Remember I asked you what niche I chose on my previous post? Just a recap…
Niches I’ve thought about:
- Baby Diapers
- Olive Oil Skin Care
- Shea Butter Skin Care
- Skin Phototherapy Products
- Arthritis Alternative Treatment Products
- Dental Hygiene Products
- Heart Rate Monitor
And Donace got it right 
:D Good on you!
I chose to setup a niche product site selling Heart Rate Monitors. I got this idea when I knew of a friend who spent 400 dollars on a heart rate monitor, which was insane! I never knew heart rate monitors can be so expensive especially those that have GPS built into them. I also know a lot of fitness junkies who like to use this to train especially those on endurance training.
Of course there are many niches available out there but it all boils down to a number of things that are very important which has significantly influenced why I chose the heart rate monitor niche.
It’s all about filtering
Filter..Filter..Filter…
Search Volume
Don’t rank for something that nobody is searching. To be honest what you think is popular might not be popular at all. So don’t be fooled!
Competition
It’s obvious. If everyone is trying to rank for a keyword in the top position like weight lost recipes than it will definitely be tough.
Commercial Value
If you rank well for a keyword that everybody is searching but the chances of them buying anything with that keyword is low, then you will also be in trouble.
Getting My Arsenal On Board
Amazon
I’ve taken the Amazon route to building my niche sites thanks to some friendly influence (from you know who…). Amazon sites are pretty easy to create (if you have the right tools) and they have great monetizing potential. One of the things you have to notice about Amazon is that it’s like a mega marketplace. Almost anything can be purchased here. To make things easy, features like related searches, related products, bestselling products, cheapest to most expensive products are the norm.
Related Searches – get popular keyword phrases to use for your niche site to help people search for your site.
Related Products – Get great ideas to have related products to each of your product
Bestselling Products – Get to know the popular best selling products and put them on your site on a clearly visible area. Promote the hell out of it
Prices – Although this might not be a deterrent factor for people who really want to buy something. It’s also a good idea to promote why the cheap products are great compared with the expensive ones.
Wielding the Samurai Sword
Market Samurai is one of the best tools to use for niche research, period. Like I’ve mentioned before, my fav! I know I know.. a gazillion people use this software and have heaps of praises for it but it is a worthwhile investment. I don’t know what I’ll do without it.
I must also admit that I’m still learning the techniques of using it so I’m
no black belt here yet.
Getting Down and Dirty with it..
A lot of these preset figures are a product of reading around and looking at the tutorials on Market Samurai. This is essentially what the most important things you need to be concerned about. I’ve unchecked the Total Searches checkbox because it just doesn’t give you a good perception of actual traffic compared to SEO traffic.
SEO Traffic – I cap mine at a minimum of 80 per day.
PBR – Minimum of 15%. I’ve read somewhere to keep this higher. I would prefer not to keep this lower than 50%. This is because the lower it gets the more unlikely people are actually searching using that keyphrase on Google. This is especially important for keyphrases not in order like heart rate monitor polar compared to polar heart rate monitor. People are more likely to type polar heart rate monitor than heart rate monitor polar.
SEO Competition (SEOC) – A max of 100 000. I’m not really sure about this but I choose 100 000 which I think is a safe value. Market Samurai advises to keep this at 30 000.
SEO Value (SEOV) – A minimum of 30 here. The higher the value the better its commercial value.
Trends – As you can see searches for heart rate monitor is on an up-going trend. The last bar is for the month of December 2010. If you see that, then it’s a good sign otherwise use another keyword or start again.
You can challenge my figures here if you want to…
Market Samurai vs Amazon
As you can see in the picture, Market Samurai showed 9 different key phrases based on my settings. So this gives me a good idea what key phrases to choose from while Amazon came up with “heart rate monitor polar”, “heart rate monitor watch”, polar heart rate monitor”.
Some of the top key phrases listed on Market Samurai came up as:
- best heart rate monitor
- heart rate monitor watches
- heart monitor watch
- heart monitor watches
- timex heart rate monitor
- best heart rate monitors
- nike heart rate monitor
- heart rate monitor reviews
- heart rate monitor review
I’ve also done research on other key phrases but they just don’t meet the requirements on Market Samurai. So I’ve decided to just cross that out completely. What was surprising was “Polar Heart Rate Monitor” just didn’t show up. I was expecting it to be in the list above but for some reason Nike and Timex Heart rate monitor are the only brands meeting the rules set in MS.
If you are unacquainted with heart rate monitors, Polar heart rate monitor watches are one of the most popular ones and their top of the line models can be very expensive. Omron seems to be the bestselling heart rate monitor on Amazon because its cheap.
A Brief Analysis…
1. “Best Heart Rate Monitor” became my main choice mainly because SEO competition was low, monetization value is good and PBR is good. Strangely enough not many people key in for the search phrase “best heart rate monitors”, partly because people want to look for something specific on Google.
2. “heart rate monitor watches” and “heart monitor watch” has great commercial value, SEO Traffic and SEO competition but it just didn’t have a good PBR ratio. So it was off the list.
3. “Nike heart rate monitor” and “heart monitor reviews” was my second choice but I didn’t want to just set up a niche site specifically on a single brand and there were too many sites competing for those keyphrases. So I was a little concern.
Anyway guys, what you see here is a streamlined version of the research I’ve done on this niche.
After considering all the variables, domain research and SEO competition I finally settled for “best heart rate monitor”.
The key phrase “Best Heart Rate Monitor” has all the combinations for what I want on my niche website. Do you guys think so?
My next step is to see my competition. Now I’m worried about the amount of reds there but I figured that I would be able to rank even on the first page with enough backlinks. So do you think it’s a mistake? Yes I admit I’m still new to this but back-linking is the next big plan now.
So Best Heart Rate Monitor was born…
Tell me what you guys think…I could have been wrong in putting this whole thing together.
N.B: If you want to use Market Samurai like how I do, take a short trip using this software and tell me what you think of it.
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{ 16 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi! In interested reading your blog. Im new here and I want to learn more and explore to this kind of business. thanks for sharing this.
ebusinessmom recently posted..WordPress Blog & SEO Example
Hi there,
I’m glad you find this very interesting. It is certainly no easy task doing niche site. Not a straightforward thing at all. I hope you learn something out of this post too.
Cheers!
I said that one because instinctually that was the easier sell. People who search for that term know they are looking for it to buy sooner or later!
Btw what plugin are you using for the listings? 2 weeks into my ‘quest’ I’m seeing one of my keywords hit page 6 and my niche site still on page 17 fro main keyword (links /site still being indexed). So im still eager to jump on another niche site and get it rolling.
Donace recently posted..Why a com is better that a gov and edu link
Hey Donace,
You’re right! They know what they wanna look for and its just a matter to look, find and buy the product. I think doing this niche research thing has given me a lot of ideas about choosing the right approach and that is to think as someone looking to buy something online. What would I key in on Google first?
I think a lot of other comments that came through this 2 posts thought that going for the heart rate monitor niche was a good idea. I think so too. But one of the deciding factors came from Market Samurai. All the other niches were either too competitive or had very little people searching specifically for those products that I thought of. The stats on MS proved that people are searching and are looking to buy it. Competition is still there but I believe over time, with link building, I will get the search engines to help boost my rankings.
Ooh I’ll drop you a line on the plugin for the listing
Twitter: alexanderthegry
January 31, 2011 at 2:42 am
This looks good Bryan, you should really try some fitness forums to promote this website and see the response.
Why did you put the adsense in the header? You should first try to see how it converts without adsense and then you can add the adsense ad and compare the two situation, because that ad can steal some of your potential clients for just a couple of cents.
Alex@Jocuri recently posted..Avatar Maestrul elementelor
Hey Alex,
Thanks for the advice on Adsense. Will remove it asap. And yeah, I’m looking into commenting and promoting this sites on health and fitness forums too. Definitely some of the best ways to get targeted groups of people and backlinks from appropriate sites.
Twitter: stevescott1
January 31, 2011 at 7:23 am
A lot of the top ten for the key phrase do have some high PR, but a few are not well title optimized and there look like possibility for competition. So you may have to work a little harder to but it looks like it is possible to make it work.
It certainly seems like it is winner. will it really gets a good long tails out of it but perhaps have the page for each specific type reviewed. Like Alex said what’s commenting on fitness websites and forums and health fitness and forums should get you some real quality back links, and help to rise your site pretty fast..EDU and .GOV sites and forums relating to health might be good to. if you don’t good to have the on the hard sell the product it is related enough that it can probably get through any sort of spam filters
Steve@Internet Lifestyle recently posted..Follow the Yellow Brick Road – A Guide to Inspiration- Motivation and Melting a Witch
Yeah steve, that’s what I realized. There are some red boxes that concerns me. The thing is most of them are big consumer-based websites and not really specific to HRM. Anyway, I’m going to take advantage of the backlinking part and take up your adcvice and Alex’s too on hitting on the right sites.
I have heard so much about market samurai. Is it really worth the cost?
Mariam@seo social media recently posted..Importance of Social Media
Mariam,
Market Samurai is quite pricey but for the things that it can do, I totally vouch and support it. There is an early bird discount during the trial period for “action takers” If you do plan to get one, make your decision within that time frame.
Hi Bryan,
I am a beginner now, I have been working on this from quite some time, gathered many ideas but am dumbstruck with analysis paralysis. I am really glad that I happened to find your blog to get a better idea over the picture.
Anusha recently posted..WordPress Header Design – Sample Header 261
Hey Anusha,
I think the important step right now is to find a niche, do research, get your keyword list an set a domain. I know sounds like a lot but you won’t know how well it will work out unless you try. No one is telling you to make it in the first instance. It’s always a matter of doing things better with experience and trial.
Good luck!
Thanks Bryan.
Anusha recently posted..WordPress Header Design – Sample Header 261
A very in-depth post and once again, another MS fan. I have yet to use the Samurai but everyone seems to swear by it.
Have you seen or had any experience with WP Zon Builder for Amazon niche sites?
Jon recently posted..Will You Achieve a Healthy Work-Life Balance this Weekend
Hey Jon
Welcome here! Yeah, It is really useful. Even if you don’t use MS for niche sites, use it for writing articles. It will help you look for good article titles as well based on keyword research. Yup WP Zon Builder is by far the best Amazon plugin to populate your Wordpress site with Amazon products. It is quite pricey but it is less buggy, works great and does the job really quick. You can see it on one of my niche sites in the next post
Hi, Great guide. I’ve checked in google it seems still you are not in top 10 for keyword “best heart rate monitor”, what linking method you do follow?
Swami recently posted..La pression sociale déclenche faux souvenirs