So I think I have found a niche that has some potential but I feel like I'm missing something. The search term, we'll say it's "
happy days" gets 135,000 global monthly searches and the person ranking #1 in the Google SERPS has the following stats:
PR: 0
Indexed Pages with Google: 74
Links to the URL: 2
Links to the Domain: 3
Indexed Pages with Bing: 1
Sitemap: none
All 3 of the inbound links to the domain are from pages with shitty stats as well. The only thing that seems like this place is doing right is that his domain is
www.thehappydays.com . The page itself is just a piece of trash flash into thing. What the hell am I missing? Why is this page ranking so easily when it seems like it is a piece of shit? Did I just get lucky and find something easy to dominate?
What is it with newbies and domains with exact matches? The reason that the so called "niche" you've stumbled across is so easy to dominate is that there's very likely no money in it at all.
Sites that make sales make money. Buying domain names based on the number of exact matches etc is a waste of time and money.
RANKING for a term that has proven to convert site visitors into sales/leads is what affiliate marketing is all about. Domain names are almost irrelevant.
I bet that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of Wickedfire members with too many domain names and not enough money. The trick is to invest your time into building a site that makes you a profit. NOT building a site that brings lots of traffic and nothing else.
My suggested starting point for any newbie is this question - "Can this make me money online?" Not "am i interested in this subject" or "are lots of people searching for this online".
Exact matches and searches will never pay your bills. You need profits for that, which come from sales. Nothing else.
One of the very best ways to establish whether or not something can make money on line is to see how many others are already competing in the market, where the number of both free SERPS listings and more relevantly paid listings are an obvious pointer.
Saturated markets, or "big niches" if you will, are a much better place to make money IF you are confident of outranking the competition, either through brilliant SEO or deep pockets for buying paid PPC ads or inbound links.
But there is another way - my favoured approach is to find a huge market, then work tens of thousands of kws through PPC until I find the "golden nugget" kws that have low cost, high traffic, and lots of cheap conversions. Then SEO the site for those, having proven that the competition for these terms is lower than for the more obvious and usually generic ones.
The opposite, "tiny niche" approach is favoured by many because it's seen as a low cost route to earning online. But this is in fact it's downfall. Small niches with low competition are that way for a reason - the market is limited and profits are less plentiful. The next suggestion from proponents of this approach is that you only need 100 sites making $20 a day and you've cracked it. Facts are, for every niche that you stumble upon that makes you money, you'll probably have to go through 5 that don't, but you thought would. So 500 sites for $2k a day.
That's my problem with these "Eureka" posts about finding a golden opportunity domain that's just ripe for the taking. They suggest that registering the domain and doing some SEO will be step one to riches. It isn't - it's step one to a lifetime of hard work with limited returns.
Rant over - thanks for reading
