Is it really worth it to dominate keyword phrases that only get about 1K searches per month? Even if you had 10 keywords, that's only 10K searches. That's not even clicks. Maybe you will get 50 clicks from 1K searches. 50 Clicks doesn't seem like enough to even get 1 or 2 sales, I know because I have to get hundreds of clicks from Adwords to get 1 sale sometimes.
50 clicks isn't really a way to test. Ad budget for testing niche's even small ones for me would be 500$ and definitely not with Adwords.
I'm talking about Organic Traffic. 50 clicks may be all you get per month. Especially if you are using SEO to target keywords that only get around 1,000 searches per month.
The point of dominating small niches is that you dominate a lot of them. It's easy to dominate for keywords and doesn't take as much work. You may get fewer visitors, but if you are dominating more than one (which you should be), it adds up. I build it, optimize it, promote it a bit, and move on. I check it in about a week and see how it's doing. If it's moving up the ranks then I let it be, if not I do more promotion. Once these niche sites settle on the first page (if optimized), they will stick for the most part. I will schedule a day occasionally where I check to see how they are doing. Probably a little more than you asked for, but just my two cents.
Well, it depends - as usual. Chances are pretty good that people click on your page if you dominate the niche (e.g. positioned in the top 3 in Google - you could get 25% of the search volume as traffic). After all, if people are searching for something they won't just close the search result page but click on a link. So - if you target 4 phrases with 1000 searches each you could get 1000 clicks to your page. Doesn't sound a lot? Again, it depends... Here comes the big secret: You can get 20%+ converting from good traffic if you target the right keywords. Target the keywords that indicate a conversion - e.g. target "buy best gas bbq" instead of "gas bbq" (stupid example, but you get the idea).
Well, dominating the small niches is one of the best way to start with online promotion. Here due to low competition it is considerable easy to rank soon for those keywords. Once going for small niches - promotion for highly searched keywords can be undertaken.