| Keyword Domain Niche Marketing |
| 28 October 2010 |
Big fish in a small market or Small shark in a large market?When developing a website for profit, the first consideration is the market segment you wish to compete in. There are two trains of thought; one is you choose a small market and you try and dominate it to get as larger share of the potential profits as possible. You work hard to become the Big Fish and cover all aspects of the small niche.
The second option is to choose a large market segment and become a Small Shark and pick off the easy or at least, easier pickings. Sharks are intelligent creatures and they circle looking for opportunity to take an easy feed (profit) and only actually pursue their food if threatened or find themselves starving.
We personally feel that the least path of resistance is to look at a large market with already high profits and like the Shark look for your opportunity to take a bite! If the money in the overall market segment is $500,000,000 (Five Hundred Million Dollars) and you desire a $50,000 (Fifty Thousand Dollar) slice then you need to achieve a 1/10000th or .00001% share to achieve that. If the market is $5,000,000 and you want the same return then you need a 1/100th or 1% share.
What products or services can you sell?This may sound an obvious question, however just because you found a large market with huge profit doesn't mean you have products you can easily sell. Real estate, Car sales and, Insurance are huge online sales markets but apart from perhaps a lead generation fee or maybe an Insurance affiliate program, these are hard to find products to compete with, especially in small markets like NZ.
Sell your products or someone else's?This ties in with the previous paragraph; are you setting up a website to sell your widgets that you buy, stock and ship? Or is there an established affiliate program that pays you a commission for selling their products. Affiliate programs can be great; you hold no stock and do not have to ship any products. Your overheads are minimal and therefore can survive on much lower margins.
Do I have to have a keyword domain name?This really depends on the amount of effort you are going to put into your website. What I mean is if the site is a very authoritative website with loads of great content and offers real value to the visitor, then the keywords in the domain name are a little less important. Take TLD.co.nz for example; we rate in the top 4 for a number of domain name related searches "Domain names for sale" "Domains for sale" "Keyword Domain Names" etc and this has nothing to do with our domain. However, if we owned anyone of these searches as a domain name; then our website would not need to rely on having so much content and good SEO to achieve high rankings.
With small niche websites, having a keyword domain name in our opinion is very important. Preferably the domain name should be the exact phrase you are targeting for your niche. At the very least the target should be in your domain. Take one of our sites RarotongaHotels.co.nz (I could link here but it's questionable SEO wise, without a lot of relevant content about Rarotonga on this page), this site is quite new and is #3 for Rarotonga Hotels if you search NZ pages and #7 if you search the web (At least from Christchurch anyway) This site has lots of great content and we are rated for lots of great phrases, however without the exact domain name it would have been much harder to get on page one.
How do I choose a Keyword Domain?Ok, we get asked this a lot! This is bordering on sharing our IP (intellectual Property) kidding haha. A good place to start is Google Keyword Tool, however this is not very complete as approximately 85% of searches placed in search engines are completely unique and have no historical data, we all think and type differently.
Now this is where it gets interesting, the very thing that makes a domain name valuable is the amount of searches it gets for its exact name and is weighted a little by its inclusion in phrases. However this may sound counter intuitive. For niche marketing you don't want a keyword domain that's has a very high volume of searches. This is because all the existing websites in the market segment will already be competing for and ranking well for that phrase! Huh you say....
Here is another POWERFUL way to check how competitive a phrase is; perform the "potential keyword domain name" search in Google and then add up the page ranks (PR0 to 10) of the 10 front page results and divide by 10 to get an average. If the average is 3 or less then you have a pretty good chance with a medium level of work and basic SEO to achieve a page one result for your exact domain name search. If however the average is over 3; then although it's not impossible to get there, it will be a lot more difficult and move you into building a truly authoritative website to out perform your competition.
A few final words on Keyword Domain Niche MarketingJust remember not every website will succeed, and if they do they may not reach your expectations. Don't give up, keep trying new ideas and build more websites. You can get hosting at very cheap prices these days (Even from us) New Zealand domain name renewal is cheaper now than it has ever been. Do some joint ventures, exchange links with related sites which will help you both rank well. Just don't give up on your DREAMS! |
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