If I had a nickel for every time I heard…
“My site doesn’t get any traffic.”
or…
“I get traffic but nobody buys anything.”
Well I’d have a lot of nickels.
Here’s a couple of questions I usually ask…
- “How much time did you spend doing market and keyword research?”
- “Did you check to make sure there weren’t hundreds of thousands of sites that already were built around your main keyword?”
- “Did you make sure people were actually making money in that niche and there were good monetization partners?”
- “What do you have to do to get on the first page of Google for that keyword?”
THE Most Important Part of Building A Successful Online Business
Without a doubt proper Market and Keyword Research is the most important part of building any online business. Do it right and you get easy traffic and start making money right away. Do it wrong and you could waste months or even years.
What Size Mountain Are You Climbing?
What happens most of the time is people pick a niche that is way too competitive. It’s like choosing to climb a 20,000 foot mountain when you thought you were climbing a 1,000 foot mountain. They get part way up and wonder why the top is so far away. They thought they’d be there by now.
That’s when people just give up, even though they’ve already invested hundreds of hours and who knows how much money.
The only thing that’s worse…
They get to the top and realize that there’s no Pot of Gold waiting when they get there.
The sad thing is, both of these website mistakes could have been avoided.
Find The Sweet Spot In A Niche
The Sweet Spot is that ideal place in a niche where the keyword phrase has enough demand to get traffic but not so much competition that you can never get on the first page of Google for that keyphrase.
Nice place to be eh?
Yes, but it’s getting harder all the time. More and more people are building websites and trying to find a way to work at home and maybe quit that day job. So more and more websites are being put up.
The Sweet Spot is getting harder to find. But it’s still there. It just makes it that much more critical to do thorough keyword research.
Don’t Forget Commerciality
An often neglected part of keyword research is not only finding keywords that will get you traffic, but also finding keywords that have enough “buying intention” to make money.
Keywords that can get you traffic are not so hard to find, but many of those “low hanging fruit” actually have very little monetization potential. Sure “turtle propagation” may get you some traffic but how many of the folks that type that into Google are looking to buy something? Probably not many.
In fact, give it a try… Type “turtle propagation” into Google. You’ll see over a million websites about it but not one single AdWords ad.
So at least half of your keyword research should be spent checking for monetization potential for each phrase you research. You’ll want to start by making sure there are people buying paid ads for the keyword in Google. The paid ads are the ones over on the right on the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs). If people are paying for that keyword they must be making money.
And also check to make sure there are either products you can sell or affiliate programs that pay well. You could find some keywords with plenty of products but are people buying those products online and do they offer a good enough commission so you can actually make money.
Those First 30 Days Are Just A Test
Even if you do plenty of research and think you’ve found some good money-making potential you won’t know for sure until you test your conversion rate.
What’s that?
- Of the people who come to your site, how many click on your sales links?
- Of the people that click, what percentage actually purchase something?
If it takes hundreds of visitors before you make a sale then something’s wrong. You want to convert at least 1% ideally… in other words 1 in 100 who go to the sales page actually buy. If you can’t convert visitors to customers at that rate then you may have found a niche with no buying intention. It might be time to pull-the-plug before you waste any more time.
Don’t Waste Your Time
For many, it takes months and sometimes years to realize the niche they chose is a dead end street. They spend months climbing up the mountain and realize they are nowhere near the top.
Before you spend what will be hundreds of hours building a site, why not do the work and thoroughly research your potential market. Trust me… you’ll be glad you did.
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