In our partnership, I usually come up with the ideas. Not to say Jay hasn’t come up with some amazing ideas himself, but most of the time I dream up some crazy idea and Jay shoots it down mercilessly. It works well! Why? Because I tend to focus on the big picture and not the details. If the details aren’t in order, then you’re going to crash and burn eventually. My ideas are good, but I often forget to look into the ease of making my product successful. Jay always grounds me back in reality and looks into the competition and how difficult it will be to launch my latest crazy idea. We have limited time and resources for new sites right now, and doing some simple checks often throws many ideas out the door.
Knowledge is power. The more information you have about the market and competition you are going up against, the better picture you’ll have of the road ahead. This allows you to go into a tough market knowing what to expect or to abort an idea before you get in too deep and come up with a new idea. Here are the simple steps you can take to give you more information.
Step 1: Keyword Research
This is a very rudimentary check, it doesn’t take a lot of time to do manually and it can provide some great indicators. List all the keywords you’ll be using for your new site and run them through Overture or Wordtracker. While the results you get back aren’t 100% set in stone as an indicator of traffic, they give you a good estimation of the traffic you can potentially capture through the search engines. Next, load up Google Trends and search your keywords there. Here you’re looking for steady results over the last year or two or an increase in traffic. If the keyword has been steadily declining, then you may be in for trouble.
Both of these checks can be done manually, and there is no real need for a third party tool as the time investment to do this keyword research is relatively low.
Step 2: Adsense / Adwords research
The reasoning behind this next step is two fold. You want this information so that you can have an idea of what your Adsense payout might be per click, as well as the cost per click you’re looking at if you’re going to be advertising your site through Adwords. Now that Google is banning MFA arbitragers, the payout for Adsense on content networks may rise once advertisers regain trust in it again.
Login to your Adwords account and plug in your keywords to a new ad group. While you’re at it, use their keyword suggestion tool to add any related keywords. Then on the next step, use their traffic estimator to see how much you need to pay per click to get in the top 3 spots, and how much estimate daily traffic you’d get being in the top three. The estimate daily traffic is another bonus piece of information. It can back up the results you previously got in your keyword research or refute them. These various traffic estimates are not 100% word of law, what you are looking for is a bunch of different sources all providing the same or similar results. That increases the chances that the term is in fact trafficked.
If you’re just looking for an idea of what type of payout per click you could get from Adsense ads, you may have to wait a few months before that data will be very accurate, as it will take some time for publishers to regain confidence in the content network. Once they do, you will be able to use this tool to indicate if you will be able to publish high paying ads on your site. However, no additional tools are really necessary to compile that information.
On the other hand, if you intend to use Adwords to publish your site, you should really look into Keyword Elite… especially if you plan on earning money through affiliate networks / CPA ads. Keyword Elite will compile a large list of keywords related to your site automatically, and show you prices per click and a wealth of other information. It also goes one step further and will allow you to track the top advertisers on a particular keyword and their bids over time. This allows you to let other people take the risk for you. If they have their ads up for a month and then they disappear, they obviously weren’t earning a profit. However, if their ads stay up over a long period of time, then they are most likely converting and earning the advertiser a profit. Now you can incorporate some of their ideas into your own site and get your ad up on the keyword too. Read Jay’s review on the above link for the complete skinny on Keyword Elite.
Step 3: Link Profiling
If you’ve gone through the other two steps and the numbers look good, it’s time to find out what type of competition you are looking at, if you expect to get ranked on the search engines for your term(s). For each of the keywords you want to rank for, look at the top ten results on the particular search engine you want to rank for. Do a back link scan for each of them and record the number of links for each PR level ( 1 - 8 ), and also record how many of those links have the keyword in the title.
Links are not the be all and end all of SEO, though they are an important factor. If you have two keywords with similar amounts of traffic estimated, but one has an average competition of 200 - 300 inbound links and the other only has competing sites with only 20 - 30 links each, which keyword are you going to try to rank for first? Exactly. This post isn’t addressing on-page SEO, but don’t forget about it. On-page optimization can have a dramatic result on your rankings, so make sure you look into that as well once you have actually built and promoted your site.
You will almost certainly need a secondary tool to make your life easier on this step. I believe there are free programs that will let you do back link scans, but we use SEO Elite for this process as it also includes all in title, anchor and text scans, as well as some other useful tools. Click on the link to read our full review of that product.
Hopefully this little guide will give you a leg up, next time you are thinking about launching a new website. Always remember, making money online is only easy to get into, not easy to do. The details matter!
Good Profits.
