Now that I’ve got PMR to a point where it’s happily bubbling away it’s time to copy the model and start another niche micro business. As with PMR the idea is simple. Setup a mini site in Google that ranks number one for a key word phrase and offer a product to people who land there. If enough people come through the site let’s say 200 a day the maths tells me that I could possibly sell 1 product per day.
Ideally what I want to do is replicate what I’ve done with PMR, but this time more targeted and scientific, what I really want to do is make it an easily repeatable process. So, this time I’m going to break the activities into easy to digest phases and time them. I’ll call these phases:
- Research
- Construction
- Operations
- Monitoring
In this post I’ll cover the first two; research and construction (that’s what I’m up to with this site.)
The research phase
The first thing, and to be honest the hardest, is to think of ideas to start with. Because I’ve had a little bit of success with PMR and because I’m a project manager by trade I’ve thought of ideas within the “project management market”. The idea I’m going to research further for this project is “templates”.
Now, when I say research what am I actually going to do? Well, the very first step I took was to look up the key words “project management templates” in Google and get a feel for a few key indicators. What I’m looking for is, how many web pages mention the exact phrase, how much advertising there is and more importantly what’s being sold. In this case there are a few ads selling templates, this makes me happy, because you could assume that people are buying, otherwise how would people making ads afford to advertise.
Ok so far so good.
Next, I did some deep keyword research in my favourite tool Market Samurai. I pumped in the keyword “project management templates” and looked to see what sort of traffic I could expect to see daily for the number one spot in Google. In this case it’s 200+ so I’m happy to proceed on that number. If MS predicted that the key word phrase would get less than 80 hits I probably drop it like a hot potato!
We are still ok to go with “project management templates“. Next step is to see how competitive it might be to get my site to rank number 1. There is some tricky maths done inside MS and the results tell me it’s going to hard but not impossible.
Lastly because I am setting up a keyword targeted site I’m going to register a keyword optimised domain name. As per usual the exact match domain name was taken so I settled for a 80% keyword match myprojectmanagementtemplates.com, easy!
The whole research process all up took about 2 hours.
Construction Phase
Now that I’ve researched the idea, it’s time to build a basic site and populate it with content. For this I’m going to register the domain name with my existing registra, namecheap and host the site with my existing hosting company hostgator. All I need to do now is build the site. Because I’m still “testing” this niche I don’t want to spend a lot of time on design or building so I’ve used WordPress to setup a blog style site. I’ve added an article and that just about completes the construction phase.
The construction phase including setup of the blog and setup of plug-in took 1 hour to get online and search engine optimised.
What’s next?
Before I move on to the operations and monitoring phases I’ll let this sit while I write some content. In this case “content” will take the form of a few 300 word articles about the benefits of having project management templates.
Ok, I’ll get into the next phases once I’ve got some articles to use and distribute,
See you then.
Justin.
