Niche Market / Keyword Info

This post is based on an important truths about search engine traffic:

Truth: When you enter a market (begin to target a set of keywords) for the first time you don’t know really anything about it.
You don’t know what keywords have traffic.
Yeah, Adwords Keyword Tool gave you some numbers, but in case after case, those numbers prove to be nothing more than symbolic. When you actually get into the market and start your SEO, you inevitably find that some keywords that apparently had “28 global searches a month” or whatever, actually bring hundreds of visitors and keywords that have “20,000 searches a month” don’t bring near as many.
Furthermore, you don’t know what keywords convert. You can make educated guesses, and based on principles, you can make intelligent assumptions, but until you’ve got the data, you don’t properly know.
This of course, is the reason why affiliates used to start a campaign by testing a market with instant PPC traffic. That allowed them to know their conversion metrics from the first week, and know the “real” numbers that Adwords doesn’t tell you straight away. Of course – and sadly – that’s no longer possible, so we need to take a different approach.
Think of this…
The BEST situation you can have in any market, is one where you know what keywords can provide easy search traffic, and you know what keywords convert for the affiliate offer you want to promote. As soon as those keywords are in your head, no one can take them from you. Yeah, your site can lose rankings, or get penalized, but who gives a shit? You know those keywords are profitable. You want what you did to get traffic from those keywords. And you can do it again. And again.
That in mind, here’s how you get to that point, without PPC, in a new niche, as quickly as possible.

Is Content Really King? Maybe. But In The Beginning? Definitely!

Here’s a secret some – maybe a lot – of new affiliates don’t know:
Advanced affiliate marketers don’t do much “niche research”. They know their niches already. They’ve had profitable sites before, they know certain markets, they know the right keywords, they know what sells. They keep hitting the same markets over and over again and keep replicating the same results… Google slaps be damned.
If that’s not you, the first thing you need to to do in a new market, is bomb your site with content targeting as many keywords as you can, that you THINK might have traffic, and THINK might be profitable.
Then you start your SEO.
On a new site your SEO shouldn’t be too specific anyway. You should be working on building up the authority of your domain name, and building those root domain backlinks to set yourself up for the specific keyword domination that will come later.
Why do you do this? It’s like fishing.
You’re casting a bunch of lines into the water, in all different places, to see where you get bites.
At first, the new content you add will do nothing. It will sit there – anything from a week to a month – depending on your market. But as your domain authority grows (thanks to your link building), some of those posts will start showing up in the SERPS for some of those long tail keywords we always talk about. 

THAT’S when things get exciting…
As soon as one keyword pops up… one keyword where you got traffic without even trying… that’s a sign.
You go back to that post, you consider the monetization, you try to improve it, you drop some internal links to that post (with the right anchor text) from other posts, and you see if you can grow that traffic… and if you can sell with that traffic. If you can’t improve the traffic or make sales… no problem. You wait for the next keyword to pop up. If you can. BOOM. You’ve got a keyword that’s in your bank so that you can draw on it and it’s potential FOREVER.
And if months pass and NONE of these keywords pop up? You couldn’t even get a few visitors from long tail keywords with all that content? It might be a sign that this market is too competitive to begin with. You take the hit, and you move on, happy that you didn’t waste even MORE time in that space.
Do you see why this is infinitely smarter than the alternative approach?
I mean the approach where you have some affiliate offer and you pick a keyword, then spend months SEOing it, riding all your hopes on that, only to rank for it and find that it doesn’t have as much traffic as you thought, or it doesn’t convert like you thought?
The approach I’m talking about in this post is one where you’re minimizing the possibility that factors out of your control – unexpected occurrences like the Adwords data being wrong – could hurt your profitability.
You’re maximizing the number of decisions you’re making that are backed by experience and data. It’s a TOTALLY different ball game.

Start Now…

If you’ve recently entered a new niche, or you’re about to do so: Give this a shot.
Do some keyword research. 
Grab 20 keywords. (adjust as per your budget)
Have 20 good articles knocked up. It’s a $100-$150 investment. Small for what you’ll get out of it.
Publish them on your site
Continue with your SEO
And watch your traffic stats.
Do this in enough market and you’ll be operating like a super affiliate before you know it.