr, but building sites FOR Tumblr: sites around tumblr
themes, how to work with Tumblr, etc..
Since Tumblr is relatively new in the popularity scale, the CPC will be lower to the CPCs
around other more established platforms, mainly Twitter and Facebook.
One thing I have learned from publishing in the AdSense model is that traffic can
overcome a high CPC, and that would be the formula we take for this niche.
While this is purely theory and something I canʼt prove, I expect as Tumblr gains more
popularity, the bid prices on this niche will increase, as they have around Twitter ($),
Facebook ($$), and WordPress ($$$).
How to Implement
There are three main areas Tumblr users are searching for content on: Themes,
Pictures (Gifs), and advice on how to grow a Tumblr following.
Fortunately, all of these areas are incredibly easy to generate content for.
There are a number of free and commercially available Tumblr themes, as some of the
major WordPress Theme shops have begun designing for the platform such as Obox
and UpThemes, as well as PixelUnion, which designs almost exclusively for Tumblr.
Niche 17 Tumblr! 91
The Tumblr user-base, while tech savvy, is not necessarily web development or
marketing savvy. What that means is that while they might know a bit about HTML and
probably have an iPhone, they may not know a thing about marketing, blogging
effectively, or building an audience.
Remember, Tumblr is sort of an entry-level look into the blogging world, so for those that
have aspirations to do something bigger, they may start there, but they may not know
what to do next.
Keyword Variations
Look primarily to features specific to tumblr, such as themes, following and unfollowing,
as well as keywords related to some of the more popular tumblr memes. Some broad
keywords include:
Niche 17 Tumblr! 92
Example Sites
Here are some sites catering to the Tumblr niche:
Tumblring
www.tumblring.net
Established: April 2010
Monthly Visitors: 402,780
Monthly AdSense: $3,384.60
Website Valuation: $41,178
Totally Layouts
www.totallylayouts.com
Established: Oct 2006
Monthly Visitors: 94,500
Monthly AdSense: $794.10
Website Valuation: $10,058
Niche 17 Tumblr! 93
Notes to Consider
The Tumblr niche is one to get into if you want to watch a site rise rapidly in the search
engines. The two sites I have in the space, one on gifs for Tumblr, and another on
popular topics in the Tumblr community have seen a tremendous surge in traffic in the
few months they have been running with minimal backlinking.
The Tumblr community is very ad sensitive, in fact the founder of Tumblr, David Karp
was quoted as saying, “Weʼre pretty opposed to advertising” (a stance he reversed a
year later, btw), but a hard sell is not the best approach in this niche.
Even if your posts are essentially a dump of links to different Tumblr themes, you get a
lot more traction with the post if you package them together and give it a catchy
headline like “60 Handpicked Beautiful Tumblr Themes” and “34 Amazing Tumblr
Themes, Twitter Could Never Look This Good!!!” (These are actually both pretty lame
headlines, Iʼm sure you can do better).
Niche 17 Tumblr! 94
18. Sports Injuries
Injuries through sports or exercise are a fairly common occurrence. Many of these
injuries are not serious enough to warrant a trip to the emergency room, but are enough
for people to look for answers, either for prevention, cures, or treatment.
The CPCs you can expect in this niche range from $1.60 to around $4.00 for general
keywords, and will increase exponentially once you get into local and treatment related
keywords.
The authority sites in this niche will be government sites and pages from sites like the
Mayo Clinic. In can be intimating to get into this niche with such “trusted” domains,
however there are a few things in this niche that you can use to your advantage.
First, unlike product type keywords, google does not cover the first page with their own
branded verticals, so the first half of the page wonʼt be covered with YouTube videos,
Google product search, Google News, etc.
Second, government sites and major medical institutions are known to have very
accurate medical knowledge, but it isnʼt always the most user friendly.
Iʼve done this a number of times. Iʼll be doing some research, come across a major
health organization, but when I click on the page, I am bombarded with a series of PDFs
and medical studies that donʼt really make any sense to me, nor do I have the time to go
through each study.
Iʼll often find myself passing over the .gov and .edu sites in favor of a site that is a bit
more digestible in its content. So even you are unable to outrank the main authority site
for a keyword term, you should still see a good amount of traffic from those that frankly,
donʼt want a clinical trial.
Finally, your competition in this niche is a goldmine for research. Since government data
and content is produced in the public domain, you have no worries of any sort of DMCA
complaints, and all the research for your articles is presented for you.
This is not to say to copy what you find on these pages, which would defeat its purpose,
but you can certainly pull your research from these sites and look to how you can make
the information more user friendly.
In this niche an exact match domain is a tremendous asset. Content-wise, I have found
longer articles (1000+ words) to perform much better then shorter (500+ word) articles.
In addition, pay particular attention to your internal linking structure with these sites.
Each article should link to the next, and allow the user to flow from article to article. Take
a look at the Mayo Clinic site to see what I mean.
Related Sub-Topics
The most common sports injuries are sprains and strains, knee injuries, swollen
muscles, Achilles tendon injuries, shin injuries, fractures, and dislocations. Sports
injuries often have more common names, such as tennis elbow, shin splints, and yips.
Keyword Variations
For keyword variations, you can target the name of the injury, the location of the injury,
symptoms of the injury, or injuries related to a particular sport.
Hamstring Injury
www.hamstringinjury.org
Established: July 2011
Monthly Visitors: 42,900
Monthly AdSense: $361.20
Website Valuation: $4,597
iTendonitis
www.itendonitis.com
Established: July 2006
Monthly Visitors: 44,610
Monthly AdSense: $375.15
Website Valuation: $5,111
Pay particular attention you your on-page SEO in this niche. That means title tags, urls,
optimized images, linking structure. You will also do much better in this niche if you link
to some very authoritative sources within your articles.
With these sites, I like to build a base of around 20-25 articles that are tightly related.
For a link building campaign, Iʼll do initial promotion blast to a handful of article
directories just to get the word out, then I prefer to use an automated linkbuilding
service to slowly drip-feed backlinks over time.
The ones I use with great success are ArticleRanks and Unique Article Wizard (this
service has been around forever, but is unbeatable) for article content, and then I use
Backlinks Genie to schedule out backlinks to both my money site and the properties I
built during my initial promotion phase. I really like this setup because once I get the
content on the site, I can schedule out the backlinks for months without worrying about
it.
Advertisers in this niche, particularly on the local level are willing to pay a premium for
advertising. In addition, there are a number of large national placement agencies willing
to bid on these keywords as well.
This niche targets a more affluent customer, although the niche isnʼt exclusive to the
extremely wealthy.
In addition, the trend in outsourcing and hiring help has made many middle-class
families consider employing some domestic help.
How to Implement
With this niche, I would focus on the the first-time buyer; one that hasnʼt hired any
domestic staff before. There are a lot of concerns for the first-timer, specifically “Can I
afford it?”, “How do I make sure I get someone reputable?”, “How can I make sure they
will do a good job?”, etc.
Basic content rules apply in this niche, however if you feel so inclined, sites have done
well in this niche that have incorporated job board functionality.
The easiest implementation is to use one of the WordPress job board themes. Iʼve
tested a number of them, but JobRoller from AppThemes is my personal favorite.
JobRoller lets you setup a payment gateway to charge for posting, however I would
recommend against this.
The bigger asset is the traffic you can gain then the potential revenue. I would only
consider charging for the board if the site becomes massively popular or you have a
problem with spam.
By making the board free to post, you can really increase your traffic as well as get a
little social sharing.
Related Sub-Topics
For sub-topics in this niche, focus on one particular skill. Despite the title of this section,
people will rarely search for the term “domestic services.” Instead, if they are looking for
a landscaper, they will search for landscaper, if they are searching for a nanny, they will
search for “nanny”.
Another growing sub-niche is senior care. As the baby-boomer generation ages, more
and more families will be looking for nurses and caregivers for their elderly family
members.
A great resource for finding topics is through Care.com, a large site that is like a
craigslist for Home-care professionals.
Keyword Variations
Location keywords are really strong in this niche. One technique I have used in another
locally focused niche was to create one main site, and then use sub-domains to host
mini sites in each of the major metropolitan areas. Keyword and keyword variations
include:
Step By Step CC
www.stepbystepcc.com
Established: July 2002
Monthly Visitors: 66,180
Monthly AdSense: $556.20
Website Valuation: $7,982
If you choose to add a job board portion of the site, most of your maintenance will be
spend on that, cleaning up the occasional outdated or spam posts, but otherwise, pretty
hands-free.
Iʼll promote these sites using the same drip-feed approach that I use with the sport-
injuries sites, mostly because I would much rather work on other things then
backlinking.
One thing I have implemented on these sites that has worked quite well is the SEO
Search Terms Tagging Plugin for WordPress. Itʼs a free plugin that will translate
incoming search terms into post tags. Iʼve found it invaluable to find out the terms
visitors are using to come to the particular pages.
This niche remains steady all year long and it contains visitors that are looking to solve
problems.
Working online, I also believe it is a niche many of you can relate to (dealing with
procrastination, staying focused, the stress and frustration when projects donʼt work out
as planned, dealing in a sometimes isolated and lonely world).
Just looking into the keyword “stress”, we can see that these terms get a large search
volume and the CPCs associated with them are quite high as well.
How to Implement
The tactic here is to create simple, effective, and tangible solutions to problems. I
particularly like this niche because I feel I can help, as I have learned a lot over the
years in regards to time management, stress, and combatting procrastination, among
other things that are useful to others.
Of course you can peddle crap all day in this niche, but it is a strategy that I believe is a
losing one.
Moral argument aside, the main reason publishing the same losing content is bad, is
because that is what everyone does, even the more established authority sites in the
niche.
People donʼt want to hear the same and ultimately vague “think positive thoughts”
advice that can be applied, and often is, to just about every ailment under the sun. They
want answers.
Around this time, the time management system du-jour was Getting Things Done by
David Allen. On paper it sounds like a fantastic system (and for the most part it is),
however it was so complicated to keep up with that if you didnʼt do your weekly review
or empty your inbox, you felt like you were 6 months behind.
After struggling with all kinds of notebooks and software applications and still feeling like
I needed a to-do list to manage my to-do list, I came across the Pomodoro Technique.
Thereʼs a bit more to it, but basically it involves setting a little kitchen timer (a
pomodoro) for 25 minutes and challenging yourself to finish that one task before the
timer goes off.
Seemed simple enough, so I tried it for two weeks and reported my results (almost
tripling my productivity).
That article got a lot of attention, and I didnʼt invent the Pomodoro method, I just showed
how it could be used.
Now I am not saying you need to conduct these extended personal case studies, but I
believe what made that post popular was that the Pomodoro method was relatively
unheard at the time and that I shared my specific success and struggles with the
system, providing tangible actions for someone else looking to do the same.
I recommend you do the same for this niche, focus on the tangible strategies, and you
can be very successful.
Related Sub-Topics
Stress, grief, depression, and anxiety seem to be the largest culprits in this niche.
Keyword Variations
An interesting technique I discovered working in this niche is to not just focus on the
name of the problem, but to focus on some of the questions and statements people
make when suffering from some of these conditions. For example, have you ever done
a search for the phrase “I canʼt sleep” when you couldnʼt sleep?
Help Me To Sleep
www.help-me-to-sleep.com
Established: April 2005
Monthly Visitors: 24,660
Monthly AdSense: $207.30
Website Valuation: $4,997
There are a few info products to promote in this space, however Iʼve yet to have much
success with any of them. Not saying they canʼt work, they just havenʼt worked for me.
Iʼve had great success compiling list style posts in this niche, even on topics that have
been covered 1,000 times before. For example, “The 7 Symptoms of Depression” vs.
“Symptoms of Depression”.
You can build a blog around this niche or more of a niche site, however I prefer the
niche site approach, where I will draft 15-20 pieces of strong pillar content that will have
a long shelf life.
For a little freshness on sites I donʼt intend on updating, Iʼll employ some sort of RSS
feed or even a twitter stream just to give the search engines the impression that the site
has signs of life.
Finally, for design, Iʼll rarely employ more than a graphic header (please nothing
cheesy) and a basic template.
As you can see in the trending graph above, this niche has remained steady over the
past 8 years, spiking briefly around Christmas time (holiday break).
I was worried when Apple had dropped support for flash on its devices, and the talk was
around building games with HTML5. However, there are still very few HTML5 games,
and if youʼve ever tried to play an HTML5 game, youʼll realize flash will be around for a
while longer.
Even if the online game world fully embraces the HTML5 platform, you could always
integrate those games into your site.
Despite the low CPC and reliance on impression advertising, sites in this niche can
easily reach $50 a day just from the sheer amount of traffic they can bring.
How to Implement
Itʼs surprisingly simple to get a lot of freely available flash games on your site. Game
publishers will often publish feeds that you can use right on your site. Playtomic,
Mochimedia, FlashGameDistribution, and Kongregate all have free feeds you can use.
Once you get a feed, you can build a site around it with either one of the pre-configured
gaming scripts, such as PHP Arcade Script, or Pro Arcade Script.
You can also build a arcade directly into a WordPress blog. The MyArcade Plugin Pro is
by far the best, however a paid plugin. I like it because it makes it incredibly easy to
setup, plus you have all of the benefits that come with WordPress such as pretty URLs,
comments, scheduled posts, and categories.
With WordPress, you can also very easily have a Tweet generated every time you posts
a new game through Twitter Tools, and allow users to rate the game with a plugin like
WP-Post Ratings.
Keyword Variations
Some keyword variations include:
Creating a social presence around these sites in huge. A twitter account, and a
Facebook page are almost prerequisites.
Monetizing these sites is incredibly easy, but using text ads are a mistake. Instead, opt
for display ads, and collect your revenue on impressions versus clicks.
One thing to note, is that with a standard AdSense account, you cannot place AdSense
ads as a pre-loader to flash games, however this is something you can apply for.
I also highly recommend to integrate user interaction components into the site; at the
bare minimum, integrate a ratings system, but I recommend you take it a step further
and offer single login via Facebook, a high score leader board, and various
achievements that can be unlocked by using the site.
I highly recommend using the MyArcadePlugin Pro for this, since it can incorporate all of
those features, and also allows for easy game management and loading of games from
all of the major publishers. Iʼll rarely push a product this hard, but when it comes to
building arcade sites with WordPress, this plugin is a real game-changer (pun totally
intended.)
Well, now itʼs time to drill down and take these niche ideas into a single keyword to build
your site around.
Regardless of whether you want to build a micro niche (5-10 pages) or a more
authoritative site (20+ pages), you still need to start with your main keyword.
This is what your site is going to be “about”. This keyword will often have the highest
search volume, but also the most competitive. It may or may not be your most profitable
keyword.
When I research a potential niche, I like to do it once. I like to cast a wide net up front,
and then quickly eliminate any keywords that donʼt fit my criteria.
This may make my keyword research process a bit more intense than most.
I do it this way because I donʼt like to leave any stone unturned, and I want to make
sure I am getting the largest data set possible to make the best decision.
Fortunately, Iʼve refined this process over the years, so itʼs become very structured for
me, a structure which I will share with you:
We only want to narrow our keyword down enough to avoid ambiguity from the keyword
tools weʼll use later. By avoiding ambiguity now, weʼll save a lot time.
Letʼs take the term “interviews” for example, because we want to build a site around
interviewing tips for someone looking for a job.
However, the term “interview” could mean a lot of different things, so we need to narrow
it down slightly to the term “job interview” so when we do the automated portion of this
process, we arenʼt left with a number of erroneous results.
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First, take out a sheet of paper and simply write down every related keyword that comes
to mind. For backpacks, that might be: school backpacks, red backpacks, blue
backpacks, book bag, hiking backpack, camera backpack, computer backpack, etc.
Next, weʼll go online and see what other terms we might have missed in this process.
There are two sites I find particularly useful. The first is Wikipedia and the second is
Buzzle.
In Wikipedia, simply go to the article on that entry and scan through it, pulling out any
keywords that fit into our broad theme.
Buzzle, is a large article site that does a phenomenal job of categorizing content and
articles.
Our first stop is to search the Buzzle site for our main keyword. Along the left hand side,
youʼll see a list of categories related to that term. Add any that are appropriate, but donʼt
stop there. Every time you click on an article in Buzzle, a new list of related categories
show.
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Once you have exhausted the related categories list, take a look at some of the articles
and see if either the titles, or the content of those articles contain more keywords that
we can add to our list.
At this point, depending on your niche, your should have about 10-50 keywords.
First, I will do a Google search for each term in my broad theme keyword list, recording
the top ten spots, ignoring YouTube, News, duplicate results, and results from sites
where the niche is not their main topic.
Next, I will search for the broad theme keywords on SpyFu. SpyFu is a research engine
that aggregates PPC data and gives us two valuable pieces of information.
From the keyword search, weʼll see terms advertisers have bid on in addition to the term
we just searched for. Iʼll record all of the ones that relate to my theme.
SpyFu will also give us the sites that are placing ads for that keyword. Iʼll record those
as well.
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SpyFu offers an excellent paid subscription service, but unless you are heavily involved
in PPC advertising, what information displayed for free is more than enough for our
purposes.
Next, I will use Alexa to grab keywords related to my competitor domains. Start by
looking up the competing sites you recorded earlier, and click on the search analytics
tab.
It will show you the top 10 search terms users of the Alexa toolbar have used to reach
that site. I will add these keywords to my keywords to my keyword list and repeat the
process for each of the competing sites I found in my earlier research.
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Finally, I will take each of the competing sites and run them through URLTrends.
URLTrends lets us see all of the keywords a particular site ranks for in the search
engines.
You can run up to 5 URLs at a time unregistered and get 10 keywords per site. By
registering for free, you can get up to 20 keywords per site. They have a paid option
which will give you all of the keywords.
I have it, because itʼs only $15/month for the unlimited plan, and I really like keyword
research, but to be honest it is completely unnecessary if you are anything less then a
keyword nut. The free registration should be more than enough.
At this point, I will take all the keywords I have collected into my list and give them a
once over, removing any duplicates and terms that donʼt fit my niche.
I use BBedit on the Mac for this, because I can remove duplicates with two clicks, and I
believe you can do the same thing with NotePad++ for the PC.
You will need an account, but that account is free. The keyword tool is based on
WordTrackerʼs Database, which is different from what youʼll get from Google, and
remarkably better at searching horizontally across a niche.
At this point, I am not interested in any of the data the SEO Keyword tool gives us, just
the keywords.
I will do this for each keyword on my list that was created in the previous steps. At this
point you should have a pretty hefty list of keywords.
I will scan the list and remove any obvious junk as well as remove duplicates.
For this research I use a tool called LongTailPro. I used to use MarketSamurai for this
research, but have become really unhappy with that program and switched over the
LongTailPro.
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If you have have Market Samurai and are still happy with it, then you can essentially do
the same thing we are doing here, but with a few added steps.
LongTailPro Instructions:
We will start by analyzing each keyword with gathered from before. In LongTailPro,
paste the keywords we gathered earlier into the Seed Keyword box of the program and
have it gather the domain availability and CPC; filtering out any keywords that have an
exact match search volume less than 1000 search per month, a CPC less then $1.00,
and anything where an exact match or hyphenated domain is unavailable in for
the .com, .net, or .org TLDs.
Then, what we need to do is click the key icon next to each term to open it in its own
tab. Once the we create a tab for each keyword, click on the generate keyword button to
generate a keyword list from Google for each term.
Once that is complete, analyze each keyword filtering out those where the exact match
search volume less than 1000 searches per month and a CPC less then $1.00.
Export all the lists from Market Samurai and then run an available domain search. You
can use GoDaddyʼs domain bulk registration tool, or if you are afraid goDaddy in going
to steal your domains, DomainTools has a comparable tool.
Go ahead and export your researched lists and take a look at what you got. When
evaluating what kind of site I want to make.
One thing Iʼve learned about analyzing competition is that itʼs not about being able to
outrank all of the sites on the first page, but finding one slot I can unset.
1. Root domains in the top 10. A root domain means that the homepage of the site
ranks for a particular term (i.e. mykeyword.org vs. somewebsite.com/mykeyword).
This means someone is specifically targeting this keyword.
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2. The appearance of YouTube Videos towards the top, WikiAnswers Sites or
Yahoo Answers. The appearance of any of these generally means Google canʼt find
enough relevant content to fill the first page of results.
3. First page results with a PRs less than 3. While PageRank has shown time and
time again to be an unreliable metric in terms of ranking, taking a looking at the
collective range of PRs from the first page can give you an idea of how strong the
competition is for that term. While you can easily outrank a site with a much higher
PR if your content is more relevant, an entire first page result consisting of sites with
PR5+ will indicate that it will take a bit of effort.
4. Keyword in URL, Title, Head, and Meta Description. These metrics indicate if any
on-page SEO work has been done on the competing pages.
5. Backlinks to the Page. This is still the primary metric to determine rankings. Iʼll want
to see not only how many backlinks a ranking page is getting, but what kind of
backlinks they are and where they are coming from. You can check this either in
Market Samurai or Backlink Watch.
Step 7: Profit
Since my research process is pretty intense, Iʼll usually end up with a few dozen
keywords and available domains to choose from.
With the competitive analysis, we can infer the type of site we should build to do well in
that niche, as well as how much time and effort we can expect it will take to rank well.
Now itʼs just a matter of building out the site and promoting it.
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Conclusion
So there you have it.
With this list of niches alone you have enough material to build sites for the next few
years.
As you start with these niches, you will start to see new niches and new trends emerge
as you continually collect data of your own.
Realize that much of this business is a numbers game, so if your first site isnʼt
successful (or not as successful) as youʼd like it to be, keep trying and you will soon
have a small army of winning sites that earn for you.
The most important thing is to never give up. You can spend a long time in the slump
(as I did) not making anything, but once you hit your stride, your income wonʼt grow
steadily, it will grow by leaps and bounds, and youʼll think its stupid how in 3 months,
youʼll have made more money in the past three years.
Itʼs how its worked for me and it how its worked for just about every successful Internet
Marketer I know.
Erskine Meyers
P.S. - If you find yourself stuck or you have a success story you want to share, feel free
to shoot me an e-mail at erskine.meyers@gmail.com and Iʼll see if I can help. Itʼs always
good to hear people taking action on their goals, even if they arenʼt quite hitting them
yet.
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