If you want to be successful, you'll need to learn how to find a money making opportunity.
Before you buy a domain or set up a blogger blog or even commit to building anything online, you should know the rules of the game you're about to enter.
Be careful about whatever you think you already know, a little knowledge can somethimes be a very dangerous thing and before you begin you need to get educated.
I've already discussed the target income you're going after and a timeline, so, now you are ready for the basic information about doing business on the internet.
Internet Marketing Basics
You want to make money and you want to do it online so you are learning to be an Internet Marketer. Internet Marketing is about Making Money Online.
It could be from a wide variety of activities but for now, we are concentrating on making money with a blog so we're not going to stray far from the task at hand.
As an internet marketer you need to understand that in order to reach your goal, you'll need to get traffic to your blog and you'll need to monetize that traffic.
Traffic on the Internet flows from search engines to pages based on Keywords, Search Terms, Queries, whatever you want to call them.
It will become very apparent as we go on just how closely related these three objectives are and how important they are in guiding everything you do online.
Search Engine(Keywords) ---> Traffic ---> Money
Search Engine Organic Listings
The listings on the Search Engines Results Pages(SERPs) are referred to as Organic Listings. Aside from massive effort on your part, getting listed here is free of charge. This is where you will concentrate on getting your traffic.
Each listing is the result of a query typed into the search engines search form. The results are returned according to an algorithm which rated each listing and ranks the listings in an order according to the criteria set forth in the algorithm.
This is where everything becomes subjective and Google does this different from Yahoo. The main thing to understand is that these listings are FREE and generate the majority of traffic on the Internet.
Getting your page or site indexed is the first step to accomplishing your primary goal of getting on the first page and the first position. More on this a little later.
How To Define A Profitable Niche Market
We are going to define the amount of traffic necessary to effectively monetize a money making opportunity for your blog.
You are going to have to take my word for the following metrics I layout here. These measures are not exact numbers and they could also vary widely, but they will form a guide to help you choose a niche that has the possibility to make money.
You can decide the value of a Niche Market by using Google Adwords Prices. Why? Because they are listed in the Free Google Keyword Research Tool, in other words, they are available.
The Google Keyword Tool
If you go to the Google Keyword Tool you'll be able to get a general idea about the approximate traffic generated by searches on particular keywords.
Bookmark the link because you will use it a lot.
The first step is to enter a keyword or keyword phrase into the tool that best describes the topic that interests you.
For the purpose of demonstration I am going to use how to make money online as my starting keyword phrase because that's what this site is all about.
Leave all the settings on the default setting and type in your keyword.
Go ahead and click Get keyword ideas.
The page you see now shows you a variety of information that will give you an idea of the traffic generated by searches in Google. This number is going to be on the low side and is not to be taken as dead-on accurate, it will only give you a general idea.
You are only looking at this type match because at this point, we are accessing the traffic of the niche and not the specific search term itself.
CPC is what an advertiser would pay for a text ad in the sponsored search section of a Google results page. The text ad only shows when a keyword is searched and advertisers bid on the keywords. This value can give us an approximate value of the keyword.
If you talk to 20 people about how to use the keyword tool you'll probably get 20 different answers. I guess I'll be no different but I'll try to give you reasons for each setup in the tool itself. You must remember that the accuracy of the numbers shown in the tool are not perfect and should only be used as an estimate!
What you are looking at initially, is a broad match. This number includes all the traffic generated from the keyword or keyword phrase for every individual part of the keyword phrase in any variation. This will give you an idea of the traffic for the niche.
You don't need to concern yourself with the differences between the local and global search numbers, whichever one is higher is the number you should use to evaluate if your topic idea has enough traffic to generate the proper pay off.
So how do you use the data to decide if your topic - niche, has enough traffic at this point?
You'll need some metrics to help you decide and the reasons for the metrics. We are going to make assumptions that are loosely based in fact. At this point we only want an indication that you can generate $5000 per month.
So here are the rules I use at this point in the process.
- If I am #1 in the SERPs for every keyword contributing to the broad match I will only get 50 percent of the traffic if I am lucky - the rest will be divided between every other listing including sponsored ads. So the number I see in the broad match I immediately divide in half.
- There are many methods you could use to make money from your site but I am going to assign a value derived from typical sales averages. You can call it Average Niche Value and its also based on CPC suggested by Google in the Keyword Tool as I have stated above. So we'll say that we can get 10% of the value of the traffic. This is a guess and is assuming other monetization methods will be used on your site as well. For now we just want an idea.
So what we have is an equation for you to plug the numbers into and I'll call it The Niche Evaluator.
For the niche - how to make money online.
Monthly Traffic = 135000 - divide in half = 67500
Average Niche Value = CPC X Monthly Traffic X 10% = $3.09 X 67500 X .10 = $20,857.50
Can we possible make our $5000 per month in this niche? Oh yeah! As you can see Average Niche Value is over $20,000 per month.
But what does this number actually tell us? Not much really except that the niche described by the keyword search phrase - how to make money online, which is broad, has serious value and may work if the stars align for us.
Try this method for your ideas and see where it leads you, it's How To Find A Money Making Opportunity.
The next section will show you how to decide if a niche is right for you or too competitive to enter.
