ForTheLose.org

Note: This is part 2 of a 3-part post series about how I build my mini-websites. My goal is to inspire some people out there to stop procrastinating and start creating some decent websites. I aim to show them that it's really not as hard as they may think. Read part 1 here.

Hey guys. Sorry for the big break there between part 1 and part 2 of this series, I'm a bit busy outside of the internet right now. Anyway, lets get to discussing niche sites.

In part one, I gave a brief introduction to what this series is going to be about. I also explained what a niche site is as well as gave a link to one of my successful mini-sites. Check it out and refer back to it as I go on in this post - http://MyBombayCat.com.

How I Choose a Niche

Alright, let's get started. A niche is basically a "topic". In my last post, I used the example of "Sports > Baseball > Baseball Betting" as a decent niche. See, the smaller and more-focused the niche, the better your odds of ranking well in Google are (which should really be your number 1 goal, as that's how you'll be getting traffic).

Every site is a niche site, really. Take ForTheLose.org for example. This is basically a "Wordpress" niche website. Notice how if you search for "Wordpress themes" in Google, however, you won't even catch a glimpse of ForTheLose.org. You know why? Because the "Wordpress" niche is huge. There's really no way I can get to the first or second page on Google with that kind of search phrase.

For this exact reason, you want to find a small niche. For my Bombay cats website, I got the idea from, well, my cat. In all honesty, the idea to create MyBombayCat.com came when I saw my cat walk into my bedroom. After doing some research (which I'll go into detail with shortly), I found it to be a perfect niche to create a site in. The hierarchy of my site can go "Pets > Cats > Bombay Cats".

You can also get ideas from places like Amazon.com. (Bare with me here.) Go to Amazon.com and head over to something like the Best Selling Books, choose a category, and just read some of the book titles. Odds are if they're selling well in book-form, there's also a demand for the same topic online. Do some quick research and you'll have a perfect idea in no time.

How to Tell if a Niche is Profitable

Before I go into detail here, let's go over just a few of the methods you can use to receive a profit off of your websites:

Adsense (CPC ads)
Konera (in-text ads)
Clickbank (affiliate markets)
Sell your own products (ebooks, etc)

What do all of these methods have in common? That's right, they all require substantial amounts of traffic first. I think the best way to start off this short lesson is with an example first.

A "Wordpress"-niche website.

Search for "wordpress" in Google - ForTheLose.org nowhere in sight
Search for "wordpress themes" in Google - ForTheLose.org nowhere in sight
Search for "web design" in Google - ForTheLose.org nowhere in sight

MyBombayCat.com

A "Bombay cat"-niche website.

Search for "bombay cat" in Google - MyBombayCat.com fifth result on first page
Search for "bombay cat pictures" in Google - MyBombayCat.com sixth result on first page
Search for "british bombay cat" in Google - MyBombayCat.com fifth result on first page

So what's with this big difference between these two websites and how they each rank extremely different for their niche keywords in Google searches? The simple answer is because the "Wordpress" niche is huge and way too competitive to rank well in Google for, while the "Bombay cat" niche is small and a LOT less competitive.

Alright Ralph, how do you know when the niche you've selected is profitable and not already saturated?

Simple. Firstly, head over to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. This application is usually for people trying to enlist in the Google Adwords program. What we're going to do, however, is find just how popular this niche of yours is.

Once the page loads, put in a keyword, fill in the CAPTCHA code, and click "get keyword ideas". In my case, I put in "bombay cats" as my keyword.

Once the list of keywords is generated, sort them by Global Monthly Search Volume. What you're looking at is this number here. Anything over 600 - 1,500+ searches per month is a perfect keyword. (This means that this keyword is searched for that many times a month, averagely.)

You want about 5-10 keywords here before you go onto step two. Step two is relatively simple. Since you now know these keywords have a demand, you must now check whether or not they already have a supply. (Hopefully not.)

Now, head over to Google.com and put in each of your keywords one by one. If the keyword is more than one word, surround it with quotes. This is very important. What you're looking for on the Google search results page is how many pages Google has found surrounding that keyword.

In my case, I'll go ahead and Google "bombay cats". This is what I see:

Results 1 - 10 of about 15,500 for "bombay cats". (0.19 seconds)

The key number you're looking for here is 15,500. If this number is anywhere between 10,000 - 17,000 and the keyword has averagely about 1,200 searches per month (determined by the Google Adwords Keyword Tool from before), then that keyword is ripe for domination.

In my case, "bombay cats" returned about 4,400 searches per month with only 15,500 competing pages in Google. Perfect!

The goal here is to get about 5-7 keywords that fit into this range of numbers. Once you have them, you're basically guaranteed a successful niche site.

Buying a Domain Name

This section is very brief. Once you have all of your keywords and keyphrases selected out of Google, it's time to find a domain name. A perfect domain is roughly based upon these rules:

One or two words (not including a "the", etc...)
Preferably a .com
No dashes
Includes a keyword

Let's take a look at the MyBombayCat.com domain name for a second, shall we? Does it fit all of the qualifications from above? Why yes, yes it does. Perfect, no?

And there we have it. Part 2 of how I build my niche websites is all done for you guys. In the next few days I'll have part 3 up where I discuss, well, the rest of the process. This includes things like setting up Wordpress, designing a unique theme for the website, and more. Stay tuned!

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