Create Niche Websites

One way to generate free traffic online is to create niche websites. This website is an example of a niche website and has been built around the keywords “autopilot money making software“. There’s a couple of main reasons I chose these keywords:

They relate to the affiliate products I promote
Related keywords get searched for already on Google (see image below)
There’s less competition for this keyword and those like it, than most other similar keywords.

Create Niche Websites – Planning

The reason you might want to create niche websites is to rank them on Google and get visitors to your site for free. Most new affiliate marketers get stuck at getting visitors to their website. So planning a website around a specific keyword or set of keywords can help you get noticed by Google and/or the other search engines.

This site goes up and down the rankings on Google, according to a number of ranking factors. In some ways it’s not been as successful as I had hoped. But it does get traffic from the search engines and I’ve made sales from this site too. It’s not huge, but it’s something and I have several other websites like this one which get free traffic.

To find a keyword to build a site around does take some time. Ideally you want to find a keyword using the keyword planner, or some other tool. The criteria I used was to find a keyword in my niche (affiliate marketing/making money online), and find a keyword which I could potentially rank for. In this niche it’s incredibly hard to do this because of the large volume of other affiliates trying to do the same.

But it can be done if you’re prepared to put the work in and find a good keyword to base your site from.

Create Niche Websites – Keyword Domain Name

It’s worth mentioning that it’s not entirely necessary to use the keyword in your domain name. This is only a small ranking factor but it can help massively to get your website on the first page of Google and other search engines. I’ve tried both with and without it and find that it helps. But of course content is king. Don’t expect to throw up a thin website with no content on it and rank it just because it’s got a keyword domain name.

There’s many other ranking factors which are more important too:

Domain authority
Age of domain name
Back links
Content
Social media presence
Which sites link to you

There’s literally thousands of ranking factors which Google uses to determine which sites they rank and which they don’t. However, don’t forget the other search engines too: Bing, Duckduckgo and Yahoo for example. They can bring you visitors too.

Create Niche Websites – Visitor Intent

When you start out looking for keywords it’s important to decide on a keyword which has a good customer intent. What does the keyword say about your customer? In hindsight, the keyword autopilot money making software may have been a bad decision. It implies a certain laziness in the intent of the search query! My visitors may want to purchase a software which does all the work for them; so they don’t have to!

Of course in my content I don’t suggest that building an online business and/or earning from the internet is at all easy. I don’t want customers who think it is either. They will be difficult customers who will want a refund as soon as they see a problem or find out there’s a lot of work involved!

So customer intent is pretty important. Choose a keyword wisely with this in mind. Another of my niche websites is about affiliate marketing mentors. Again this lines up with a customer intent and the products I promote. Once you find a good keyword which does this, you need to see whether it has a chance of ranking on Google.

Ranking Your Niche Website On Google

There’s never a guarantee that you’ll rank your site on Google. But if you build a good, authoritative website and choose a keyword which is aligned with your products and has little competition, you have a chance!

When I first learned about this strategy the tactic was to find a search term with 2000+ searches every month. There’s little point in finding a great keyword you can rank but has little or no visitors! You might rank at the top, but still you’ll get very little traffic, or none!

However, this was 15 years ago or so. Things have changed and there’s far more competition on Google than ever! Finding a keyword which has 2000+ searches a month is not difficult; but ranking a site with such a keyword is incredibly difficult if not impossible. However this will depend on the particular niche you are looking in.

For a competitive industry such as affiliate marketing or making money online, it’s incredibly difficult. You’ll probably need to aim a little lower.

Start With Your Main Keywords

You can start by typing your main keywords into Google’s keyword planner. You should see the most competitive keywords first which will give you the most search volume. You don’t want this because although you’ll have thousands of people searching for these terms, you’ve little to no chance of ranking your site for them.

So instead you need to aim at the low hanging fruit. These are the long search terms which get less traffic volume but also are easier to rank for.

Click on the average monthly searched tab until you see the long tail keyword results.

Look For A Keyword Which Meets The Criteria

This should be a lot lower in search volume but you’ll also notice that there’s less competition on Google for these search terms.

From here scroll down to the bottom of the page and you’ll be able to scroll forwards through the search results and find long tail keywords with more search volume.

As you scroll through you should see quite a few search terms within your particular niche.

The key is to find a search term you want to base your site around and which offers a good balance between search volume and low competition for ranking a site.

I might, for example, choose this keyword “big ticket affiliate programs” because it meets a couple of criteria for me:

It lines up with the products I promote
There’s 50 monthly searches for that keyword
The “phrase” match on Google brings up only 1410 competing pages for that search term.

With a little more digging I might decide to build a website around that keyword. Namecheap shows the domain is free so I could decide to build a site on this keyword.

Do The Research

Although this keyword looks good, a deeper look into the Google results for a search of this term shows quite a lot of competition. Ideally the number should be less that 10,000,000.

Here’s a picture of the screen shot of a search for Big Ticket Affiliate Programs as of today (22nd September 2020). Look at the number directly underneath the search bar. It shows a massive 20 million 100 thousand competing pages. Plus many of those websites have a lot of information so there’ll be a lot of work in getting your site ranked.

Other Relating Keywords

Of course it pays off to find a domain name which can be used for many keywords within a group. With this domain name, I’ve been able to rank for all sorts of keywords which contain the keyword “autopilot” in them.

Once you find your keyword which you want to build a site around, you can create content using all the other keywords which come up for your main keyword choice.

So, even though the keyword “autopilot money making software” didn’t have a lot of monthly searches, many of the other relating keywords gave me enough to take a chance and build up the site.