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The 5 Minute Affiliate Niche Evaluation

When evaluating new affiliate niches, I always follow the same routine.  The first thing I do is pull up the following 4 sites:

1. Keyword Discovery – My favorite keyword research tool - though there are plenty other options out there.
2. Google - with ‘SEO for Firefox’ enabled
3. A little Google ‘inanchor’ & ‘intitle’ estimate tool I made
4. Google Adwords Traffic Estimator

Since I focus mostly on organic traffic, I need keywords that have a lot of traffic with a relatively low level of competition. 

Let’s look at “Insurance” to see if there are any possibilities there.

The first thing I do is to go to KeywordDiscovery to do a little research.  Searching for “insurance” gives 851,978 possible keyword matches.

The next thing I do is browse the list – I already know that some of the keywords are too competitive for my taste. So… I read down the list until I see a keyword that I think might not be as competitive.

For example, let’s look at ‘rv insurance’, ‘insurance company’, and ‘affordable insurance’ – I’ll also throw ‘car insurance’ in there to show you what a highly competitive keyword looks like.

Now that I have the keywords I want to research, I’d make a quick excel spreadsheet to keep track of everything.

Keyword	Top 10 PR	in-title-anchor	#1 CPC	Total Daily
rv insurance
insurance company
affordable insurance
car insurance

Then, I’d do the following data collection to fill out the table:

1. Go to Google with ‘SEO for Firefox’ enabled to find the average PR for sites in the top 10 for each keyword.
2. Use my custom Google research tool to see how much competition there is for each keyword.
3. Put each keyword through Google Adwords Traffic Estimator (SIDE NOTE: I always use [] to get a more accurate reading for each keyword)

When I am done, I would see:

Keyword	Top 10 PR	in-title-anchor	#1 CPC	Total Daily
rv insurance	3-6	9,850	$22.46	$290
insurance company	6-7	371,000	$18.65	$80
affordable insurance	3-6	515	$21.31	$60
car insurance	6-8	9,650,000	$24.94	$11,123

At a glance you can now see where you might have some success with an affiliate site. Car insurance and Insurance company would be out in my book (too competitive), but RV Insurance and Affordable Insurance would both be fairly attainable.

 

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