One of the first questions that people have when looking to start up any web business is… “What niche should I choose?” – I’m sure you, like me, have been there too?
This question has surfaced several times recently, in talking to Mastermind Members, so I though it might be helpful to look at some of the criteria for selecting suitable products to promote with a Hub and Mini-site strategy.
As ever, the first thing to do is take off your ‘YOU’ goggles and put on your prospective customer’s shoes, hat and glasses – and see life as they see it and live it! As they say in marketing circles… ‘walk a mile in your customer’s shoes’ – see my blog post “The Anatomy of Great Copy”.
Next thing is search volume, of course… As a general rule, go for a product (range) that has good traffic – more than around 3,000 searches a month.
And the number of competing websites should, preferably, be less than 200,000 – that’s using ‘phrase match’ on Google by putting quotation marks (“ ”) around your search phrase. If you use ‘broad match’ for a term like ‘portable garden equipment’, Google will return ALL websites that have EITHER the term ‘portable’ OR ‘Garden’ OR ‘equipment’ – ie likely to be in the millions and not relevant to you.
Stiff Competition?
Now, 200k other websites would seem like stiff competition – but you can bet that most are not well optimised for the keywords you’re targeting and you’d be surprised how easy it is to get up in the top rankings, as a result. Especially if you focus on ‘long tail’ keywords (more on that in a moment).
And think how you would react, as a prospective customer, to the website you’re creating and the product you’re targeting…
Yes, you want to maximise the return you’ll earn from affiliate commissions by going for higher-priced products, rather than $2.50 toys (unless you can attract thousands of visitors a day).
But people looking for products online costing over say £100 will want to shop around much more than people buying lower-priced products, where the differences in price between different sites are likely to be rather less important.
And the higher the price, the more prospects will want to buy from a ‘professional’-looking website and the more pre-selling you’re going to have to do on your website, so the more effort will be required in setting up the website.
So it’s perhaps best to focus the Hub and Mini-site strategy at products in the range of £100 or so, rather than higher-priced products, where price differences between sites encourage shopping around.
Your Keywords
Now, back to Keywords… The trick is to focus on ‘long tail’ keywords, that include the primary (highly searched) keywords and have a reasonable search volume themselves, but on which you’re not competing with the whole world…
And each page of your Mini-site should be optimised for a different keyword. So your ‘Butterscotch Pony’ mini-site could have separate pages focussed on ‘Butterscotch Pony’, ‘Butterscotch Pony Saddles’, ‘Butterscotch Pony Gadgets’, ‘Butterscotch Pony Interactive’, etc. And you’d have one page of your ‘Toy Pony’ Hubsite focussed on the ‘Butterscotch Pony’.
Or your Mini-site might offer Flip video cameras, for example, and the individual pages might focus on ‘pink Flip cameras’, ‘silver Flip cameras’, etc. And your keywords would reflect the subject of the page. See for example www. flip-cameras .co.uk (Tip: check the keywords they’re using for each page by right-clicking on the page somewhere and selecting ‘View Page Source’). Your Hub site might offer hand-held video cameras, and the individual pages of the Hub site would include Flip and other cameras.
So I hope this helps with Niche ideas for your Hub and Mini-Sites!
Happy Niche-ing!
John Thornely
Internet Tycoons
