Grab This Cushy Niche Now!

I received an email today from Pepperjam about an affiliate who sells pillows. That got me to thinking about what that niche looked like so I decided to run it through the “drum machine” to see what I’d find. The results were pretty cool, but instead of keeping it for myself I thought I’d share it with you and let you run with it.

First, I went to Google’s Keyword Tool and searched on “pillow”. I added the CPC column and sorted on it in descending order. I usually look for keywords or keyword phrases that have a respectable search volume, are not too competitive, and have an average CPC (cost per click) that’s worth going for. Of course, the higher the CPC the better, but my threshold usually sits around above a dollar and change.

Here’s a sample of what I found:

So we have “mattress pillow” with an average search volume of 74,000 and CPC of $3.15. Now, that doesn’t mean that you are definitely going to get $3.15 each time someone clicks on a Google Adsense ad, but it’s a good indication.

I then took that keyword phrase and ran it through Market Samurai (one of the prizes I’m giving away in my contest) to see what it had to say about “mattress pillow”. The steps I take in determining a niche evolves constantly, but for now, if Market Samurai tells me that something isn’t worth going for, then I typically just let the keyword go and search for something else.

Well, this time Market Samurai told me in its own way that the phrase “mattress pillow” might actually have potential. See below:

The image above is a portion of a screenshot using the SEO Competition screen. It tells me the backlinks and PR of sites that rank for the keyword phrase I’m researching. For those of you who don’t have Market Samurai, I can tell you that green colored cells are good or “less challenging to dominate”, amber cells are slightly less than good, and red ones are indicators that you have a lot of work ahead of you if you choose to tackle that keyword. In other words, it’s probably not a good idea to spend your time on something that has a red cell.

Well, as you can see, there’s a lot of green cells for this one. So if it were me, I would decide to either write a post that’s rich with the phrase “mattress pillow” and its ilk or I might even register a domain with that as the name or something similar and build it to contain other related keywords. You know, your basic search engine magnet.