Autoblog - Long tail micro niche keyword or broad keyword with many searches?

volund said:

Personally I try to find niches where I can build a pyramid of sorts. Niches that have a main keyword that gets a lot of searches but has a lot of related long tails that I can start with. I then start with 4-10 of the long tails and then work my way to the harder keywords.

This does a few things. First off having a bunch of pages ranked for related terms makes getting the main keyword ranked easier since I already have a base. Second since the long tails are easier to rank for (ie:quicker) I can start earning money from the site sooner than I would going after the main keyword by itself. Third I then have a site ranking for a bunch of keywords so it is not dependent on the ranking of just one of them. Fourth it allows you to go after some of those long tails that are not really worth going after if they are by themselves. Most do not bother with them so there is a lot of low hanging fruit out there to be had.

For example it would go something like this.

First level

crazy red widgets
funny red widgets
short blue widgets
long green widgets
etc. I usually go with a mim of four to start but if possible 10.

Second level

red widgets
blue widgets
green widgets

Third level

widgets

By the time you shoot for that main high traffic keyword you already have a bunch of related keywords on the front page making you a few bucks and giving your support for your attack on that main keyword.

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volund said:

I stay away from brand names in the domain myself. The idea of spending 6 months building a site up only to have some company tell me to take it down and give them the domain does not appeal to me. I try to use the top or second level in the domain name as much as possible and name the pages for the targeted keywords.

What kind of blog really depends on the target. Specific product types seem to do well for me using an autoblog but with anything else they seem to go off the rails a bit and you end up getting pages you really do not want on your sites. If you only have a couple of sites it is not much of a problem to check them and make sure you do not have any weird stuff on your site but as you get more of them it takes more time out of your day. Digital cameras would be a good example of a kind of niche where autobloging works well. There are a lot of very specific brands and models pages that can be built and it is a lot easier to keep the software on track. A niche where people are mostly going to use more general search terms instead of very specific models and brands or a niche with maybe a limited number of them I stay away from the autoblogs. For those I go ahead and create the content and just add it to the site myself.

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volund said:

Just keep in mind I am not claiming to be an expert or anything....These are just things that I have found that seem to work for me.

Really the most important step is your niche research, screw that up and you will not make any money no matter how well you do the rest.

I could not think of an example earlier that I was not using. But lets use lawn furniture for now. Compare that to digital cameras where a lot of people are going to be searching for specific brands and even models. Nobody (or very few at least) is going to be typing in a specific model of outdoor chair or table. There are probably a limited amount of keywords in that niche that get enough searches that are worth going after even if you group them together on one site. Setting up an autoblog is not really going to work very well if you are going to have maybe 10-15 pages total.

Buying or action keywords are almost always the best no matter how you are monetizing your site. Whether you are using adsense, Amazon, clickbank or whatever you are going to want your visitors to take some kind of action so you can make some money from their visit.

I actually have a couple of health related sites and they started off as autoblogs with wp-robot but I had a very hard time with them going off the rails with the content so I ended up getting some original content to add to the sites. I kept most of the generated content that fit but baby sitting the sites was more than I had time for. There is a very good possibility that there was a way to fix the posting issues but I did not find it and for me spending the time tweaking the settings endlessly to find the right ones was not something I really had time for.

As far as monetizing sites go I have had fairly good luck combining adsense and Amazon on the same sites. More than clickbank but honestly I think it is just a matter of the niches that I have chosen so far. I have a couple in mind that I think will be a good fit for some clickbank products I have looked at but have not had time to get them going yet. One thing about clickbank is that there are a limited number of decent products which makes those niches somewhat more competitive and it is hard to find something where I can target multiple keywords on the same site. Really just not very conducive to building my little pyramids.

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