Niche and keyword selection is really hard for some people. I’ve written before about profitable niches and how I think a lot of marketers just don’t put in the work to find good keywords and niches. And my view all along is that what in doubt you start with the “big markets” where you know there’s going to be tons of traffic and interest. Heck even the US Government agrees with me 
So with all that said, let me give you a market, niche and killer keyword: heart monitor watches.
A small 10 page minisite built around that term can make you $750 – $1500 a month…
A 1 page microsite… $100 – $400.
Not bad really for a keyword and a minisite. And certainly within reach of the average marketer. In fact, with a little elbow grease the 10 page minisite is pretty easily a $5000 a month money maker.
Now I am not the first marketer to “find” this keyword phrase. If we look at the SERPS for ‘heart monitor watches’ you’ll see pretty clearly that the internet marketing crowd is all over the term.
Even without looking at the backlink data a couple of things pop out:
The “pure” exact match domains aren’t here:
- heartmonitorwatches.com
- heartmonitorwatches.net
- heartmonitorwatches.org
- heart-monitor-watches.com
- heart-monitor-watches.net
- heart-monitor-watches.org
Some of these are parked domains but heart-monitor-watches.com and heartmonitorwatches.org aren’t.
Looking At What Didn’t Rank
In fact HeartMonitorWatches.org has 30+ backlinks from unique IPs according to Yahoo. But if you look at the PR spread you see that there’s only 1 PR1 links, 5 PR0 links, and the rest are N/A. To make matters worse, the PR1 is on a page with 518 other links. Ouch – that’s a lot of dilution.
HeartMonitorWatches.org IP & PR Spread
The good news is that the anchor text is very focused:
Anchor Text Word Analysis
So this is a site that got links with good anchor text, but the links weren’t strong enough.
There’s another thing – the theme of his page.
On Page Keyword Analysis
The terms are certainly themed. You can argue that ‘heart monitor watch’ and the plural should be favored over ‘heart rate monitor’ but that may be picking at nits. I’d also take note of the title tag – Heart Monitor Watches – best Discounts, Rates, And Reviews On Heart Rate Monitors.
All this though to be honest probably doesn’t matter. I just don’t think the homepage is built to convert well even if it ranked #1. The category page http://heartmonitorwatches.org/category/heart-monitor-watches/ is better – but I still think it wouldn’t do well.
What about the other exact match domain missing in the SERPS? Heart-Monitor-Watches.com?
The site layout itself is better than the other but the full width template is probably killing conversion. The site owner unfortunately is using this site as a link feeder to his personal site. For an affiliate site you’re monetizing there’s no need for that.
Let’s take a quick look at the off page link stuff – umm… what off page? Yahoo, Google, and Majestic don’t show any backlinks. Oops.
OK… let’s look at what did rank:
- heart-rate-monitor-watches.com
- heartmonitorwatchesreview.org
- heartmonitorwatchesreview.net
The two review (cough, cough) sites are XFactor MFA sites. All 3 sites nail their onpage factors with the keyword term words being used in the title tag, header, description, and URL. ‘Score one for the team.
Heart-Rate-Monitor-Watches.com
PR Spread For Heart-Rate-Monitor-Watches.com
This site is using directory submissions (mainly) and some profile/forum links and has PR5, PR3, and PR1 links. The ranking page itself is a PR3 and it’s not hard to see why. It’s just pure math. There’s more image links than you normally see. The anchor text is interesting – the page is trying to rank for ‘heart rate monitor watches’ – and doesn’t. This type of thing will certainly impact their Adsense earnings.
Yahoo – like Google – doesn’t show all the links it has spidered. Plus, it may not have seen everything. It’s always good when you’re doing deeper analysis to check Majestic or the other large link bases like SEOMoz.
MajesticSEO's Link Analysis
HeartMonitorWatchesReview.org
PR & Anchor Text Analysis
More links than it’s cousin MFA site below. Still, everything a PR0 but the focus is on blog comments and an occasional article. There’s only 20+ unique sites here linking in. They are taking advantage of the tag and category pages on blogs. This site actually has a number of incoming links that Yahoo isn’t showing. Most likely these are stats links, profiles, additional blog comments, and the like.
MajesticSEO's Link Profile Picture
HeartMonitorWatchesReview.net
PR & Anchor Text Analysis
All PR0′s and half the links untargeted are forum/profile links. Not a lot of effort for a top 10 ranking but likely also not a lot of return. The picture from Majestic is what you’d expect – much fewer links and half of them are nofollow’d.
Wrapping Up
Our keyword ‘heart monitor watches’ is not really difficult to rank for. But just grabbing an EMD (exact match domain) and expecting magic won’t really cut it. Still, the barrier into the top 10 is pretty darn low.
Another thing – there are 169 ezineArticles with ‘heart monitor watches’ in the title. Even though EZA usually gets good penetration in Google, none are in the top 10. Same with Blogger and the other usual web 2.0 sites.
Is heart monitor watches the lowest of low hanging fruit? Nope. But it is not very competitive yet has a good revenue projection. You won’t be able to crack this one with just profile links and the usual slink blasting (“slink” – I just made that one up, lol). But a few good articles on PR pages will let you leap the other folks pretty quick.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Just by reading this article I realised two things:
1) I do not understand half of what you said.
2) You know what you are talking about.
You don’t have the Long Tail Cash product online anymore, but what do you have where you teach this?
Greetz
I probably needed to do a better job explaining some of the thought processes here… so sorry if there was some confusion. I’ll add a follow up article to the list of future posts.
One of the points here is that there are great markets and niches just about everywhere. You just need to spend some time to find them.
In this case I found a good keyword and then was able to expand that to more good, related keywords. All of them are easy enough to monetize.
Now, a lot of marketers these days use very simplistic ways to judge if a keyword is “good”. There’s nothing wrong with this – you’re focusing on “low hanging fruit” – but along the way you miss a lot opportunities.
So what I was trying to show was some of the competition for that phrase and some of the sites that weren’t ranking at all – but the IM world (at least some) would tell you should. And others that were ranking, and a little insight into why.
Dave,
Nice write-up. Thank you! Can you explain the math behind your revenue projections, though? I’m not getting there despite the many ways I’ve run the numbers.
You said: “A small 10 page minisite built around that term can make you $750 – $1500 a month… A 1 page microsite… $100 – $400…. the 10 page minisite is pretty easily a $5000 a month money maker.”
?!?! lol
For the search term “heart monitor watches” MS shows only 2400 searches/m (phrase match) and even if could get ranked in the 2nd or 3rd spot, that means you’ll capture +/- 15% of that search, or 360 visitors/month.
(Were the dollars based on monetizing with Adsense or affiliate commissions?)
Thanks!
-Steve
It was a little linkbait Steve. I am glad you noticed
I’ll be talking about the revenue projection formula in the AA2K10 webinar. The projection is a floor to what the site should be able to produce. Whether you get there with Adsense or affiliate marketing (or both) depends on the specific approach you take and a few other factors.
The $5000 for the 10 page minisite is based on experience in the same market and a similar sub-niche. As I mentioned, it requires more work and thinking but is well within the reach of most.