The Ultimate Niche and Keyword Research Method

I am going to show you how to research ANY niche that you are not sure about (and maybe thinking that is not enough ‘material’ that you can write posts about); or how to get more ideas for your niche if you feel STUCK.

Using this niche research / keyword research method you will end up with:

• ALL the questions that people are asking from Google
• 300+ longtail keywords
• 150+ potential blogpost titles

And we will finish under 2 hours tops. Clock starts, 10 minutes allocated for reading this post.

Sounds impossible?

Give me some credit…

I have done one myself this afternoon for a random niche topic that first come to my mind: portable generators. You can download the file here (and you can start making your own niche site straight away, I don’t mind). I must warn you that it’s 24 pages long and I did not even bother to insert all the findings in it.

You must do some work too, though…

But let me show you first, how I made this comprehensive research in such a short time?

Ultimate Keyword Research – Phase 1

Pick a main topic that you are interested in – nothing surprising here.

This can be anything that you have a slight interest in, and maybe already know a bit about. Crucial, that it must be something that other people may be interested in. It’s beneficial if there are products that you will be able to mention as part of your posts, but at this point it does not even matter that much. (if you’d like to know how to find products and programs for affiliate marketing, check out these posts I wrote: Finding Affiliate Programs & Products In Your Niche or How To Find an Affiliate Marketing Niche (5 Easy Steps) – however, what I am going to show you will complement those methods and take them much further.)

I used Ubersuggest just to check if my idea of a niche had some real potential. If you put the most generic (short tail) keyword in to Ubersuggest, it will tell you how big that potential is, and will start suggesting more ideas based on that keyword.

In the example that you can download, Ubersuggest returned with a ‘High’ traffic potential, expecting 40,000 monthly viewers based on the topic. I don’t want to go into how accurate that number could be, because that depends on a lot of factors, but I can tell you that in a much less ‘generic’ niche the website I built brought in 12,000 visitors just after 5 months.

If you target long-tail keywords and building up the content cleverly, it is only a matter of time until your posts will rank for the short tail variation too. Maybe not all of your posts, maybe only one in the beginning, but gradually many of them will get there. Trust me, with this method I am showing you targeting exactly what people are after, and Google will notice that.

But in order to do that, you must see the keywords Google tracks and that are relevant within your niche.

I would call them mid-tail keywords, cause the REAL long-tail ones going to come later (again, straight from Google).

So you need a keyword tool.

I used Jaaxy Lite for this part, for two reasons;

1. It has many ‘brainstorm’ features that could give me more and more ideas of these mid-tail keywords.
2. It comes ‘free’ with my hosting as part of my Wealthy Affiliate membership.

I recommend you use it too, because if you register a free account with WA, you can easily have access to it.

With the free WA account come two free websites, which you are going to need anyways to make money. (You can buy a domain later for flat $15 through the platform, or link your free websites to a domain you buy or have bought elsewhere (ie namecheap)).

So put in the same keyword as you researched with Ubersuggest, and save all the suggestions that make any sense and the monthly search is above 50. If you find something that sounds ‘generic’ enough, run a search for that too and save the suggestions that make sense.

Ideally you’d end up with a list of 70-80 keywords on the list. You can export this into a CSV file (opens in Excel or any similar program, even in Google Docs).

Select all an sort them by search volume, from high to low. You should end up with a top 5-10 or more keywords that have at least 2-300 monthly visits estimated. Ignore the ones that are very similar.

Now the fun part.

Head to Answerthepublic.com

Select US, if you can, as search location.

Enter the 1st key-phrase off your list and run the query.

What happened?

Answer The Public pulls all the relevant questions that people have asked from Google related to that keyphrase. It uses Google’s autosuggest data, the most popular questions have a greener little circle before them.

Answer The Public also categorizes them by the type of query using prepostions etc.

You can save the images by clicking on the button in the top right corner of the image, and you can download the whole analysis in CSV again.

Now you basically just have done what I did, and what I have inserted into a pdf document for you.

You can download it here.

So what’s next?

Ultimate Keyword Research – Phase 2

You are mainly interested in the top 5-6 questions of each type. This part needs a bit of a common sense, as you need to compare the questions people ask with the keywords you have found with Jaaxy (or any other keyword tool, even the ones in Ubersuggest).

Targeting those keywords and questions with the first 30-40 posts will achieve the following things;

• You are targeting the right audience
• You are targeting topics that people are interested in, have questions about and you are answering those questions
• You are targeting the most frequently searched questions / problems
• You are targeting keywords that are mid-tail or even long-tail variants of the main keyword of your website. These are less competitive. By building up your niche site using these variants, as you progress you will be able to target AND RANK FOR more competitive keywords too.

That is: recipe for success.

Use the questions as the base for coming up with post titles.

Some of the questions could be used straight as post titles, but some would sound ‘weird’. So to complete your ‘Hit-posts’ you must go through them and come up with a formula to make them sound a bit more captivating, like:

10 (or any number)   +   [long tail keyword or question]  +   for … (anything that makes sense)

You should end up with a bunch of ideas like these…

Top 10 Quiet Portable Generators for Camping

Portable Generators – main keyword

Quiet portable generators – mid-tail keyword;

Portable generators for camping – mid-tail keyword

Quiet portable generators for camping – long-tail keyword; and also targeting questions in the post (more long-tail keywords) like ‘Which portable generator is the quietest’ or ‘portable generator for camping’. So you’ll end up ranking for all those 3-5-10 variants of mid- and long-tail keywords that you naturally have to cover in that post. This will easily bring in 1000 clicks a month.

Over time, you will have 40-50-60 posts that will include some variant of the main keyword in the title and in the text plenty of times. Potentially you could be on the first page of Google with this posts even if someone just searches for portable generators for weekend parties…or whatever…

And its only one post.

More ideas could be, just so that you get the gist of it:

13+1 Quiet Generators For Home (with comparison table)

7 Home Use Portable Generators to Run a House No Matter What.

Etc. the options are endless. If you ever feel you have run out of ideas, have a look at Ubersuggest and/or Google Trends to dig out some related queries. In our example this could be ‘mobile generators’. Then you go to Answerthepublic.com and…you surely get it by now.

You Have a Niche – What Now?

You have a great niche with plenty of traffic potential.

You are almost 100% sure what people look for within that niche.

You nailed 15-20 mid-tail keywords and possible 100+ longtail keywords.

You already started to come up with post titles, 40-50 of them.

Before we make this niche website a reality, there are two things we need to check.

Is there a product to promote in that niche?

With portable generators, you don’t have to think about it. There are plenty. But it’s always worth double-checking that there products that people actually buy online.

This can be a physical product (ie. portable generators)

An e-book (how to maintain portable generators, how to fix it onto your RV etc.)

A course (probably not in this niche)

Any other info-product.

So it’s worth having a look at Amazon, Clickbank.

Be creative. You may find (info-)products that are not strictly related but can be of interest to the people visiting your website. So you could also promote other camping stuff for people visiting your post on camping generators. Because they camp.

Even if you struggle to find products (which I doubt), it may still worth building that website.

Reality check number 2. Monetizing.

How much could you earn with this niche website?

Let’s say you have 40 posts each bring a 1000 visitors per month on average.

That’s 40000 views a month. Say you have found products and you are able to monetize by affiliate links, using Amazon’s affiliate program. Average Click-through rate is around 10%, so that’s 4000 clicks on affiliate links. Let’s say that the conversion rate is 4% (average).

That means that 4% of that 4000 clicks will end up buying something on Amazon (160 sales a month). Not necessarily a portable generator, but anything. Average basket value is around $60 (some people will buy a shower gel for $10, others will buy the generator for $330). Commission rate is 8% ($4.8 average commission). That equals to 160 x 4.8 = $768 a month. (Note, that Amazon’s affiliate program is by far not the best and only way you can monetize your website. For a more detailed picture on how much can you make with affiliate marketing on a niche site in the first year, check out my post on the topic: How Much Can You Earn in Your First Year of Affiliate Marketing? (Real-life Example)

You can also have ad revenue. With 40,000 clicks a month you can apply for premium ad networks, rather than Google AdSense. With a premium ad network you can calculate a $12-$15 per 1000 pageviews. Say $12 x (40,000 / 1000) = $480

So you will have a site generating you $1250 a month.

This a very conservative estimate, but – for just the sake of the example – your website would bring 2000 visitors a day (60k a month), the monthly total would be $1152 + $720 = $1870

So if you are happy with this figure, it’s time to make a website. If you are not, well, there are plenty of other affiliate programs and there are other ways to monetize your website. If you’d, let’s say, happen to find a ClickBank product with $27-$30 average commission that you could recommend through your website, you could easily double or triple your income (160 sales x $27 = $4320). Or if you could find an affiliate product that pays recurring fee, even if it is just $15 a month then month 1 = $2400, month 2 = $4800 month 3 = $7200 etc.

Making a Niche Website

I don’t want to go too deeply into how to create a niche website, I have written some posts about this that you can find here and here.  In general, you’ll need a domain name for your website – that’s how people are going to find you on the internet, and you need hosting – that’s where you keep the files of your website.

The order of sorting these two things does not matter. You can easily start a website using the widget below (that’s free hosting). You can buy a domain through SiteRubix at any point later, or you can secure your domain via other registrars such as NameCheap.

Similarly, you can head straight to any domain registrar, most of them offer relatively cheap WordPress hosting as part of the package. (However, most of the time you must pay 1-5 years in advance to get the advertised price for hosting)

Picking a domain name

Make sure that your domain name is brandable, and/or contains something so that people know what your website is about.

For mobile generators I would consider something like PowerUpAnywhere.com, BringMeThatGenerator.com, GeneratorAnywhere.com or TransportableGenerators.com, at the time of writing this article all of them are available for $10-$15 a year.

The actual hard bit is filling up your website with content.

Niche Content

Again, I’ve written about how to write content that ranks (here), but the key here is to write with intent. And your intent is to get people come to your website and click on your links.

Here’s a quick training under the link on the customer purchase life-cycle: how to target viewers exactly, who are ready to buy and how to write with intent. (Registration required).

In fact, I strongly recommend you to at least watch the videos on Wealthy Affiliate (it’s all free) to get a better understanding what sort of content you need to write, and how to write it in order to convert visitors to buying customers. You can have a better understanding of how to carry out product research and what sort of products your visitors are looking to buy.

The Ultimate Niche & Keyword Research we just carried out is Step 1 and will help you greatly in that process, but with the underpinning knowledge it would be much easier to figure how to turn this bunch of data into a lucrative business.

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Greg

Aspiring entrepreneur online and offline for the last 14 years who is not afraid to share his trials, errors, failures and successes to help you avoid the same mistakes. Owner of 2 websites and 2 online shops, making websites ever since FrontPage Express was a thing and earning a side-income online since Amazon was a small business.

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