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AFP 15: Keyword Research – First Page Analysis

AFP 15: Keyword Research – First Page Analysis

Justin Cooke March 27, 2012

In Episode 15 of the AdSense Flippers Podcast, we cover the most important section of our entire site-building process: Analyzing the first page competition for the primary keyword we’re targeting. While everything else we do tends to be outsourced or automated, this is the piece that Joe and I still perform each week. The first part of our keyword research strategy  involves looking at objective criteria to determine whether a keyword is worth targeting or not, but the second part of our research strategy is much more subjective. We analyze the first page of Google to determine exactly how well we think our process will perform at getting the site ranked on the first page of the SERP. If we feel we have a good chance at getting the site ranked (or the opportunity is high) we’ll go for it. If it’s not, we won’t.

First Page Analysis

We rank the sites on a scale from 1-5, with 1 being a really low chance to rank and 5 being an excellent chance to rank. We’ll typically purchase any sites that are a 4 or 5 and discard the rest. We usually require a 5-1 ratio of available sites to sites we actually choose to purchase, so if we want to go after 40 sites that week we’ll most likely require 200 potential keywords with the associated domains available for purchase. We then narrow that list of 200 down to 40 through first page analysis.

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Podcast Transcripts (Click Show to view)

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Justin
Welcome to Episode 15 of the AdSense Flippers podcast. I’m your host Justin Cooke and I’m here with my business partner extraordinaire Joe Magnotti. What’s going on, man?

Joe
What’s up everybody?

Justin
We’ve got an excellent episode lined up for you this week.  We’re going to be getting into evaluating the first page competition for your niche. So making sure that the competition on the first page is reasonable for you to beat. Before we get into that, let’s get into some updates, news and information. The first one we’ve got is our iTunes reviews, man…we’re killing it with iTunes reviews, huh?

Joe
More and more every week, unbelievable.

Justin
I’m stoked; we’ve got six new five-star iTunes reviews.  The first one comes in from Jeff Mendelsohn, “Justin and Joe, the real deal.  I just finished listening to monetizing free what a show.” The guy goes on to say some great things I’m really excited about that.  We’ve got Rick Payton giving us 5 stars. We’ve got a comedian, a full-time comedian who loves to be able to listen to these guys.  Not only informative, but entertaining.

Joe
Wow, look at that.

Justin
Awesome man.  Comedian I am not, but I love the fact that comedian appreciates us.

Joe
Glad to hear we’re just not droning on and on.

Justin
Anyway, so love the iTunes reviews, that’s awesome. Next thing bit of business we wanted to cover was we have got a new schedule.  I ended up getting a bit sick at the end of last week and we weren’t able to put AdSense Flippers podcast episode out.  So we’re going to be switching… we wanted to do this anyway… we’re going to be switching to probably a Tuesday release, so expect Tuesday releases from us now on the podcast, and you can get that on iTunes also.

Joe
The other thing is we visited Pearl Farm this week which is a five-star resort here in Davao. Beautiful place, right Justin?

Justin
Yeah, we were there last Wednesday night, Wednesday through Thursday, and we went there to hang out with a potential site buyer.  So the guy came down from Manila where he lives, he wanted to come down, kinda check us out, get a feel for us.  Kind of went over our business operations, gave us some really good ideas for business, which we’ll be discussing in a future blog post, but then also walked away and wanted to buy some websites from us, so we’re setting up that deal right now… looks good and we should have some sites out to him within the next couple of weeks.

Joe
Yeah I love these big buyer deals, man. Nothing like being able to transfer a whole bunch of sites to one person instead of many sites to many people.

Justin
Speaking of sites dude, we’ve got another 15 site sales last week.  We put them up on our buyers’ sites page, and we sold about $5,000 worth of sites in 48 hours.  Really cool man, really exciting to see that we can just put them up there, people are willing to buy them.  They’re hot man. I feel like I’d like to push more out so that people can buy these sites, then expand them.  We don’t expand the sites so we’re giving opportunity to someone else to really kind of dig in, see what else they can earn out of it, and get more out of those sites that we create.

Joe
Yeah upside, I mean I think that’s one of the things that we bring to the table. The reason why people are willing to spend a larger multiple than they do with other sites because we provide that upside.

Justin
So man, you almost broke AdSenseFlippers.com.

Joe
Yeah well you know we had to move to a private server and we were trying to schedule this last month, but we finally got it done. So let me know if anyone sees any links that are broken, anything broken on the new site, you should see a significant speed increase, probably as much as 50% speed increase over our old platform.  The UI is a lot better, back end things are a lot faster for WordPress.  We’re going to be doing some upgrades to the buyers sites page, including some auto updates when sites get sold so we don’t have to do that duplicate thing anymore, and then being able to sell packages, which I know we would really like to be able to offer directly.

Justin
Yes, similar to our Flippa sales, where we’re able to sell packages of sites and be able to offer those. I’d love to be able to do that with our buyers sites page too.

Joe
Yeah if you guys have any suggestions for the buyers sites page please let us know in the comments.

Justin
So anyway, that’s fantastic.  I don’t know what the exact speed difference is, but we’ll put that in the show notes so you can take a look at the VPS and see how much faster AdSenseFlippers.com is because of that.

Joe
We’ve been really busy this week. We had customers coming to town, we had that visit to Pearl Farm, we had friends coming into town from DC, all kinds of stuff going on.

Justin
We had an awesome week….it sucks I got SICK during it, man…it didn’t really help with all the people here.  I was glad I was able to attend our dinner on Thursday.  We had a great group of guys here in Davao City, the entrepreneurial scene is really growing and we’ve got some people kind of blowing through town that are really adding value to all of us really.

Joe
yeah and we’ve added a local Filipino shop owner as well, so that’s kind of interesting.

Justin
He’s a sharp cookie, man, I’m glad he’s on board. Anyway, let’s get right into the heart of this week’s episode, which is all about evaluating the first page.

****The AdSense Flippers Podcast****

Justin
So with the Adsense Flippers keyword research process, we really have two phases that it goes through. The first phase is done by our outsourced agents. And that’s finding the objective information, the exact match, search phrases, the CPC, making sure that the domain is available, an exact match domain is available. These are all the steps that our outsourced agents perform. So they find all these exact match domains available and put them in a spreadsheet for us. Every week right now, we’re buying about 40 domains or so, which means we need a five to one ratio. We need about 200 that meet our criteria. Then, the next step is the first page evaluation. Joe and I will go through those 200 and find out which ones we think we have a chance for ranking on the first page. And what Joe and I will we’ll take a subjective approach.  We’ll look at the first page evaluation and try to decide which ones we think we can get ranked, and then we’ll assign a number or a rating to that, 5 being the highest, we think we have an easy chance to rank on the first page, and 1 being the lowest, there is no way our process will get that site ranked for that keyword on the first page. So that’s basically our process and that’s what we’re looking for. Today we’re going to cover the second portion, what Joe and I do to evaluate the first page of Google for that particular keyword.

Joe
Yeah and it’s so critical Justin that you get that right.  It’s going to throw the whole rest of the process off, so that’s why we try to objectify a subjective process.  It’s tough to do but I think if you take all the factors into account and assign it a ranking, it will be a little more clearer in your mind about how to convey that once you have all the keywords in front of you.

Justin
Yeah we had a friend that had a bunch of domains available, 40 or 50 domains available, he said hey I’ve already got these domains… I might as well just build the content out around them right? Well the problem is the domains are not keyword targeted, so it would’ve been a random content.  Now he would’ve ranked and got some traffic and clicks for some of the long-tail stuff that he would have found, the problem is though that it’s not highly targeted to one specific keyword, so even if he’s doing well, he won’t know how well or how to improve for that particular keyword because it was kind of a random domain.  So we say it is better to start over if you screw up on your domain purchase and target something that’s right, rather than continuing to spend money and build content on a keyword that’s a bad idea. So basically, up until this point we’ve had our agents find all these exact match phrases, find the domains available, and we’ve got our 200 for the week. This podcast will be all about how we analyze those 200 and break them down to the 40 where we’re going to purchase the domain and actually build out those sites.

Joe
And like Justin said, we haven’t outsourced this portion. I don’t know one day might we outsource this portion? Yes, but we’ll have to find a really good keyword evaluator, researcher, an SEO expert that really gets first page evaluation before we outsource that.

Justin
It’s difficult man, because if this part gets screwed up, a little change… they do something a little differently than us… and we won’t know for 2, 3, 4 months, and then all of a sudden we find out that we’re not ranking, we’re not getting the traffic we thought we were, and we take a big hit because we put a lot of spend in over that three or four months right.  That’s why it’s so critical, that’s why we still do it today.

Joe
Yeah and I don’t think it can’t be outsourced, you just need to find the right people to do it because it’s not an ABCD kind of process.  It definitely takes critical thinking, outside the box thinking, and it’s subjective.

Justin
So what we’re looking to rank these keywords or these URLs, we’re primarily looking at the first page only. So I’ll do a quick search on Google, look at the first top 10 results, and try and get a feel from there, and that works about 80% of the time. Another 20% of the time if I need a little bit more information, I’ll go to the second page, I will dig through the second page and look for some of the key indicators we’re going to talk about in a few minutes.

Joe
Yeah I even take that a step further and say on the first page I love to look at the top three and then the bottom three. If the top three is very difficult to beat, then the bottom three better be very easy to beat, and we’ll talk about how I evaluate that later on.

John
John the intern here. What sort of traffic can you expect from a bottom three ranking on the first page right?  Because it can look pretty attractive and pretty lucrative to be on the first page of Google search results but obviously it dwindles towards the bottom.

Justin
It’s not known for sure but there are some great analysis done on this where some people are saying that the bottom three you are looking at between 5% to 10%, the estimate we go for.  The first position you can look at around 40% of the traffic, second position around 25% and third position around 15%. So now those are estimates, guidelines only, but they give you a pretty good idea, and it’s interesting to note that being in the number 10 position, and moving to the number 1 position, you could get 8 times the traffic for that one specific keyword. That’s a big jump because that could mean 8 times the earnings as well.

Joe
Yeah I would also say though it’s a risk versus reward kind of scenario.  If you have something that has a very high SEO value, then you might be able to rank for it in the bottom three and say wow that’s worth it, whereas if it has a very low SEO value, you’d better be able to rank in the top three because you are going to need that traffic in order to make enough money for it to be worth it.

Justin
Absolutely Joe. So let’s get right into it, we’ve got 12 points here, we’ve got six positive signs and six negative signs you should be aware of when evaluating the first page to determine whether or not you want to go after a particular keyword. The first positive sign I want to talk about,and  I think it’s a really big one, is an exact match domain on the first page.  This can be a great indicator. Now it’s not any exact match domain, but it’s one that’s similar to the types of sites we build.  So let’s say that it has less than 30 links, it’s less than one year old, it’s an AdSense or like Amazon affiliate type site, and it’s ranked on the first page. That’s a great indicator or great comparison for the site you’re going to build because if they’re already on the first page, it’s been two or three months and it’s a similar type site, you can expect the same results.

Joe
I especially like looking at the site age for this particular evaluation, so if you see it was just created in the last 12 months, last six months, and it only has like 10 links, then you know that this is a new site, they’re going after the same sort of process that we would use, and that it’s probably pretty easy to rank at or above that level using our process.

Justin
Now that’s good and bad of course right, because if you see someone already targeting that keyword, you know that there are other people going after it that type of thing.  But if they were ranked that easily, you know you have a pretty good shot at being ranked in the top 10 as well.  It’s definitely something we like to go after, and the higher ranked that site is, the better chance you probably have.

Joe
Now this next tip I really love but you can’t go crazy with it.  You don’t want to be checking every link on the first page, or first page evaluation will take too long, but if you do come across sites that are broken or linked to parked pages, that kind of thing, that’s a good indication that next time Google updates the cache, those sites are probably going to lose their ranking and therefore you might be able to replace or supplant those areas on the first page.

Justin
Or if they’re not going to lose their ranking, they’re a parked site right.  Ultimately Google wants better content, so that’s content that they’re finding because there’s so little about that particular keyword or subject, it should be pretty easy to usurp that particular site or keyword for that target. Third point we want to make for positive signs would be article directories on the first page.  Now you’ll see sometimes an E-zine article is on the first page, you’ll see Buzzle, you know these types of things, and they’re kind of crappy articles that maybe they’re targeting that keyword, or maybe they’re not.  The benefit here is that article directories are huge. So E-zine articles is targeting a ton of different subjects.  It’s not finely tuned around that particular keyword.  Your site will be.  So if this particular article is not finely tuned around the keyword, your site is going to be, you’re probably going to be able to out rank them.  So finding them on the first page is a plus. I love that, it gets me kind of excited. I think we have a pretty good shot there.

Joe
Yeah especially when they’re very general type of article directories.  I would say when you get into more specific types of article directories, for instance if you were going after do it yourself type keyword, and you got to do-it-yourself type of directory, that might be structured better and might be a little harder to beat, so keep that in mind.

Justin
Yeah good point Joe, that’s true.  Usually you’ll see that, especially with the keywords you would go for around a particular niche in a general industry or whatever, that it’s an industry- specific article directory and those might be tough.  It’s worth checking out, and if you get familiar with an industry, you’ll start to see the ones that are good and the ones that are bad there.

Joe
You know that said, if the article directory doesn’t use the keyword in the URL or in the title, it’s probably going to be a little easier to beat.  And then if it’s a sub domain of some sort, like you’ll see these entries sometimes that are not even at the exact domain, but they use a sub directory of some sort, those are usually easier to beat.

Justin
Well Hub Pages switched over to an author subdirectory and sometimes you’ll see that as well. That’s generally a good sign that you can beat that keyword, especially if they’re on the first page, even if they’re like top of the second page, it’s a good sign for you. I’d also say a really good sign is any large shopping sites that have dynamic lengths, so an Amazon or something that is not a category page, not where it’s the higher-level domain page talking about a particular category or industry or product, but one with a dynamic link that’s XZY593.

Joe
Again, not in the URL, not in the title, and it’s some large shopping site Amazon, eBay, Biz Rate, any of those price-comparison sites… those are really easy to beat using our process.

Justin
Yeah, so again none of these are necessarily a five or necessarily going to down you down to a one, but if you see a couple of these signs in there, it’s going to be helpful, beneficial, and you know it’s probably a keyword you should be targeting.

Joe
Now we’ve talked a little bit about like how we evaluate these positive signs looking for links, looking at the description in the keyword, looking at page rank, well you know we don’t do all that manually.  If we did that manually it would take us forever.  So we use tools to do that, and SEOmoz provides an open site explorer, but Long Tail Pro combines SEOmoz and some other factors that allows you to see the first page evaluation very easily. So once we get it down to some competing keywords that we know are the top keywords, we use Long Tail Pro to do an evaluation from there.

Justin
Yeah, whenever we can kind of eyeball it and get an idea that it’s a two or one, we’re tossing those keywords we are not looking at them again, that’s an easy determination. What’s hard is the threes and fours.  The fives we’re for sure going to be pick up, we know we can get them ranked, not an issue there. But the ones that are 3.5, 4.1’s that are really close, those are the ones that we use tools like Long Tail Pro to dig a little deeper and see if it’s a site we want to go for, especially if it has high potential value.  On AdSense Flippers, we have a keyword research tool calculator basically you can use to determine what the potential value of a site is and if it has high potential value, it’s something we want to look a little closer at.

Joe
Yeah and the biggest reason that it’s so important is if you make a lot of mistakes on the valuations between threes and fours using our process, that means you’re going to get a lower average return on your sites and then long-term when you are scaling this process, your numbers are not going to be  right.

Justin
So the four columns we really look at in Long Tail Pro would be description or keyword area, the page rank of the particular site, and the SEOmoz links to that page particularly. So getting into the negative side of things, some things that we see on the first page that we don’t like, you’re going to see that a few of these match up to the positives and that’s because we use the same signals to determine whether or not it’s positive or negative and we’ll get into that.

The first one I would mention is when you see Google Places or formally known as Google Maps on the first page, this is generally a negative sign.  You’ll see this when you put some kind of geo- modifier in a search. So if you look for window replacement Arizona, or window replacement St. Louis let’s say, there’s a fair chance that you’re going to get a Google Places result.  What that means is you only have maybe one or two organic searches at the very top and then you’re going to have 8 to 10 Google Places below that and then organics below that so there’s not a very good chance that your organic site is going to get ranked. It’s going to be eaten up by Google Places listings.

Joe
Yeah and there’s a whole other process for optimizing for Google Places. Justin and I used to work at a company that did that. So you can’t really mix the two in my opinion and that’s not what we go after.  We go after organic search results and that’s what our process is optimized to do.

Justin
Now if you can get into one of those top two spots above Google Places, there’s a huge ton of value there. But it’s a real gamble trying to get there right, trying to beat out Google Places, so we generally avoid it for niche sites. If you run a plumbing company in that particular city or whatever, and you want to get ranked for plumbing contractor’s Las Vegas, definitely worth picking up that domain but not as worth it from an investment niche site creation perspective.

Joe
Yeah and then also usually keywords that have a geo-modifier don’t have enough search volume in order to create a niche site around it. So the other thing that is a negative sign is niche shopping sites. We said shopping sites before are a good thing right… well the big ones like Amazon, Biz Rate, eBay those one’s yes easy to beat, especially when they have dynamic links. But when you see niche shopping sites something like if you were doing keyword research on a particular type of  shoes and you see Zappos come up, especially if it has multiple results on the first page and its optimized in the URL and the title it’s going to be very hard to beat that.

Justin
Yes and let’s say I’m shopping for blues ski boots, and I see skiboots.com/blue and this is a site really good e-commerce site that sells ski boots, not really a good sign for me. That’s not something I’m going to be able to beat with my niche info sight, not going to happen. Another thing that’s kind of a bad sign is a root level domain.  So I’m not talking about exact match domains, I’m talking about  maybe a partial match or maybe a non-match domain at all, but that is a root domain and a fairly high level site. So that means that they are probably targeting that keyword and they are being seen on their root domain.  That means they own that, they all over it.

Joe
I love this one.  I think a great keyword for it is green tea or Japanese green tea, if you do that, like the top 10 results are all root keywords meaning that there are no URLs, no sub directories, no sub domains, nothing like that. and they don’t use the keyword in their domain name.  Sure, they have it in their title or something like that, but these are old sites that actually have been there for a long time ranking for this keyword.  It’s a really easy way to determine that hey… a basic niche site is never going to rank easily for this keyword.

Another negative sign is the Corporation thing right. So if you’re searching for a particular brand or model of some type of commodity, object, whatever, something you can build, or service online, and the Corporation that does that or makes that item comes up in the first three results, it’s probably going to be harder to outrank that particular company website.

Justin
You’ll see this sometimes when the site shows up and then they have a subdirectory of the pages that are underneath that, and it pushes down all the other natural organic results.  That makes it a bit more difficult.  You’ll also see it where the first results is the  particular company, maybe their root domain, and then some like extended domains for the second, third, and even fourth result.  That’s not the worst sign in the world, but it means you’re not going to be taking the first couple of spots, so you could lower your expectations for that particular keyword because you’re not taking over the top 2, top 3, top 4.  At best you’ll be top 4, top 5 right.

Joe
Yeah and especially when that first result has a bunch of subdirectories popping up underneath it from that particular site, it pushes down the rest of the results and that means that if you rank in site, in place number 8 on the first page, it’s less likely you’ll be seen and clicked on.

Justin
Yes, we talked about number one getting 40% of the clicks from exact match searches.  If they own the top three results, they’re going to get a lot higher than that, so they’re going to basically own the traffic that is for that keyword. You know we talked about as a positive sign an exact match domain, a similar site to what you build, there’s also potentially a negative for you as well.  So you find an exact match that is well optimized, that has a ton of links, that is a much older site, that has fantastic content, that’s not a good sign for you.  So if you see that type of page, exact match domain, and its let’s say ranked number eight, and it has 380 really good solid links, the content is stellar, it’s been around for two or three years, it’s only number 8, that’s not good man.

Joe
Yeah, And then especially if that exact match domain… they’ve switched away from monetizing via AdSense or affiliate links, and it seems like they are drop shipping or maybe even making the product themselves and they’re an exact match domain, that’s usually a bad sign.

Justin
That’s cool but they’re ahead of you. So if we create that type of niche site that’s based on AdSense earnings… remember our sites are kind of starter sites. A lot of our sites could ultimately be built out to affiliate sales, drop shipping or even an actual product site, but it means that we’re three or four levels behind that guy.  That guy has already taken it, that is owned, and  if they’re not ranking for number one and number two for it then that’s a pretty bad sign.  That means that it’s a pretty aggressive niche to be going after and we don’t want to put our entry level site into that mix.

Joe
Our last negative tip deals with category pages in large shopping sites.  As you said before sometimes large shopping sites can be a positive thing.  But if they’re well organized, especially looking at the URL, if the subdirectory has the keyword in it and it has it in the title and it is really about the particular subject, then that large shopping site entry is going to be tough to beat.

Justin
I’ve made this mistake before too where I saw Amazon and just kind of quickly went that’s Amazon, we’ll smoke them, and then come to find out I look at it later and… wow we’re terrible with that one, I thought it was going to be a real winner and I go back and look at the first page and that was the one that told me to buy it, and I go back and look at it and go oh that’s a category page; they’re  all over that.  No way.

Joe
Yeah especially when you see a category page that’s well optimized in the last three results.  If they’re only ranking 8, 9 and 10 and they are well organized, then your little EMD site is probably not going to be able to beat them.

Justin
So those are 12 tips for you.  We’ve got six positives, six negatives Remember none of this is a guaranteed and it’s very subjective, but this should give you a good idea of what we’re looking for when we’re looking to pick up our domains every week, and we’re looking to target the keywords that we target.  So that’s it for the heart of this week’s episode.  Let’s get right into our ninja marketing tips, tricks, and our plans for the future.

****The Adsense Flippers Podcast continues****

Justin
So our first Ninja Marketing tip for you is the use of Spyfu.com. Now what Spyfu.com allows you to do is it gives you a much more detailed answer as to how many advertisers there are for a particular keyword, what the real CPC is, how many clicks you can expect, that type of thing.  And it doesn’t just do it now, it does it historically.

Joe
That’s what I love; I love the history that you’re able to get on advertisers.  Because sometimes you may have a keyword that sounds a little odd, and the CPC right now might be good, but historically it’s been nothing, and therefore you can say probably in the future it might go back down to being nothing.

Justin
So check this out. I just looked up ski boots, right.  Right now it’s saying there are 21 advertisers, the cost per click is .48 cents to .60 cents per, you can expect around 212 to 295 clicks per day, and the major advertisers are skis.com, crtradingpost.com, mountaingear.com, this kind of thing.

Joe
Yeah that gives you a great idea that this is a good keyword and that there are plenty of advertisers.  The worst thing to have when you’re  building an Adsense niche site is no advertisers.

Justin
So this is one of the things we may look at if the advertiser competition is a 3 or a 4 out of our 1 to 5 scale. If it’s a 1, we probably won’t look at that keyword in the first place.  But if it’s a 3 or 4, meaning that it doesn’t have as many advertisers, Google is saying there aren’t as many advertisers, we might check it out on  spyfu.com. The cool thing there is spyfu.com is free to use. They do have a paid version as well, but the basic functionality, especially if we’re looking for advertiser competition, is free.

Joe
So the other thing we want to talk about is I’m getting my own basketball team buddy.

Justin
The AdsenseFlippers basketball team dude, that owns.

Joe
Yeah, Mark Cuban, eat your heart out. I have my own basketball team right here in Davao. We’ll be adding some pictures of the team.  I was having a little trouble with the logos and the jerseys so we’re working on that, we might not have that until next week. But yeah, it’s pretty cool. So when Chris Tucker comes to town, he’s a pretty big basketball guy too, we’ll hopefully have a little one on one and have some jerseys ready for him as well.

Justin
The last part, we’ve got a new thing going on, it’s going to be a charity event.  And we’ve got a boxing event that our own Joseph William Magnotti will be involved in with a buddy of ours here, Daniel, here in Davao.  It’s the Ka-pow in Davao boxing match. So we’re going to have two white guys battling it out in an arena of about 4,000 people, and that’s going down end of May, buddy.

Joe
Yeah I’m excited. I’ve been picking up boxing over the last 8, 9 months so I think I’m ready.  I’m not sure about my opponent, we’ll see about him. But yeah, it’s all for charity, we’re wearing head gear. But we will have some professional under cards, so it’s kind of exciting you know.

Justin
Here’s the funny thing… it started out over a couple of beers, they were like yeah… you  know we should do a little boxing in a ring… it’d be kind of fun.  Dan was like yeah dude, sounds great, let’s do it.  So we started talking about it, we were like we could rent a ring or something. So we find out there’s one we could rent here for about the equivalent of $500 bucks, seats around 4,000 peopleSo true to our free  roots, we’re going to make attendance free, we’re going to have VIP seating that is paid. And the idea is we’re going to sell beer, nachos, and then make some money there and give that away to some local charities.  So we can turn that money into good use. But we started digging more and more into it. We were like dude, we could get sponsors for this. So we’re going to get sponsors.  We’re going to see if we can get a discount on the ring from the mayor here in Davao, and we also have a friend that’s on local TV so we’re going to get announced on TV.  We’re talking about getting a billboard out.  We’re going to have ring girls… dude it’s going to be ridiculous. John’s over here laughing at us right now because he knows this thing is kind of blowing up.  We had a planning meeting on it the other day.  It’s crazy.

Joe
Yeah, you know how many times do you get to say I was part of a huge boxing event where I was the main attraction.

Justin
Yeah we have a buddy that has the tux and everything… does a lot of ringside announcements, so We’re going to see if we can get him down here from Manila.  We’re going to invite a lot of people from Dynamite Circle, and we’ll be putting some information out if you guys want to come out and check out Joe get his ass kicked in front of a bunch of Filipinos. That’d be fun stuff.

Joe
And it’s all for a good cause so hopefully we raise some good money for charity.

Justin
Well that’s it for Episode 15 of AdsenseFlippers podcast. Make sure to check us out on Facebook.  We got 150 likes there buddy, I’m pretty stoked about that.

Joe
Yeah we’re hopefully going to add some pictures and stuff, I’ll have the basketball team stuff up late next week, and you know if you’re in the Davao area we can invite you to the Ka-pow in Davao so check that out.

Justin
Yeah dude. Check us out on Facebook.com/Adsenseflippers, I’ll be adding some more photos… we’ll do some from Pearl Farm that we went to last week, and we’ll see you next week. Remember the change will be on Tuesdays so you can expect the podcast episodes out on Tuesdays from now on. Thanks everybody.

Joe
Bye-bye


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Topics Discussed This Week Include:

  • Our really interesting and busy week last week and our meeting with a potential buyer/investor
  • Introduction to first page evaluation and why it’s critical to keyword selection
  • 6 positive signs that show us a high likelihood of getting the sites ranked with our process
  • 6 warning signs on the first page of the SERP that tell us we should probably avoid the keyword
  • A few tools that really help you determine the usefulness of a keyword

Mentions:

  • iTunes reviews for AdSense Flippers and our Twitter page – Some great new 5 star reviews!
  • BuyOurSites page – Where we sell our available niche sites
  • LongTailPro  – Keyword Research tool we use to evaluate the first page competition for a keyword
  • Hostgator – Using a VPS for AdSenseFlippers.com that’s MUCH faster and trusted host for all our niche websites
  • Pearl Farm Resort FANTASTIC 5-star resort here near Davao City, Philippines
  • SEOMoz and Open Site Explorer – Industry leader when it comes to SEO and checking backlinks for your competition
  • SpyFu – Great resource for detailed historical information on the number of advertisers for a keyword
  • Ka-Pow In Davao – Event page on Facebook describing the boxing event we’re putting on…sweet!

Did you like this week’s episode or would you like to add anything we missed? Let us know in the comments below!

Discussion

  • Pingo says:

    How about working Pingo into this boxing match to help with the charity cause. You can earn up to $35 that you can work into the VIP seats or something by referring new Filipino customers to Pingo. Just need 100 sales for $3,500 to cover your $500 investment but we can’t cover the long term medical bill of the damage your doing by getting into the ring!

  • James says:

    Hey Guys – just listened to your podcast. Some really great info there. I’ve actually been focusing more on keyword research lately as I think its key to niche sites success. I’ve done some really poor research in the past and didn’t get my sites ranked however I changed my strategy and got on page 1 after 2 weeks!

    So question for you guys. I plan to go after 10 new keywords for 10 more sites. Do you suggest spreading them out through a variety of subjects/topics or put them all in one particular subject? Example – Fashion, Home & Garden, Electronics.

    I was thinking about trying to find one for each category I can think of to see what will convert best for me in terms of revenue.

    • JustinWCooke says:

      Thanks, James!

      I think if I was still testing through it, I’d rather have the 10 niches in different industries. Our goal has always been to try to diversify the niches, the exact match search, etc. It keeps us from finding the winners on a more regular basis and going after more aggressive niches all the time, but tends to keep our niches balanced along with our revenue. Starting out, I’d rather have a balanced approach.

      Later on, you may find a particular industry has a better CTR, is easier for you to rank, etc. At that point, you can then build more sites in a particular niche to maximize your returns…

  • Hi, great podcast. I am currently using Market Samurai but I am interested in getting LTP. Couldn’t find a free demo so I just wanted to ask you if you are really happy with it – is it generally fast, faster than MS maybe? You see any real downsides?

    • JustinWCooke says:

      No free demos, but he does honor refunds, of course. (We’ve seen just a couple with all of the LTP sales that have come through the site.)

      I would say that, for ME…if they both were equally fast at finding the keywords we need, I’d prefer Market Samurai. It’s a more polished, more robust platform. That being said, MS has just become too slow…we’re probably 2-3 times as fast at pulling out keywords with LTP. We wouldn’t go back unless the speed problem was answered and answered well…

  • Truseller says:

    Great insights, some very useful information here

    • JustinWCooke says:

      Thanks! Anything particular that you think helps your business? Anything we missed that you’d like to add?

  • Steve Wyman says:

    HI Guys

    Very usefull insights to the details of your process. Whilst i knew most of it the negative signals was a usefull share.

    Very nice resort – yet another rason to make it out to the philipines one of these days. Unless google closes down the little guys 🙁

    Just read eddale.co and his articles on the coming winter on google. A bit much but i take his point..

    Good to hear from John the intern another great question

    Good luck Jo with the boxing!!!

    Thanks

    • JustinWCooke says:

      Hey Steve,

      Read the article on “Winter is coming” as well. I usually don’t pay much attention to fear mongering when it comes to SEO, but Ed Dale is a guy to listen to and I thought his cyclical framework for the SEO space was a good balance between the true concerns and the “don’t worry” crowd…

  • Slava says:

    Brilliant episode guys. Your process is pretty much similar to what I do, but there were a couple of “A-ha!” moments that will definitely make the daunting process of assessing the top 10 much easier next time. Thanks!

    Interesting observation about Amazon/Walmart/eBay pages in the top 10: you say they are easy to beat as long as they have dynamic URLs (which makes perfect sense). However in my experience these pages very often rank much higher than perfectly optimized EMDs and authority sites (usually in the top 3 with hardly any backlinks). So with time I kinda started treating keywords with lots of Amazon/eBay results in top 10 as a “no-go”. My thinking was the big G is giving those established shopping hubs a lot more authority for every product-related keyword, pushing them to the top of SERPs.

    Hopefully I was wrong! Guess, I will change my habits now and reconsider the way I evaluate the top 10 now… Will let you know how it goes.

    Hey, my first comment here. Along with Spencer you are my virtual gurus in the IM world and I’ve learned a ton from you. Thanks! 🙂

    • JustinWCooke says:

      Hey Slava…thanks for your first comment!

      Really glad you found this episode helpful. The dynamic URL’s do seem to be easier to beat, but you’re right…the Walmart and Amazon sites on the first page can definitely be tricky. There are some I just KNEW we could outrank and we’re nowhere to be seen on the first page, heh.

      Ultimately, we try to follow “best practice” strategies, knowing that a certain percentage of our sites will just not be ranked or big earners. We’re playing the percentages here, for sure.

  • Andre Garde says:

    That resort looks pretty sweet! I’ve never been to Davao City, but I’ve been to Cebu. I stayed at the Shangri-La Macatan. Also a nice place!

    • JustinWCooke says:

      Sweet! The Shangri-La chain is one of the high-end chains in the Philippines…they have some great hotels in Boracay, Manila, etc. for sure.

      • Andre Garde says:

        Yeah I have family in in Pasig/QC/Manila, and I’ve been to the Phils, oh, I’d say at least 10 times now in my lifetime. Although I’m mostly a city slicker when I’m there, aside from the occasional Baguio or Tagaytay trip. Wish I had the dough to go more often. Gotta keep grinding it here until then. 🙂

  • Paul Kassens says:

    It could be my crappy ISP connection… (Globe sucks) but I have tried about 5 times to download Ep.15 on iTunes to no avail. I’ve had problems before, but all my other podcasts are downloading fine. Is it just me? I look forward to your podcast every week! – I’ll download it from the web site. 🙂

    • JustinWCooke says:

      Hey Paul…was this fixed? Sorry…not sure why that is, unfortunately.

      • Panabo Paul says:

        Tried a couple more times, and no go still. I get an error on the link here as well. Adam Carolla & The Men’s Room (my fav local radio guys from back home in Seattle) podcasts downloading fine on iTunes… but no adsense flippers for me. 🙁 If others have no problem, then I need my Globe connection fixed! I’ve had trouble with Google pages or ads loading sometimes also (which is a bit like cutting off my air supply). I’ll have to take my laptop to a WiFi spot – that should prove it’s my connection here. I need my adsense flipper fix!!! LOL I hope to meet you guys sometime soon – maybe sometime after Holy Week in Boracay! 🙂

        • Paul Kassens says:

          Problem was def on my end. I rebooted modem/router and this time it downloaded! (yeah) I was also able to login using Google. My connection has been bad since the Feb 6 Cebu earthquake, when Globe went down a couple days. Anyway – now I have it – I look forward to listening. As Emily Litella would say… “nevermind”. LOL

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