$100k Case Study Update #1 – The Beginning

Guess what, folks?

We’ve chosen the niche for our public case study!

After an extensive research process, we narrowed the topic down to a niche inside of the evergreen health vertical.

If you’re wanting to follow along with the case study while building your own site and are stuck on which niche to choose, or even brainstorming niches to begin with, take a look at one of our latest blog posts: 10 Multi-Billion Dollar Niches That Are Prime For The Taking.

You’ll learn how we dig into the niches themselves, how we perform research, and how we make a final judgement call on of we believe the niche is going to be profitable, or not.

How We Performed Niche Research

Now, while this type of research can be done by hand, we’ve found (through years of experience) that there are tools available to make the niche research job substantially easier, and save a ton of time in the process.

The tools that we used to dissect the different niches we looked at were:

Ahrefs is perfect for figuring out exactly how strong the sites in the top 10 are, as far as how many links they have, pages they have indexed, how old they are, and figuring out other keywords that they’re ranking for that we may not have thought about.

Here's a list of medium-tail keywords we've pulled out of Ahrefs after an extensive research.

There are dozens of long-tail (easier to rank) keywords we're going to tackle as well, but having a solid list of low competition medium-tail keywords ​reinforces the fact that we can easily dominate this niche.

Here're the combined stats with long-tail keywords included.

SEMrush helps aid the keyword research process, gives us a quick way to determine the difficulty and strength of the sites competing for the top 10 results, and allows us to keep tabs on them as we’re making our way to the 1st page.

Google Trends is great for figuring out the long-term staying power of the niche, whether or not it is seasonal and will cause spikes in our income from the site as a result, and how long the topic has been popular, which points to how many competitors we may be looking at.

The niche is a bit seasonal, but we don't mind that because people don't shy away from spending money all year long and won't hesitate to pull the trigger and take out their wallet after reading through our content. ​

Our Competition, Broken Down

During the research process, we determined that the competition was actually pretty weak.

In fact, there were 4 niche sites that were dominating a majority of the key buying terms, and they were all doing a very poor job at properly optimizing their websites.

In other words, they were ripe to be overtaken by a strong site that would effectively come out of nowhere.

The fact that the poor and obvious amazon affiliates sites are running the show and netting >$2k per month (each)​ in only one silo (out of 5), definitely proves the concept and makes me really comfortable with our goal for '17. 

This isn't even the biggest silo 🙂

If we ​play our cards right and (eventually) expand and cover all 5 categories, I have a strong feeling that this site can break the $20k/month mark within 2 years of its inception. 

We also figured out that there weren’t a ton of informational keywords. Most of the keywords that we discovered had buyer-intent, and were angled more towards recommending products and services than they were for strictly providing information only, and funneling those visitors onto our money pages.

The niche also has quite a few different products available, with high margins, giving us a chance to make quite a bit of money. The average product price is around $300, with some of the more expensive products running $1,000 and up.

How We'll Monetize The Site

It’s clear to see that the affiliate side of the industry is going to be substantially more profitable than other monetization methods so, to kick off the project, we’re going to rely on Amazon.

As time goes on, we will look into other monetization channels and product suppliers so that we can increase our margins, but Amazon will give us a great foundation to build off of.

Once we’ve gotten the kinks ironed out, we will join direct affiliate programs that provide higher commissions for higher payouts while driving the same amount of traffic to the site.

As it stands right now, we believe that AdSense and other CPC/CPM ad networks will only reduce our income, based on the fact that there is very little in the way of informational content, and we have so many options available for affiliate offers, including Amazon.

Our Content Strategy

With so few keywords that are geared toward information style content, we’ve determined that we can group the keywords we are going to target into 5 different silos (groups).

Each one of those groups will be contained in their own category on the blog, allowing us to create multiple pieces of content that will strengthen the main money page.

We’re going to try to keep the structure as simple as possible, so we’re going to target one silo at a time, focusing on getting it ranked for our target keywords before moving onto building out the second funnel.

Our main mission is to dominate the first set of keywords/topic, make our presence known, and then use the strength that we’ve built up to continue taking over each additional silo that we build out.

In Our Next Update...

With the niche research completed and a topic decided on, our work has only just begun.

We still have a ton of work left to do.

We have to…

Follow along as the updates continue pouring in. We have a lot to teach, and are excited about this project moving forward, based on the research that we’ve already completed.

Each month we’ll release an update teaching you exactly what we’ve done to the site, and how you can do the same on your own project, if you’re following along.

We’ll also reveal the niche site URL to our subscribers, so unless you’ve entered your email above, you’ll probably never get to see the site for yourself.

We have a bet running with our subscribers, too.

If we’re not able to get the site to earn $100,000 in 12 months, we’re going to give away 5 of our premium packages to 5 lucky subscribers.

Stay tuned for the big niche reveal, and make sure you’re subscribed so you get notified when we reveal the exact URL in 60 days.