Hello everyone! Long time lurker here, first time poster. I have been trying to learn more about SEO and building a profitable niche site. Unfortunately, this seems to be more of an art than a science and requires quite a bit of trial and error. I have recieved, reading these forums, lots of useful tidbits of information and I am now going to try and capitalize on them, hopefully with the help of this forum. I want to create a niche site and market it to see how much advertising revenue it can bring in. I want to discuss each aspect of the site such as ad layout, what ads to use, marketing on these forums and use some of the suggestions to build the site. I have registered a new domain name and set a quick website last night to follow the progress of this new experiment. You can see it at: http://www.parttimeseo.com (can't live link yet) First Order of Business: How do you decide on a niche? From what I have read, you logically want to pick something that (a) you like (b) has a fairly high search rate (c) has a high per click adword costs. So, my initial idea is to go to the overture keyword tool (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/) and search for topics that interest me. Question: What is the minimum number of monthly searches that you would touch with a niche? Once I have that term, I go to the google adword suggestion tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) and type it in to see what kind of pay per click cost it has. Question: What is the minium cost per click that you would touch with a niche site? Do you use flat amounts with each of these when deciding a niche, or do you have a ration of searches to payout that you use? If you are the first to suggest an idea that I use, I'll credit you in my blog and link to your site.
I would use www.Symbiotic.com to compare the relative values of keywords you are interested in. Look at the Lowest Cost/Per Day as this combines the Cost/Click and Clicks/Day. Bare in mind that you own revenues will be much lower than this, but it will let you decide which keywords might be best to concentrate on. The site will also show you Related Keywords, which you'll want to check out too. Good luck! Cryo.
well, after 3-4 months of working on my General Link Directory i now get 200 searches/month only from google i haven`t used adwords campains or something, only part time seo i had adsense click of 5 cents, minimum, also har adsense clicks of $1.5 and once a $2 but it was from the Adsense for Search.
Cryo, Nice suggestion. I used the tool at Symbiotic.com to search for niches that interest me. I found one with the following stats: Low Cost/Click: $2.66 Low Clicks/Day: 2828 Based on my other searches, that seems to be a moderate payout and a decent traffic combination. That comes to a total possible income pool of $7522.48. I know I won't get all of those clicks or near the full $2.66. However, looking at this number vs other keywords that had a lower "pool" should mean that this is the better niche, correct? I found one that had a low cost/click of $20. However, the clicks/day were at 0.8, which means a total pool of $16. It is this ratio or "pool" that is the best way to compare possible niches, correct? Cryo, I am going to post this tool on the parttimeseo.com site. I'm going to give you credit for the suggestion. Any particular site of yours you want me to link to in the credit? The #1 result in google for my niche is a pagerank of 5. Good, but not unbeatable. There are many topics in my niche that could be easy material. There are many related niches that have less clicks, but higher payout.
A pool of $7500 is reasonable, though some niches can get 5 or 6 figures. You might want to look at the number of search results for the same keywords (aka Keyword Effectiveness Index), and see if you can figure out how many people you have to share the pool with. This may show a relatively low paying niche to be worthwhile after all. Thanks for the over of a link, I'll PM you with some details. Cryo.
Cryo, Another good suggestion. I think my "niche" is a little too general based on the numbers. Google results for this term: 69,100,000 Using the overture keyword tool located at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ gives me 541,861 in the last month. By dividing the searches by the results, I get a keyword effectiveness index of: 0.0078. If I apply this to the "pool" of income on the keyword, I get what I am calling a "profitability index" (let me know if this actually has a name): .0078 x 7522.48 = 59 Question: What is an acceptable keyword effectiveness index to start a niche site?
You guys might want to check out a LIVE SEO experiment at seo-webmarketing.com. That's a full-time SEO experiment.
Hello! They're not convincing: on the Google results they show, there is no number of results nor number of the page where they "were" ranked. Did they intentionally quit the experiment? If you tape : "seo experiment" on Google, they're no longer there, maybe they're experiencing some temporary promblems?