Diary of a Niche Site Duel

Thanks to those who responded to last weeks survey. Although the number of responses were less-than-stellar it was enough to provide me an indication of visitor interests, so thanks again. If you missed please check it out it will only take about 30 seconds of your time. I’ll be posting up some of those results and delivering more content around those topics in a future post.

Participating in the Niche Site Dual

Today I’ll be going into depth about a new affiliate site project that I’ve been working on. My first project as some of you might already know was CarInsuranceQuoter.com, an affiliate based business website model that I built on and off and finally completed recently to a mixed degree of success. The biggest mistake I made was going into a market I knew nothing about, had little interest in, and was insanely competitive. A year later I’m fair bit wiser and  much more scrupulous in my process of market selection.

The subject of niche affiliate sites isn’t a topic I’ve written about before but quite frankly it deserves a lot more attention. As I’m constantly reviewing different internet business models the affiliate niche sites always comes up for many business-people as the preferred choice of income. Note this post will be a bit longer today so I apologize for the length in advance =)

What sparked me to actually document this new project was a post on Pat Flynn’s awesome blog Smart Passive Income where he wrote about entering into a challenge with blogger Tyrone Shum ,who writes about outsourcing and automation. They challenged each other their readers to develop a profit generating mini-business. I thought this was a pretty cool challenge and decided to give it a go myself. As I embark on this challenge I’ll be documenting as much of the process as possible in blog posts.  I’m pretty much in the same boat as Pat and Tyronne as I’m pretty fairly inexperienced in the ways of building niche sites so its going to be fantastic experiment and learning experience.

Hopefully readers can derive some value from this too. I’ll take you through my process for researching my niche, how I built the site, and how I plan to generate traffic. Some of the methods I talk about here are not only good for niche sites but the keyword research process is applicable to any business which markets itself online. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to drop me a line.

You can check out the introductory post about the challenge on Pat’s blog – Niche Site Duel: I’ve Been Challenged…and I Accept

Two Different Approaches

The great thing about this challenge is the two main “duelers” Pat and Tyrone are both very talented and experienced in their own rights, but are actually quite new to niche marketing and have taken two very different approaches to this challenge. Pat Flynn is an experienced blogger and has built several successful internet businesses is a taking a more grassroutes approach and actually doing all of the work himself.  Tyrone on the other hand is approaching the way most marketers do and that’s by outsourcing a large portion of the work.

It’s been interesting watching their progress, as both confessed they initially screwed up their niche selection which is testament to the challenging nature of this process. You don’t want to invest a ton of Time, Energy and Action into a niche that may not be profitable to you.

My approach has been a hybrid and Pat and Tyrone’s, in that I decided to do all of the legwork myself with the exception of writing articles which I outsourced to incredible copywriter from South Africa. More of that later.

Market Research

My process niche selection wasn’t very scientific. I wanted to get into a market that was popular yet but not yet saturated with information products. One info product site that you’ll often hear about is Clickbank, which is a huge marketplace of information products. The difference is you don’t buy anything at Clickbank. Clickbank is a marketplace for marketers to find products to sell and receive a commission on that sale. That way both the creator and the seller get paid on the sale and Clickbank takes its own small cut. Call it Win-Win-Win.

The product I settled on was strategy guide for Starcraft 2 due to its high gravity, relative low number of competing marketers, and because Starcraft 2 is the hottest game out there right now. As any marketer will tell you, never get into a market that you’re not at least somewhat interested in. I’m not really the gamer I used to be but I’ve always been interested in strategy games. If you’re not familiar with Clickbanks gravity score, they don’t explain what it is that clearly at Clickbank but I’ve learned that its the approximate number of sales that product has made in the last week by all the affiliates. Generally when selecting a product on Clickbank the higher the gravity the better because its an indication that people are actually buying large quantities of the product.

Keyword Research

Once I selected the product I had to do keyword research to understand which keywords I would actually have a chance of ranking for. For this I used Adam Short’s matrix for selecting keywords that have low competition but have a significant amount of searches. Here’s a reproduction of the matrix in Google Docs that I kindly borrowed from Adam’s excellent webinar to Yaro Starek’s readers.

The number of monthly searches (left column) indicates the number of monthly searches a particular keywords receives per month.

The number of search engine results (top row) indicates the number exact keyword results that keyword receives in Google. In other words its the number of sites in Google that are competing for that particular keyword. The way to use this Matrix is very simple:

1) Load up the Google Keyword tool and ensure your search location is set to global.

2) Type in your keyword, then sort by Global Monthly Results. Record the number of monthly results for that keyword.

3) Type in your keyword in Google with quotation marks – ie. “Starcraft 2 Strategy Guide” – including quotations. Record the number of search results.

So in researching keywords for my niche, I discovered that Starcraft 2 strategy guide (the most obvious keyword) had a good volume of searches per month at 3900. When I researched the competitiveness of the keyword by putting the quotes around the keyword in Google I discovered that there were over 500,000 different results in Google meaning there were over 500,000  sites on the internet competing for that keyword. Plugging in those two figures in the above matrix – that keyword receives a POOR score because the chances of my site getting ranked in the top 10 search results is slim to none.

So after a fair amount of digging around with the Google keyword tool I settled on a keyword that had good monthly search volume and low relative competition – Starcraft strategies, which landed at over 22,000 searches per month but only 4500 results on Google. This means a lot of people are searching for information but few sites are ranked for that keyword.

Choosing a Domain

I decided Starcraft Strategies would be an excellent choice of keyword despite the fact that it doesn’t have the number 2 in it (as in Starcraft 2, which is a gamble I suppose). I chose it as my theme keyword which is basically a keyword that best describes your site, fulfils the above matrix criteria,  and one that you could purchase a domain for. I knew there was no decent Starcraft 2 domains to be purchased that had Starcaft 2 and strategy in it, and that was a Dot Com domain.

I used my trial version of Market Samurai to test which domains were available for my keywords. I decided that getting a good keyword in my domain name was more important than getting a less-than-stellar domain name for a more exact keyword.  Will this strategy pay-off? Time will only tell. For a rundown on Market Samurai check out Pat’s post on the subject if your interested.

I purchased my domain and hosting from BlueHost which I deemed far superior than GoDaddy. I’m a big fan of buying domains from BlueHost – even though they are slightly more expensive ($10 vs. $6-8 elsewhere), I love having all my domains in one place and they make domain management incredibly simple. Click here to find out more about BlueHost and their excellent hosting and domain capabilities. The cost of hosting here was $6.95 per month.

Generating Content

Once I had my domain I needed to get content generated. I decided that I would contract the services of a writer through Elance for 7 articles based on keywords that I already chose. These articles would serve as categories on my website and are related to my theme keyword. Generally its recommended that your articles are between 500 and 750 words and are written in a conversational style. One of the best pieces of advice that I ever received on writing articles and blog posts was that you should write as if you’re talking to a friend. It makes your writing far more personable. I ended negotiating 7 600 word articles for $12 each. Total: $84

Two days later I had my content written. In the meantime I began generating my own content for the mini-course.

The Money Is In List

If you’re not familiar with the mini-course concept you’ve no doubt seen it before without even realizing it. A mini-course is essentially a series of emails set to you about a particular topic over a set period of time. I use the excellent Aweber for this purpose.

Many bloggers use this method as promotional tools to offer valuable content and information to visitors who have “opted in” to receive email marketing. They are then offered subtle lead-ins to buy products and services Sometimes it’s done very overtly – like overly used ‘impending deadline’ style of selling, and sometimes its far more subtle but the concept remains the same.

This drip campaign style of marketing has proven to be very effective. Of course you can’t provide them with that information without collecting their email address. When a visitor opts-in with their email address the autoresponder then cues a series of emails that are timed to be sent once a day or once a month, whatever. These days most email marketing happens through opt-in permission based marketing, which I’ve written about before.

The mini-course is just another form of email marketing except I’m offering a daily lesson about some kind of aspect of Starcraft strategy, such as building strategy, race vs. race strategy, beginner build orders, and so forth. My goal here from the start is to provide as much valuable information as possible that is packaged and delivered in a way that unobtrusive and subtlety promotes my offering.

For this mini-course I wrote 10 daily lessons in a Word document over the course of an afternoon based on research I did from a variety of sources. After completing the content I subscribed to Aweber, one of the defacto newsletter providers available and is by far the most popular, and a favorite amongst the blogging and marketing community.

Choosing a WordPress Theme

For the design I chose Adam Short’s excellent Niche Profit Press WordPress theme. Unfortunately its only available if your a member of his site. I choose this because of its easy customization, built in plugins, and it offers a choice for 1 column and 2 column design. Having a 1 and 2 column design will allow me to test two distinct styles and see which one works better.

Up next I plan to add graphics, functionality to the autoresponder, and complete the 2 column design. For traffic building I plan to do a combination of article marketing and link building and I may even play around a bit with Google Adwords.