A $1,000 Lesson in Creating an Affiliate Niche Website

I recently planned and created two niche websites, WordPressMembershipPlugins.net (WPMP) and BestGamesForKids.net (BGFK).

I personally wrote the content for WPMP. It took me about 4 days. And to setup the website, I took another 4 days. So, let’s say the entire website took about 2 weeks to set up. I didn’t outsource anything.

BGFK on the other hand is bigger. It has more than 30,000 words of content. I outsourced the content writing to someone on Elance. The content cost me $1,000. The idea behind BGFK was to promote games for kids from Amazon.com. So, I personally built a system to facilitate this. Building this system took about two weeks.

Based on the sizes of these investments, I was expecting BGFK to do much better than WPMP.

Both sites have been live for more than a month and the results are in. BGFK is just dead. It’s not getting any Google love and it’s got no other source of traffic. WPMP on the other hand has already made $60 in sales! And here’s the lesson…

The Lesson

Niche affiliate sites are usually created to cater to pre-selected search engine keyword(s).

In the case of WPMP that keyword/keyphrase is “WordPress Membership Plugin”. For BGFK that keyword/keyphrase is “kids games” or “games for kids”.

According to Google Keyword Tool, WPMP’s keyphrase gets fewer than 1,000 searches a month. BGFK’s keyphrases get nearly half a million searches a month! Huge difference!

I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I actually didn’t know these facts going in…Wait, that’s not the lesson…

Google is smart enough to know “games for kids” and “kids games” are the same. BGFK won’t rank for one keyword and not the other. If it’s gonna rank, it’s gonna rank for both. And these two are VERY competitive.

When I did my keyword research, I was just looking into the phrase “games for kids” and I ignored “kids games”, which is actually more common! Had I done my analysis using both phrases, my results would have been different.

The lesson learned here for me is this.

Use the right keyword tools

Do more diligent keyword research. Don’t only use Google Keyword Tool. Mix it up. Verify your results using other tools such as Keyword Tracker.

Keyphrase variations

When you do keyword research, don’t pick an awkward variation of the keyword. Pick the natural one. “kids games” is better than “games for kids”.

It doesn’t matter if the exact phrase “games for kids” shows lower competition than “kids games”. Google realizes that both are the same.

Very Small Niches Can Be Profitable

Also, just because the main keyword for a niche gets fewer than 1,000 searches a month, that doesn’t make the niche unfeasible. By covering the niche with rich and useful content, like I did with WPMP, you can probably capture more visitors through longtail keywords.

In fact, the $60 I made through WPMP came and I still haven’t even ranked on the first page for the main keyword, “wordpress membership plugin”.

Bigger Niches Require More Resources

If I wanna leverage what I have at BGFK, I would need to invest even more at it. Create more content for each sub-topic. Do more aggressive SEO and link building, and so on. That would require more money than I had initially planned. Usually, a bigger investment is required for a more popular/bigger niche.

But also keep in mind that just because a niche isn’t popular that doesn’t mean it’s not competitive. There maybe a few players in a certain niche, but they may all be very enthusiastic about what they do.