Upside Downturn

I thought that I’d do a post on how I made www.lightweightlaptops.co.uk number 1 in Google’s search results for a niche, and as such it generates me up to £200 a month in revenue. I take you through the steps so you too can create nice little side revenue streams. Which should be welcome in this economic climate.

Brainstorm

So first, keep a notebook and brainstorm ideas that come to you as you are going through your day. Your goal is to think of niche’s within bigger search groups, or emerging markets that are likely to be bigger in the not-to-distant future.

Over 12 months ago, I could see that netbooks were emerging on the scene, and I thought, ‘well people are going to be searching google for these little things’. Rather than a site on the perhaps larger search term “netbooks”, I targeted a similar meaning but nich-ier target “lightweight laptop”.

So collect your ideas, whether they are “Scottish antiques”, “costa tropical hotels”, “washroom hand dryers”, “garden hoses”, “shitake mushroom kits” or “selvedge jeans”, Really think about anything and then think of a sub-branch of that idea.

Research

So you’ve got a list of say 15-20 ideas to look at. Your goal is to now find out 3 things:

1) Does the niche have traffic from google?
2) Is it crackable? In other words: is it possible to get to first page of google?
3) Would it be possible to monetize, once you have visitors

So let’s take “washroom hand dryers” and type it into google’s keywords tool:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

It says that there are an average of 73 searches a month, and 210 searches last month for this keyword. However, it now identifies related keywords, that might be worth targeted. It illustrates that “hand dryers” has 9,900 searches a month. A worthy target!

So then we go onto checking in it’s crackable. We do 2 basic things, first we check how many results it returns in your countries google. E.g Make sure you select “results from pages in uk”. Put the term in quotes (“hand dryers”) to limit the results to more relevant sites, and you get 38,400 results.

And also we get the web page result that’s 7th- 10th on the 1st page of google, and paste it into yahoo’s site explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ ). This will then give you a guide to how many sites link to this site, and approximately how authoritative google perceives it. In this case, the 8th result in google (www.o3solutions.com/) has 71 inlinks from sites other than itself.

Is it worth it?

Now assuming that you got the traffic, is it possible to monetise this “hand dryers” niche? You could check out affiliate sites like affillatewindow.com or tradedoubler.com to see if there is a commercial vendor offering an affiliate scheme for commercial hygiene equipment. Or you figure, that once you’ve got the traffic you will approach independent retailer, and offer them your leads, for a commission.

Either way you gotta do the math. In the case of “lightweight laptops” 5,000 people a month searching generates 5-10 affiliate sales a month. So that’s a particularly low 1 in 500-1000 visitors produces a sale. So with hand dyers, if you sold 5-10 products a month. Would that be worth it if you were getting 10% from a sale? A hand dryer costs £200, so 10% is £20 x 5 to 10, so between £100-200 a month revenue.

Compile and compare

So you should create a table, or an excel spreadsheet of all your targets and new ones you find as you go through it, and you can then compare and choose:

With all your 20 keyword targets side-by-side, and the new related ones you’ve found, it should be clearer which one to target.

Of course there are some nuances to the tools mentioned above, but they are fairly easy to get to grips with.

So buy a domain & build a website

Now you’ve chosen your target, you should think carefully about the domain, and include the keywords in it if possible. Perhaps handDryersReviewed.com might be a good choice. You then want to set up a site, Wordpress is a good CMS that’s easy to setup, and choosing, and customising a relevant template is easy.

It’s worth at this stage knowing more how google ranks content, this is the best snapshot guide that tells you all about what’s important from title tags to image names: http://www.webconfs.com/15-minute-seo.php

Don’t forget to add google analytics, and a sitemap registered with google webmaster tools.

What’s your content plan?

So, blimey you’ve got a niche a domain and are ready to add content. You could write it all yourself, or perhaps you can place an ad on www.getafreelancer.com, and find someone on the other side of the world that will write for you for $6 an article. So best start as you mean to go on. I mean, are you really going to have the time to write 2-5 articles a month? Best just for you to plan the articles and outsource them to someone else.

Also remember, that genuine content brings genuine visitors. So really do think of real content around your topic.

Link build

You’ve got to now build links. I reckon the best way to start of with is to this yourself, aim for 2-5 links a week and you’ll soon build up inlinks. Some of the easiest strategies are, commenting on relevant blogs and forums or adding your site to relevant directories. Also look at your competitors sites via yahoo site explorer, where are they getting links from

You can then outsource this to someone on getafreelancer.com once you’ve got a style of link building.

Wait….

So you’ll need to keep monitoring your site, adding new content and link building for 4-6 months, but you should see it gradually creep up google, monitor it both in Analytics and Webmaster tools. You can of course start the next project so you are building up multiple revenue streams.

Page 1!

So there, once you are on page 1 of google, it is worth reviewing how you were going to monetize the site. So now plug in that affiliate, or cut a deal for leads from the site, or perhaps even sell it lock stock to a competitor. Good luck.

Paolo ecommerce, marketing, planning