THE NICHE SITE CHECKLIST So you just finished s mini course That means you know what it takes to build a niche site to a full-time income online. We covered a lot in the 5 lessons. Basically, we went over all the major areas that niche site growth consists of: Growth, SEO, niche and keyword research, and link building. If you haven t built a niche site to $100/day before, it might seem a little complicated to remember and implement everything into real-life practice. Reading something, and doing something are really different. So, I created this checklist as a checklist of all the major things we learned in the free course. Not all of them are action items. But they all contain checkmarks so you could keep track of which points you understand, and are ready to implement into your sites. The Niche Site Checklist 1
Lesson #1: How to build a profitable niche site in today s SEO landscape. The SEO landscape has completely changed. Things that worked years ago don t work anymore. It s not as easy to build a brand new site and rank it quickly. Rather, it s a long-term play. Although it might take longer, that also means that results last long-term too. So if you re in this to build a full-time business that you can rely on, then conditions are better than ever. So, everything we do now is about sustainability, especially SEO. Sustainable rankings means: Doing SEO, and building links in a way that doesn t get us destroyed with the next Google update. It means building something that grows stronger over time = a stronger, more sustainable business asset that grows as time goes by. Google is all about authority now. We need to understand just how much the search results are shifting towards giving favour to big brands and trusted authorities. Instead of thinking, How can we throw up some micro sites and quickly make a couple hundred bucks we need to shift our thinking towards: How can we build out this site into a REAL business that makes 6 figures per year, and will be a sustainable, long-term business model. Those are the sites worth working on and spending our efforts on growing. The model that we want to achieve with our sites now is one that: 1. Target the biggest keywords in the niche. 2. Consistently build links to these pages targeting the big keywords. 3. Build out the site with inner articles. 4. Pull in tons of long-tail traffic. 5. Not right away, but eventually our rankings will rise for our big keywords. And following this model results in the following: 1. Our site will rank for the biggest keywords in the niche, and every variation of the phrase. 2. It will have great content that people love. 3. It will have powerful links from relevant external pages/domains. 4. Because of our built authority, our inner pages targeting long-tail keywords will rank almost instantly. Our site will be given so much extra weight over our competitors. 5. We will start getting traffic to our site from tons of long-tail searches which will eventually out number the number of visitors who come in through our biggest keywords (even when we re ranking #1). The Niche Site Checklist 2
The long-term benefits that we realize from following this model is: 1. It s sustainable and long-term. You don t need to worry about spam updates demolishing your traffic overnight. 2. It s passive once you build authority to the site, especially when using Adsense. I frequently take 3-4 weeks off and income stays the same or even increases. The beauty of Adsense. 3. You build a REAL business. $10k/month is a real business. We re going to be driving a lot of traffic to our niche site and you have a lot of opportunities to grow. 4. You have an amazing valuable asset. A site making $10k/month can be sold for around $250,000- $300,000. Especially with the type of links and the amount of authority we re going to be building to our site, that alone makes the domain extremely valuable. Lesson #2: Finding profitable niches for Adsense Finding the right niche is so crucial because choosing the wrong niche can set yourself up for months (or even years) wasted down the drain. Who wants to build a site, work on growing it for months, finally get #1 rankings for your keywords... and only make a couple dollars per day? Remember that Google and SEO in general is all about authority now. Once you build up enough authority to rank for anything competitive these days, your domain carries enough power to rank for smaller long-tail keywords with far less effort than you needed in the past. You just have to know how to find the right keywords, and put this strategy into motion so that it works effortlessly. As a result, we want to do keyword research at the top of the food chain. If you re starting a new site, instead of targeting low search volume, low-hanging fruit kinds of keywords, we re going to aim for the biggest search volume keywords FIRST. If we can work on competition for the big ones, we can rank for smaller keywords later with no effort at all. When looking for a niche, remember that every niche is profitable with Adsense. Remember the monetization model, and what increases revenue: traffic. Niches aren t profitable. Traffic is profitable. You don t need to push sales for anything. You just need to get people to your site, and Adsense s ad targeting will do the rest to encourage clicks. Focus on high traffic first. The most important part about finding a keyword that gets you to $100/day is traffic volume. CPC and CTR are important metrics, but not as much as traffic. The majority of people starting out spend too much time thinking about CPC and increasing CTR, but their traffic is minimal. Even at a ridiculously high CTR or CPC their income wouldn t be near $100/ The Niche Site Checklist 3
day with the level of traffic they get. Keywords that bring in $100/day with Adsense need a lot of traffic, plain and simple. Lesson #3: What it takes to get to $100/day When you're doing niche analysis, when you doing keyword research, and when you're thinking about creating your new site, always think about the potential payout. Think about the traffic cap of the niche and keywords you're targeting - Imagine the best case scenario - where you're ranking #1 for every single major keyword you target... what's the traffic potential? What's the income potential? These are the calculations that I run for any new niche I enter today. Although they're just rough estimations, they give me the confidence to know that the effort I put into this site WILL BE WORTH IT. The most important metric you need to calculate Adsense income for a website is RPM. This is the calculation of how much money you make per 1000 page views. It s calculated based on your traffic, CTR (click-through-rate), and CPC (cost per click). If you re able to know your RPM, you can accurately estimate earnings potentials for higher traffic numbers, as well as the amount of traffic you ll need to make a full-time income. For instance, if you re making an average $10 RPM from one of your websites, that s $10 for every 1000 visitors on your site. So you can easily calculate that if you increased your traffic to 100,000 visitors, you would make $1000. If you grew it it 1,000,000 you would make $10,000. Again, not perfectly accurate, but a good estimation. Lesson #4: Link building strategies that WORK SEO is still all about links. The Niche Site Checklist 4
A good link builder will always have a way to create income for him/herself. Whether it s by consulting, being hired as a full-time employee, or growing their own websites/businesses, a good link builder will always be in demand. It s what drives the entire SEO industry. The better/stronger the link, the more difficult it will be to acquire. While this isn t always the case, it gives you a good idea of the differences between a good link and a bad link. Bad links are: 1. scalable / can be automated 2. identifiable patterns 3. control anchor text Good links are: 1. not very scalable / impossible to automate 2. few patterns 3. no control over anchor text Put simply, links are all about quality over quantity. A single powerful link can increase rankings and traffic to a website significantly. And in today's SEO landscape, the best type of links to get are editorial links from relevant sites. Although there are a lot of moving parts to the strategy, and a ton of different methods you can choose to use, the most basic strategy works like this: Step 1: Find your link prospect by running competitors sites into a backlink checker. Find the sites that are linking to them. Step 2: Reach out and ask them for a link, essentially stealing the links of your competitors. You might not beat one competitor by stealing their exact links, but if you steal the links of 5 or 10 or 20 you ll have a stronger link profile than any of them. Outreach strategies are how the top SEO s and the biggest SEO agencies in the world build links for their top-brand competitors. It s how they compete for some of the most competitive keywords online. It s very worth it to learn it, and become good at it. END The Niche Site Checklist 5