Make Money from a Mini Website – Part 3

Go to Part 2

Choosing a Niche

The first step in creating a Mini Website is to choose a niche. When it comes to choosing a niche for a Mini Website, your passion is NOT the most important thing. You have to find a niche that is profitable and one in which you have reasonable knowledge. You can find the profitability of a niche by doing some basic keyword research using the Google AdWords Tool.

Let’s assume that you have some basic knowledge about Carpet Cleaning and you want to create a Mini Website on this niche. So let’s examine this niche to see whether it’s a profitable one.

The Estimated Average CPC and Advertiser Competition columns in the AdWords Tool will give you a general idea on the profitability of a niche. For example, the keywords “Carpet Cleaning” have 100% Advertiser Competition and the Estimated Average CPC is around $6. The global monthly volume for this nice is around a million searches! Everyone wants to keep their carpets clean so it is no wonder that this niche is popular. But this does not mean you pick the keywords “carpet cleaning” and build a SEO optimized Mini Website around these keywords. In this next section we’ll look at how to pick the right keywords for this niche.

Picking the Right Keywords

The profitability of a keyword is determined by the following 3 factors:

1. Traffic

Traffic is the search volume of a given keyword. The Global Monthly Search Volume column in the Keywords Tool is a good indicator for this factor. But higher traffic does not always mean the keyword will bring you profits. Sometimes a keyword has a large search volume and virtually no advertiser competition. So simply there is no value in targeting that keyword because it does not generate income.

2. Money

The term money refers to the amount of money advertisers are willing to pay for a given keyword. The Estimated Average CPC column is a good indicator of how much money the keyword can make. Some keywords are very sought after by advertisers compared to others. So you might think that picking a keyword with a large search volume and one that makes money is the best option. But looking at only these 2 factors is not good enough. This leads us to the third and most important factor.

3. Competition

For example the keyword “Carpet Cleaning” is searched 1,000,000 times per month in Google, while the word “Carpet Maintenance” is search only 3,600 times. At first glace “Carpet Cleaning” seems to be a great keyword than “Carpet Maintenance”. But this is not always true. The keyword “Carpet Cleaning” is very popular so there will be many websites that are already targeting this keyword. A rough measurement of competition is the number of pages Google finds when you search for that keyword. For example the term “Carpet Cleaning” is found on 14,400,000 pages! This indicates high competition.

So the idea is to pick keywords that have less completion and one that can make decent amount of money as well. This means the search volume of the keyword will be relatively low.

For example, the phrase “Home Carpet Cleaning” is searched 14,800 times a month and has an estimated average CPC of around $4. This phrase also has a very healthy advertiser competition. This keyword phrase may be suitable for your Mini Website.

In Part 4, we will do some number crunching to see how much money we can make by optimizing our Mini Website for the phrase “Home Carpet Cleaning”.

Go to Part 4