clickbump

Since I posted the "My First $100 day on Xfactor method" last week, I've been overwhelmed with PMs, emails and blog posts asking about my method.

It seems that most people are taken aback that you can get a site ranked (and stay ranked) highly without a certain amount of article marketing or extensive and consistent backlinking.

Somehow, between the teachings of John (aka Xfactor) and George (aka Sniper) Brown, I've managed to hit on a process and approach to niche site publishing that, at least in the short time I've been at it (a little over two months) has enabled me to earn a pretty decent amount of money relying solely on organic (free) search and with no paid advertising for traffic. See attached file for earnings since my first $309 check in October...

If I do have a "secret" (and I don't, I prefer to call it an "edge") then it would be that I've been building css based websites, that are about as fast as its possible to make a website fast, for most of my adult life.

But if that's all I could do, that and a five spot might buy me a cup of Starbucks...

What's really propelled me into somewhat of a visible "Anyone-can-do-this" example, and hopefully an inspiration to others who are struggling, is that I've managed to cut through the noise of all the various approaches to niche site monetization and developed a simple, teachable and provable process that, when combined with the right tools, can put the power of the "gurus" into ordinary people's hands.

So enough with the theory, I'm going to post the process right here and hopefully you can learn and be inspired by my results...
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Attached Thumbnails

 

Craig McPherson

Hey CB,

Firstly thanks very much for doing this.
I will fire off the first question.

Can you list exactly your criteria for finding a keyword phrase. Point by point.

Cheers mate

Craig

Money Making eBook

clickbump

My basic approach to niche site success revolves around five simple and proven fundamentals. Get these right and you are way ahead of 90% of those trying to make money from free search traffic...

1) Develop a passion for niche research - you really have to enjoy ferreting out the next niche and you have to be able to get yourself inspired to do this over and over again. This is the most important concept you can master. If you fail at this, no amount of expertise at the remaining steps will matter. You'll be fighting against the wind.

2) Only work with exact match, top level domains - I value .com, .net and .org all EQUALLY and I've got sites ranked in the top 10 with all three extensions.

3) Seek niches that have a minimum of *1000 EXACT match local monthly searches for their keyword phrase (KWP) - use Google Adwords Keywords Tool (GAKT) for this.

4) Look for three PR- or PR-0 sites in the top ten results for the KWP that you can unseat - Once you've verified 2 and 3 above, type your search term (without quotes) into Google using the SEO4Firefox plug-in to determine if you can meet the 3 site min criteria

5) Launch a tightly focused, insanely optimized, seo savvy, css based site that showcases your niche's KWP with laser focus. One page of content with 350-1000 words and 3 site pages (about, contact and privacy) is all you need. Develop or adopt a system that allows you to repeat this rapidly.

*This number was recently lowered from 2400 to 1000 to reflect the new GAKT update as of August 2010.

clickbump

Hi Craig, great question.

Besides the fundamental 5 steps criteria I've outlined above, the niche needs to be something people want or are buying. It can be information or products. I prefer products because people tend to have a click mentality when searching for a product; where they tend to be more in "browse mode" when searching for information.

To determine this, I will first check the GAKT PPC to make sure it supports a minimum of $1 a click (will accept lower down to .50 cents with a 10k monthly exact search count)

I also check the number and specificity of the right sidebar ads for the search in the engine

Finally, I will triple check this in Spyfu in order to get a good sample of the data and make sure there are no anomolies.

Does that answer your question?

There's also a certain mental state that helps tremendously with the initial niche discovery process, this is the right-brained stuff before it switches dramatically over to the left when you are digging through the numbers and analyzing competition.

I call this the inspiration side to niche discovery and that's a very important facet to step 1 of my process. I've got a post about that over here.

Craig McPherson

Clicky,
Previously you have spoken about having a fast loading page based on CSS.

I am using a template with css and have a tool that tells me the loading time.
How does 2.61 sec stack up?

==================
edit for answer above.

Great reply mate. I really appreciate it.
Thanks for taking the time.

Money Making eBook

clickbump

Anything under 3 is fine. The other part to the speed is the markup. You want to make sure you've got clean semantic markup that the bot can digest. Judicious and appropriate use of heading tags, an informative and keyword rich title tag on every page, good focused content that answers the searcher's questions just enough that they want to click through the ads to look further.

clickbump

I'll be offline until morning US Central time. Post any questions you have and I'll get to them in order they were posted first thing in the morning...

G'nite :-)

9ball

he said something works. i just need several days to make my blog on the top 10 with his method. many thanks clickbump

bobnolan

1.What's the maximum number of competition in a keyword do you go for? I found a great niche that fits your criteria, but I have to compete for 300,000 pages.

2.If a domain name is already taken, can we go for the plural version of the keyword (ex: niceyellowwidgets.net instead of niceyellowwidget.net)?

3.I know this will be asked sooner or later, but what is your technique for looking for keywords. Usually the niches I search for have very low EXACT searches.

Tom Goodwin

maximum schmaximum

doing Google searches for your term with and without quotes is a *very* poor way of comparing competition. I created a site 7 days ago with the exact keyword as a .net domain. There are over 7 million search results for the term without quotes, and 3 million search results for the term with quotes.

But guess what? That doesn't matter. What matters is the allintitle and allinurl competition. In this instance, there were 7000 and 400, respectively. With zero backlinks it showed up as #10 in google after 6 days

I would only look at allinurl and allintitle, as those are the only pages that are optimized for your keyword. I look for allinurl of under 1000. I also don't want someone else with the exact keyword in the top 10, unless they have very few backlinks. I don't want to be getting in a p*ssing war with someone else in these microniches.

Masters Powerlifting

dariuszszyc

What if the keyword passes Your criteria but it has a SOC in MNF of 998?

And if there are 2 PR0 + 2 PR- sites - it it good keyword?

Craig McPherson

Great post mate and so true.
Too many people throw away good micro niches cos they see a
few zeroes in the search results.

Your only competition is the 10 dudes on Page 1

Money Making eBook

Tom Goodwin

Note, just a few tips on how I do the keyword research using Market Samurai.

First, I still start with Google external keyword tool, as it is still fastest for me at this point. It isn't hard to get very basic keyword ideas. You can browse ebay, amazon or overstock. You can't think about what were your big purchases this year or what you still need. Larger appliances and mechanical items often work out well.

I type that into the google tool and do an exact search. I do this to get my initial list of possible keywords.

Since I can spin off sites pretty quickly, I have a bit lower standard than Scott. I won't rule out a keyword unless both of the following are true:

(a) the keyword has an exact match of under 2000/month; AND
(b) they keyword plus/minus its plural combined has an exact match of under 2000 month.

I prefer if the keyword itself has over 2000, but won't absolutely rule out a keyword if say it has a search volume of 1500 and its plural is 500. Not saying I will take it, but won't rule it out.

I recently got a batch of 50 keywords i'm going after, and the monthly search volume got as high as 22,000 / month (managed to get the .net domain for that), but most in the 3-5k range.

I input that list into a new project in Market Samurai and analyze all of the keywords under all of the factors.

For competition, i care about allinurl and allintitle, not about general searches, as those searches are generally BS. allintitle and allinurl sites are the sites I am really competing with.

I want allinurl of <1000, allintitle of <10,000.

As long as there are competing advertises, I actually rarely rule out keywords. for me, its just another piece of the puzzle. If I am confident I can hardly any work for a site and make a consistent profit from it, I will put it up. There is no magic minimum number for me. Obviously I love to see larger numbers, but if I can do a site in an hour, its worth it for me to go after it then.

I will then take a quick look through the SEO competition module of Market Samurai just to make sure the competition isn't that tough.

As I have stated on the other threads, I don't envision shopping.com, amazon, nextag, etc. as real competition. If they are in the top spots, and I can't get on the 1st page of google in a couple of weeks, something is seriously messed up.

I know some people around these parts have rules about how many high or low or whatever PR domains/sites there can be, but that doesn't work for me.

I just need to make sure that if i'm doing a site on "big blue widgets", there aren't multiple sites on google page one that are devoted to big blue widgets. If there aren't, I will go after it. If there is a PR9 site about baseball, that happens to have a PR0 page on it about big blue widgets and its on the first page of google, then I am a very happy man.

Masters Powerlifting

stoaf88

Clickbump! You are the man!!
I launched 5 sites using your exact method on 11-15
On 11-17 all 5 were indexed and 3 are on page one!
Made $6 in adsense clicks today and this is just the beginning.
One thing, how do you brainstorm for niche ideas. I'm going to do research all day wednesday!
Thanks for all your help dude you da man!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

warrior123

Using allintitle and allinurl for checking your competition won't give you accurate results.

The only way is to simply enter the keyword phrase into Google (without quotes or allinurl, allintitle, allinanchor, etc)

Whatever Google displays for the first 10 results, this is your true competition.

Google ranks many sites that don't have the keyword phrase in the url or title. The SINGLE most important factor of them all is actually the "allinanchor" -- the site with the most links pointing to them with the exact anchor link keyword phrase wins.

clickbump

Some great conversations going on since I last visited. Looks like its on autopilot!

@stoaf88 - great to hear that! :-)

@thmgoodw & @warrior123 - I think there's room for either of your approaches.

clickbump

Exactly, don't be swayed by the number of total search results for a given KWP. As CM correctly asserts, the only ones that matter are the 10 sitting on page 1.

clickbump

I think the others have answered this one. ie, we don't care about it...
I would not, just move on to the next one. Prequalify the domain availability very early in the process so you are not emotionally attached to the niche idea. It will be easier to move on that way
If they all had high search volume and low comp, then it would be like shooting fish in a barrell, right? The niche opps are there, millions of them, but you have to be relentless in your pursuit of them. So the technique I employ is called "relentless persistence"

clickbump

In that case, check out the age of the two target sites and if they don't appear to be dancing in, then you can likely overtake one of them. I might also check the 11-20 slots to see incumbants in this case...ie, if these guys are dancing in, who's likely to replace them if i dont launch my site? if the answer is more of the same, and everything else about this KWP looked good, I'd likely go in

adamsad

seems like clickbump become an adsense rockstars...

clickbump

Man stoaf88, thanks!! I think, you da man!

You've taken action and it looks like you've got some momentum. Once you get momentum, you can really reap some good results. It fuels your process and keeps you going. Just keep doing what you are doing.

In terms of brainstorming for ideas, be receptive to everything around you. Try to maintain a positive and upbeat attitude and stay inspired. Read, listen to music, serve others, seek balance and you will find yourself more receptive to the creative, right-brained state of mind that you need to be in to uncover hidden niche opportunities. I found my #1 earning site while playing with my kids!

The interesting thing is that, the niche discovery phase quickly yields to the niche research phase, so you do a sharp transition from creative, inspired right-brain thinking over to persistent, analytical and methodical left-brained thinking so you need to be well balanced to excel at niche discovery as well as niche research.

The cool thing with this is, the cost for making a mistake, vs the opportunity for discovering a real cash cow that will provide consistent passive income on autopilot, is very very low.

adamsad

how many article did you write for each site??
its like 10 article for 5 site, right?

clickbump

I really dislike the process of article marketing, writing just for the sake of writing. I know there are lots of folks who excel at it, and I do like to write, but I really dislike writing for article marketing.

I think at last count I have about 10 articles published between EZA and GA and I did those right after reading John's book primarily because that's his main weapon and I was putting his method into practice.

I soon found that I had some success with the 5 fundamentals I mentioned earlier and you can see that I've not listed article marketing as a key step there. It does play a part under certain circumstances, but its not one of the core fundamentals of the process. Which, for me at least, is very liberating.

adamsad

all right, I'm not going to emphasize too much on article marketing for link building...i hate writing articles for article marketing...I think your 5 fundamentals will keep me going...definitely...
after 25th, I will try to get stoaf80 level...5 site in a week...wow... his story really inspired me...even if I can do 3, I will feel better

dariuszszyc

So another thing should be what to write about that one page?

I mean if we have a keyword like "red porsche" then what would You write about? The first thing that comes to Your mind?

I mean?
How much "red porsche" costs?
Where to buy "red porsche" ?

Or maybe You have some system to find out what content will be best?

Regards
Darek

clickbump

That's an important question. The process I use is that when I'm searching in GAKT for the phrase, there will several additional "related keywords" that will be listed below your search. I use these, ranked in order of search volume to determine the character and content of my page.

dariuszszyc

And what if (using those methods) my page won't be on 1st page, but let's say on third?

Then what? backlinks? do You try to get this page higher? or You leave it as it is and seek another one?

Michael Gavre

Clickbump,

OK, so which methods are you using to get your site 'noticed' ? You have pointed out that you do not use Articles (I don't like to either :-) ) Do you use Social Bookmarking, RSS submission... what do you do to get the initial links pointing to your page to get indexed?

Thanks,

Michael

dknyrob

Great information here Clickbump.... You answer all my question from the PM in just the first few posts. I'm also following xfactors plan and a little of yours too. Starting to have some nice success but still have a ways to go..My pass stats was sept 12 bucks,oct 77bucks, now over halfway i'm at 140 bucks for this month.... now trying to step up a lot more. keep the great information coming

clickbump

This is another good question. The answer is going to depend on your portfolio of sites and what they are doing as to which you will want to spend time with.

The fundamental truth that I've found is that I get a much higher return on my time from efforting to move a site from say #8 to #4 than I would trying to push a #30 to the first page. There is a significant different in income at those positions, but there is virtually no difference between a #15 site and a #200 site in my experience.

If it gets put there on the initial indexing, it tends to stay there (at least for me) so I've just resigned to allowing those few sites to age a bit. I've had the great fortune of having 10 out of 26 sites hit the first page and climb and 15 out of 26 hit the top 20. I leave the others alone and continue niche discovery and research...

clickbump

Hi Michael, (thanks for your email btw) I use a method I picked up that I call the "sneaky punctuation trick" that involves keeping a rotation of new sites on your sig in one of millions of frequently indexed forums.

I believe there is a post that I have explaining it in depth, but if I can't find it and point to it, I'll repost it here...

What I like about it, in addition to the fact that its hands-down the fastest way I've found to get my sites crawled, is that they are indexed "with a tail wind" and I'll explain how that works too.

Bishop81

That's a key piece that I also learned recently.

I didn't do that with this first round of articles, but the next round will include some of those terms.

I'm hoping to have 6 sites up by the weekend, and get started on another 7 by this weekend too. I'm not writing my own articles, so it's easier for me to get everything going. I don't have the time or patience for articles right now, but do have a little money that I can spend, so it's a perfect tradeoff for me.

As I told you in PM, I'm hoping for about 50 sites by the end of the year, all with this method. That's when I'll reevaluate and see if any of them need backlinking to increase earnings.

Radix

I jumped on the Xfactor + Clickbump wagon last week. I made a quick site in a niche I'd looked at before. After the first day, I laughed when on the first search page I saw an xfactor template site, but it wasn't mine. It was a pretty poor copy, but unmistakable. I was really trying to follow Xfactor's program ...I have a really bad habit of not following instructions 100%. So I submitted articles as prescribed and hopped the other site, hopped a PR4,2 PR3's, a PR6 and the actual manufacturer's site which was at #1. I will mention it was a significant investment of time to write the articles versus clickbump's method which I will be trying later today because I love niche reasearch, but I'm also a really lazy *******.

I think Clickbump is definitely on to something very big. With that said, his relatively easy ranking success can quickly be undone if someone finds the same niche. I don't think that devalues his process in the slightest and actually quite to the contrary. I see it as a one of the best niche testing methods I've ever seen and that you can get immediate financial gratification makes my kees a little weak.

My advice means little compared to clickbump or xfactor, but if clickbump's method works for me, I will definitely be shoring up those sites with a significant amount of article backlinks to protect that property.

Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.
-Groucho Marx

clickbump

Sound advice Radix. And I appreciate the kind words. I'm perhaps the accidental adsense success story because several things had to fall into place for this to work out like it did.

That I can repeat the process almost at will, is the real discovery and it makes my knees weak too :-)

Cyrious

Thanks Clickbump
It really does help to have - the specifics and the confidence that someone has done it so recently with success
Thanks again
Cheers
Alan

Bishop81

That's how I feel too, about just using a standard site over WP. I love wordpress and all, but I don't want to end up with 50 - 100 sites that are hitting the database with each visitor, and that have to be upgraded just to prevent intrustion.

With a standard html site, you completely eliminate all of those security holes, and it's much easier on the server.

Since these sites are only 1 main page, I'm shooting for over 500 words of content, trying to get closer to 1,000. The articles I bought are 800 - 900 words, which I feel should be just right. My thought is that as long as you are still providing great content, Google shouldn't have problem with your site only being one page. It's the sites that copy a couple reviews from Amazon, or only have about 300 words of ridiculous dribble that really catch their attention.

Oh, one thing about the site design... To make it easy, I used PHP and designed my template in a way that I am able to just change a few variables at the top of each page, in order to redo my whole site very quickly. Just something to think about... I don't have to worry about missing a keyword replacement, because when I change it in one place, it uses that variable throughout the site.

JMartin

I'd love to hear about the punctuation indexing thing. Usually I just ping the new site, submit the RSS if it has one, and throw up 2-3 links on an existing site (mine, Squidoo, etc). For instance, I have lenses on Squidoo that are old and have PR, so I use em. Sure, it's not directly related, but that's ok. Usually just doing that I get indexed and see ranking within the week (sometimes a day sometimes more).

Biggy Fat

I have a question about the competition PR search. When you say you look for at least three of the PR-, PR0, and PR1 sites, the other seven can be anything as long as you have at least three that meet the criteria?

Also, do you do this search for the phrase with or without quotes?

Marhelper

When you are checking the competing sites do you look at the main page PR or in the case where a site is ranking for an inner page ... do you check the inner page PR?

clickbump

The method I've referred to as "The Sneaky Punctuation Trick" is solely used to get my new sites indexed and ranked as quickly as humanly possible, once my site is ready to launch.

And since my sites take around a half hour each to build, it becomes a very valuable tool to not have to wait around a long time (more than a week) to get the site indexed, ranked and earning.

So this trick involves placing links to your new sites within your signature(s) on one of many hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of forums that (a) allow signatures with links that are not underlined and (b) get much G love and are crawled and indexed many times an hour.

For example, If I've got a niche on "kids soccer shoes" then my domain is going to be kidssoccershoes.com (or .net or .org, whichever is available and cheapest)

So lets say I belong to a forum that meets that criteria (gets indexed frequently, allows links in sigs, doesnt underline links, etc), and that I'm a frequent poster and I know that I can start a conversation that will get a few replies fairly quickly.

Then I go to my signature edit screen (usually under User CP, just like here at WF) and I open my sig for editing and it looks like this...

and then I will make sure that the links in other users sigs are not underlined (otherwise its not so sneaky) and I will wrap each item of punctuation, the individual "..." s in one site each, or up to the total amount of new sites I need to get indexed.

It becomes,

And I just rotate the old sites off and the new sites on.

I will also apply a color that matches the forum sig area's background and a small font size as well (just to the punctuation part of the sig).

Again, I don't do this for backlinking purposes, only for indexing. I say that because I know someone who is clever with how backlinks work will say, "Hey when the backlinks rotate off, aren't your sites going to suffer in the SERPS"

And my response is that once the site has indexed, the sig trick has done its job, its succeeded. My site's fate now rests in G's opinion of it based on all of the various criteria they use to determine if my site gets pimped for its targeted search term.

More times than not, G lets me slide on the backlink deal and rewards me for taking care of fundamental #5 in the opening thread.

...with a tailwind

What I mean by that, and the interesting thing with this technique is that despite the fact I'm only using it for indexing, by the time the site gets indexed, it already has 8-10 Y! page backlinks due to the number of responses that occurred on the initial post prior to the crawl. That's why its important to create a thought provoking and quality post so that you can elicit several responses, and set your site off with a tailwind.

That's it...

Note for advance users or old school table based site designers like I was back in the day: You could also use a transparent image and wrap that with your hyperlink (thanks for the tip Justin :-)

clickbump

Hi Biggy from BAMA! Exactly, you are just maximizing your chances of unseating one of those three sites. All things being equal, your chances for progression are going to be determined by the quality of the other seven, but every site doesn't have to be a home run, steady wins the race.
Without quotes, just like my target searcher is doing.

clickbump

I always look at Page PR since that's what I'm seeing in the results for the search. For backlink competition, I'm interested in Y! Page Links (I use SEO4Firefox for that)

Biggy Fat

Awesome, dawg. One last thing - there are shopping results and video results that get PR- as well, do those count as far as searching for the three PR-, PR0, and PR1?

clickbump

Yes, you can beat them with the biggy 5!

Marhelper

Maybe I missed it but ... are you using MNF to find keywords suggestions? If not, what are you using? Do you recommend any free tools? Thanks.

Tom Goodwin

I guess the point is, that I can use the allinurl/allintitle as a proxy for how hard a keyword generally is, without actually looking at the top 10. This proxy is effective for me upwards of 95% of the time.

Masters Powerlifting

clickbump

Hi Marhelper, I use Google adwords keywords tool. You might see me reference GAKT in a few places and that's what I'm referring to.

I started out using MNF and found it to be pretty amazing at that point in my journey in IM (remember, I'm real new at this). I started getting a bit frustrated with opening and shutting down the app and it was a bit kludgy with respect to that and with the G blocks and OCI defects, etc.

So I started just using GAKT more and more and then I discovered a firefox plugin called SEO4Firefox and I started using that, along with GAKT to evaluate SOC. I've been using this combination since then and both are free tools.

Hope that helps! Like your verse, btw ;-)

Eric H

Hi clickbump, excellent information you're sharing here! Much appreciated. I'm interested in the actual template your using.. I see from your sig, your template links to an email, so should I just email you for more details?

Thanks!

Craig McPherson

Hate to be a touch off topic but I seem to remember a website that allows you to type in your keyword and while doing this it lets you know if that domain is available in all forms.

Anyone here recall that site?

Money Making eBook

QuadDamagePT

I've been using a little bit different method than this one but still getting good results.

Last night I've made a so insanely optimized page that Google Ranked it in less than 6 hours (!)

50% of the method is to choose the right domain name (and correspondent keyword). If you find a good keyword but doesn't have a .com/.net/.org available, too bad, go for another.

What we are doing here is not a simple Niche Website, is forcing Search Engines to put our pages in first place because they answer to all their requirements.

Anyway, good Spirit ClickBump!