APS Micro Niche Challenge – Getting started

As anyone who knows me and reads my blog will know, I am one of many successful Acme People Search Affiliates and one of the greatest things that has helped me succeed with the business is the forum for this affiliate platform set up by Tissa Godavitarne the owner of Acme People Search. Well! A challenge was thrown on the forum recently that I really could not ignore.

First a little background for anyone not familiar with APS. Acme People Search, or APS, was founded by Tissa Godavitarne and is based on his own specialized People Search engine, and has an affiliate program to promote the People Search niche, which is huge by the way, approximately 30% of all search engine searches are for People.

So, what was the challenge? Well, one of our forum Super Sponsors suggested that for the month of May 2010, we buy a People Search related domain name, with a minimum of 1000 searches a month, and have it on the first page of Google before the month end.

Can it be done? Yes of course it can and I am going to stick my neck out now and tell you that I will do it, not only that I will show you how as we go along.

So at the time of writing this article it is the 6th of May and time is running away. What have I done at the moment to progress with this challenge, and where did I start.

Here is my process to starting a new website.

1/ Buy a domain name.
2/ Build site.
3/ Put content on blog.
4/ Monetize that blog with offers, in this case the use of our Free People Search Engine.
5/ Drive traffic to that blog.

That’s it in a nutshell, easy eh!  Well before we do anything at all we must have some idea at least of the search keywords we are targeting, even before we buy a domain name.

So how do we research the keywords that we will be building our site around and do we need any fancy keyword research tools? No, we do not need to buy any keyword research tools, in my opinion it is money that we do not need to spend when Google itself gives us a free tool to use. The ‘Google Keyword Research Tool’ is where you now need to go.

So now we are in the tool we must think to ourselves, “what are people searching for’? I started with ‘find old friends” and after typing this into the keyword tool I was presented with a huge list of keywords.

Which keywords to pick?  Well for a new site like mine I am looking for at least 1,000 searches a month or more, but not thousands a month because the completion will be too strong for a new site, and not less at this stage because it is not enough. I managed to pick out 10 keyword phrases and this is enough to get  my site rolling.

From this list of 10 keywords I picked what I thought was the strongest one and went in search of a domain name with that exact phrase as the domain name. To do that I headed over to ‘GoDaddy’ and did a search, I could not get the .com extension so I bought the .net one instead. And so was born my new People Search Site and in my next article I will show how built my site and added content.

Tagged as: Acme People Search, Internet Marketing, SEO