Niche Blogs Tutorial 1 – Choosing the Right Keywords

Hi, sorry for the delay in creating this step-by-step tutorial for creating niche blogs. Many things (both good and bad) have happened in my family these few weeks. First, my second daughter was born 6 weeks ago. Then she had high fever and was admitted to hospital last week.

Today she looks much better.

Next, one of my favorite uncles peacefully passed on in his sleep three days ago. He suffered heart attack. It was VERY shocking to me because he was still well last week and he drove us to the hospital last week. So right now, we were really busy at the funeral.

Even though I was very busy, I had an hour of resting time before helping out again and I decided to create this tutorial now, as promised.

As you know, we have been actively creating our network of niche blogs. Now we have hundreds of them. We work as a team and we had developed a more efficient system (after encountering many challenges, failures and difficulties.)

Though to set up the system is very hard, it is quite easy to manage it once it has been set up. I will do my best to explain as clearly as possible. If you have any question, feel free to post in the comment section at the bottom of this post.

In short, there are 5 steps to this system.

1. Niche research – done by me and my partner

2. Site set up and content creation – done by my virtual assistants

3. On-page and off-page seo – done by my virtual assistants

4. Maintenance and tracking of keywords performance – done by me and my partner

5. Selling earning blogs to our customers – done by me and my partner

Now, to start off explaning “Niche research”, here are the 7 steps which we have followed closely to generate hundreds of niche blogs so that we can flip them after they are earning revenue.

In fact, the list of top selling products (known as best sellers) is already available in a big online library. Check out Amazon.com, one of the largest online market places. Search for 10 popular products ideas from Amazon Best Sellers.

You can research on anything that interest you. There are many niches (as shown on the left sidebar) that you can choose from. If you are a cycling enthusiast, you can consider bicycle niche. Or if you love computers, you can explore “Computers & Accessories” niche. Do spend an hour or two to check out some of these niches. You may be surprised by what will interest you.

Click on the links on the left side to explore more.

For this tutorial, let’s work on the cat’s niche. I love cats, so do my 2 year old daughter. I have specially selected this kitty camper based on two criterias. Firstly, I know cat lovers will invest in getting comfortable cat beds for their cats. Secondly, there are over 46 reviews shown and there is a rating of 4.5 given. So this is a pretty popular niche and people are buying them (and reviewing them too.)

Next, once you have selected a niche. Go to Google.com to check if there is any ad being run for this niche. This step is very important. If you see ads, it means there are exisitng advertisers and this niche is profitable such that the sellers are still running ads and paying for them.

This is what you should see if you put in the seed keywordd – “cat beds”. There are ads above and on the right side of the organic search results.

Next, you will need to check the CPC (cost per click) of the keyword to decide if it is worth your time and money to invest in this niche. According to Google, this is what CPC means.

“The cost-per-click (CPC) is the amount you earn each time a user clicks on your ad. The CPC for any ad is determined by the advertiser; some advertisers may be willing to pay more per click than others, depending on what they’re advertising. “

Go to Google Keyword Tool. Make sure you log in with your email and password so that you can view the CPC.

Do make sure your CPC is at least $1.00 and the Global Monthly Searches is more than 1000.

Once you click on “Search”, you will be shown a list of related keywords.

Click on the keyword and click on “Google Search” Check out the “Google Search” of those keywords which are made up of at least 2 words. This is to help you chunk down further and explore any possible micro niche.

You will see the following page. You will also see relevant Google ads.

1. From my experience, root domains are difficult to beat in the results. For example, they are getresponse.com or groupon.com

2. However, if you see subfolder like www.domain.com/subfolder.html, you may be able to outrank the listing. It is important to check if your keyword is part of the url. If it is, it would not be favourable.

3. If you see e-commerce stores like Amazon, they may be easy to beat. Do check if the specific page is not SEO-optimized.

4. Product or service sites specifically selling the items you are searching for are generally hard to displace. If your first 3 results are companies in this niche, look elsewhere.

5. In general, classified sites and forums posts are easy to outrank. Likewise, content sites like article directories are easy to beat.

Let’s analyse the first 3 organic results.

Hidytidy.com has the keyword we are tring to rank in the title, page and the URL. This is not good.

It is possible to outrank a squidoo lens. You will need to analyse the backlinks linking to this page.

Petsmart.com has a page that is not SEO optimized very well. So beating it looks promising.

And you can see the first three results. This looks good and bad.

Let’s check out the other results. And they look pretty good to us. There are a few pages with the keyword in their titles and that is not good. At the same time, there are some other weak pages. So this is a potential keyword to be added into your list.

Looking at the last result, it is not well optimized for the keyword “cat little box furniture”. And they managed to hit page one. So we will need to check the results on page 2 if their websites are strong or weak competitors.

Next, go to Namecheap.com and find out if the exact match domain is available.

You should go for .com, .net or .org If .com is already taken, go for .net or .org
If these three domains are already taken, you can add a “v” or “x” at the end of the domains.

Carrying out these 7 steps, though defined, are very time consuming. If you follow these steps and if you are a beginner, you may need at least half an hour to find a niche. In actual fact, you will need to generate a list of about 10 to 15 niches to find one domain that may be worth looking into.

Honestly, niche research is one of the most frustrating processes we have to go through. Once, we spent an hour to research on a very promising keyword (with a very high CPC) but it turns out that the other sites are very strong, competition is too tense and the domain is not available.

An easy way out is to outsource this process to virtual assistants. But this step is the most crucial step because finding the wrong keyword can lead to the subsequent failure of the niche blog and you will end up not earning a single cent. If we want to succeed in building profitable niche blogs, we have to take control of this step.

I understand that most of you are holding on to a full time job and some of you will also need to take care of your kids or cookonce you reach home. So you may not have the time to find 10 to 15 niches a day. This will require to spend at least 5 to 7 hours a day.

So what can be done to solve these problems?

One of the solutions will be to find a reliable and fast software which can speed up and automate most of the steps. The best method will be to be able to:
– include the seed keyword and the criteria for the search results (step 4 to step 6)
– generate a list of available exact match domains (step 7)

In fact, we are already using a very powerful third-party paid software that allows us to find 10 to 15 niches under 30 mins. This cuts down our research time by at least 8 times.