OIL 001: All about Adsense Niche Websites with Spencer Haws of NichePursuits.com

T: Hey everybody it’s Trent Dyrsmid here from the OnlineIncomeLab with another expert entrepreneur interview. Today on the show with me I have Spencer Haws from NichePursuits.com and I first learned of Spencer as a part of my own journey into learning how to generate additional forms of passive income online.

So Spencer, welcome to the show. It’s a pleasure to have you. I think rather than read your bio what I’m gonna do is just ideally take just a minute or two, probably not a minute or two. But let’s go back to college, just tell me a little bit, you know you were headed down the traditional path. I know you went to BYU is that correct? What did you study and what did you do after college?

S: Yes, that’s right. Yeah I did like you said. I kinda have the traditional plan in mind. I got my undergraduate degree in Finance at BYU. I’ve always been interested in finance and stock market and that’s kinda why I guess I originally go into finance and that’s in 2002. I started working in the financial services sector actually at Merrill Lynch for a few years and then went back.

T: So was I.

S: Oh really? I didn’t know that.

T: It bought a company that I worked for.

S: Yeah. Similar background back there then. So I went back and got my MBA. It was kinda at that time I guess I decided I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I just didn’t know what business I’d want to get into. So I got my MBA. Kind of too prong, you know effort to both further my career and should the opportunity to start my own business come along I’d have the appropriate background I thought. So that’s what I did in 2007. Got my MBA graduated from Arizona State University. And worked at Wells Fargo Bank and business banking for about 5 or 6 years up until a couple of months ago. So in March is when I quit Wells Fargo, quit my full time job and then working online full time.

T: Terrific! And little did you know that time that taking up MBA really stands for Masters in Building Affiliates.

S: There you go. That’s what it is.

T: I was gonna say Affiliate Sites but for you it’s Masters in Building Adsense Sites.

S: That’s right. Didn’t know that until just now.

T: So you quit your job in March of 2011. Congratulations by the way.

S: Thank you.

T: I think that’s a goal of many of our listeners aspire too.

S: Yes, it’s pretty nice.

T: Now you got I think I read on your blog’s income report you’ve got over a hundred niche sites that are all monetizing with Adsense. Is that correct?

S: Yeah, I’ve got just about 200 websites. I think right now it’s just under 200 websites and they are primarily monetized by Google Adsense. I do have a few other things in there but the large interim of income is from Google Adsense.

T: All right. 200 sites. Big number. Lots of sites. But this podcasts is really for the beginners and 200 is a daunting number. So let’s go backwards to site #1. What was site #1? When did you build it? How bad did it crash and burn? Or did you make any money? Let’s talk about that one first.

S: Yeah. Probably very typical. It did crash and burn for sure. It was back in probably 2005. I think it’s when I built my first website and it was on personal finance. You know that is what my background was in so I thought I was gonna create a huge resource for people on personal finances. I actually put a lot of effort into it. I had great contents, you know, stuffs that I thought would be very useful. But I knew absolutely nothing about search engine optimization, how to choose good keywords that would help my website to rank and to get people actually coming back to my website. So, essentially I had all these great contents nobody was visiting the site. I made very little money, you know, a few dollars a month. I may have toughed out like $20 you know, 1 month or something and that was about it.

T: So a lot has changed since then obviously you’ve gone to as I say 200 sites. So there’s a lot of different ways that somebody can earn money online. You’ve got adsense. You’ve got affiliated coms like Amazon and a million other retailers. You’ve got CPA. You’ve got creating your own products, quick bank products. There is literally an endless way to monetize the site. What made you choose Adsense?

S: You know it’s just so simple to implement. It’s really the main reason I started using Adsense. Because Google really does everything for you. You just implement the code where you want it on your website and because Google has such a large network of advertisers the appropriate ad will show up on your site based on the content that you have. So that’s why I started using Adsense initially. And I, in fact, tried that since in some of my very first website and that’s how I made some of my money. You know, in between my first website and where I am now I tried lots of different things. But just the fact that there was so much a lot of pre-selling if you’re trying to sell a product, customer service if you get more involved in selling your own product or even with affiliate products you need to answer questions sometimes and things like that. So I was drawn to Adsense really because of how simple it was to implement. So that’s initially. Now I continue to use Adsense not simply for that but more because it covers such a wide variety of advertisers. Because literally every product that has ever been created, every service that’s out there advertisers are advertising about that and they’re using Google Adsense. So for example compared to Amazon. A lot of people like using Amazon affiliate program because it’s a large network that has lots of products. And it really does. And it works well for some people. But if you compare that to the number of keywords or products that you could target with Google Adsense, Google Adsense stores what is available in Amazon. Literally every product imaginable, every keyword imaginable almost out there, you can make money with on Google Adsense.

T: And that’s the thing. I know when I was new I was really, you know the first thing that you’re faced with is keywords. How am I gonna pick a keyword? And I had this process that I would go through of looking for search volumes and computations and so forth. But then I built one with Amazon sites in the beginning and when I couldn’t find the product I didn’t know how to monetize it. So I was kinda like stuck. And I know here’s the keyword and I could probably write for this but hmm nope, no product on Amazon. So what you’re saying is that with Adsense you didn’t have that problem. They’ve opened a lot of doors for you.

S: Exactly! And it doesn’t mean that Adsense is necessarily the best way to monetize every keyword out there. That’s definitely not the case. You know Amazon may be a better source of income for certain products but just because of the breadth of options that the Adsense offers you can target more keywords.

T: Okay. So I’m sure that at this point everybody that’s listening to this podcasts, myself included, really wants to get a better understanding how you pick your keywords. So can you give us and go into a formal detail and I think in one of your posts, I think maybe in today’s post, you did go into formal detail in case folks listening here hasn’t seen that can you walk us through let’s start with how you’re gonna find your seed, how you’re gonna find your specifics, how you’re gonna find your related and what you’re gonna do in terms of competitive analysis.

S: Sure. That’s a huge topic.

T: We’ll probably go a whole hour on that.

S: Yeah it really could and to be honest I mean if there’s one thing people could learn about here is keyword research that is I don’t know how much percentage of the game it is but it’s a huge percentage of the whole ball game is picking the correct keyword, low competition keywords. So if you can get that right, the rest is really a piece of cake. You got to learn all the other things of course but if you do that right you’ll make money.

So initially you do have to brainstorm to look for some seed keywords out there and you can do that in a lot of different ways either by looking at other websites. You can look at categories on Amazon.com. You can just browse there and pick a category and look at the products. And there you’ve got thousands of root keywords whether it be on clothing or cameras or other electronics. You can start there. You can go over to Ebay and they’ve got lots of categories. One thing that I like to do is when I’m looking at other websites I’ll notice the keywords that they’re targeting or what their subject are there. And so I like to actually keep a little notepad on my desk here and will just jot down a word or two so when later I go to some real keyword research I’ll have some seed keywords there. So whether it’s something around you in your own room that could be a seed keyword. Whether you go shopping at the store you can take note of products there or ideas. Really you can get seed keyword anywhere.

T: Let me interject quickly coz I wanna point out a couple of things and ask you heaves. I know that I use a firm out of Google Instant so for those who don’t know what Google Instant is you go to Google and you start typing whatever you’re searching and then it starts to automatically filling it all for you. I think I commented in one of your post the other day on how to. So how to and I’ll put in an “a” and I’ll see what’s there. And then I might go “how to aa” and then it’ll give you a bunch of words. And then I won’t go through 3 a’s coz there’s no word with 3 a’s in a row. And then I’ll go through b, ba, be, bo and whatever. And it just keeps on giving you ideas. And then the wonder wheel is kinda a similar approach wherein you put in a keyword. Wonder wheel is found on the left hand side of Google on main page and it will give you 2 related words. Have you had much success using those particular tools or have you got on your own approach?

S: I think those are great suggestions definitely. And I have used Google Instant and I’m familiar with the Wonder Wheel as well. The Google Instant I have probably used it more because it’s great resource really if you just can’t think of anything at all you can literally just go over there and just type in a letter and you know like you said type 2 or 3 letters. I really like the “how to” or I think you’ve mentioned a couple of other things, a couple of prefix words you could type, things that people have problems with or something. I think that’s great. You could mind that Google Instant for keywords probably all day long so that is a great resource for sure.

T: So let’s move on now. One last question, I’m kinda jumping in, it’s on top of mind and I wanna get it out. In your 200 sites, do you find that you predominantly found yourself in maybe 1 or 2 markets with lots of keywords in those markets or you’re just all over the map?

S: Yeah I started out all over the map for sure. Just kind of a broad stroke, you know, just built whatever keyword I find and I’ll build a website on. But that’s a great question because actually I found a couple of my websites were doing very well and they both happen to be in the same market. So what I did then is I went back to the Google Adsense keyword tool and looked it up, looked at other similar keywords in that exact same market and that has really been part of my big success actually to be honest. So once I found 1 keyword in 1 particular market I’ve now built dozens of websites in a very similar niche. And it really has been a very good in terms of income because I found keywords that pay a lot in that particular niche and most of them have little competition so I think that that is a very good thing to do. If you have a website that’s successful try to replicate that success with similar keywords.

T: You know that here you’re talking about that and that reminds me of an expression or a piece of advice, I don’t remember where I got this but I got this years ago and the quote goes like this, “the best way to succeed in business is to be in business”. I remember when I heard it I said that’s dumb. I didn’t get it. And then it basically means that there are all sorts of opportunities in the market place that are called 1 or 2 levels but unless you’re actually in business pursuing that first level opportunity you may be failing along the way you’re never ever gonna see the the 2nd level or the 3rd level.

Actually my friends call it my blue dot theory. I wanna sell blue dots, I’m trying to sell blue dots. I’m failing at selling blue dots but I realize there’s a process of selling blue dots but there’s red dots market out there. And then I research on the red dots market and I start selling some red dots not so bad but while I’m selling red dots and researching I discover green dots. And I knock like a ball on the green dots. Is that basically what’s working for you in your niche portfolio?

S: Definitely. You hit the nail on the head there. And so another way to kind of mine those keywords or find other opportunities that I didn’t mention specifically is looking at if you have any analytics installed in your websites because I found that even though I’m targeting 1 particular keyword I’m getting a good amount of traffic for another keyword that I wasn’t really targeting. I just happen to rank for. And so I actually built an entire website based on that keywords that I just kinda rocked out and got some traffic for. They’ve been very successful as well.

T: Let me just make sure that I understand that correctly. So you got website “a” targeting keyword “a” and you start ranking for keyword “b” in the analytics of website “a” so then you build a new website for keyword “b”. Is that correct?

S: That’s exactly right. That’s brilliant.

T: Thanks for sharing that nugget with us.

S: Yap no problem.

T: Okay. So let’s go back to keyword research. We’ve now got a seed keyword, what do we do? You got a seed keyword and you’re now ready to get to the next level but not ready to build a website yet.

S: So basically you just jot down your idea so get a piece of paper and then you go and expand that keyword list. Then you really need to find some keywords that are gonna be profitable to you. So the primary way you do that is using the Google Adwords keyword tool, it’s a free tool by Google that when you punch in 1 root keyword it will pull out to a hundred additional keywords that are similar to that. And there’s lot of keyword tools out there but they all essentially use the Google Adwords keyword tool as their source of data. So that’s why I just mentioned that we can talk about keyword tools later but that’s where the data is usually coming from. And when you go to that tool you wanna look for 2 primary things. You wanna look for keyword that gets searched for enough times every month to make it worth building a website on. And so the absolute minimum search volume that I say that I wanna look at is a thousand searches per month.

T: Let me interrupt you there. Exact phrase or broad. Let’s get really specific.

S: And I look at the exact match searches and I also look at the local volume. There’s 2 columns, there’s the global volume search and the local volume search. And so I look at the local volume and I have it as the US so for those outside the US you might want to select the US to look at those volumes and it’s the exact match. The reason I do the exact match is because then I know with certainty that people are typing that into Google. When you do the broad and the phrase it still might be a good keyword and it might get that much volume but you just don’t know with this much certainty as you do when you select the exact match. So that’s why I do that.

T: So I’m interrupting again I realize but I want to ask a question here, so let’s say when you find a word that has a thousand exact local searches per month and according to industry data, again that’s why in you’re recent blog post that when you rank #1 you’re gonna get a roughly 42% of the clicks. I quite think that when you’re anywhere in the top 3 you’re gonna get 42% of the clicks coz people will click more than 1 link. So let’s assume for a thousand searches you could end up with 420 visitors a month. My question is in your experience do you find that your actual traffic exceed, coz for me it has, 420 a month.

S: Right. Yes and it will definitely because not only will you be getting traffic from that one keyword. You will be getting traffic from other long tail keywords that you weren’t targeting. Like what I’ve mentioned before you’ve got keyword “b” that you weren’t targeting that you are gonna get some traffic for. And so the thousand exact match searches give you really a minimum of traffic that you should be getting. If you rank in #1 it might be 420 visitors but realistically you should be getting more traffic just depending on how much content you have on your website and the other keywords that people are finding you by.

T: Let’s tie into that if we could. We haven’t talked about competition here we’re gonna get to that. You’ve identified your seed keyword, the word that you’re gonna build the site around, how many related keywords are you looking for? How many articles are you gonna write in the launch of the site? I’ve got one more question but now I’m gone. I forgot about it. It’ll come back later.

S: Yeah that’s right we’ll probably get to it down. Typically I will target between 5 and 10 total keywords. I have the primary keyword and then the other keywords are really just supporting that to kinda fill out the site to make it have complete information. So when somebody comes to the site they don’t just see 1 page but they’ll have other topics that they might also be interested in that are related to that 1 keyword. So when I launch a site I will have typically between 5 and 10 total articles on the website with each article targeting a separate keyword.

T: Do you publish them all at one time at site launch or do you do them a day, a day, a day, a day…?

S: You know I’ve done both and I don’t think it really matters. Maybe it’s better to do it one a day or one a week or something but most of the time I just do it all at once. So I’ll publish maybe 10 articles then kinda wait and see how the website performs before I usually add more content.

T: So I wanna finish off at least in the brief version that we’re doing and I would encourage anyone to either come to Spencer’s site or my site. We’ve got a lot more detail on the keyword research aspect as well as the other things. But let’s talk a little bit about competition unless I’m missing something. If there’s something in my mind you go you understand volume and making sure there’s sufficient volume, sufficient related keywords. Taking it all can I actually develop interesting content around these topics now I’ve got to look at competition. Is that the next step for you or is there a next step?

S: The one other piece that we didn’t talk about is the cost per click. That other advertisers they’re gonna advertise about this keyword and again that’s in the Google Adwords keyword tool. I like to look at a dollar or more in CPC. It’s the average CPC column there. And that’ll just let you know if advertisers are spending money on this keyword so I really like to have those 2 pieces. I’ve gotta have at least a thousand searches per month preferably more, I talked about that. I’d like to target maybe 3-5,000 is a lot better. And then a minimum of a dollar cost per click because that’ll tell me that you know I can make some money from that keyword. But then the next step after that is to look at the top 10 competition in Google to see what the websites are that are ranking well and to see if I can beat them and outrank them.

T: We’re gonna get to that in a second but I wanna put up a couple of questions here. So the CPC, I know I read in your post today, you had a little formula for forecasting potential profitability of a niche site. And it was a really good one for me coz I knew the Adsense and I’m more familiar with Amazon and you wrote that even if the CPC is $3 or $5 or $10 or whatever in your model you only count on getting a buck.

S: Yeah I do. It’s not to say I can’t make more but generally speaking the values that you’re seeing in the Google Adwords tool and this gets kinda complicated of course so I’ll try to keep it short. But the values that you’re seeing there are what advertisers are willing to pay to be listed on Google.com. When somebody does a search for cell phones (on the right hand top or at the side) that’s the value that’s listed on that tool. That value is not what you can expect to get paid on your website with Google Adsense. It’s related so high paying keywords there you will make more but it’s not gonna be you know, if it says a dollar you shouldn’t necessarily expect to get a dollar every time somebody clicks. It will be an estimated 30-50% of that. With a maximum of a dollar is what I do simply because I look for a minimum of a dollar cost per click but in my earnings model even if it has listed $20 per click I’m still gonna only estimate about a dollar simply because of what I explained. On Google.com is really where they’re spending the big money. On the content network they’re just not spending that lot of money and it’s hard to predict. So I basically take it as well, I’ll put it in as a dollar and if I make more than that I’m happy.

T: Absolutely. And just so you know listeners, if an advertiser is paying a dollar per click to get on the homepage of Google, Google is taking a slice of that. I think it’s about a third. And then the content network, in case you don’t know what that term means is that niche site like ours, we become part of the content network and people will bid a lower to have their ads played on the content network than they will on the homepage of Google. Combined with the fact that people are always changing their bids and other people are bidding and other people are not bidding anymore. This causes the value of the click to continually fluctuate. I really like every model just assuming a buck per click is always what we’ll be able to do.

S: As part of Google Adsense Terms of Service you’re not suppose to say exactly how much you make on a particular website. Let’s just say I found that it’s rare to consistently make much more than a dollar per click. You know that’s why I use that.

T: Now one other thing that I’ve done a lot by myself it’s continually getting trickier and I remember watching Math Cook from Google talk about the decreasing importance of exact match domains. Now I read in your last income report that you launched around 30 or more sites in the last 2 months or slightly less than 2 months. How many of those sites were on EMD, EMD by the way is short for exact match domain?

S: I don’t know the exact number of those that I can say that whenever it’s possible for me to get an exact match domain I get it. I still believe that there is value in getting that and maybe there is some decreased importance the Google formula for exact match domains but I still believe it is beneficial. But at the same time I’ve also found that I am still doing very well with keywords even if I have to get a domain that adds either a prefix or a suffix to it. So meaning keywordpro.com or keywordhome.com or adding something before that. So a lot of the websites I built is probably half and half. I had exact match domains maybe 15 and 15 that were not exact. But all of the websites had the keyword in the domain.

T: Yeah you know I do a lot of keyword research myself and finding the exact match domains for search volumes of 2500 exact and up is tricky now.

S: Yeah it takes some time. It does definitely. So my highest earning website is not an exact match domain. It does have the keyword in the domain. I have lots of websites that rank #1 on Google that are not exact match domains. So it is not essential at all. It’s just it’s nice to have.

T: How about the extensions, .com, org, info? Do you have one that you won’t do?

S: Yeah you know and I should probably test this out a little bit more but I’ve done fine sticking to the .com, .net and .org, those 3. And so to be honest I don’t know how well a .info or a .biz or a .us would do. I just haven’t tested it out.

T: I have.

S: So how’s it going?

T: My #1 producing site is a .info because when I started I just didn’t know any better. It was getting around 3500 visitors a month. At that time the top site was an exact same keyword as mine but he was .com and I was .info. I had almost 4,000 links to my site. I had almost 2x as much content as him. Our domain age wasn’t a lot different and I couldn’t pass I guess that saved my life. Subsequently we’ve both been passed by a .biz and I remember how it was a really interesting story because I saw the .com for sale on flip ads. So when it was on sale I was able to get all the analytics and everything so I was able to get a really good inside review of this guy’s site. He then sold it for 2500 bucks somebody else bought it and I’m pretty sure that the guy that sold the .com immediately launched the .biz because it looks exactly the same. It’s the same theme. They just really smell very, very similar so in my experience I don’t highly recommend .info’s because if I all rise I should have outranked the guy. I had 3x as many backlinks as he did.

S: Interesting. Wait. At least you were ranking you know and you were making some money.

T: Yeah and then I got Google slap and now I’m all back out of the hole.

S: That does happen.

T: Okay. So competition. I keep trying to vote that it leads to a value because this is really the killer obviously. It’s easy to find words with volume. It’s easy to find words where you can prefix or suffix the domain. It’s the strength of competition. Now some other rumors out there we’re talking about looking at keywords in quotes in Google. I’m looking at a number of competing sites. Now you and I both know that that doesn’t mean anything but our listeners may not. Why is that meaningless and what is important?

S: Yeah I don’t look at that at all. I don’t worry about it. That is just telling you how many websites out there mention that keyword on their website. It doesn’t mean that they’re targeting that keyword. It could have been a big news website happen to mention that keyword. They’re not trying to rank for it. So you wanna look at the websites that are ranking. You know, you wanna look at the top 10 websites in Google that are actually ranking for that website, that is it. I don’t care how many websites talk about the keyword. I don’t care about how many have it in the title even. I know a lot of people look at that all in title and that can help narrow things down but really you just wanna look at how hard it is to rank in the top 10. It is a lot of information to cover but this really is the meat and potatoes of how to create a successful niche website. How to find a low competition keyword.

And so there’s a few different factors that I look at and I should have a list here so I don’t forget something but you can look at first of all, the title of the page. Are they using the keyword within the title and you can do that just in Google. When you do a Google query, the hyperlink that is listed on Google, the little blue underlined words, that’s the title. So if they’re using the keyword in that title they’re doing a good job. But if you can find several websites that are ranking for a particular keyword that aren’t even using that in their title, that’s a definite sign of weakness. And so that is a huge thing that I look at. Are these websites ranking well and they’re not even using the keyword? If that’s the case, I mean, all you gotta do is basically use the keyword in your title.

T: Let me jump in there for a minute coz I see this all the time. I was doing some analysis the other day. I use a tool called SECockpit which uses Mozrank which is – are you familiar with Mozrank at all?

S: I don’t think I am. Maybe you can tell me about it.

T: Well, Mozrank is a simulation of page rank from Google. It’s not the BOM though. Google’s page rank time is about 90 days old. Mozrank I believe is only 30 or 60 and the folks over at SEO Moz are reputed to be some of the best number of crunchers out there. Anyway, it’s part of the tool. So I see pages that don’t have the keyword and title but they’ll be in like 3rd or 4th position. They have a high Mozrank call it like a PR4. They’ll maybe have 3-400 links to the page. And they might even be on a relatively strong domain authority. Not necessarily they have much page authority. Are you telling me that because the lack of a page title attribute that you think you can knock out one of those for that position?

S: Possibly. There are a lot of factors that go into ranking a website, title is one of them, and if I see it like I just mentioned where it’s not there I dig a little deeper. So that’s not the only factor I look at. I should clarify that for sure. But specifically in your example, yes if there are websites that have a high page rank that may not really mean anything if they’re not targeting that keyword. They may not be using it in the title but sometimes they are using it in their contents so you do have to dig a little bit deeper but if they’re not even using it in their title and sometimes they’re not using the exact keyword within the content of their page they may have a high page rank and have lots of links to that page but they’re really not targeting what you’re trying to target so that can be a sign of weakness but just going off of that I don’t look at the Mozrank I guess but page rank I do look at specifically. And I use it to basically tell me how strong that page is and the higher page rank the higher authority that it has. And it’s kind of an elusive figure to nail down exactly.

T: Do you have a rule of thumb that you can share?

S: Well to be honest I’ll give you the ideal situation. And there are keywords out there that fit this ideal so it’s not just sort of pie in the sky. Ideally is to have results that have a page rank of 0 or sometimes there’s a dash which means there’s no page rank yet. Usually that means that’s a newer website. So I like to see a couple of results on the top 10 that has a 0 or a dash and those exact same results. So those pages that have a 0 page rank also have less than 10 backlinks to that page. If you can find that, that’s usually a sign that there’s some weakness within the top 10 results in Google. So no page rank, very few backlinks and especially if they’re not using the title, the keyword in the title, you should be good.

T: So that’s your first smell test for creating and looking like a green flag?

S: Yeah absolutely, absolutely. And then you can do some more in depth things like age of the website, the older the website usually the more authority it has on Google. I mentioned links, now there’s 2 types of links. There’s links to the websites or the root domain of the website and there’s links to the actual ranking page. Primarily, you just want to look at the links to the page that is ranking. For example, if you look at Ezine articles for example. You know article directories that have millions of links to their domain. Lots of their articles that rank well have no links or just 1 or 2 backlinks. Articles are very easy to outrank. That’s a very weak listing in the top 10 sites on Google. Usually if you see an article that has no backlinks from Go articles or Ezine articles that’s a sign that it’s a pretty weak listing as well.

T: How about a Youtube video?

S: Yeah Youtube video is… that one’s kind of hard. It can be a sign of weakness but Google likes to rank Youtube videos because they like the hot pick mix list. You know they like pictures, videos, shopping results so sometimes even though it is not of a strong page they’ll throw a video in there because it’s relevant. So I like to see at least a couple of weak listings within the top 10. So if everything is very strong in the top 10 of Google and there’s a weak video I probably wouldn’t go into that market. I would like to see at least another weak website.

T: And so what are some of the, I mean obviously some of this takes time, you know you’re looking for a keyword you can’t just spend half an hour analyzing the competition with every single keyword because you’ll never get to the gold nugget that you wanna build your site on. So experience is going to undoubtedly make you quicker coz you’re probably at a point now where your writer, maybe you’re using an SEO quake extension in your browser or you’re simply just looking at the top 10, what is it for you that allows you to do this quickly before you’re gonna go and do a deeper dive?

S: Yeah I do use the SEO for Firefox plugin. It’s a free plugin from SEObook.com that gives you all that data we just talked about. And it’s very similar to the SEO quake plugin. So that is a free tool that I use quite a bit to look at the competing websites in Google. So I’ll punch in a search query and I can do it pretty quickly now just because I do have, you know, I’ve looked at a ton of these keywords but that tool is a huge, huge time saver to get all the data.

T: And SEO quake, the thing that I like about it is that it’ll display the results in a line under each listing in the page results so you don’t double click the little button every time. I don’t use Firefox so I’m not familiar with it.

S: It is the same way with the Firefox plugin. It list right there.

T: It doesn’t get 10 clicks to look at the results.

S: No. It works very similar to SEO quake.

T: So let me summarize so far what we’ve got on the competition side and I’m dwelling here because I’m drooling really, really important stuff. Ideally you’re trying to find PR 0 or PR dash for at least 2 of the results in the top 10. And you wanna see fewer than 10 links to the page for those results. You wanna see the page title having containing rather not containing the keyword. So those are we’ll say the 3 first filters or is there something else you wanna add to that?

S: Those are the primary things and again that’s an ideal situation. I mean, most likely you’re gonna have to go into markets that don’t fit that ideally every time. You are gonna be using the keyword in the title but you’re just gonna do your best. That’s the ideal and you kinda go from there. But the other things are the site age that I mentioned, the number of links coming from an education website, the .edu or the .gov website. Those are signs of strength.

T: How do you tell where the links are coming from? Do you use Market Samurai for that?

S: No. That is actually also on the SEO for Firefox plugin right there. That data show how many links are coming from .edu or .gov websites. So I look at that. Those are kinda secondary, well I guess they’re not secondary but rarely in the niches are the keywords that I’m targeting there will be a .gov linked into that page. So it’s kinda rare but you just got to glance at it just to make sure.

T: Okay. So now you’ve found one that passed all those filters, is there a second layer of analysis that you’re gonna do before you decide to commit your resources?

S: That is really the main chunk of it. The other thing that you might wanna do is just take a look at the websites that are ranking. I kind of take a look and you know if it met that criteria and then I take a look at their website and it looks unprofessional. If it looks like they really don’t know what they’re doing it gets me really excited. Like, okay, I can go on to this market. I can beat this guy. I can tell he doesn’t know what he’s doing, whatever, so I will take a look at some of the websites that I thought were weak just to kinda confirm my suspicions. And like I said I look at how professional the website looks, the content that’s on the website doesn’t look like it’s well written, well organized. Is it useful? That sort of thing. So if I think I can provide better content and provide a better experience to the actual users then you know I get excited about the market. And will go into it.

T: Okay. Now speaking of markets, are there any (there’s no context for this question of course) markets that you’ll avoid just because the competition…. For example, I first built a lot of photography sites. And I truly when I look back that’s when I looked at all the things that we’ve been talking about but what I’ve tried to spend the lifetime analyzing was the actual, my new review sites were reviewing SLR cameras, and foolishly I didn’t spend a lot of time actually looking at their content, the degree to have high quality, the radius were and what was included in that content and after a while I started looking in that when I was getting more traffic in my sites but I wasn’t getting conversions and I thought it’s great that I built up this traffic but my content relative to the professional photography review sites sucks, for lack of a better term. The Amazon it’s the last one they clicked not the first one. So if they were on my site first coz I’m ranked #1 but then they go to the next guy’s site coz he’s no #3 and he’s got great content, he’s gonna get paid not me. Are there niches that you won’t go into because you know that you’re just competing against real jet businesses that can do this?

S: Well, that’s partly why you use the Adsense. You just need to click.

T: It solves that problem.

S: But that is a great question. Now I do try to provide professional content, I really do. But there are certain markets like medical related things I typically will stay away from just because I don’t know what I’m talking about and if somebody’s got a real medical problem I don’t want him to rely on my expertise, my lack of expertise to solve their problems. So I usually avoid anything medical related. And there are some markets that can be very difficult. A lot of finance related terms are just extremely difficult to rank for. You know it doesn’t mean that there aren’t some long tail individual keywords out there but just in my experience I found very few and far between. So there are markets like that finance, medical related, there’s probably 1 or 2 others that are just so highly competitive there’s not a lot of long tail keywords that I’m finding.

T: Okay. We are 9 minutes to go roughly until… I wanna keep this to an hour. I can see that we can talk all day so I’m definitely gonna be hitting you up. Maybe we can even do some webinars together. I’m sure folks would love to see some real live keyword case studies.

S: Yeah for sure.

T: But we haven’t talked about content production or site production or backlinking or any of these things yet and I know you’ve got the niche site hub on your blog where you’re talking about that. I’ve got the niche site mastery portal that’s where I’m talking about where the information are already available. But I do want to talk a little bit more about … just to kinda we’ll shift to a motivational aspect up here just a minute. I think if I read that in March 2009 is when you kinda started doing some money and you sort of floundering for a few years before that, did I get my facts straight?

S: That’s pretty close. Yeah. For about 3 years from about 2005 to 2008 I really didn’t make hardly any money and I think it was …

T: What changed, that’s what the question is.

S: Sometime in 2008 I just almost on a whim just built a couple of websites on very small niche topics. And that was the change for me because I’d always targeted this big finance words or keywords that received tons of searches. You know my outlook was I gotta be targeting these keywords that get tons of traffic because I rank well for one of those and its money in the bank. And so I never ranked and never got any traffic. And so I just kinda thought well why don’t I just throw up a couple of websites that target these really small random niches. And just to give you an idea 2 of the niches were worm farms you know a really random topic and the other one was buffalo nickels which is again random. But I built a couple of websites and I actually basically forgot about them for about a year. I went on and kept trying some losing business ideas basically. And so a year later I came back and looked at my earnings for those sites. I knew they were getting some clicks. And it wasn’t much but I was making about $20 per month for each of those websites. So about $40 a month and I hadn’t touched them for a year. So the passive income thoughts started kinda rolling into my head. It was like I didn’t do any work and I’m making you know $480 a year doing nothing. And so I said let’s try this a little bit more and so about Sept 2009 that I really built about 20 websites I think within a couple of months and kept building coz the websites kept doing well. And the rest is basically history to be honest. Those first set of 20 websites did well and after that I was able to reinvest and I decided let’s build a couple hundred of these things and see what happens.

T: So, high level, tell me how you build a website? We don’t have a lot of time for detail but how much do you do, how much do a VA do, where are you getting your content from, what types of market are you using?

S: Okay. Yeah a big part of me being able to do all of this was outsourcing for sure. So I outsource my content writing to textbroker.com. So I will order 5 to 10 articles from there and that works really well for me. I recommend it. So I get my articles and either I will post that content myself and I use wordpress on all of my websites. So I install wordpress, I install some plugins and themes.

T: You do that yourself?

S: I do that well… not always.

T: Coz I don’t do that. I mean I hit the install wordpress button and then I send a work order to my VA and then aaawww…

S: Yeah I know. Yeah my last 30 websites I haven’t done any of that. And probably a hundred before that too but sometimes I still do it.

T: Let’s be clear. We’re not recommending this approach. Use a VA. You are never gonna get out of the rat race if you do not outsource.

S: Yeah. I mean if nothing else you really do have to outsource at least the content creation and at least the link building. It’s just too time consuming to do yourself and yes you can definitely outsource adding the content to your site, installing the plugins and all of that but you can decide on your own what works best for you. But after I add the content and get the themes set up, I add my Adsense code and I use the why do word Adsense plugin. It’s just a very simple plugin and it helps you position where your ads go whether at the top or at the bottom or wherever that may be. And then I start building links to the website. I outsource that. I found some great resources from the warrior forum. You can buy just some sort of package deals where they will do some article marketing for you. Then they can write the article, spin the article and distribute it. So that’s a great resource. Or you can go to freelancer.com or elance.com to hire somebody on a more regular basis to build backlinks to your site. But really if you’re gonna be building a ton of this websites you’ve gotta hire somebody to do it. It takes forever.

T: It does. It’s not technically an exciting work.

S: Yes. So that’s a quick overview of kind of what I do to get the website up and going from getting the content to linkbuilding.

T: How about one thing you didn’t tell what types of content or are you making use of audio or video or images or you’re predominantly text based?

S: It is predominantly text based. I do occasionally add some images or video to it but it’s fairly basic and it really depends on the niche that it’s in whether that really enhances the content or not but for the most part it is text based content.

T: Okay. I realize by the way we do have a couple of more minutes because we had to restart at the beginning of this. (Remember the video…) Without going into the detail to this topic would really deserve, just briefly explain linkbuilding and give one message to the reader that if you want more detailed information on linkbuilding there’d be links below this podcast as well as you can go to Spencer’s niche site, nichepursuits.com, and I think you will find niche hub. You’ll gonna be getting more information. So article marketing, are you doing other forms of linkbuilding or you just you article marketing and wait till they rank?

S: No, I will do other types of linkbuilding as needed. A lot of websites will rank with just sending out some articles to some article directories. And so that is kinda key there is I don’t like to build too many links too quickly. So let’s say I’ll order a package of 200 links to article directories or something like that. If I do that I will then usually wait a couple of weeks just to kinda see what happens to the website. Kinda wait and see and then as needed I’ll have more links and sometimes I will do social bookmarking to different social networks out there. I have done profile backlinks. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that. Yeah I’ve done that. Just about everything else that’s out there I guess but predominantly it is article marketing or I have found a couple of people that offer private blog networks essentially or they are either an owner in or they have a bunch of people within the network that will allow you to produce content on their blogs with the link back to your website.

T: Any links or domains or services you can offer to the listeners?

S: You know like I said they can definitely go over to the warrior forums. I’ve used Mat Laclear over there. He’s got some few good packages and you know to be honest I don’t think it’s necessary anything specific that he offers that his links are better but he does have a good service. It’s quick and easy to use. But just about any other sort of link service that provide those quality either article directories or other types of links will give you the same benefits. So there’s literally dozens of services you could select that would probably be sufficient.

T: Okay. I’m gonna go back to my Google slapping incident because I really believe that it had to do with overly aggressive link velocity. So when you’re building links it’s really important to have link diversity so they’re coming from a variety of places. Ideally you’d like to have a better keyword diversity in your links so that when you look at the screen the anchor text, that’s the one the person sees on the screen that’s underlined, you don’t want to have a 100% of the links with one keyword because that looks odd. But here’s what I did wrong. So remember I told you I was #2 with my .info. #2 and #3 for a different version of the keyword. So I signed up for this service from backlinks genie and I thought I’m just gonna slam this thing coz it’s been around for a while. Had already 3500 links and my pick was called a backlinks genie 4-day project which is the link wheel’s 10,000 profile links, a bunch of blog comments, I think like a thousand blog comments in 4 days. It was like a sledge hammer on my site. And Google rewarded me appropriately. I immediately dropped to 17th place.

S: Yeah that’s pretty good analysis. That’s probably exactly what happened.

T: There’s a couple of lessons for you there. Don’t do just one site at a time because you’ll be bored. You can only rush these things along so fast. So if you’re new into this business I would encourage that you start with at least 5 sites or may be 10 so that you got a way to keep yourself busy. So maybe on the first 2 or 3 days you’re on the first site and by the time you get to the 2nd and to the 10th site 30 days have gone by you can now circle back and start building some more links to that first site. You know with one site you’re gonna start throwing too many links fast.

S: Yeah. You’ll over analyze things. But exactly I’m sure that’s what happened to your site, too many links. I mean just to give you an idea I mean lots of my sites are ranking that have only 50 links within yahoo that shows up as actually indexed. Maybe they have more links otherwise but you don’t always need thousands and thousands of links to rank a website. In fact that’s the whole key is that you’re trying to find low competition keywords that take almost nothing to rank for. So just like how we discussed here I’d like to start it out slow, build some links, wait a few weeks, take a look where it is and build some more as needed.

T: Last question then before we wrap up. Do you point all the links to the homepage or do you point to the related articles as well? And if you do how do you diversify?

S: Yeah I do point some of them to the related articles as well. I do diversify the anchor text right. I rotate the anchor text so it’s not all just the same keyword. And I guess I don’t have an exact percentage or formula that I use. It’s just kinda feel or do. Most of them do point to the home page with the keyword as the anchor text. But then I’ll be sure to throw a few in there that point to a relevant article that don’t. So I just kinda mix it up. It’s just more by feel then saying 50% go to home page or whatever.

T: Okay. So how can my readers if they wanna know more about you or they wanna get in touch or they wanna read your stuff here’s your opportunity for a shameless plug and I also know that you have a keyword research tool that’s being launched soon so…

S: Yes I do. Alright. Well you’ve done pretty good mentioning my blog a couple of times so if they haven’t noticed it yet it’s nichepursuits.com. Go on over there and I’m in the process of building a niche websites hub where I go over lots of information that we’ve discussed here and hopefully a lot more great detail that’s probably gonna take me months to be honest to get through all of the information I wanna get through. But I’ve made a good stub at it so far so some great contents. So it’s nichepursuits.com. Feel free to stop by and say hi. The other thing yes as I do have a new keyword tool that’s coming out. I’m hoping that the beta version is out actually in a couple of days. It’s long tail pro. You can go to longtailpro.com if you want. You can’t buy anything there yet but you can kinda get a look and see what it does. I’ll probably be posting some videos there in the next week or two. So kinda just look for that coming down the pipe here shortly.

T: Okay. That goes without saying I’d love to be one of your beta testers or customers of longtailpro. I think that’d be fascinating. My shameless plug of course this podcast brought to you by my primary brand the online income lab where you can find all sorts of grumbling from me. My niche site hub is largely done and is another brand the nichesitemastery.com. It is a paid site however there is a substantial amount of free content in the keyword area, in the content area and in the site development area. So if you’re not at a point where you’re willing to make an investment in your business you can still get a lot of educational content there. And no one person has all the answers so I would encourage you to check out both Spencer and I’s resources.

So that wraps up this episode. I wanna thank everybody for listening. This has been an absolute joy to do. Spencer, thank you so much for making time. This is way more fun than typing up a new blog post. I will tell you I will be doing a lot more of this in the future.

S: This is great Trent.

T: You’re very welcome. And comment below the post please. Tell us what you thought of this. Spencer and I are both gonna be reading the comments and you can count on the back at least I hope Spencer’s gonna be on board for doing some interviews and as well maybe we’ll be doing some webinars. There’d be a good appetite for us to do some case studies and how to’s. I’m willing to offer up a niche site as a guinea pig and maybe you are so join my mailing list and you’ll find my notifications if that’s gonna happen.

S: Now that sounds great. I’m more than willing to work with you in the future. This has been great Trent and I appreciate it.

T: Okie dok. Thank you so much. I’m gonna hit the stop button now and will talk with you again soon.

S: Okay. Thanks.