Selling Websites for a Living

Probably the hardest part of building $3 a day websites to sell on Flippa.com is choosing the keywords to go after so to follow up on the previous post ‘Building and Selling $3 a day Websites‘ I’m going to go through exactly how I choose the long tail phrases to go after.

First off, there are now many keyword tools on the market and as far as I know I own or have owned all of them at one time or another. Right now the only keyword tool I use is Market samurai because for my purposes its the best by a distance.

You can download market Samurai for free by clicking here and it makes sense to do this first so you can follow along with what I do.

First thing I need to do once Market Samurai is fired up is to choose a project topic. As an ex builder I like to stick to home improvement topics simply because its a subject I know something about but as long as your topic is a buying topic then anything will do.

I’m going to go with ‘flooring’ and see where that takes me so I create the project and then click on keyword research.

Market Samurai comes into its own because it lets you set up variables right through the selection process so before I ask it to go grab keywords related to ‘flooring’ I set my variable as such:

Phrase length (number of words in phrase) minimum 3 maximum 4
Minimum traffic a phrase could get if it were number 1 in Google – no less than 100 per day

Out of the 200 phrases it fetched from Google Market samurai has filtered out 159 and left me with 41 potential phrases that fit my criteria as a suitable long tail to build a small web site around.

I can now analyze those 41 further and use more variables to dig down deeper so on the keyword research page I set up my variables as such:

Number of pages that use the phrase in the title – no more than 25000
Cost of Adwords click not less than $1 each

And then I let it do the research and filter out the phrases that have too many pages competing and those that won’t earn much via Adsense.

I am now left with 14 phrases from the 41 that will all get at least 100 visitors a day once they are top of Google, all with less than 25000 serious competitors and all would cost at least $1 a click in an Adwords campaign ensuring they make me decent money per click via Adsense.

All I need to do now is check the competition in the top 10 results and again I can do that from within Market Samurai. At this point you might start at the top of the list and check each one by clicking on the key at the side of each phrase and then clicking on SEO competition.

I tend to scan the list and check out the ones that appeal to me. The picture below shows the results for one of the 14 phrases we have left.

Click the picture for a closer look

In Market Samurai green means very low competition so is easy to beat, pink means extremely difficult while yellow means if you’ve been in this game for more than a year you shouldn’t be too worried.

The only columns I concern myself with for a simple Adsense site are the url names in the top 10 (shown on the left), the page rank (column labeled PR) and the amount of back links to the page ranking (column labeled BLP).

URL names: I don’t want to see the exact phrase as a domain name – in this case I wouldn’t want to see engineeredwoodfloors. com, net, org etc. Neither do I want to see it with hyphens ie. engineered-woodfloors.

Page rank: While there is a PR5 in this example the owner clearly isn’t going for this particular term otherwise it would be #1 instead of #3. There are several PR0′s, a PR2 and plenty of PR3′s. The exact phrase in the domain name would be pretty easy to get ranked among these.

BLP: This is what really counts for these type of sites. This is the number of links pointing to the page that is ranking for the term. Number 1 in this example has 54 back links. Market Samurai will break down that number for me and shows it has 1 link from a PR4, 10 from Pr3 pages, 6 from PR2 pages, 1 Pr1 and 34 PR0.

If you had the exact phrase in your domain and pointed a few links to it either from your own sites or your favorite link building service then it wouldn’t be long before you were up there competing for the top spot.

So now we have a phrase that is worth going after we need to see if the domain is available. A word of caution here, alarm bells would be ringing in my head if the exact term without hyphens was available as a dot com. I actually like to see all 3 main domains gone – com, net and org – because it helps to confirm I have uncovered something worth going after.

Almost all of these small websites I build for selling will have a hyphen in them. You will almost always find a way of only using one in the domain when its a 3 word phrase.

engineered-woodfloors com

engineeredwood-floors com

engineered-woodfloors net

engineeredwood-floors net

If none of those were available I would be re-checking my figures as it would suggest more competition than I thought.

That’s the process I go through. From start to finish it might take an hour to find 5 quality phrases to build sites around. Before Market Samurai I could spend half a day trying to find just one worth going for.

The thing I love about this particular keyword tool is that you can set it up to find phrases with competition to suit your own experience and capabilities. Watch the training videos on their site for all the ways to use the tool to fit your needs and experience.

Visit the Market Samurai website by clicking here and download it while its free and have a play around. Once you know your way around the software you will be throwing out sites faster than you would ever believe.

Market Samurai