20130228

Niche Site 2

An Idea

Okay… I researched alot of different topics this month, including knees, knives, solar cells, and knife making. I even searched for beer and wine making. All of these ideas would be difficult to rank for, because of the strong competition already in place… translation… other people already thought of these things.

Ratones y Mouses

But then I searched for rats and mice… and it turns out that while anything having to do with mice is extremely competitive… there is very little competition for rats! There is a big hole in the rat market. (A hole probably made by a rat!)

Look at this guy!

Concept photo of a pet rodent in a wine glass


Rats

Okay… it looks like my site will be all about how to catch and dispose of rats. Rats are the bane of mankind, the creature who killed over 1/3 of our ancestors in the Middle Ages (with some help from their fleas). And, worse than that (yes! much worse than the tens of millions who died in the 13th century) is the fact that a rat from my neighbor’s compost ate my cilantro. How is my pretty wife supposed to fix her famous guacamole without cilantro?

What Does this Mean?

It means that all of the posts that have ever been made on historic rosenberg will be deleted, and will be replaced by a series of pages about the best way to catch rats, kill rats and get rid of rats… those are the best keyphrases in the Rat Set. They are searched for a combined 1900 times a month. The cost per click is around $4.10 and has an advertiser competition score (averaged together) of about 90… that means there is money being spent on ads (mostly by Terminix, it appears). And there are alot of rat-related products available on Amazon, but, sadly, nothing on Clickbank. Too bad, Amazon commissions are 4%, but Clickbank is more like 75%. This may call for creativity.

Catch – Kill – Rid

I score “How to Catch Rats” as a 24.94, “How to Get Rid of Rats” as a 33.25 and “How to Kill Rats” scores a 23.67. Anything under 35 should be good, and 25 is, I hope, the sweet spot. I note weakness in the top ten G pages for “Catch”… 4 articles, 2 forums and a You Tube video. On “Rid” I note 2 You Tubes and 3 articles. But also a couple of merchant and local government pages. And “Kill” is seeing 4 articles, two You Tubes, 3 merch sites, and WHAT? A one page mico-niche with no links? And only two posts ??? Insane! And its number 1! I score it a 0.4!! Google scores it a fat zero! Yet, it is Number One!

The Competition

So… the page to beat is howtokillrats (.) org. He has two ad areas in the main body… the first is Adsense… the second seems to rotate between Adsense and Google services. He has a sidebar which also rotates between Adsense and Google Services. He also has two Adsense strips.  Amazingly, he has no backlinks and his Page Rank is 0. He has linked to a You Tube video that doesnt even belong to him!
Edit 2013.03.08.1156: I noticed that Bing gave this guy a backlink from my page... so I have broken up the url to prevent that from continuing.  No backlink for you!

Conclusion

I now need to prototype the site on paper. That means looking at the topic and deciding how many pages I need to write, what topics I need to hit, what sort of pictures and graphics I need… in short, I need to work out the details of what I need to create. THEN, I would need to actually write the articles and post them, do the SEO on each page, and see if I can get some backlinks. If all of that works out, I could be on the first page in Google and Yahoo/Bing (so, 98% of the search market) by April. And then, we would float the ads and Amazon affiliate links. And… along the way… learn everything we need to know about avenging my cilantro and killing rats!

Catch Up

The Timeline up to Now


Here is a brief timeline of my Niche activities up to this point. I will try to better in the future keeping this updated. There is a funny story about why I wasnt putting anything here... maybe I'll tell it someday... hahaha

2012.12.18 - I was laid off from my main job as a non-profit executive director. In my second job, I am a part-time college professor.

2012.12.25 - I celebrated Christmas, and put the thought of layoffs and whatnot out of my mind.

2013.01.01 - Happy New Year

2013.01.15 - Now that my wife has gone back to work, I have become looking for a job, and have straightened out issues with my unemployment and compensation package. In contemplating this issue, it occurs to me that my real problem is a lack of diversity in my revenue streams. I had two major income sources, that is, my two jobs. In addition, I have one or two passive income sources, both of which are related to interest income, and neither of which can provide enough money to live on.

2013.01.17 - In searching the web for income ideas... preferably passive, I come upon Pat Flynn's site, Smart Passive Income. Although, in reality, his income is hardly passive, I begin researching and learning about niche site marketing, which I had never heard of. In fact, I had Ad Blocker installed on Firefox for so many years, that I didnt realize how pervasive ads had become on the internet, or how willing people were to click them!

2013.01.18 - Began research to discover a niche for myself. I set a deadline of the first week in February to have a domain and to start building a site.

2013.01.20 - Bought goparalegaltraining.com after doing some research. In reality, I saw Flynn's security guard training site, and based my idea on that, without doing alot of good keyword research.

2013.01.30 - Installed Wordpress and began creating my paralegal training site. I used the keyword research I had done to come up with ten questions I that people ask when searching for paralegal training issues, and created pages to answer each of those. The content for those pages came from internet research - since I literally know nothing about paralegal studies.

2013.02.04 - Wrote and posted the main article for my paralegal training website. Around 1,000 words, basically outlining the content of the pages I am going to create. I also messed around with the theme alot.  I ended up with the Zee theme that I liked, and it was free. I decided everything has to be free!!

2013.02.10 - I have filled in about half of the content I am planning, which includes about 12 pages of material, plus one page for each state. I am halfway through creating the 12 pages, not the 50 state pages!! Havent even started on those.

2013.02.13 - After watching every possible video on Market Samurai and Long Tail Pro, I have decided that I just have to put some money in this, if I am going to suceed. I am flying blind! The problem is that I use a laptop that cannot run windows for more than a few minutes without going bluescreen. So, as a result, I use Linux exclusively. Funny... both MS and LTP will work on a Linux machine, because both run on Adobe Air... but Adobe just stopped support for Air for Linux... so, although it may work now, there may be a problem in the future.

2013.02.17 - Purchased Long Tail Pro. Hope it is worth it! 

2013.02.18 - An actual Google search visitor showed up at my paralegal site! He (or she... who knows... searched for "is it hard to become army paralegal". Since I had a military paralegal page, that page was showing up in the search results, so I hit Long Tail Pro and saw that I was not ranked at all for my main keyword, "paralegal training", but for "military paralegal" I was on page 2. And, for the even longer keyword, "is it hard to become army paralegal", I was ranked #3. This caused a shift in my strategy.

Keyword Shift

I had originally targeted "become a paralegal" as my keyword. LTP reveals that the competition for this in the top 10 on Goog is very high. I adjust my target to "become a paralegal" and "military paralegal". I hope this helps. I am not sure if a midstream keyword shift is a good idea, but clearly, "paralegal training" was never going to rank. Most of the top ten were .edu sites!


2013.02.20 - I have broken down and purchased a theme for the sites. In prototyping ads for my sites, I realized that maintaining the ads, and placing them exactly where I want them is going to be a nightmare! Between the theme, LTP and the domain, I am in for just under $80. So... I have to make $80 to show a profit! :-(

And... just to make it more complicated... I happen to own a second domain, which has been mine for close to two years. I bought it for a project at work... however, that project got crushed in the jaws of city politics, and in the end, I was left owning the site. I kept paying for it... $60/year or so, because I thought it might be useful someday... however, now that I no longer work there, it is unlikely that the domain will ever be useful to me. I suppose I could try to sell it, but instead, I think I'll use it for a second income site. Call it, recycling.

2013.02.22 - In order to focus on bootstrapping site 2, I need to scale back on site 1. In my list of pages to create, I have 3 articles left to write (I am doing all of the writing) and decorate with pictures. I have done just two states. I have decided to do just one more article for the paralegal page, and to stop production on the state pages. I will write the last article (for now) and see if I can learn about backlinking. If I cant get the page to start rising in Google, I will have to reconsider the project. I know it has only been a month, and that I am beginning to rank for long tails... but I need to see more movement before I put more energy into it. Perhaps backlinking will help. If it starts to climb, I'll start work on it again.

Meanwhile, I am converting my second site, historicrosenberg.org, to a new topic. I am currently doing research to see what that topic will be. Before last April, you got a boost in the rankings if your domain name matched your keyword (which is why I chose "go paralegal training" for my paralegal site.) But now, Google no longer cares if the keyword and the domain match. As a result, I can use historic rosenberg for anything I want!

There... that catches us up! I'll start posting these as they happen from this point on (I hope).