Spencer and Samara Coaching Call 3: More Review and Examples of How to Choose a Niche

Welcome back to another coaching call between Samara and I!  If you have been following along, you will know that during our last call, we discussed in depth how to go about picking a good niche for your website.

In addition, we also covered some of the strategies and steps we will be employing overall during this project.

For our 3rd call, we decided to do a bit of review.  After Samara dove in with her assignment, she was struggling a bit and wanted some clarification.  This is totally normal!  I remember Perrin going through the same struggles when he was a student during Niche Site Project 2.

If you recall, the assignment from call 2 was:

• Do Keyword Sampling for 3 to 10 Potential Niches
  • 10 seed keywords
  • Filter (4 words or more, modifiers, etc)
• Find the weak (doppelganger) sites ranking in top 10 from your 3 to 10 keyword samples
  • Under 25 to 30 DA
  • Less than 1 year old (ideal but not required)
• Complete the “Is This a Good Niche” Checklist for your 3 to 10 potential niches (Here is a link to that spreadsheet here).
• Now think about…what niche “tastes” the best?

Before you watch the video from call 3, you can read Samara’s thoughts below.

Samara’s Thoughts…

Hey everyone!

How’s the quest to find a market going? I hope you’ve been having better luck than I have! I was seriously pumped after my second coaching call with Spencer, and I spent the week (happily) chained to my desk searching for doppelgangers. Turns out it’s harder than it looks!

My excitement to get cracking quickly turned to frustration. I was able to find lots of long tail keywords with a low KC, but every time I checked the competition on the first page of Google, it was always Brutal (capital B)—I’m talking DAs ranging from 40 all the way up to 90. Cue the sad trombone!

But the search continued, and I finally found some keywords which had several sites with a domain authority of less than 25. I was thrilled that I had found a few potential markets, but I had to cancel the celebratory champagne when I looked them up on SEMrush: their traffic numbers were less than 1,000, making them ineligible for doppelganger status.

So, I asked Spencer to spend one more coaching call walking me through the process with the hope of getting a better handle on it and maybe approaching it from a different angle.

We took a closer look at some of the keywords I found and he dissected the results. The one keyword I found (bad sign!) in my jewelry making project quickly proved to be a real dud. The websites ranking had weak authority, but the traffic was dismal.

We also took a look at an example from my gardening project in Long Tail Pro. This exercise provided several interesting takeaways.

First I learned that not all keywords need to be money keywords. Not all articles will aim to sell products, and the site needs straight-up informational texts as well.

Second, when looking at a competitor’s domain in SEMrush, you can plug the keywords they’re ranking for back into LTP and see where they take you (the “following the breadcrumbs” approach).

And third, it’s generally a good sign to see websites ranking for our keyword that are also focused on a wide range of other topics (like http://ift.tt/1WbycEF). As Spencer says, if they can rank with their “non-focused” websites, then our “focused” website has a very good chance of ranking too, since our links will be more relevant and the websites linking to us will also be related to our specific market or niche.

It was also really helpful to hear how you approach the market once you find a few keywords and doppelgangers: even though “gardening tools” looks promising, the website should revolve around gardening in general, and you might start with tools and then branch out into loads of other related topics.

Seeing Spencer go through a few more examples was ridiculously helpful and really hammered home the steps of the process and what I should be focusing on (product-based keywords, doppelgangers with traffic in the thousands, etc.). All in all I felt this was a super valuable coaching call as he was able to share his thought process as we explored different keywords, domains and SEMrush results. Nothing like getting inside the head of an expert!

Well it’s back to the drawing board for me, but this time I have the feeling I’m going to knock it out of the park!

Watch Coaching Call 3 Here…

If you would prefer to listen to the audio, you can download it here.

Otherwise, enjoy the video below!

What’s Next?

During our next call, we are going to cover how to do in-depth keyword research.  Remember, at this point in the process we are still just trying to figure out what niche to go into.  Once Samara has picked her niche, we will then start compiling keywords that we can target on the site.

I’m excited to see what Samara comes up with!

Overall, I hope you are having some luck with your own niche research and that this video call helps.  As always, if you have additional questions, feel free to join the Niche Site Project 3 facebook group right here.

As a heads up, I’ll have Jake and Perrin’s next coaching calls posted either this weekend or early next week.  Thanks!

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