Finding A Profitable Niche
Written By: Posted On: July 1, 2007 Tags:
Everyone knows Chow has been on a massive link-back building campaign to rank for the keywords “Make Money Online“. He recently reported that Google has given him a slap on the wrist for his self-admitted grayhat SEO tactics he used to get him to the top of SERPs in the first place. In his post “It’s All About Pushing The Limit“, he reports having only been getting 150 unique organic visitors per day for that particular keyword string.
“Make money online” is probably one of the most competitive keywords marketers shoot for, yet it only yields 150 per day for the #1 spot? That’s absurd. I know what most of the keyword research tools tell you the phrase gets per month, but Chow is talking from real-world experience and his word is likely to be true. Some may argue the string is important because visitors are ready to take action. I argue within every targeted niche, visitors are ready to take action.
A few months ago I was doing some keyword research and developed a site in a nice niche with little competition. I bought a few domains, put up a single optimized page, and over the last month have been getting much of the organic traffic that I was expecting.
This particular one page site (which I must mention the topic can be spread in so many directions, it’s insane) has garnered me over 15k uniques (strictly organic) during the month of June. So, what’s the lesson to be learned? Find your niche. Don’t always shoot for the most sought-after keywords or phrases, do lots of research and testing– and then launch.
Organic Traffic Is Reliable
In the above mentioned article, Chow recommends not relying on Google for your traffic. The fact is, organic traffic is reliable so long as you aren’t practicing shady tactics to get it. Obviously if you’re running a blackhat or grayhat SEO campaign, you can’t expect to stay #1 in SERPs forever. If you practice legitimate and methodological back-link building, page optimization, and advertising– you will be fine.
When the site is completed I will give you all an update with the URL and a full case study!
(I also must say I’ve finally hit the #1 in Google for ‘Scot Smith’)
Almost all of page 1 in Google SERPs for my name is a site owned by me, lol.
Rouhafzai is a pretty unique name
Smith, on the other hand… haha.
A lot of the highly competative terms have sites that have thousands of links with the same link text. I am trying to push them out the way, particularly if you are in the web industry.
Scot,
Have you been able to successfully monetize your niche site yet, or is it purely in traffic-generating mode currently?
Troy Rutter
Troy,
I haven’t optimized the site for monetization just yet.
It will be easy to monetize 1,000 uniques a day to start out with though, not too bad at all.
Hm, some niches can give you low traffic even if you’re ranked 1-st in Google. But this doesn’t have anything to do with potential income.
Regarding your traffic (15K), I would welcome some charts from G Analytics:). I am just curious how many visits come from Google vs. MSN vs. Yahoo.
Hey Jan,
90% of my traffic comes from Google, and about 8% from Yahoo. MSN doesn’t deliver much but I haven’t really honed in on MSN, either.
I’ll see about posting up some screen shots later on when I get some time!