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Hey. How’s it going ZZZ Profit readers? This is my niche site duel update. Now, it’s been a while since I did an update. It’s been about a month. I apologize. It’s been a lot longer than I expected. My day job was the busiest year ive had do date as a surf instructor.  I run a surf yoga retreat here in Costa Rica. This is one of our busiest season and I got totally swamped and  haven’t been able to really update. Although, I have been doing some work on my site Zweapons.com.

What I want to do is update what i have been doing during this time. I have a bunch of things I want to talk about so I am just going to breeze through everything. The first thing I wanted to talk about is the status of the website Zweapons. For you that are following the duel. It’s me vs. my VA (virtual assistant). My VA is doing a dog training website(k9trainingden.com) and I’m doing a zombie weapon website or zombie apocalypse survival type of website(zweapons.com).

You can go back to our initial post when we started it to find more information and follow the history. You can go back and see what my VA is up to as well. He is more into stats and writing everything down whereas I just kind of wing it. I don’t do a lot of keyword research for this particular project. This is more passion, something that I am really interested in and that I really enjoy doing. Where I left off last time was picking the site, setting it up, getting it up and running, and begining to hire some writers.

My Niche Site Content Strategy and Monetization

I hired a couple of writers to write articles for my pages. I wanted to create a website, that had core pages that people could navigate and be found at any time from the main menu, but at the same time i wanted a blog so I could post random blogs with related topics. For the core pages I had the writer write articles about particular weapons against zombies. These weapon pages are to be the foundation of my monetization plan

For example, if you go to zombie vs. handgun It is about hand guns vs zombies and at the end of the post we have a table comparison plug-in of our top ten hand-gun pics (I got the idea from Spencer from niche pursuits). In this case however the guns do not link to any affiliate products yet because I haven’t found a gun affiliate site that sells online and offers an affiliates.

Most of the other zweapon  pages such as Zombie Compound Bow  are set up with Amazon affiliate links too . Just like the handgun article, at the end of the article we list our top choices of compound bows. What we did is list  information such as the materal, size, ratings stuff like that. Each product links through an Amazon affiliate link. That is the primary ways I was planning on monetizing Zweapons.

Since the website is primarily about weapons for a zombie apocalypse, I have created individual articles covering weapons such, Samurai sword, machete, axe etc. I plan on continuing until I have covered every weapon I can think of. I am also going to cover survival gear like portable water gear, food rationing, camping gear, survival knives and things of that nature. Once again they will link to either Amazon or other affiliate products that relate survival or zombie or weapons. That is basically the type of monetization that I am going to be targeting with this website.

I haven’t sold anything yet. I’ve really just been working on getting the content up and getting the site looking complete. For social media I set up a Facebook fan page, a pinterest page and a twitter account.  Currently I only have about five blog posts which is really not that much, however I have a more pages because that is what I want the core of the website to be.

Outsourcing Website Content

I have been paying 5 dollars an article on Odesk which is a really good deal in my eyes. One of the things I do when I hire writers is request they are a native English writer. There’s a lot of people on Odesk that are just starting out and they don’t have any ratings or reviews, so many times they are willing to do some work for cheaper than what they would normally do it for.

There are a lot of people starting to look for work on sites such as Elance, oDesk. When i post a new job, I usually get a handful of good matches. Depending on the subject you can get anywhere from a couple to 40 or more applicants. With the zombie topic I always get a lot of people.  A lot of people seem to be interested in zombies and are willing to write for cheap. Then, I may hire three or four writers, and repy, hey let’s do a two article test. I’ll do it at a trial rate and then I’ll pick the best writer and say, hey are you OK continuing at this rate for say another 20 to 30 articles? I found a really good writer whose really into zombies so the site is coming out really nice as far as the content goes. It’s actually very interesting and entertaining to read.

That is what I have been focussing on, just filling in the content, and creating Amazon affiliate links. I may look into other ways to monetize the site but right now it’s all about building the traffic.

Niche Site Analytics

So let me show you my traffic here. This is my Analytics(watch video attatched to see). What I wanted to show, is although it’s not getting much traffic because it’s a very new site(about two months old), it is however already getting some organic search traffic. Also I am getting some referral traffic and direct traffic. In fact I was already contacted by another popular zombie site and they asked if they could link to my weapon descriptions. I was like, of course. I wasn’t really expecting that so that will be a decent back-link.

My Niche Site Rankings

Next what I want to show you is my rankings. I just picked six keywords to track that I would start with, then as time goes on and think of more keywords I will probably grow the list. For now I am just tracking my main keywords.

•  zweapons
• z weaons
• zombie weapons
• zombie apocalypse
• best zombie weapons
• zombie survival gear

My primary keyword is zombie weapons, which I do not rank for yet, But I do rank first for Zweapons together which is my domain name Zweapons. But I also rank 12^th for Z weapons. I just got that ranking yesterday. So that tells me that I am on the right track. I went from no rankings, to my name, and now similar to my name. There’s actually some traffic that goes to Z weapons. My next goal is to start ranking for zombie weapons, best zombie weapons and zombie apocalypse as well as any other related keywords.

Sumary and final thoughts

The last thing I wanted to say is, so in our niche site duel we did give ourselves a budget of 100 dollars each. I’ve spent my 100 dollars on articles,  so i am pretty much right at my budget of $100 bucks. I haven’t checked exactly but it is around 90 or 100 dollars. I decided to stretch my budget a so I hired someon to write blogs. I found somebody who English is not their first language but they are a huge zombie fan and they seemed to write decently according to the samples provided, She wrote satisfactory and  had decent English writing skills. It wasn’t perfect but the price made up for it.

Normally I would only want to hire a native English writer but in the case where somebody has a passion in a subject I think that can actually overtake somebody with perfect grammar. Of course, I can always go in and edit. So I hired a girl from the Philippines who will be blogging. We agreed on 3 dollars a blog post for now. I told her let’s try it out for a month or two so if you check back to Zweapons you may see some new blog posts in the next week or so.

That’s about it. That’s what’s happening with Zweapons. Everything is going as planned. This is a long-term project so I plan to keep tracking progress. We’re going to track this for at least a year. I will try to do more consistent updates. I would love questions. If you have any questions or anything to add, please just leave them in the comments below. I will try to address them in further updates. So that’s about all I have to say. Until next time, ZZZ Profits.com, my niche site duel me vs. my VA.

The post [Mo'e] Create a Website that Makes Money Online Duel – Part 3 – Content Strategy and Monetization appeared first on ZZZ Profits.

The only reason why niche sites, authority sites and blogs altogether fail is due to lack of keyword research. It’s either you picked a keyword that is too competitive to begin with or chose a keyword that lacks commerciality. In my previous post about how to find a profitable niche, niche keyword research starts from choosing your topic and domain name. 

What is Keywod Research by the way?

Keyword research is the first thing to carry out when doing search engine optimization (SEO), or perhaps when starting a new niche site, blog, or authority site. It’s like digging for information which serves as a basis for effective content strategy. I can’t think of any better solution to leverage available search volume data.

Let’s take it from seomoz:

“Keyword research is one of the most important, valuable, and high return activities in the search marketing field. Ranking for the “right” keywords can make or break your website. It’s not always about getting visitors to your site, but about getting the right kind of visitors.”

In this niche site duel update I’ll just teach you how to do a simple niche keyword research. I already tried many keyword research tools around including free and paid. Sem Rush, Wordtracker, Seomoz Keyword Difficulty Tool, Keyword Researcher, Market Samurai, and Long Tail Pro, etc. However using all these tools is overkill for niche sites, let’s just keep things simple, and let’s just stick with a few tools.

A Note on Keyword Competitioin

Keyword difficulty a.k.a. keyword competition or keyword competitiveness is simply the difficulty of the keyword to rank for the first position in SERP or search results (I’m going to use any of these terms interchangeably). The lesser the competition the easier it is to rank for that keyword. This way we can prioritize which keywords we should target first for our content development.

For this research we’ll be using Long Tail Pro, one of my favorite tools in doing niche keyword research. What I like about it is it has a built in competition checker, it does the job automatically. However that feature is not for free, but I’m not trying to sell you anything here. I also included a free alternative to check for keyword competition. I’ll discuss it in a few minutes.

Now let’s get our hands dirty and do some keyword research.

First download a free trial of long tail pro, then follow these step by step.

Remember the keyword is “K9 Training” I’ve already done competition analysis and the chances of ranking at the first position are high, and we’ll get it there for 2-6 months. Let see how it will go…

Step 1: Click “create your first campaign” button

Step 2: Type your campaign name which is anything you want

Step 3: Log in to your Adwords account, select exact match and enter your keyword.

(You can sign up for an Adwords account here)

Step 4: Hit “generate keyword” button

Here’s the excel file I pulled from this report.

Step 5: Remove unnecessary or off topic keywords by clicking the x button.

Remove keywords which are

• Too broad
• Not related
• Wrong spelling
• Can’t be used in a sentence

Once you’ve filtered the keywords, for Platinum users we can take advantage of the competition module labeled “Average KC” which is something like this.

Just hit the “calculate button”, and then it will give you an estimate of the keyword competition from a scale of 0-100. And as I promised, I’ll suggest a free alternative in a couple of minutes.

Going back to Average KC here are the official values along with my own interpretation enclosed in parentheses/brackets.

• 0 to 10 – No competition (takes 1 month to rank with basic keyword optimization)

• 10 to 20 – Extremely low competition (takes 1 month to rank with basic keyword optimization and some link building)

• 20 to 30 – Low competition (takes 2-3 months to rank with keyword optimization and some link building)

• 30 to 40 – Moderate Competition (takes more than six months to rank, moderate link building required)

• 40 to 50 – Somewhat High Competition (takes more than six months to rank, moderate link building required)

• 50 to 60 – Very High Competition (takes more than a year to rank, massive link building needed)

• 60 to 70 – Extremely High Competition (takes more than a year to rank, massive link building needed)

• 70 to 100 – Don’t even think about it! (self-explanatory)

Please note that the interpretation enclosed in parentheses above are just my guestimate, no one can really tell the exact time a site will rank, and to add Long Tail Platinum’s Average KC values are not absolute, it’s merely based on an automated algorithm, but at least we have a way to make things easier and faster when checking for Keyword Competition.
Now for the free alternative to check for keyword competition, we’ll be using SEO quake toolbar and google by doing a simple search with any keyword.

How to tell if a keyword has a low competition manually?

1. If the average number of PR (page rank) are less than 4 (please refer to my first duel update)
2. If indexed content less than 100 (please refer to my first duel update)
3. If hubpages, ezine article, squidoo, ehow are dominating the first page of SERP (search result)
4. If forums and Q/A sites are in the top ten search result
5. If you can find social media pages in the first page including facebook, twitter, linkedin, etc.
6. If you can find other niche sites in the search results, it means that you can do it too (these sites usually have few content, some backlinks, and have exact match domains)

You don’t have to check all the keywords; I bet it will take hours if you’ll do it for 300 keywords. That’s a waste of time. Just check the main keywords (with good amount of search volume – above 100). Keywords that are searched less than 100 are usually long tail and less competitive. Then, rate it as very easy, easy, moderate, high and very high based on the six criteria above. Nothing really beats the human intelligence, when judging keyword competition.

Now let’s check the data we’ve gathered so far. Here’s the excel file of all the data we filtered with its corresponding competition. I usually strip Global Searches and Advertiser competition in this part…

The Hardest Part of it all – Categorizing Your Keywords Logically

There’s no shortcut to categorizing keywords, you have to do it manually, and you have to take advantage of Microsoft Excel advanced filter options along with your common sense. This is the most difficult part of it all. It takes me hours to categorize and filter all keyword correctly depending on the topic, but it will pay off sooner or later.

Based on that data we will decide which keywords will be the main categories of our blog, and this part is pretty subjective, you can categorize it in any way you want it as long as it make sense and as long as you can use the data from the keyword research. Preferably, each category will have its own content having the main keyword along with the long tail phrases. And if you have keyword difficulty data, use it to prioritize which articles should be written first.

Here’s the finished product of our keyword research. Enjoy!

If you missed any of my updates, feel free to click on the links below:)

Niche Site Duel Challenge Part 1:  How to Find a Profitable Niche Market?
Niche Site Duel Challenge Part 2: Niche Site Content Strategy
Niche Site Duel Challenge Part 3: How to Make Money with Niche Sites?

Or you can check all our updates here.

The post [Arvin] Niche Site Duel Update #4: Niche Keyword Research and Site Architecture appeared first on ZZZ Profits.

photo credit: 401k 2013

We are building a niche site for two things, to provide some quality content and in the process… you bet… make some money, not just money but passive and recurring income. But how do we make money by simply creating niche sites?

Making Money with Adsense

The best and easiest way to make money with a niche site is serving Adsense ad which is by far the best ad network when it comes to number of advertisers and available ads. If you haven’t join yet, you can sign up here, but there’s a long process to go before getting approved. You can read more about their policies here.

Advantages

Adsense is basically free but you have to share your profit with Google, you’ll get 68% and they’ll keep 32%. If you are lucky enough to be chosen as a premium publisher(according to rumors you should have at least 1 million page views per month), you’ll get more than 68% and additional privileges.

Google is the biggest online ad network, there’s almost always an ad for anything. A lot of hungry advertisers are bidding for your ad space that is ready to pay decent cash depending on the keyword. FYI, the highest CPC at the time I’m writing this article is “Tennessee Mesothelioma Attorney” You can get paid as high as $285.64 for just one click.

Disadvantages

It’s difficult to get approved especially if you’re based in Asia, if your niche site is relatively new, you have to wait for 6 months before they’ll accept you to the program. That’s not an issue before but due to high number of spammers (according to Google) they have to do this. Too bad for me and other people who happen to live in Asia. Good news for everyone else.

Getting accepted in the program is not the end of the story. With Google’s strict policies along with some people who want to harm your AdSense account, you’ll never know when you’ll get banned, whether it’s your fault or someone else. The only solution is proactively monitoring your Adsense click through rate and traffic. If you think there’s something abnormal you have to disable ads on the affected site, analyze your IP log, find the culprit and send it over to Google. That sounds like a lot of work but that’s how it works.

So far Adsense is still the widely used form of monetization, among bloggers, niche sites and even authority sites because of the advantages I just discussed.

Estimating Adsense ROI

As I’ve shared in my first niche site duel update here’s my formula on estimating Adsense revenue:

Local Broad Match x 42% x average CPC x 3% x 68%

that is..

18,100 x 42% x $2 x 3% x 68% = $310/month

You can read more about this formula on my first niche site duel update

Make Money with Affiliate Products

Depending on your chosen niche there may be a lot of products to promote. For example,searching for “dog training equipment” in amazon will return thousands of dog training equipments, 1,526 to be exact. We can promote books, clicker, dog leash, and other k9 training gears. If we are going to successfully sell any of these products, we’ll get 15% commission. If we are going to refer people to buy any Ray Allen’s k9 training equipment, we’ll also get 4% share. What I’m planning is I’ll promote Amazon products first, then once I ran out of product to write reviews, I’ll move on doing Ray Allen’s.

Estimating Affiliate Revenue

Based on the same formula we’re going to check our estimated affiliate revenue for the keyword “k9 training”.

Local Broad Match x 42% x 3% x Average Commission

that is…

18,100 x 42% x 3% x $5 = $1,140/month

• Local Broad Match is the number of search volume in a specified country (broad match format)
• 42% is the estimated click through rate if you reach number one in Google based on a leaked data by AOL
• 3% is the average conversion rate when promoting products
• $5 is the average commission for the dog training products (average price of products on the first page of amazon product listings multiplied by 15%)

Advantages

Promoting affiliate products is a good hedge or even a good alternative for AdSense earnings. There’s also a huge number of products you can make money from thru referral. You can join almost all ecommerce sites such as Amazon, Shopping.com, Walmart, Target, and the list goes on. You can also promote digital products from Clickbank, Commission Junction and ShareaSale.

In addition, you’ll not get banned easily with this popular affiliate networks. They have their own policies, but it’s more flexible. You can even build a niche site around one affiliate product without worrying anything at all. If you already have an AdSense based niche site, you can diversify your revenue by promoting affiliate products.

Disadvantages

Aside from I need to write a ton of product reviews, I don’t see any other disadvantage to it.

Conclusion

For this duel challenge I want to make money with my niche site using Adsense and promoting affiliate products. There are thousands of products in this niche, and good number of advertisements which is good enough to diversify income streams.

Missed something? You can check my previous duel updates below:

Niche Site Duel Challenge Part 1:  How to Find a Profitable Niche Market?
Niche Site Duel Challenge Part 2: Niche Site Content Strategy

Or you can check the entire duel challenge here.

The post [Arvin] Niche Site Duel Challenge Part 3: How to Make Money with Niche Websites? appeared first on ZZZ Profits.

Google hates Made for Adsense (MFA) sites, cookie cutter sites or those sites with crappy content which provides no value to the reader at all. These sites have very little content in it, and most of the time, it doesn’t make sense to read. What I want to build is a website that has good amount of content in terms of quality and quantity.

Content is king is an overused statement and I bet many will disagree. Yes, Google’s algorithm is still flawed when it comes to filtering quality content but the point is, sticking with quality content will make our strategy future proof from any algorithm updates, at least that’s the idea.

How Much Content Do We Need to Add?

Looking back to my Niche Site Duel Update Part 1 on finding a good niche, where I discussed about gauging your competition, the least number of indexed content from the top ten search result is between 13 and 25.

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Based on this data for the first month my goal is to add 15 to 25 articles or 20 in average, which should be enough to get to the top ten results at least based on this data.

Outsourcing Your Content

Since this topic is new to me, I’m going to outsource my content from oDesk. I don’t want to write it myself since I’m not a good writer and it will take me 4 hours to finish one, and I don’t really like writing; it takes a lot of time and research.

I’ve been working as a freelancer in this marketplace; I assure you it’s pretty saturated with highly skilled talents. But for now let’s concentrate on finding a good writer who can provide us “quality content”. My budget for each article is $5 for 500-word-article, preferably native English writers.

Here’s the content of my job posting:

We are looking for writers (3-4 writers) who can write about dog training around 500 words each. If you think you can do this job, and you are passionate about dogs, then this job is for you.

Requirements:

• Articles should be 100% original and should pass copyscape
• Paragraphs should be in a positive conversational tone. They should not look like something you would find in a textbook.
• You should deliver one article per day, or if you can do it faster, the better as long as the quality is not compromised
• Excellent writing skills and should be familiar with the topic

Along with your cover letter, please submit writing samples or link to articles which you’ve previously written that highlight your writing style. Please also rate your experience with dogs and your availability over the next 24 hours.
And last but not the least please mention the word “I love dogs!” in your cover letter.

If you pass this test, I’ll give you another 4-5 articles to write

Tips for outsourcing your content

• Pay close attention to quality content (that should be good for readers and search engines), so it’s advisable to hire native English writers. I don’t want to be biased but based on my experience nothing beats native English writers when it comes to quality. I want to stress on this because Google loves quality content.
• Make sure that your job description is clear enough for anyone to understand
• Initially, post a job for a test project to assess the skill of the writer
• Use filter keywords like “I love dogs!” or anything you want to filter out those who are just submitting recycled cover letters without reading the whole instruction
• Last but not the least, someone told me that when hiring a writer, those who have a passion for the subject (in this case dogs) will always write better articles. This is the part where I’m going to consider non-native English writers; let’s see if they will do well.

To wrap it up, I need 15-20 articles for the first month, and I just did a job posting for it at oDesk. Let’s see how it will work out. After I’m done with the initial articles I will be adding at least two articles per week.

Other than that I’m also planning to put a directory by using a WordPress plugin. Most of the keywords have local intent so I think it would be beneficial to list dog training schools, dog training programs, dog trainers etc. in an organized directory. I’ll also be adding review of k9 dog training equipment (since there’s a lot of product to promote).

I think that’s my whole content strategy, see you on my monetization update…
You can check the whole Niche Site Duel Challenge  or check my previous update below.

Niche Site Duel Challenge Part 1:  How to Find a Profitable Niche Market?

The post [Arvin] Niche Site Duel Update #2: Niche Site Content Strategy – Quality and Quantity appeared first on ZZZ Profits.

What are the Tools I used?

Spyfu (to check for commerciality) – free
Long Tail Pro (niche research) – paid
Keyword Researcher (topic generation, and domain search) – paid
Domain Typer  (domain availability tool) – free
Google Keyword Tool (to check search volume and CPC) – free
SEO Quake Toolbar (to check the overall competition) – free
Majestic SEO Bulk Backlink Checker (to check number of page backlinks) – free

Content Navigation

Initial Considerations When Choosing a Niche

There are two approaches when selecting a niche. You can either start with your hobby or something that you have some degree of familiarity, or find a niche that you don’t have any particular interest but has relatively low competition.

Most experts would advise approach #1 which is to focus on creating a niche site around a topic that you have interest in. Indeed, it’s easy to write on a topic that you love or at least you know, and as an additional advantage building the content yourself will lessen the start-up cost much further.  However, often times these topics are highly competitive especially if you don’t narrow down your niche enough. (I’ll teach you how to check completion in a few minutes)

Now, for this duel I’d like to use the second approach. Since there are available outsourcing platform like oDesk, Text Broker, Freelancer and other sites, we can delegate the writing task. Provided that we are going to outsource the content, it’s no longer necessary to have some degree of familiarity with the topic. At $5 per 500 words you can find good native English writers in oDesk.
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Why I care about competition?

Low competition keywords can take 2-6 months to rank for the first position in Google, while competitive keywords can take as long as 6 months to 1 year and a lot of work to reach even the first page of SERP. Now if we can rank any keyword a lot faster using legitimate white hat methods, we can expect ROI much faster.
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Step by Step Guide on How to Find a Niche

Step #1: Find a Good Topic

Using Keyword Researcher I will generate as much keyword as I can then I’ll check each keyword with Google Keyword Tool for search volume. Training is a hot topic for niche sites as there are hundreds of low hanging keywords out there, and in addition the CPC is always higher than average.

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As a free alternative, you can find good keywords by thinking of topics randomly. Sometimes, you can find a good niche from a TV ad, newspapers, magazines, and based from an article written by Mo’e you can steal ideas from Flippa, I can’t find the link to the article, but before starting your niche website always check the competition.

If you want to do it much faster, you can try Keyword Researcher for free. It pulls all these keywords from Google’s auto suggest database, basically it returns more keywords than Google Keyword Tool. It’s a perfect tool for niche research, domain selection, and long tail keyword generation.
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Step #2 Check the search volume and CPC

Using Google Keyword Tool, let’s check if our keyword has an adequate search volume and CPC that can provide good monthly revenue. (You need to sign in to see the CPC column)

Please note that I set the filter to exact match, and I set the geographic location to  US…

Click to view larger image

What does the values above mean:

Competition or Adwords Advertiser Competition means that there are high number of advertisers bidding for that keyword. It’s a good sign that you’ll get enough advertisement for your ad spaces but don’t confuse it with keyword competition. It’s absolutely different thing. Don’t worry, you are not alone as I also thought the same thing when I started with niche sites Before, I wanted to target the keyword “blood donation” since I saw that the Adwords competition is Low, however I later realized that it means there are less advertisers for that keyword.

Global Monthly Searches is the number searches performed every month for a given keyword across the globe. You can set it to display broad match, phrase match or exact match. I used “exact match” by the way.

Local Monthly Searches is the number searches performed every month for a given keyword based on your preferred country. You can set it to display broad match, phrase match or exact match. I also used “exact match“.

Approximate CPC is the estimated amount an advertiser should pay Google if a legitimate user successfully clicked on the advertisement. If you’re a publisher you’ll get 68% and Google will keep the remaining 32%.

Keyword Matches in a Nutshell

Broad Match is the number of searches for a given keyword that may or may not contain the exact keyword at all.

Example:
low-carb diet plan

Broad Match:
carb-free foods
low-crab diets
low calorie recipes
Mediterranean diet plans
low-carbohydrate dietary program

Phrase Match is the number of searches for a given keyword that contains the exact keyword in the same order.

Example:
tennis shoes

Phrase Match
red leather tennis shoes
buy tennis shoes on sale
red tennis shoes

Exact Match is the number of searches for the exact keyword.

Example:
tennis shoes

Exact Match
tennis shoes

Why I prefer Exact Match?

I prefer exact match over broad match because it gives me the ability to gauge the actual potential traffic I’ll get from a given keyword. When building a niche site, we can’t target all the broad matches at once but we can do optimize one keyword at a time. I only use broad match for my ROI formula.

Now that we know that it has a good search volume and good CPC, let’s check its commerciality or its potential to yield monthly revenue. Prepare for some basic math.

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Step #3 Check for ROI Potential

For me a good keyword should generate at least $30 per month in Adsense revenue alone which is my breakeven point. At $30 per month, in one year I’ll have $360 dollars. If we’ll deduct startup cost of $100, I still have $260 to keep. That’s pretty cheap but remembers that this is just the minimum estimated Adsense revenue. My main goal however, is to make my niche site earn $1000 per month in six months to one year including advertising and affiliate revenues.

I believe most of you have your niche site setup or you already selected one. To begin let’s visit Spyfu.com(free).

Now let’s type our chosen keyword and see if it will earn $30 per month for us.

Click to view larger image

Using the value above here’s my formula in estimating Adsense revenue:

Local Broad Match x 42% x average CPC x 3% x 68%

• Local Broad Match is the number of search volume in a specified country (broad match format)
• 42% is the estimated click through rate if you reach number one in Google based on a leaked data by AOL
• Average CPC is my quick estimate of the average CPC based on Spyfu’s data
• 3% is the average click through rate of Adsense ads
• 68% is the publisher’s share of Adsense revenue

Now let’s substitute the values:

18,100 x 42% x $2 x 3% x 68% = $310/month

The estimated Adsense revenue is $310/ per month which is more than $30. I think this is good enough.

I do not guarantee accuracy of this formula. This is just my own formula in estimating potential Adsense revenue for a given keyword. I arrived at this formula by using Pat Plynn’s revenue in his security guard training site. Thanks Pat! He is earning $1500 average monthly. Try his keyword security guard training using this formula, and tell me if I’m somehow close to it
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Step #4: Check the Competition

Here are my criteria for Checking the Competition of a Certain Keyword

A.) Average Page Rank of the Top 10 Result should be between  1-4

To check PR you need to install and toggle SEO Quake Toolbar (free)

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Simply type your keyword as you normally do it in Google, then something like this will show up. Scan through the top ten search result to check the page rank. Having Page Rank of 1-4 is a good sign.
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B.) Indexed content of the top 10 result should present websites having 100 or less indexed pages.

You can use this information to plan your content development. For example using the image below, www.ventosakennet.com has 25 indexed pages, when creating your niche site, begin with 25 pages of content or blog posts in the first month, then add at least one article per week afterwards.

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C.) Number of Backlinks

I always go for websites who have 100 backlinks or less. I wouldn’t compete for pages that have thousands of backlinks as it will take longer than competition with relatively low number of backlinks.

To check backlinks, visit Majestic SEO  Bulk Backlink Checker (free)

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Then paste all the URLs of the top 10 search result:

Just hit the check backlink counts button then you’ll see something like this:

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Take a look at the external backlinks tab. Most of my competitors have very few backlinks. Bingo! (Please note that the data is page back links count which means the number of external backlinks pointing to the exact URL we entered a while ago)
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Find a Good Domain

After confirming that the keyword is indeed low in competition, now we need to find a perfect domain. A good domain for me should contain the keyword, if exact match is available much better. Most of the time all of these good keywords are already taken, and since EMD have lesser value nowadays but still a huge factor, I would go for common prefixes and suffixes such as my, hq, info, pro, etc. Sometimes I’ll find a related word that best fit as a suffix.

For this step I’d like to check all possible keywords with available domain name in the k9 training niche using Long Tail Pro.

Click to view larger image

But since most of the keywords I like seem to be already registered I’ll just find a good alternative, perhaps I’ll just find a good suffix for it that is related to k9 or dogs. When thinking about a good suffix, preferably a short suffix, I remembered the movie “The Grey” played by Liam Neeson. But I can hardly remember the word he used for the territory of the wolves, I’m not sure if it’s “den” or some other word, but let’s try if k9trainingden.com is still available. Let’s visit domaintyper.com and type our keyword in the search box.

Click to view larger image

Voila! It’s still available  (Note: I already bought the .com).

Thank you for reading guys, until my next update on niche content strategy….

You can also check the niche site challenge page.

The post [Arvin] Niche Site Duel Challenge Part 1: How to Find a Profitable Niche Market? appeared first on ZZZ Profits.

Picking a Niche Site Topic

(Transcription)

Hi guys. How’s it going? It’s Mo’e from ZZZ Profits and I am doing an update on our niche site duel(Click here to see the first post) that I am doing with my virtual assistant Arvin. We are a little delayed. I came down with the flu and spent 8 or 9 days bedridden, but we are back up and running. I want to do a quick update on the sites we picked, the domain names and the niche topics we picked. The interesting thing is basically we are taking two different approaches.

Key Word Research Methods

Arvin, my VA decided to go with K9trainingden.com. Anything Training is obviously popular. Any type of training is a popular topic. What he did was use research and strictly statistics to find his niche keyword. He used a few tools; Keyword Researcher, Google Keyword Tool, and Long Tail Pro. You can check the next post, and what we are going to do is a walk you through how Arvin’s my Va picked his topic, he will be doing a step-by-step walk-through exactly how he came about picking his topic.

Mine is a whole different approach. My domain is zweapons.com. It is a zombie website. It is going to be about weapons that you would want to store, or use for the zombie apocalypse. My whole aproach is I just wanted to go with something off the top of my head so, I didn’t really do any keyword research. I threw a couple of keywords into the Google Keyword Tool just to make sure that there was some traffic available and check that there was some interest, but it was mainly just broad-search that I looked into.

What I am doing is selecting my topic based on being a huge zombie fan. My son is also a huge zombie fan, and we wanted to create a site based on subject that we are really fascinated in. Keyword research didn’t seem like it was that important because it was a topic and something we want to have a lot of fun with. If the site doesn’t do that well, that’s OK. We’re going to treat it like our little baby. But, what makes it an interesting contrast is our zombie site and the VA’s canine training are two separate approaches.

Keeping Our Niche Websites Simple

Those are the sites. We are doing everything very simple. We are outsourcing most of our article work. We are manually going in and doing a little bit of editing, but for the most part we are trying to keep it as simple as possible. We are using the WordPress platform with Woo Themes, which I happen to own a few copies of. I am just re-using some of the themes that I have already purchased.

Then we created the theme, the navigation, and did the pictures and graphics all ourselves. We didn’t pay for any of that. Both Arvin and I have a little bit of a graphic experience, so we were able to get a simple layout the way we wanted to, easily. It was really simple. It literally took us a day or two to set up.

Now what we are doing is we’re waiting for our outsourced articles to come in, so we can lay out more content. We are not going to do any back linking right off the bat. We’re not going to be really monetizing the sites at first. We’re just going to start building them and start trying to get the traffic in slowly. We’ll probably begin some very basic back-linking in a few days or so. That’s the update.

Learn Advanced Key-Word Research

Now make sure to stay tuned because on the next blog post, as I said, Arvin will be doing a walk through of how he did his keyword research, and what tools he used. If you are interested in learning valuable keyword research this will be great for you, a lot of people believe that if you want to have the best success or the best chance for success for a new niche type site, it all boils down to advanced niche keyword research.

Anyways, that’s it. That’s all I have to say until the next update. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them in the comments below. I am Mo’e with ZZZ Profits and I will talk to you next time.

Missed something?  Go to my previous niche site duel challenge posts:

Create a Website that Makes Money Duel – Part 1 – Me VS My Virtual Assistant

For your convenience we created a page listing all our niche site duel progress.

The post [Mo'e] Create a Website that Makes Money Online Duel – Part 2 – Topic Choice and Set Up appeared first on ZZZ Profits.

Video Transcription

Making your First Five Dollars on Fiverr

Hey guys, I’m Moe with ZZZ Profits and I want to share something with you really quick. It’s about something that I had covered in the past and I want to revisit. It is a website where anyone can make some real money online. It’s called Fiverr.com. The reason I want to share this with you is because this is something I did with my son about a year and a half ago and it turned out to be pretty successful.

The post Making your First Money Online – Fiverr appeared first on ZZZ Profits.

Video Transcription

Today I am excited to announce a project that I am going to be doing with my virtual assistant that I hired about a month ago. I had been looking for somebody who had certain sets of skills and originally it was kind of hard to find. I finally found somebody who thinks alot like me, and has been a valuable assistant in many ways.

Building a Website That Makes Money

We decided to do something kind of unique; something a little different.
We got the original idea off of Pat Flynn’s website niche site duel challenge. Any of you who follow Smart Passive Income will be familiar with the niche site duel, which became kind of a famous post. Basically, he challenged his friend that they would each build a niche site and they would see which one would make the most amount of passive income.

It was cool because it was two people with two different approaches. I came up with the idea with why not take it one step further and do a duel against my virtual assistant because it is kind of a win-win situation for me. If he beats me, I still own the website because he is working for me. If I beat it him it is also my website. At the same time we can learn from each other and look behind the scenes at everything of how we do each thing.

Niche Site Duel Challenge Guidelines

Now what I did is I came up with a rule or guideline. Originally we were thinking we were going to do a build a niche website that makes money. We decided that it didn’t have to be a niche site. The idea would be like it would be like a niche site but a niche site kind of had that – people thought of niche sites or small sites to have five or ten pages. In this duel that we are going to do, the rules are similar but we have a certain budget that we can each use. You can put as many pages as you want if you can find somebody to write it for you.

Here are the rules:

• We must come up with the niche topic as well as a domain name ourselves. My virtual assistant is going to do all his own keyword research and come up with the domain name. Then he is going to tell me and I am going to register it. Then I am going to do the same thing myself.
• Both sites will be hosted on my shared hosting through Hostgator.
• Both sites must be created using WordPress and we have to use either a free theme or a theme that we already own or that I already own. We will probably end up using a Woo theme since I own a bunch of Woo themes.
• The time frame that we have to finish our site is going to be ten to fourteen days. We are trying to shoot for two weeks to have the sites up and completed.
  

Niche Site Creation Budget: $100

What I am doing is I am giving my virtual assistant a $100 budget as well as myself only a $100 budget so we have the exact amount of money to work with. That hundred dollars does not include the domain name. That hundred dollars is to outsource. My virtual can outsource a writer if he wants to use a native English writer. He has access to my oDesk account as well as my Paypal account. How is that for trust? The monetizing method is going to be advertising affiliate links or any type of monetizing as long as it is a form of passive income. It will probably end up being Adsense, maybe some affiliate links or click bank products or something like that.

We are going to start this duel today and one week from now, maybe next, I will announce the niches we decided to pick and also the approach we are going to take. Each of us is going to take a little bit different post. We are going to make this public and put it on the website ZZZ Profits. You guys can check it out and follow it. I think these kinds of things are really fun and really interesting to see the outcome. That’s basically it.

Just look for the next audio podcast where we talk a little bit more about what we will be doing in this niche site or website make money duel. Until next time, I am Mo’e and I’m out.

The post [Mo'e] Create a Website That Makes Money Online Duel – Me vs My VA appeared first on ZZZ Profits.

Video Transcription

Hey, how’s it going? It’s Moe from ZZZ profits and I just want to say happy New Year. This is 2013. Let’s make this a great year. Let’s make this the year we find that financial freedom, we start finding that passive income and we start finding success with our online businesses.

Now, I want to share a few things, and one of the things is I have not been writing a lot of content lately. To be honest, I just really don’t like writing content. And I know how important it is to create content if you have a website but I’m just not the greatest at it. I don’t mind shooting a video or creating an audio so what I’ve decided to do is a little experiment. I know a lot of people do it. But what I have decided to do is I’ve decided to try recording some screen captures in the form of a blog post and then hire somebody to transcribe it.

Now what I did is I put in an ad at oDesk for transcribers. You can find transcribers around the price range of .80 cents to 2 dollars per minute of audio. You can find them on oDesk, and you can also do a search on the internet. Anyway this is kind of an experiment so what I want to do today is I’m going to basically share a few things and then I am going to create a transcribe so this is sort of a test run and this is also going to be my first blog post of the new year.

So let me share a few of the things I started working with at the beginning of this year. Now, I work with some VAs (virtual assistants). I was having a problem organizing myself and I wanted to use a project management tool. Now, I was looking into software like BaseCamp and a couple other ones, but I didn’t really want to pay for something I didn’t understand. Then somebody turned me on to a free one called FreedCamp. You can check it out at freedcamp.com and you can set up an account and basically have a project manager that assists your work. I am using it right now with my VA. So far I have to say it’s pretty cool and I feel like I’m a lot more organized and I’m able to put together to-do lists. Now I think my VA feels like he’s got more clear tasks and knows what’s going on. So that’s the first thing.

The second thing I wanted to show you guys that I started working with is a software i use with my VAs. I have a couple backlinkers and I have a personal VA that helps me with technical stuff. And occasionally I’ll hire another VA that will come in and help me with some things . I used to either hire them through oDesk,  or hire them directly and I would just have to trust that they were working their hours. When you start with a new person you kind of want to know what’s going on as well as monitor their work. So I found an online time tracker called Time Doctor. You can go find it at timedoctor.com.

What timedoctor does, is it allows you to create profiles for your VAs and they have to log in and then it tracks their time. Also, what’s kind of neat, is it records screen-shots every 10 minutes so you can check up and see what they’re working on. This way you know that they’re online and can see what they are doing. I don’t really check it all that much but you know, out of curiosity sometimes if I haven’t talked to them for a day or two, I’ll see what they are working on. So check that out. It’s about 5 dollars a month to have one user. If you have 2 or 3 users it’s like 10 dollars a month. It’s real cheap. So I definitely think if you are going to be using a lot of VAs you might enjoy the peace of mind to have a time tracker.

Now, I want to share with you guys something else that I did that was a project for Christmas. My son and I, we wrote a new book called the NY Zombie Run. And it’s a zombie book. My son is a huge zombie fanatic. But I just kind of wanted to share this with you guys how I did this because I thought it worked really well. We don’t care about making money with this even though it is making money online. We just wanted to see if we could write a fiction book and how cheap we could do it. So what I want to share with you is how Id did that really quick and then I’m going to end this podcast…not podcast, this audio video, then ‘til the next one.

But anyways, what I did is I went to oDesk and I posted a writing job. I put in a job post and I said I am looking for a ghost writer for a short book, fiction, and teen horror. What I wrote and posted is:

I’m looking for someone who can ghost write a book for me and my son. This is just a fun project we are experimenting with. The story is a zombie tale. I’m thinking the book will be around 75 pages. We have a rough outline of the story that we can record verbally via audio. Your job would be to put it into words, fill it out, and add some creativity and make it easy to read for teens in the age bracket of 12 to 16. Only native English speakers, writers please.’

I definitely recommend if you are looking for writers on oDesk to clarify that. So anyways, what was interesting is how many people responded to this because it was about zombies. Within 24 hours I had like 30 people respond saying: I want to do it,I really want to do it.  What we did, is we found a good writer and communicated with her completely online, she agreed to do it for the budget of $250. What we did is we recorded our audio using a program called audacity. She just took our audio file and put it into a book. It took about three weeks and then we had a book.

And then what I did is I went to Deviantart which is the next thing I want to share with you. It’s basically an art community. Now you can find graphic artists on oDesk but if you want a real artist you need to go to an art community. After a little searching I found a website called deviantart.com and I went to the forum section. They have a forum and in the forum section you can post jobs for artists.  I posted a job and wrote:

Hi, I am creating a zombie book with my son and I’m looking for someone to help design us a cool front and back cover.

Once again, I had like a hundred people answer. That’s when I knew that zombies were pretty hot. Well zombies are definitely pretty hot with all the movies, the show “The Walking Dead” and everything else going on. Anyway so we got the graphic done. And let me show you. It is now available on Amazon and it’s called The NY Zombie Run. And you can see right here that it’s a pretty cool graphic. And it’s by Atua M’oe who was at the time my ten-year-old son, even though I did a lot.  What we did is we used characters from our real life and put them in the book as characters. It was just a really fun project.

That’s a little look into what I’ve been busy doing here with ZZZ Profits. So I just wanted to share some of these things. Oh yah, finally the last thing I did is I found somebody help publish. Because once I had the book, I was like now what do I do with it? How do I get it on Amazon? I ended up hiring another person with self publishing experience on oDesk for a hundred dollars. She basically took the PDF, the graphic and put it into the correct format. Everything you see inside a physical book, such as copyright and all that. Then she put it up on Amazon etc.

So it was $250 for the writer, $100 for the art front and back cover, and another $100 to have the book up put together and selfpublished. So for $450 we have this cool book that’s on create space and Amazon, Written, edited, and graphic, and it was completely outsourced. So it’s amazing what you can do if you put your mind to it and just be creative. So that’s all I have to say for this video podcast. Until next time I hope everybody has great success your projects.

I would love for you to visit me at my forum. ZZZprofits.com forum and join in the conversation if you have an ideas or questions about anything.

We’d love to hear you. And until next time have a great day.

Free Yourself Up from Repetitive Tasks, Find Highly Skilled VAs at oDesk.com

Don’t forget to check out my new book NY Zombie Run:)

The post Internet Tools & How to Outsource a Zombie Book for Under $500 appeared first on ZZZ Profits.

photo credit: Mish Mish

“Here is a guest post by Julie who has made the transition from corporate job to online Freelancer.”

Let me start by giving you a little background on me. I’m not doing this to bore you; I simply want to give you some idea on what we might have in common. There were two reasons I decided to sign-up with oDesk. The first, I was fed-up with working for someone who took all the credit for my hard work, and, incidentally, hadn’t given me a pay rise in over 3 years. The reason I was given for this was I wasn’t worth anymore than I was already being paid!

The second reason and this was something that kind of forced my hand. I was made redundant (possibly why I never got that pay rise)! Many of you will relate to both of the reasons I decided to enter the world of freelancing. The unfortunate thing for me was that I was left without an income before I even got started (but that’s a story for another day).

After much deliberating and I have to say, a good deal of panic, I decided to start looking on the internet for ways to make money online. This, I have to say, took longer than I expected. I had heard of money making scams, but never in my wildest dreams did I think there would be so many! The amount of “companies” that tell you about making money online and how you can become rich in a matter of days is astounding. However, I digress. After some-time, I stumbled across a website called oDesk, and I’m really glad I did.

I’m proud to announce that since the summer of 2011, I have been working as a freelancer, and I can’t believe how much money one can make from oDesk , thanks to this website. However, there are two sides to every story, and in the following words I’m going to tell you all about “the good, the bad and the ugly”.

The Good

The first and best thing to note about this website is they’re a real company. They are most definitely NOT a scam. You don’t have to pay to join, and it’s free to set-up your profile. In fact, you don’t pay anything for the benefits you receive with this website. So how do they make their money? I hear you ask. Well, they charge a percentage of any fees charged to the client, easy!

If you’re serious about using this website as your platform for making money online, you have to be prepared to put some hard work in. It takes time to build a profile you can be proud of, and you should take your time doing this.

Of course, there are basic details required and once that’s done then you’re into the realms of showcasing what you can do. If you want to make money online with oDesk, you need to have a good profile. The good news is they have a system to assist you on how to do just that; such as information on the best way to word the introduction you need, how you should present your resume, and all sorts of other tips, which (and I know I keep saying this) are free.

You can add a photo to give your profile that personal touch, and you can also take various tests that prove you can do what you say you can. It’s worth noting here that to become 100% oDesk “ready”, you will need to take a test but it’s not hard to do.

Once all of this is done, and you’re profile shows as 100% complete, you’re ready to start applying for jobs of which there is no shortage.

The Bad

I’m going to be fairly brief here because I’m a fan of oDesk and their website has helped me go about making money online, but it’s only fair to point out the downside. After all, nothing in life is perfect:

• When you apply to a job you will be in competition with other “bidders”. It doesn’t cost you anything to apply, but you do have to bear in mind that some clients will choose their contractors based on price alone.

• It can take a while for you to land your first job simply because you have no background with the website. Once you do start building on your profile, you will receive feedback. Again, some clients choose contractors based on this.

The Ugly

Yes, it’s a sad fact; there are undesirables that manage to set-up profiles on oDesk. They advertise jobs as “fixed price”, get you to do the work, and disappear without paying. This is the biggest problem the website has in my opinion. They will protect your earnings if you have an hourly contract, but not fixed. Maybe one day, they’ll correct this.

Conclusion

Making money online on oDesk is possible, I’m living proof just keep the following in mind:

• Vet your clients like they would you
• Make sure (where you can) that you factor the websites fees into your rate
• Take your time, and be patient!

Like this post? Check out our free course on how you can make money online.

The post How to Make Money Online with oDesk – The Debate appeared first on ZZZ Profits.