I didn't mention this before so I'll post it here since it may help others thinking about AMA sites.
When I was researching niches, yes
NICHES more than 1 or 2, I looked at about 20 that I had in interest in some fashion or other.
Either products I had personally purchased, or was fascinated with and thought maybe I myself might buy. That helped me a lot when I started all this for 2 reasons:
- It's something I was already interested in.
- I figure I can't be the lone ranger, if someone else (or a lot of someone elses) wanted to buy these type of products then there's a market.
I actually made a google sheet and popped all the niches in there with the average sale price of the category, how many searches per month the category got, what the commission rate from Amazon is on that niche, and with a target goal of $XX per week - how many sales of the actual products I would have to have in order to get to that $XX goal per week.
Then I took it a little further and looked at the average searches per month, then spitballed how much of that traffic I would have to have to hit my site by calculating an average CTR from search engines to the site then CTR from the site to Amazon then the Conversion Rate for the clicks to turn to sales.
I estimated everything at shitty CTR/Conversion rates so that I would have a worst-case scenario all lined out for how much traffic I was going to have to get from organic searches in order to make that $XX goal.
So, it looks something like this:
niche x - average sale price - % aff com - $ avg comm - visits per month assuming 1% CTR - # of sales req per week to meet $ monthly goal - weekly goal (monthly/4.3) - $ monthly goal
The last 2 columns are handy just in case I have more than 1 site in development or figure I need more sites in order to reach the monthly goal. The
lower the average sale is in the niche - more sales required to meet the $ goal per week. I know that makes total sense but sometimes it really helps me when I can see it all in front of me in a visual way.
**Now I can go in & put my average CTR & Conversion Rates for the last 3 months or so into that sheet and update the traffic numbers to get a more realistic understanding of what percentage of that monthly search volume I need to grab in order to make X sales per week to make that $XX goal. I know that may not be a big thing that people think about when they are making sites, but I thought it was important for me to know.**
The results were staggering BUT, now I had my eyes open as to what may have to happen, how much content I'm going to have to write, etc.
QUICK TIP: You can use Ubbersuggest to spy on your niche competition traffic to their articles. The tool pulls up the most highly ranked content for the keywords you will use to find your niche. Take a look at what pages are driving the traffic for those keywords and take a look at the numbers. That will give you a ballpark idea of the % of the total traffic they are getting for those keywords and niche. It will also give you an idea of what their aff income is of that article. Nifty stuff to know.