How do you judge if your niche can make you 5 figures a month (10k$)

Kakarot

Kakarot

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Hello guys,

I was wondering when you pick a niche and rank for its keywords in top 3, before that how can you judge for example that you will pick this particularly niche and rank it in 4-6 months. That you will have the potential to earn low 5 figures or more? Do you look at CPC or you look at buyer intent keywords with volume etc, I just don't want to be another guy who will waste half of year for ranking a site by investing both time and money and in the end to end up with not making low 5 figures or more.
 
This is a very broad question that would be impossible to answer fully without typing a novel. But I think I can help give some perspective on the surface level.

You can make $10,000 a month in a lot of micro-niches. You can easily make that in macro-niches. And without a doubt you can do 100x that in a broad vertical. It's all about not locking yourself in and being able to expand horizontally. I wrote a large post about this in Day 2 of the Digital Strategy Crash Course. You won't clear your goal with one site about blue christmas stockings, but you will if you make a site all about Christmas as a whole.

However, competing and ranking is a different story. There may be a micro-niche for some odd occupation that can make you 5 figures but have fun trying to outrank all of the EDU and GOV sites for the limited number of keywords out there. But in a giant vertical of something like Wealth Management you could make that much by ranking for a single term, and there will be limitless options available to go after. It will all add up, even if one can't take you there. And you'll have an actual shot at ranking some of them if you do the right keyword research as laid out by CCarter in Day 6 of the Crash Course. CPC is a decent indicator of the value of an ad click, a lead, a product sale, etc, but only on relative terms. It's not remotely the exact value you'll receive even on Adsense monetization, let alone other types.

For instance, I was working in a vertical where the CPC was about $2.50. But I used Pay Per Call instead and got paid $315 per lead instead of $2.50 with Adsense.​

Yes, keywords matter a lot, but you shouldn't hyper focus on any specific set as much as you should try to dominate the niche in it's entirety. Playing on this level demands that your site become an authority. You must command a lot of pages, page rank, social signals, links, etc.

I'd forget about a time frame on ranking anything or ramping up earnings. This industry is finally starting to mature and resemble actually building a business. You wouldn't be saying 4-6 months on a brick & mortar business. You'd be saying 4-6 years. It's not quite that bad online, but Google has done a lot to the algorithm to stop people from speed ranking new domains. Now... new pages on old domains can rank as quickly as immediately. All the more reason to get started.

I'm talking about treating this like a real business and making sure it sticks around for the long haul. I'd rather wait 3 years to hit $10k a month on a project than spam it and get it there in 3 months and have it last for only 1 or 2 months. $10k x 2 months versus $10k for a few months and then $15k and $20k months and keep rising.

The winning path is one of sacrifice. It demands that you delay gratification, give time, strain relationships, lose and waste money... it's a test that those who did the right keyword research, marketing, and link building have to pass. The people that screw up those steps don't have to worry about it because they didn't even pass the entrance exam.

Now, this is all about SEO and ranking. You can go the PPC route if you can fund it and never worry about Google. You can go the Traffic Leaks route and never worry about Google.

But the wise man would do all of it. Maybe not PPC initially but eventually.
 
Wow, thanks for your awesome respond Ryuzaki, really appreciate it!

I was earning 4 years ago close to mid 5 figures in finance vector, at the time I was looking at CPC as my main indicator of potential of industry and such, because if advertisers are ready to pay $20 or more per single click, then that traffic must be converting and have a lot of potential and I was right.

I was promoting binary options $200-300 per lead, my main keywords had like 12k monthly searches + other long tail keywords, but all keywords had really huge CPC average like $5-30 per click, but then update arrived and pretty much I went from hero to zero, with capital I earned I started my own venture with my partner but in the end It was huge failure.

I wasted nearly 100k$ and after that, it took me awhile to update to new changes and learn how google works etc to return to action, but unfortunately everything required way bigger capital than when I started my SEO journey when things were way easier.

So I decided to get a job in SEO Agency to learn and make cash along the way so I can start my own affiliate websites like in past, today it's 2 years that am working in a company and want to slowly quit and dominate like before. With my own projects, I know how to make PBNs and find good valuable domains, even to do outreach with more "White Hat" approach, but am pretty sure that I can reach my goal again now, 100-200 PBNs should pretty much help me achieve my goal easily.

By the way, about PPC approach, I know it's instant traffic, and that you need a budget to test and optimize till you find your winner.

Let's say I picked google Adwords or facebook ads as my main traffic source, how much budget would I need a month minimum to keep going testing and optimizing to eventually reach 10k$ a month profits? Would $2000-4000 be enough for such a thing a month?
 
It would completely depend on what kind of profit margins you could obtain and how fast you could optimize without running out of funds (aka knowing how to obtain the right data and use it). I wouldn't personally recommend doing it but @miketpowell and @eliquid are our resident PPC experts. They could speak on the topic far better than I could ever attempt.

I'm anti-PBN on any project meant to last. The entire internet can be your PBN with marketing and outreach. Of course, you could build a PBN and only use it to link to pages that link to you with less risk but that'll likely catch up to you if done at any large scale.

What I would do is get far more strict on my domain buying. I'd only buy ones relevant to my site and then I'd 301 them and use the Wayback Machine archive to resurrect worthy content and 301 the old file paths over to save the link juice. You could also buy full on, still live sites and do the same, merging them in.

There's ways to exploit most of these high powered black hat methods in ways that Google thinks are fine.
 
Yeah, I bought in past for one of my clients, competitors website that was ranking on 4-5 page for years, but didn't have any improvements I made them offer and bought web site did 301 and instantly overnight got increases in rankings for hundreds of keywords, and even backlink profile was not that special, but it was very relevant and had tons of pages that were related to my client site.
 
While there are exceptions to the rule and certain niches you prob. could not do it with... you could make $10k a month in almost any niche really.

People were doing this in silly niches like chicken coops. I mean, come on. People do it with wood shed plans...

I know people that sell what is basically essential oils that you rub on your feet if you are a runner and it makes your feet "relax". They do over a million dollars in sales for this and no one even knows who they are.

If you want a generic formula for $10k a month success ( BTW, it doesn't mean it works 100% of the time ), then you need to have a few things:

1. A way to get in front of new people
2. A method for them to buy from you. Those that dont buy, you need a way to grab their info to contact them
3. A way to make money off that person multiple times right now and weeks/months later

The best methods generally come in layers of 3 or more in each of the above. The below are JUST examples.

A way to get in front of new people
  1. Ranking top spots for SEO
  2. Having top spots on PPC
  3. Facebook ads

A way to buy from you or getting their info
  1. Paypal
  2. Paywall with multiple offers/payment options
  3. Pixeling them or getting their email for later upsells

A way to make money off them more than once
  1. Upsells and cross-sales while in the cart
  2. Multiple related offers weeks or months later
  3. Selling their info to others such as a data service ( partials )

Most other things are petty. Sure, Im not hand holding you here and there are things I left out and didn't mention, but when it comes down to it there is only a few ways to make more money...

1. get more customers
2. earn more per customer
 
$10,000 can happen in any niche, small or large. TBH, I think that if you are trying to go after hyper-competitive niches with SEO as your main traffic source, then I assume your skills will already be good enough that you wouldn't need to ask that question.:D

With that said, you can make $10,000 in areas with less competition and still use SEO e.g pay per lead or local lead gen for businesses with high customer $ value etc.

It really all depends on what you are trying to accomplish.

eliquid said:
While there are exceptions to the rule and certain niches you prob. could not do it with... you could make $10k a month in almost any niche really.

People were doing this in silly niches like chicken coops. I mean, come on. People do it with wood shed plans...

I know people that sell what is basically essential oils that you rub on your feet if you are a runner and it makes your feet "relax". They do over a million dollars in sales for this and no one even knows who they are.

If you want a generic formula for $10k a month success ( BTW, it doesn't mean it works 100% of the time ), then you need to have a few things:

1. A way to get in front of new people
2. A method for them to buy from you. Those that dont buy, you need a way to grab their info to contact them
3. A way to make money off that person multiple times right now and weeks/months later

The best methods generally come in layers of 3 or more in each of the above. The below are JUST examples.

A way to get in front of new people
  1. Ranking top spots for SEO
  2. Having top spots on PPC
  3. Facebook ads

A way to buy from you or getting their info
  1. Paypal
  2. Paywall with multiple offers/payment options
  3. Pixeling them or getting their email for later upsells

A way to make money off them more than once
  1. Upsells and cross-sales while in the cart
  2. Multiple related offers weeks or months later
  3. Selling their info to others such as a data service ( partials )

Most other things are petty. Sure, Im not hand holding you here and there are things I left out and didn't mention, but when it comes down to it there is only a few ways to make more money...

1. get more customers
2. earn more per customer
Click to expand...

Enough said; it would be hard for anyone to fail at making money if you follow those steps.:cool:
 
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