Niche Blogging Case Study: Can You STILL Rank On Google?

When you talk about make money blogging, one of the fastest way is to build a niche blog. Yes, there's no denial in this.

You can still make money from affiliate sales from your main website but you want the type of fast churn and turn, running a niche blog could probably be the best bet.

There are some serious advantages of niche blogging and here are a few:

Building a niche blog is easy (and fast)
Finding one good niche and then blast the way out
Compared to running a main website, you don't need much authority to earn your first dollar

When I published my previous article, Finding Profitable Niche Ideas, I received quite a few private messages and emails asking if I could show a step by step guide.

And I thought, "Hey, why don't I start a niche blog instead as a case study?"

For starters, I have gave up niche blogging last year due to time constrain. However, I (basically) took the liberty to create this case study and ultimately, you can use them to start one or more niche blogs.

What you will learn here (and coming articles):

How to find a good niche
What is the definition of a good blogging niche
How to create a GREAT blogging niche
How to monetize a niche blog

And yes, I'll show you the exact steps I took to create this blog from scratch.

Tools I will be using:

Google search
Google Keyword Planner
Long Tail Pro (try it for free plus $20 off if you buy it from me)
Clickbank (website)
Amazon (website)
Keyword monitoring tool (my personal favorite - SerpBook)

Finding the right niche ideas

Here's an important disclaimer. It is super tough to find a good niche for blogging. There are too many competitions and Google is definitely not fond of those thin sites.

On top of that, competing with big guns such as eBay, Wikipedia and Amazon could be a nut job.

The goal before even starting up a niche blog is to find a profitable niche to blog. There is absolutely zero reason to start a niche blog, ranking on #1 of Google with nothing to sell.

The choice of monetization methods are:

Google Adsense
Affiliate sales
Ad space (when the traffic hits 1,000 a day)

Placing Google Adsense banner is pretty clear cut but for affiliate sales, it is a whole different story. Choosing the right product to market is important for any niche blogging.

If you are selling a product, here are some quick guidelines:

Earns at least $10 per sale or recurring (I love recurring)
Cost per click of around $1

My personal way of finding a good blogging niche is by soul searching; asking myself what I love most etc. If you are a beginner or needed some guidance, here are some quick but effective ways to find a good niche.

Using Amazon and Clickbank for keyword ideas

Check on the top sellers (I prefer top 100) and select the a product to market.

Let's say the product is a Genesis Framework (click here to join Genesis Framework affiliate and earn up to 33% per sale). The niche you are looking for would probably be WordPress themes or premium themes for bloggers.

The second step is to find 2 to 5 related products which are highly recommended or compared by Google. On Google search bar, type in "Genesis Framework vs" and you will see a list of suggestions.

The suggestions that are provided are the most popular search topics used by us. Yes, human!

As you can see above, these would be great blogging ideas you can use when you start the blog. Of course, applying for the affiliate sales in advance (or as soon as possible) is a good move to ensure that there isn't much wait time or time lost during the application period.

Checking the niche for profitability and chance of ranking

Niche blogging is all about make money fast and therefore, profitability and chance of ranking is more than just important.

For starters, you may use Google Keyword Planner to find a list of related keywords. Jot them down or list them down in an excel form. Keep in mind the important part are number of exact search per month and cost per click.

What I doesn't like about Google Keyword Planner is that it doesn't give competition analysis; the chance of ranking on search engines.

This is why I recommend bloggers to use Long Tail Pro. Long Tail Pro does the same job as Google Keyword Planner in terms of keyword research and on top of that, providing a chance of ranking that particular keyword.

I have selected the main keyword that has 3 words, 1,000 exact mach search per month and 2 other related keywords with moderate and low search values. The CPC value is roughly $1.34.

In terms of chance of ranking, Long Tail Pro provides a detailed ranking value of the top 10 results on Google as seen below.

Some criteria I usually look for are:

Page Authority under 50
Number of links are under 30
The value of the backlinks on that page is under 10
Domain authority as low as possible (recommended: Under 50)
MozRank under 5
PageRank as low as possible (I don't really bother this)
Site age as low as possible

Also, the 'criteria' are just my own. You could easily reduce or increase the number depending on the strength of the site.

Choosing a higher value will lead to more competition in niche blogging while lower ones would usually lead to lesser income.

Note: I'm definitely not out of my mind to be trying to rank a keyword which has 7 competitors (out of 10) having above score 80 in Domain Authority.

But why?

Take a look at the Juice Page Link and Page Links. The lower numbers show either these sites are ranking well due to the authority level of the root domains. Indirectly, they are enjoying the PageRank and authority flow.

Therefore, if you have a brand new domain with top notch article, you have a very real chance of ranking.

Literally speaking.

Searching for an exact match .com domain

This is important. I prefer to go for .com than any other TLDs. However, if .com is taken, you can also consider .net or .org (expired domains are good too).

Choosing an exact match domain is extremely important (even though Google say it isn't) and just in case that domain isn't available, you can opt for alternatives such as "keyword + addon" or "addon + keyword".

In this case, addon are words like top, best, recommended, for boys, for girls etc.

Good news for you, Long Tail Pro (again) helps you to find available domains too. Guess that's why I'm giving so much love to it right?

Try Long Tail Pro for 7-days FREE and on top of that, $20 off too! Try it NOW!

For niche blogging, most of my domains come from GoDaddy as it is probably the cheapest. Click on this link to buy a domain and use promo code "199scott" to get a special offer of $1.99 per domain.

The domain wouldn't take long to kick into action and once it is ready, hook it up with your current hosting.

If you're looking for a cheap but unlimited hosting service, you can try this one: Host With Me, which is a premium hosting managed by me. Alternatively, you can opt for premium hosting (if you are dead serious in this particular niche) like such as WP Engine.

Setting up the niche blog

This is rather simple. All you need to do are:

Find a good theme (I personally recommend Genesis child themes as they are HTML5 and SEO ready)
Prepare a good homepage with sidebars enabled
Advertisement banners (Google Adsense)
Pages such as 'about me' and 'privacy'

Lastly, fire up your best post. Yup, kick start your post with a great article. My first post was around 2,000 words. Yes, hand written and zero copy paste.

Do you remember the earlier keywords recommended by Google? This is the time to use them.

Each post should have:

1 main keyword
2 to 5 secondary keywords
Density of each keywords do not exceed 3%
Each article should be at least 1,000 words
Images, video and any visual effect are extremely important (keywords to be used on alt tags)
Various heading tags (H1 to H3)
Bold, italic and underline
Permalink should either be /%sample-post%/ or /%category%/%postname%/ (I prefer the first one as it is shorter)

Disclaimer: You do not need to publish like 10 posts a day. One a day or even one a week is absolutely fine.

Results of my niche blogging case study after 48 hours

Drum roll please!

...

I started the niche blogging case study on 26th May 2014. Just for the record, I have did absolutely ZERO link building and even social media.

One post was published on the same day itself and another on 28th May 2014. And guessed what? The first post keyword has already ranked 34th on Google today.

Here are the stats as of today on Google:

Main keyword - 65th

Secondary keywords A - 26th

Secondary keywords B - 36th

Secondary keywords C - 38th

Secondary keywords D - 43th

Secondary keywords E - 43th

Here's what it looks like for proof:

I don't know you but I think this is explosive! Without doing anything, I'm already ranking 65th for my main keyword and even hitting the 26th spot with one of my secondary keyword.

Not bad for a day right?

Are you digging for more? Yes, more niche blogging results (and tutorials) to come, I promise!

This doesn't stop here. I'm pumped to see how far I would go without any link building. I'm planning to start link building on my niche blogging case study only after week or so.

And I'm not going to keep you in the dark. I'll post my updates on this and keep you informed of everything I had done so that you can use them immediately.

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