How To Build A Sniper Affiliate Site – Part 1 – Researching A Keyword

I will be doing a series of these posts breaking down each step I use to build what is known as a sniper site. These sites are made with the purpose to rank on the first page in Google and gain organic search traffic. You will not need to pay for any PPC (pay per click) marketing to drive traffic to your site since the site will be designed to be on the first page for the keyword search result. This type of site building process has been popular lately and made famous by George Brown and his Google Sniper system. He offers a system that you are able to buy and he will teach you how to do this. However, I will teach you how I do it for free and it’s as effective.

Let’s look at the key elements that will get us started with our affiliate sniper site.

1. Our target market and product.
2. Main keyword research.
3. Registering our domain name and getting hosting if you don’t already have that.

Now I will break those points down into further detail so that you may follow along exactly.

Step 1: Our Target Market And Product Choice

The easiest way to get started in affiliate marketing (especially if you’re new to this) is with a company called ClickBank as most affiliate networks out there screen applicants and many newbie’s do not even get accepted the first go around. So head over to ClickBank and sign up. It’s free and they have a wealth of good products to promote.

Next you will need to decide what it is that you would like to promote on your sniper site. I often look for something that I understand, provides a reoccurring payment (means I get residual payments monthly for as long as the user I referred stays signed on – denoted as “Future $” in ClickBank) and a commission percentage of at least 70%. Also, the gravity of the product is important since it represents the popularity of the product and will give you an idea of its conversion rate. An example of conversion rate would be something like for every 10 people who come and view the product, 2 actually sign up and buy it. That would be called a 20% conversion rate.

Now that we have the payout criteria of what our product should meet lets decide on the product itself. Again, if there is a niche that you understand and it can be monetized well, then go for it. The other way is take a look at what peoples’ problems are on the web. Problems they are actually willing to pay for a solution to solve. Yahoo Answers is a great source to start looking for what the market wants. Off the top of my head, weight loss and financial problems (ironically) are problems people a willing to pay for a solution.

Step 2: Researching Our Main Keyword

So now you should’ve decided on what you wish to promote. Our next step is keyword research and is likely the most important step involved in making this entire project successful. I am going to arbitrarily choose a niche here to give you an example of how to research a keyword for it. The niche in this case will be dog houses. Later, we will want our domain name to be our final chosen keyword.

Note: Your keyword can be the merchants product name in which case if the domain for that name is already taken I just add “review” or “info” to the end of it. You may also try .net and .org if .com is already taken. This can get a lot of natural traffic since many people search for products by typing in the product name which obviously makes it a good keyword.

The example I am using here is a keyword based on a niche. So now I’ve gone over to Google’s Keyword Tool (which is free to use by the way) and I’ve typed in a root keyword which I think relates to this niche.

Criteria that I use when finding my keyword:

1. Around 2,000-4,000 Global Monthly Search Volume. The reason why I chose these numbers is because anything higher than this will usually mean the competition for the keyword will be a lot higher. Also, anything less will make money, but not enough to be worth my time building a site around it since it will be lacking in search volume.
2. 10,000 or less competing sites when you enter the keyword in quotation marks into Google. Such as “dog houses”. Anymore than that and we will have a hard time getting our site to rank on the first page. You’ll see what I mean later.
3. Try to pick a long tail keyword. The reason why is because our chances of ranking for more variations are greater. A 3 term keyword is great. Also, authority sites tend to dominate the shorter and broader keywords.

I started with a general root keyword by typing in dog houses. Of course, it came up with a ton of keywords – most of which the competition was high. I sorted the Global Monthly Search Volume by descending order simply by clicking on it. I also selected Phrase for the Match Type. Why? Because we are looking for a phrase keyword. I will explain this in a bit.

Click To Enlarge

Looking through the keyword list I found dog house designs. I entered it into Google in quotation marks and the number of competition pages Google found for this term was 3,590. That fits within our criteria. Not to mention it has a search volume of 2,900 searches per month which is decent for what we’re doing. It might take you a couple of tries to find a keyword with the low competition you are looking for but just keep trying. Just don’t bother entering in the keywords with like 30,000 searches per month since those are almost always too competitive.

Click To Enlarge

One little trick you can do is take a suitable keyword that Google has found and re-enter it back into the keyword search tool if you are having problems finding one with low enough competition. I also recommend checking the “Additional keywords to consider” which you’ll see if you scroll down to the bottom of the related keywords list.

So the reason why I chose Phrase for Match Type in the keyword tool is because I want to see the search volume for that exact phrase. Google looks at it as a whole unit, if you will, in the search results. It will not take into account a variation like dog house interior designs as it would if you selected Broad for the Match Type. Also, we do not want the Exact match either since that limits search results to our keyword phrase exclusively.  The Phrase match will allow variations but with the core phrase still intact such as awesome dog house designs or dog house designs on dvd. This gives us the best flexibility with the keyword while still keeping it focused for our purposes.

Google’s explanation:

Broad match: keyword (no punctuation)
Allows your ad to show for searches on similar phrases and relevant variations

Phrase match: “keyword”
Allows your ad to show for searches that match the exact phrase

Exact match: [keyword]
Allows your ad to show for searches that match the exact phrase exclusively

Negative match: -keyword
Ensures your ad doesn’t show for any search that includes that term

Now that our keyword has met all of our criteria, we do a search with it in Google without the quotation marks and just do a scan on the first page to see what our competition is like since that is the page we are shooting for. The odd time you will however come across the situation where you are just not able to find a suitable keyword so you may have to look into another niche.

I do the search in FireFox with a Google page rank and Alexa rating plugin. Any site that comes up whose home page has a Google page rank of 4 or higher and less than 500,000 on Alexa will be generally tough to out rank. So check those stats out. Also, we cannot out rank authority sites. These are sites with tons of relevant content, tons of back links and are generally well known. So if the first page is littered with these types of sites, move onto the next keyword. Wikipedia, WikiHow and large product sites are some examples of this.

Sites we can out rank are blogs, article submission sites, social bookmarking sites and web pages like Yahoo Answers. The only reason why they would be ranking so high is because Google could not find anything more relevant to show.

Click To Enlarge

For those of you who are impatient and do not prefer to research a keyword the manual way, I do recommend an automated keyword finding piece of software called Micro Niche Finder. It will do the entire task in a fraction of the time. It’s a great tool to increase your productivity. However my free way works perfectly fine.

Step 3: Registering A Domain Name And Hosting It

Lastly is to register the keyword as your domain name. Example: doghousedesigns.com If possible try to get .com. If not you may use .net or .org. I personally use Omnis Network for my hosting and domain purchases. I am not going to get into how to set up a domain or hosting package as Omnis does provide you with information on that as well as many other free sources on the net.

Part 2 which I will start working on next will be about setting up the bare bones of our sniper site in terms of platform choice and some other components that we will need. So keep checking back!

If anyone has any questions on this article please comment and I will do my best to answer you.

Tags: affiliate product alexa ranking clickbank clickbank affiliate clickbank hoplink criteria for good keywords domain resgistering george brown george brown google sniper google keyword tool google sniper hot keywords keyword competition keyword research LSI keywords omnis network root keyword sniper affiliate website target market web hosting