Niche Marketing

How to Find Profitable Niches

In my last post I gave you a number of links to check out in order to show you how niche markets can be set up as well as the types of topics you can use. In truth you can find a niche for just about everything but finding a niche that can make money is the hard part. I approach niche marketing in reverse - I look for something that I can sell and then create the niche around it.

I have four primary revenue streams online. Adsense, Affiliate Sales, Advertising and Lead Generation. Before I decide on a niche I make sure that there is at least one revenue stream that will work with the niche. Preferably two. In most cases a site set up for Adsense will also work well with affiliate sales. Advertising and capturing leads also work fairly well together. As a rule I don't usually have more than two revenue streams on a site as it tends to disperse traffic rather than channel it. I will explain this further as we go.

My process for finding niches and how to monetize them always starts with Adsense.

Adsense niches are the easiest to find. This requires little more than Google and a couple of keyword tools like SEO and Keyword Elite. Every time I Google a term I pay attention to the paid sponsors listed in the right hand column. If I see a full page or more of advertisers then I run a keyword list and see how many searches are performed each month for the main keyword and the long tails. Next I check out the CPC that the advertisers are paying. If the numbers look promising then I use SEO Elite to check out the competition listed on page 1 of the serp's - the pagerank and the backlinks each site has. This tells me how much work is involved in overtaking them.

This may surprise you but most niches don't have a lot of strong competition - usually only two or three of the sites have any knowledge of SEO. If you have read my blog then you should be able to spot an optimized site from an un-optimized site. I don't have to read more than the URL, Blog Title and Post Title to tell and you shouldn't either.

If I find a keyword that can be optimized for Adsense and lacks strong competition re: Search Engine Optimization, I then go back to the sponsored advertisers listed on Google's right hand column. Are they affiliate advertisers? Are they corporate advertisers? Are they brick and mortar companies offering a service? Are they selling a product they produce? While Adsense is a nice little money maker it pales in comparison to what you can earn with affiliate sales or even the right kind of advertising.

Ideally you want to dominate a niche that involves corporate advertising as this is where the big money is. I learned this quite by accident.

An Example.

My Best niche is in the Fishing industry. I started the site as a simple Adsense earner as there are hoards of searches and tons of advertisers selling everything from fishing trips to fly rods. The niche also allowed me to incorporate affiliate sales as there is no shortage of fishing related books and products available. More money is spent on Golf and Fishing each year than any other sport. The long and short of this story is that as I climbed the serp's my Adsense revenue grew nicely but my affiliate sales really sucked. I made a new friend recently online, Mike who is in the Golf niche and he mentioned that the niche sucked because 60 year old men don't buy anything online. I laughed because I found out the same thing goes for fishing.

Had the Adsense not been working I would have abandoned the site. I changed direction and stopped writing affiliate sales articles and started writing Adsense articles. Lots and lots of really loooooooooong articles with every fishing related term I could think of. This got me indexed for all sorts of keywords and weird phrases which, in turn brought in more visitors who clicked my Ads in order to escape.

I have mentioned writing long articles before. This isn't a good idea if you are writing for readers but it is a killer strategy with Adsense. Two things always happen - your search traffic increases and you find new profitable keywords that you would never have thought of. A new keyword is a "Niche" btw. This is how I find most of my niches. It's how I have found all my profitable ones.

I am mentioning this because I know some of you won't create the kind of niches that Vic and Court have been discussing on their sites. Some of you probably don't have the time or interest in creating niche blogs. You already have a site that you have invested time in and have an interest in the subject matter. It's always easier to write about something you are interested in. This tactic is for you but you have to decide whether you want readers or money.

One of the byproducts of my long fishing articles was a surge in traffic for various terms that, while related to each other, weren't exactly related to the fishing niche directly. These indirect keywords were featured in their own posts and after gathering a few choice links they began bringing in more traffic than my fishing terms. I had stumbled upon a side niche that I would never have thought of on my own. As it turned out these readers weren't 60 year old men - they were wives and kids of the 60 year olds and they belonged to the category of people who do spend money online. Although I had ceased writing affiliate articles, my affiliate links were still on my sidebar and suddenly sales trickled in. Now I am not going to give away my niche but keep in mind that people will buy gifts for 60 year old men who like to fish. I had been targeting the wrong people when I started the site. In the end I took over the top four spots on the serp's for my keywords and this drew the attention of several corporate marketing types who had been unable to rank well with their own websites - the very people who produced the products that I outranked them for. Love it when that happens. If you can't beat me then join me and I now run very profitable ads sponsored by the top four corporate entities in the field.

I dropped the affiliate links in order to channel my traffic towards the advertisers - with what they pay I want to make sure that they get their money's worth and this can't be done if your traffic is dispersed by way of too many options. I still keep Adsense on the site and it makes a full time income on it's own. I am still writing huge posts and collecting new keywords to target. The niche is so vast that there is almost no limit to how much search traffic I can generate.

Now, I have brought this up so that those of you who have been blogging aimlessly (I mean that only in terms of not being optimized for anything that people search for) can start optimizing your existing blogs for terms that will draw traffic. It's never too late to do this and if you already have an aged site with a little PR this will be easier than starting over with a new blog.

This is how you create a multi-niche site. I now have 5 of these types of sites - all started out focused on a large general niche and then morphed into numerous side niches, some directly related and some not really related at all.

This blog is one of them. I started a campaign on here to target the term "Payday Loans". This niche is not related to the "make money online" niche and yet I have successfully added it to this blog. At the moment I rank on page 3 for payday loans but more than that I have keyword authority for hundreds of payday loan long tail terms. I am currently getting 40-50 visitors a day for these terms and the adsense CPC for this niche is in the $1.20 - $3.00 range - much higher than the CPC on my "make money" pages. While hard to nail down I estimate an additional Adsense earnings of about $5-$10 a day from this - all from writing 5 articles on the subject. This in spite of the fact that I am not ranking very well for the main keywords yet - but I will and my Adsense earnings will only keep growing.

A Word about Long Tail Keywords

The "make money online" niche has a limited number of long tails. By this I mean there are less than 200 variations of keywords people use to find this site. How many ways can you think of to ask Google to find you sites that help people make money online? In truth only about 15-20 keyword phrases are used in any meaningful amount. I rank on page 1 for almost all of them and traffic amounts to about 800 visitors a day if I combine all the terms used to find my blog. There is some room to grow but not much - it will probably top out at about 1200 or so visitors a day. Now compare this to Payday Loans. I keep track of long tail terms in all my niches. I paste them in notebook and note all the terms that are used more frequently than others - these are the terms I target with optimized backlinks in order to climb the serps. I quit counting the long tails for payday loans when they topped 300 different queries. I don't know how many ways you can ask Google about payday loans but every day I see a few new ones. The term "make money online" had a measly 15,000 searches last month and less than 30,000 searches if all the long tails are combined. See Below.

The Top Searches for "Make Money Online" last Month. (Click to Enlarge)



Compare that to people searching for Payday Loans and related long tails below.

The Top Searches for "Payday Loans" last Month. (Click to Enlarge)



How a Niche Evolves

I came across the Payday Loans niche because I had optimized a few pages for the term "Project Payday". I had chosen this program because it had a lot of searches at the time and I was looking for ways to monetize this blog. Turns out that Google considers the term Payday Loans to be related to "Project Payday" - it isn't but Google ranked my Project Payday pages high on the serp's for people searching for payday loan long tails. I noticed traffic showing up using payday loan queries and morphed my site in that direction - all because of writing posts on a topic that had nothing to do with payday loans other than the word "Payday". This is exactly the same way I came across the un-related niche on my fishing site. Below you will see the top keywords for the term "Project Payday".


Project Payday Search Queries



Another product I had targeted was "Roadmap to Riches" which sent me traffic for various "related terms" like "Make Money" and plain old "Money" - terms I hadn't been targeting with my "make money online" campaign. Both terms get more traffic than "make money online" and I added them to my list of targeted backlinks. I'm 15 in the serp's for "Make Money" and this has added another 18,000 potential visitors to my site. I will be adding more terms like "Business Opportunities" and others in future and this is how I grow a multi-niche site sideways. By continually adding targeted keywords you can build a huge amount of traffic to a blog that started out as a single keyword niche. This works best for blogs that have a general keyword niche like "Fishing" or "Plumbing" or "make money online". It doesn't work well with narrowly defined niches like "Croc Shoes".

Roadmap to Riches Search Queries



How effective is this. Look below and see what my visitors are searching for when they land on this blog.

Searches used to find this blog during the past hour.





This is what the traffic looks like all day long. This isn't you - my readers - this is all organic traffic provided by mostly Google. It keeps coming everyday - whether I post or not and it makes me money.

Monetization Techniques.

Both the Project Payday and Roadmap to Riches posts were written as negative reviews of the products. So how do you make money if you don't have an affiliate link? I'll tell you. If all the pages on page 1 of the serp's are affiliate sites then you can get to page 1 fast by writing an article that doesn't have an affiliate link. I have talked about this before but simply put Google will strive to give the person searching for information the most options available on the topic. A negative review is considered just as important as a positive review - shouldn't people be given both sides of a story?

This is how to rank high - so how do you profit from this? The plan was to force the owners of the programs to pay me off. What? I'm not a saint. I'm on here to make money. By turning people off of buying these products I had hoped the owners would have enough business sense to approach me and make me an offer in order to change my stance and funnel my traffic to them. Keep in mind that I didn't have any readers back then - just search traffic and ethically speaking I couldn't care less if I made money off of search traffic that I didn't know. This is one of the reasons it is hard to make money and have social traffic. I would never screw my readers so I have had to shelve a very profitable revenue stream on this blog - affiliate sales.

So did my plan work? Partly. Project Payday quit trying to sell a worthless ebook full of links for $35.00. Instead they offered their updated system free of charge if people would fill out an offer instead. (This involves IFW's - another subject I won't go into today.) They are paid by the companies making the offers for each person who takes out a trial membership in some product. Project Payday in turn set up a pay per lead program to attract leads. I changed my stance and now I am one of their best lead generators. They pay me $3.00 for every person I send to their site that fills out a free trial. This is a form of Lead Generation and has netted me about $1400 over the past three months. Not bad for writing a couple of articles.



The Roadmap to Riches plan didn't work - the owner of the program was apparently to dense to figure out how to do business online and the program never took off like it could have if he had got my help - oh well. It's all about experimentation. This tactic has worked quite often in my other niches and as unethical as it may seem - it's business and you may as well know some of the tricks of the trade if you are pursuing a career online. Your choice if you want to try this - just showing you some options, after all I'm the kind of person you will be competing with.

Ok I have rambled all over the place in attempting to show you how I find niches. This can't be helped as it isn't just a simple matter of picking a highly searched term and optimizing for it. You have to work in monetization factors right from the start and you have to know if there is room to grow the niche laterally in order to keep expanding. This is the opposite of most niche marketers who focus on a narrow subject and rinse and repeat from one keyword to the next. Both systems work but since Vic and others are showing how to do local niches I thought I might show a different angle to niche marketing. For those of you with sites already established you can try and morph into new terrain without starting over. I recommend both single niche and multi niche blogs as each offers their own unique forms of monetization and you want to spread your revenue streams around as much as possible.

I will be continuing the topic of niches in future posts but next up I want to discuss some of my recent findings in regards to Adsense and Social Traffic. My findings may surprise a few people - it surprised me.

Till then,

Cheers.

Griz