Topic: Finding Profitable Niches With Keyword Research

Finding a profitable niche for your business need not be something so confusing. In this
guide, I’ll show tried-and-tested techniques on how to find profitable niches with low
competition.

What You’ll Learn

- An ‘outside of the box’ method on how to find a niche market and keywords
- The specific tactics implemented to spot gold mine profitable niches
- The exact methods to use in building a site in 3 different niches.

How To Find Your Niche and Niche Market

My foolproof techniques helped me create a site in a low competition niche, which

brought in over $1000 per month eventually.

These strategies I’ll show will help you find your niche market and profit from it.

After receiving a number of questions about finding a niche market, I wrote this guide to
outline the techniques that 99% of the competition doesn’t use.

My best kept secret in finding profitable niches is Flippa.com.

This article will show you how I took 3 sites, pick them apart, and propose solutions in
building a website in that nuiche.

There’s a lot of nonsense in a Flippa auction. Finding a legit website can prove difficult.
However, there are steps that will help you filter out the garbage and find niches with a
high profit potential.

● Advanced Search

Use the advanced search feature of Flippa to look for websites that are over 12 months
old. have a net profit of $2000+, and had a successful sale on Flippa.

If a site has been sold, chances are the buyer did some careful research before making
the purchase. This gives us a great basis to work on from here.

● Scanning the Result

As you scan the results, you should ignore any of the following:

o URL HIDDEN (most of these require and NDA, which won’t happen when
the auction is already closed!)
 o Sites selling social media followers, tweets, and others because there are
a lot of these sites)
o Any BRAND URLs (you can enter a niche with a non Trade Mark Domain)
o Anything that requires building software, website themes, etc.

● Summary Listings

When looking at a summary listing, these are the questions you should ask:

1. Does the domain contain the keywords or does it tell me what the niche is
about?
2. Are there any comments on the auction page? The comments can sometimes
bring more information that is useful in my research,
3. The sale price – the more expensive it is, the more interesting the prospect.
4. The established date – our criteria is set to 12 months or older. The older the
site, the better. If a site has been a consistent earner for 6 years, I am
interested in how they did it.

I add the aforementioned details (domain name, URL, niche, and net profit) into a
spreadsheet as part of my research. This saves so much time, and gives me an
available source of proven profitable niches at my disposal.

Let’s take a look at 3 of the sites that made the cut.

Profitable Niches Example #1: MilitaryBases.com

URL: MilitaryBases.com
Selling price: $125,000
Bids: 8
Net Profit: $5,499

Description

This auction caught my eye due to its auction details. The auction ended last October
2012.

The sale price of $125,000 was definitely interesting. This is around 23x monthly net
profit, which is above average for a Flippa site.

The site is a profitable niche that provides a wealth of information on US Military Bases
covering the Coast Guard, Air Force, Army and Navy. The Flippa auction tells us that:

“MilitaryBases.com is a relocation resource. To understand this website, you need to

know that:
 1. The United States has ~800 military bases worldwide.
2. Military soldiers get PCS orders ever 2-3 years which relocates them and their
families.

Before moving to a new military base, families want to know about school options,
housing availability, hotel rates, local banks, and the cost of living. Basically what kind
of lifestyle should they expect. That’s where MilitaryBases.com comes in handy.
MilitaryBases.com helps these military families transition.”

The seller jumped right into these facts, and presented the breakdown of description
into sections.

Quick Tip: Check out the seller’s profile to get more ideas on proven niches.

Site Analysis

Even though the site auction only has 8 bids (the price tag must be out of reach for 90%
of the Flippa community), it has everything that I would look for in a potential niche to
enter. It has a proven 2-year history in the SERPS, an average of 120K unique visitors,
and 361k page views. This is definitely a winning website!

● How it is monetized

The primary revenue source of the website is Google AdSense. There are also other
affiliate resources that generate income for the site. But all in all, AdSense brings
over 85% of the site’s total revenues.

Ad slots appear as skyscrapers on the sidebar and banners under the navigation menu.
They blend perfectly with the site as image ads are enabled. On the other hand,
text ads would look out of place on this site.

● One year after the sale

After a year that Military Bases was sold, it is ranked #3 for it main keyword in Google
U.S. However, their long tail traffic would most probably drive upwards of 80% of
their overall traffic.

Here are just some of the keywords they rank for:

Military Bases in Utah - #4

Military Bases in Germany - #2
US Military Bases - #10
Military Bases in the US - #8
Military Bases in Texas - #2
Military Bases in Florida - #1
The site is indeed doing well for many different country and state searches. If the site
continues to earn at the same rate, the new site owner could expect a full ROI
within 12 months.

● Content

The site has impressive content, user-generated comments from active service men
and women plus their families, and back links.

The high authority and relevant back links of the site come from:

LifeAfterExit.com (DA 29)

Blinded Veterans Association (DA 67)
US Military Bases Wikipedia Page (DA 100)

What’s more, there is a number of anchor text and foreign back links to the site.
However, there are adult-related links in the profile. The site might be a victim of
a negative SEO attack.

● Income

AdWords still takes up most of the advertising space. There is also another method
which they use to monetize the site. They use an affiliate/referral method to direct
security-cleared personnel who are transitioning back to civilian life. The affiliate
pop-up is unobtrusive, while remaining relevant to the site.

My Approach to this Niche

While you could build a site about military bases in general, I would suggest creating a
site about “Air Force Bases” and see how that site goes. There will still be plenty of
content when you decide to niche it down.

Available Domain Names:

● MilitaryBaseGuide.net / .org
● MilitaryBasesGuide.com / .net / .org
● USMilitaryBases.net

Or if you decide to niche it down:

● USArmyBases.net / .org
● USNavyBases.net / .org
● NavyBases.org
● USAirforceBases.net / .org
 ● SEO and Back Links

The site is a little low on the DA side with 22, but we have 165 back links from 84
domains. It is a relevant domain name with part of our keyword in the website
name. It wouldn’t take too much to rebrand this into a highly relevant linking site.
You can top these sites up with targeted and relevant using GSA SER, and you
can increase the power of these sites.

● Content Ideas

We couldn’t go wrong with using the content ideas from the site and replicate them. Use
the article titles, format and layout to your advantage. I also like the map with
tags they use on MilitaryBases.com, which is highly useful when you use it on
your site.

● UberSuggest

You’ll find hundreds of content ideas when you enter the keyword “Military Bases” on
Ubersuggest. The tool takes your keyword and appends it with either a letter or a
number, thus giving you loads of possibilities for content topics.

● Site Structure

Using the MilitaryBases.com as an example, you can create a great site as long as you
have a clean navigation bar, unobtrusive ad slots, and substantial helpful info.

AdSense should be used at a minimum, since we want to build a site that service men
and women would trust.

Once the site is established, I would then look to sponsor a variety of charities. Your
image or link to be placed on their sponsors page would give you quality back
links.

Profitable Niches Example #2 – GuideGator.com

URL: GuideGator.com
Selling price: $31,100
Bids: 8
Net Profit: $14,000

Description

Auction details about GuideGator are no longer available, but I particularly took notes
about it on my ideas database.
Site Analysis
The site claimed profits of $14,000 per month.

The auction description stated –

“The site for sale is a guide and review web site with over 1,150 unique professionally
written articles and a clean sharp design
The site has grown ethically and organically with strong natural back links and is
continuing to increase revenues month on month.
All of the revenue comes from AdSense which is minimally placed as not to be overly
intrusive. Thus increased revenues may be gained from more aggressive forms of
advertising.
Current revenues are stable and producing $14,000+ per month with existing traffic
which is growing as new content is added to the site.”

● Poor content

The trouble with this site is that the content quality is appalling. There were lots of poorly
written articles by a non-English speaker. It seems like the goal of the site is to
publish as many articles as possible to capture a lot of long-tail traffic. There’s
also a big number of niches that the site tries to cover.

● How it is monetized

Their simple business model seems to be churning out financial-related content every
single day. 1,197 posts have been published and each article contains a Google
AdSense block wrapped inside of the text. It’s the easiest and quickest way to
make money with a website.

● How it looks now

The site looks exactly the same as it did three months after the sale. It did claim that the
majority of its site traffic came from organic sources. It’s a struggle to find which
keywords are actually bringing visitors to the site.

With such a bad combination of topics, articles, and content, it is unlikely that the site is
actually making as much as it was claimed by the seller.

My Approach to this Niche

Current positive trends in the market tells us that we should steer clear of mass-
produced content. The focus now should be quality content and user experience.
With algorithm updates, stiff competition, and the SERP marketplace, I really cannot
fathom that this site is indeed producing a decent income. If you do have evidence that
the contrary is true, I am all ears!

Profitable Niches Example #3 – BorderCollieAdvice.com

URL: BorderCollieAdvice.com
Selling price: $15,100
Bids: 7
Net Profit: $2,000

Description

The website focuses on a niche within a niche – they selected a type of dog breed that
is popular in the UK and US.

Analysis

We can definitely see that there is a market for this niche – as it has 25,000+ page
views and 8000+ unique visitors per month. This is because, let’s face it, people really
do love their dogs. If you have great content and information about how to take care of
dogs, people will flock to your site.

How it is monetized

The site has a net profit of $2000 per month – which mostly comes from eBook sales. In
which case, people are not just engaged with the site. They are willing to spend money
on the product that the site offers.

The eBook is selling at $27.97, which puts them at around 71 sales per month. If you
increase the conversation rate of 8K visitors from 0.88% to 3%, then that would equate
to 240 eBook sales per month or $6,712 gross profit in a month!

Months after the sale

Ten months after the sale, we can see that it is no longer the top ranking site for the
keyword “Border Collie Training.” It now lies at the #7 position in Google search. Three
Youtube videos rank just above this site.

My Approach to this Niche

The keyword “dog training” is an example of a niche you shouldn’t target. But in this
case, a niche within a niche, it definitely seems doable.

Here’s how I would work around it:

 ● Available Domain Names

Either of these domain names are a good fit for this niche:

● BorderCollieAdvice.net / .org
● BorderCollieGuide.net / .org

● SEO and Back Links

I spent a few minutes searching for recently expired domains over expireddomains.net. I
came across the domain “nards.co.uk”. The Moz OSE details show that it has a
domain authority of 27 and 80 inbound links, mostly coming from other dog-
related sites. I wouldn’t hesitate to take this domain for the reg fee and build up a
private blog network.

● Content Ideas

I use LongTailPro for my keyword and competition research. I entered “Border Coliie” as
the only keyword and filtered keywords with an exact match search volume of
over 50. The results state that there are plenty of other keywords to target. I
saved this campaign and refer back to it when I need content ideas for the site. I
am for at least 50 article ideas, but that would depend on the size of the niche.

Quick Tip: You can use Yahoo Answers and type in your main keyword to get more
article ideas. There will be loads of related questions that dog owners would want
to get answers on.

Here are some of the standout keywords I came across:

Border collie gifts: 170 US Exacts, the perfect buyer keyword with low search volume
but a low keyword competition of 26.

Border collie breeders: 2400 US Exacts, this can be an idea for the ultimate dog
breeder guide. I can reach out to the websites who make the list, or perhaps use
this as a link bait in order to get some relevant and authority back links. Keyword
competition for this is 31.

- WordPress Theme

A clean theme, whether it is free of paid, would go perfectly with this site.
- Structure

Our main keyword of “Border Collie Training” would form much of the bulk of our
homepage.
This would connect to the inner posts and pages that focus on related terms such as
“Border Collie Shedding”, “Border Collie Temperament”, “Border Collie Size” etc.

Quick Note: If something is going to be written once and is evergreen, a page should
be made for it. If it’s a piece of news or you are working on a blog, then you
should add a post.

Wrapping It Up

I really enjoyed analyzing these websites and show these results to you.

Most guides might teach you how to find a niche market by using Google Keyword
Planner or some other keyword tool.

By thinking outside of the box and taking a different approach to find your perfect niche,
you’ll discover a broad range of profitable keywords and niches.