How to build a profitable website.

The Blueprints, Plan, Strategy and Direction you need to create a profitable website

www.niche-keyword-research.co.uk

These are the foundations of a profitable website. If you do each correctly, you will profit from the website. The best way to ensure you will make money is to keep it simple, build these foundations and only then, start tinkering with conversion or re-write content to recommend a product.

Building a profitable website comes down to three key elements.

(1) Research   (2) Content   (3) Promotion

Research

Choosing a Niche

For a website to prosper, you must conduct proper research of a niche. Before you start thinking about researching a topic/niche think about what you can offer them in terms of content.

The best way to approach choosing a niche is to think about people’s problems. For instance, i’m not saying you can’t create a website with facts about Volcanoes but compare that to something as needed as acne control and you should understand which is going to be more profitable.

To begin researching a niche you need to have the right tools at hand.

Tools to aid in Research

These are the tools I use to help research a new niche. All these tools can help you research a niche including it’s keywords and then products for that niche.

Free Tools:

www.Google.com

The search engine itself acts as a tool for showing how much competition there is for a keyword. I will show you this later.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

This is Google’s own keyword tool. The main part you will look at is the search volumes. Note, it shows the amount of searches per month, not per day.

SEObook

This is similar to Google’s keyword tool only it takes into account other search engines and displays the amount of searches per day. If you explore the website there is also some other tools, but I’ve never used them.

Google Insights

Google Insights is basically a more advanced version of Google Trends, they are very similar and both can be used to track a keywords popularity. When you type a keyword into this search it will display how many searches a keyword has over a long period of time. This is good for showing if a keyword or more importantly niche is in decline or is growing more popular. It can also show you how popular seasonal niches become.

Freekeyword Wordtracker

Similar to SEObook this can show you daily searches for the specified keyword.

****Both SEObook and Freekeywords Wordtracker can be quite inaccurate at times. Use them as a guideline or as a way to dig for longtail keywords in a niche.

Paid Tools

The only paid tool I use is Micro Niche Finder

It is an amazing tool because it does the grunt work for you and brings it all back to be displayed nicely. No more typing into excel sheets or wordpad. It also has a great little feature called the SOC. Usually to see if a keyword is competitive we type the keyword phrase into Google with quotes, like “Acai Berry Fruit” and look at the top right to see how many competing pages there are (more on this later). This works well, but we can’t tell if the top 10 pages are extremely well linked, hard to shift authority websites followed by very few weak websites. The SOC feature helps with this and analyses those websites to see if they will be hard to beat.

Now that’s one hell of a feature!

How to pick a Niche

A bit of creativity is required for this first part. You need to think of a subject that people might need information or products for so you can go away and research it to see if it’s profitable.

Think of problems people have

The most basic technique is to think of times in your life when you’ve had a problem yourself and needed something, smelly feet, starting a cold car, changing a wheel, fixing a TV, mending a roof, keeping goldfish, how to draw, how to write a book, where to buy the best watch, mobile, car, tv, etc etc from. These are some random stuff off the top of my head that might come to absolutely nothing or may surprise you.

Look at products for clues

Some techniques I use are joining affiliate websites (websites that allow you to promote their products). If there are companies offering people their products to promote, there may be a good need for them and hopefully, not many competing websites. Scanning through these lists can be quite fun.

Yahoo answers

People go to Yahoo answers to ask the most random questions, it is a great place to start.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia has every topic you can think of, use it for some ideas.

Micro-Niche

If you think of something huge like weight loss as a niche, there should be many smaller niches within the weight loss niche. I tried Diet programs once but it totally flopped! Ha! Maybe there’s something new like in the Tattoo niche some people are starting to get their skin branded with hot metal, maybe that is a niche within a niche?

Thesaurus

A thesaurus can also be a great option for finding good ideas.

Begin your research

Now it’s time to discover if your chosen topic/niche is going to be a good choice.

There are three points we need to look at:

• Popularity

• Competition

• Monetization

Popularity

The First thing we do is look at how popular a niche is. We can do this by typing the most generic keyword for the chosen niche into Googles Adwords Keyword Tool. The main columns I use are the Approx Search Volume the Approx Avg Search. I also have the Advertiser competition and the Estimated Avg CPC showing, but I pay less attention to them as they are more relevant to Adsense and Adwords (Cost Per Click advertisements and campaigns). The reason I show these is because they show how much it is costing advertisers per click and how much they are competing for that keywords. This in turn shows you there are products available for that niche, how profitable in adsense it could be and sometimes an indication that it could be a competitive keyword, but do not use this as a real indication of how competitive a niche is.

What we are going to pay attention to is the first two columns, using these we can see how many searches a month we can get and also some other keywords people are searching for related to our chosen keyword. I tend to look for anything with 2,000+ per month. That translates into 66 searches per day on a 30 day month. These are just estimates though. I pick out a few of the good ones, keeping my eyes open for the words *buy*how*why* especially.

Example of some of my wesbites;

Hemorrhoid Treatment

Buy Revitol Cream

fungal nail infection treatment

facebook games

Competition

It is extremely easy to find keywords that are popular, but what we need most is to know how competitive a keyword is. This is a very simple task but can be quite tiresome. Open up your normal Google search engine and type your keyword phrase in with quotes.*** This keyword might be “how to lose weight fast”. As you can imagine, if I type in “lose weight” there will a very large number of competing websites, this is why we try to find these long tails with good amount of searches. We can see the amount of competing websites in the top right of the screen, it will read something like this.

Results 1 - 100 of about 740,000 for “how to lose weight fast“. (0.46 seconds)

This is a poor keyword, 740,000 for an exact phrase is really bad, it would take a lot of work to even get close to the first 10 pages of Google!

What we are looking for are keywords that have fewer than 20,000 competing websites. If you can find a few keywords in a niche that have under 20,000 competition and 2,000+ searches a month you can also target the slightly more competitive keywords in the niche and ramp the website up once you start promoting it. It’s these core groups of keywords which you’ll build your foundations on, after that you can target the lower search volume keywords and the higher competition keywords.

If you’re wondering why we type the keyword in with quotes it’s because Google with look for websites that match that phrase exactly, this is an indication of websites specifically targeting this keyword and putting their weight into it. When you type a keyword in without quotes Google will display pages with those 5 keywords, all in different places. The exact phrase match will look for the keywords in that order, exactly as you type it.

Monetization

Monetization is a factor you need to take into account. If every keyword you target begins with “Free” then you can guess it’s not going to go down very well when you talk to them about a great product that costs $29.99. You should not offer people what they don’t want.

Understanding what we’ve done

You may not realise that you will spend days and days looking for a profitable niche. You may feel like just launching a website on a subject anyway but you have to persevere because unless you can tick each of the boxes, it will not be a profitable niche.

• Popularity
• Competition
• Monetization

Once you have a few keywords that tick these boxes then you can proceed to dig deeper into the niche and use other tools to discover new keywords, the niche history and ultimately the content for your niche. If you’ve come this far and found something within these rules you have a good chance of a profitable website.

Researching Keywords

Keyword research is very similar to the techniques I talked about previously to discover a niche. Both go hand in hand but keyword research is a little more intensive as we try to discover more and dig deeper into a keywords profitability. This is where we start to use more advanced tools.

There are some amazing techniques some of the top earners use to discover the most profitable keywords. How they deploy the techniques depends on what type of website they are looking to create but all involve looking the same goal. Finding the most profitable keywords. We’re looking to build good foundations under our website so we’ll keep it as simple and quick as possible.

The tools I listed earlier which I’ve yet to mention will help us here. We’re still in the brainstorming process so after using Google Adwords Keyword Tool and exhausting their list we can type our main keyword into Freewords Keywordtracker or SEObook which will provide it’s own list of related keywords and daily search number. This is where we can use these tools inaccuracies to our advantage and discover some more keyword combinations!

Hopefully we will be able to brainstorm some new unthought-of keyword combinations from this and go back to cross check with the more accurate Google Keyword Tool. Keep this brainstorming process moving all the time and hopefully you’ll get a few gems. Think of what is related to your main keywords. Heck, I sometimes even combine random words with my main keywords just to see what appears.

I try combine my main keyword with other words. By typing them into one of the keyword tools it will generate a list of any searches involving those keywords. How cool is that?

To do this I try to use works like;

Why

How

Help

Treatment

Bad

Good

Season

Event

Fast

Quick

Easy

Easiest

Best

I even think of really random words which make no sense.

I will show you what I do. If “tattoo” is my generic keyword and I need keyword ideas I would go to SEObook and type in “why tattoo”.

This is the top result

why do people get tattoos – overall daily est 49

This isn’t bad at all, it’s only an estimate but 49 per day is a worthwhile. This would prompt me now to cross check the information with Google Keyword Tool since SEObook can be inaccurate.

Uh oh! It seems Google keyword tool says the approx avg volume is 1,000 and there’s not enough data for last months amount of searches. This is a good indication that it’s not going to perform very well. But now we can see another list of searches that people have typed in Google and the actual phrase “why tattoos” is apparently getting 4,400 per month. The previous month data is still not available so I would put this keywords and their relations in limbo for a while, the maybe pile. You just don’t know if creating an article for this keyword would be profitable or not.

The upside is you’re probably going to cover this keyword anyway because you’re bound to create an article about why people get tattoos anyway! If you find a lot of keywords like this it usually means there are searches being made for this keyword but they’re varied. Meaning the keywords are different each type they’re typed into Google search. The best thing you can do is optimize a page title to include these keywords in and Google should pick up on it anyway. These are the type of keywords you’ll use later to ramp up your site when you feel the need for more content and more coverage. At this stage you just want the keywords with good criteria(remember the boxes!)

If the keyword had been good and showed some search results for last month as well as this month I’d have gone through the process of doing an exact phrase match in Google to see if it’s competitive.

Results 1 - 100 of about 2,820 for “why do people get tattoos“. (0.48 seconds)

Cool! After checking Google it becomes apparent that it’s not competitive at all.

For me personally after looking at the competition, I would put this at the bottom of my “to do” list because it’s going to be very easy to rank for, but I’m not so sure about the amount of searches I will get. We just can’t take the information for granted that the tools are giving us for this keyword, but I think it would be worthwhile creating some content eventually.

Using Micro Niche finder can really speed up this process, it uses Google owns keyword tool and can display a list of keywords and the exact phrase match next to it. I love this tool and it saves a hell of a lot of time. I can almost see within 5 mins how much work it would take to make a profitable website in a niche.

Google Insights can show you how a keyword is performing over a period of time. Use this to check if your keyword is temperamental or seasonal. If it’s in decline or becoming more popular. This is particularly good for growing markets, if you can see a good steady increase in this keywords popularity over the past 4 years then it’s a good bet it’s only going to get better. If you’re a real long term you could deploy a website and be top of the game ready for the next 4 years. My second website achieved this and I’m gradually noticing and increase in visitors over months and months of recorded statistics.

Advanced Techniques

There are a lot of advanced techniques for researching a niche and I honestly don’t know many but I know there are some ingenious ways people discover gaps in the market. Some of the lengths the real earners go to are amazing.

One of the recent techniques which inspired me, these are his own words.

************

“I start with keyword lists from adsenseheaven dot com which guesstimates the most expensive keywords to bid on in the PPC AdWords side of the Google ad world. I generally ignore the top 1000, as they are very competitive and saturated. I am not concerned with the top payouts.

I store this data every month in a mySQL database with the previous months data, and over time I am able to see which phrases are consistently in the lists and unlikely to disappear. I call them long term performers.

I cross check each phrase with the number of pages currently indexed in google, to see how much competition there is for a each key phrase. It’s usually easier to land a top 10 first page SERP position if there is less competition for the phrase.

I also cross check each phrase with google trends data which has an RSS feed which is also collected and stored in a seperate SQL database hourly. If an adsenseheaven keyphrase is found to appear in my Google trends history database, it’s flagged as hot. If there’s less than a million indexed pages it’s further flagged as a top candidate for a dedicated microsite armada.

Once a month after the new list is released I analyze the data after it’s been processed and I pick a shortlist of hot key phrases that I am going to ramp up over the next few weeks.

For this lesson the phrase I’ve selected is ‘Acai Berry’.

The estimated cost for the top position according to the adsense heaven list is $19, and it also appears multiple times in my Google trends history data. That means I’m probably going to make at least $5 for each AdSense click, and there’s a lot of people searching for it.”

**********

This guy makes up to 15k a month on adsense alone. I hope now you can see the importance of good research.

Another advanced technique is to use Googles QDF to your advantage. You can find more information about this here http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/using-google-query-deserves-freshness-model/306/